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Title: The Future of the Women's Movement
Author: Swanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
Language: English
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MOVEMENT***
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THE FUTURE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
by
H. M. SWANWICK, M.A.
With an Introduction by
Mrs. Fawcett, LL.D.
President of the National Union of Women’S Suffrage Societies
[Illustration]
London
G. Bell & Sons Ltd.
1913
TO F. T. S.
PREFACE
Women in the movement often wish that the word humanist had not been
appropriated, because it would far more properly connote the women’s
movement than the word feminist.
It is significant of much that there is in the English language no
commonly used substantive corresponding to “_homo_.” There is need, of
course, for the words man and woman, but there is also need for a word
denoting the species, irrespective of sex, and I have been driven to make
use of a locution not common in English, in writing “a human.” But the
common pronoun is non-existent and I have not used the neuter, lest it
should alarm nervous persons. Perhaps when we have got over the panic
fear of unsexing ourselves, we may find it safe to speak of a human, just
as we do of a baby, as “it.”
There may seem to be a disappointing lack of prophesy in a book avowedly
dealing with the future; but since I believe the women’s movement to be
a seeking for knowledge and good, to show what is reasonable and good
in the movement is to show what will persist and triumph. Through all
our faults and mistakes, we women are aiming at better understanding
and co-operation with men, and a better adaptation to one another of
conditions and persons. We are having to hammer out for ourselves the
right principles of government. We can take them ready-made from no man.
Doubtless we shall flounder considerably, as men have done—and do. But
there is little fear that in the long-run the best minds of men and women
will not have a common principle.
Meanwhile we have to resist the tendency to easy and cheap
generalisations about woman, her sphere, her vocation, and her capacity,
based upon a very small amount of very partial investigation and a huge
amount of inherited prejudice and native conceit. Men who ought to have
some respect for scientific methods will, when some _à priori_ theory
of woman’s proper sphere has closed their minds, make the most palpably
faulty deductions from imperfect data, and use their reputation in some
other branch of science as cover for their bad reasoning. No statistics
are more useful than vital statistics, and none have been more misused
to prove some foregone conclusion. Everyone experienced in investigation
knows how helpful it is to have some general hypothesis in view, by
which to co-ordinate all phenomena, but knows also how necessary it
is to be constantly watchful lest the hypothesis should obscure new
and unexpected phenomena. When the investigator is himself personally
involved, and when the hypothesis is one which the majority of men have
thought self-evident for ages, and when the strongest of all impulses,
next to hunger, confuses the mind of the investigator, we are justified
in being very sceptical about the positive nature of his conclusions,
until he can satisfy us that they have been reached by strictly logical
methods of agreement and difference.
If to some reasonable and civilised men it may seem that I have given
undue importance to the foolishnesses and barbarisms of another kind of
men, I would ask those men to remember that these are among our masters
and we may not ignore them. We might like to treat them “with the
contempt they deserve,” but we have at present to live under the laws
that they help to make. Doubtless, when we are free, we shall suffer
fools more gladly than we do now, having less to fear from them.
INTRODUCTION
Those who open this book expecting to find in it a romantic sketch,
rather in the style of _Erewhon_, of what the civilisation of the
twentieth century is likely to be after women have won their freedom,
will be doomed to disappointment. It does not deal with what a humorist
in the Cambridge Historical Society used to call “that department of
history which treats of the future.” Those who look for a plentiful
supply of prophecy will not find it; but they will find a masterly sketch
of the sources and aims of the women’s movement; and, in the author’s
own words, a brief survey of the directions in which it appears to be
travelling. They will find also wisdom, and knowledge, and understanding.
Mrs. Swanwick avoids cheap and easy generalisation. She writes from a
wide and deep knowledge, which has been gained from years of active
work, especially in the women’s suffrage movement as it exists here and
now; and she writes with the temperance and restraint which come of the
philosophic mind.
Her book will be read and digested by her fellow-workers. They are
quite certain to make it their own, for it is an armoury of facts and
arguments bearing on their work. It ought also to be studied by every
intelligent man and woman who perceives that the women’s movement is one
of the biggest things that has ever taken place in the history of the
world. Other movements towards freedom have aimed at raising the status
of a comparatively small group or class. But the women’s movement aims
at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half the human
race—to lift it up to the freedom and valour of womanhood. It affects
more people than any former reform movement, for it spreads over the
whole world. It is more deep-seated, for it enters into the home and
modifies the personal character. No greater praise can be given to Mrs.
Swanwick’s book than to say that she treats of this great subject in a
manner worthy of it.
Her pages on militancy will be carefully studied. She is known to be
deeply antagonistic to violence in all its forms, and she gives the
reasons for the faith that is in her. It is also well known that she is
a leading member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,
the chief of the non-militant suffrage organisations. But though she
criticises severely the Women’s Social and Political Union, she is not
among those who can see nothing but harm in their activities. Militant
suffragism is essentially revolutionary, and, like other revolutionary
agitations, has arisen from a want of harmony between economic and
educational status and political status. Educationally, socially, and
industrially women have made enormous advances during the last sixty
years. But the laws controlling their political status have stood still.
Similar conditions have invariably led to revolutionary outbursts except
where lawmakers have had the sense to recognise the situation in time and
adjust the political status of the group concerned to the changes which
had already taken place in its general condition. It is by making these
timely changes, and by grafting the bud of new ideas on the stem of old
institutions, that our countrymen have shown their practical political
instinct, and have, on the whole, saved the nation from the ruinous waste
of revolution. They have not yet shown this good sense about women. But
the signs of the times are full of hope that they may revert to type and
be wise in time.
Dr. Arnold, writing from France within a generation of the Terror, said
in reference to the destruction of the feudal power of the nobles over
the French peasantry: “The work has been done … and in my opinion the
blessing is enough to compensate the evils of the French Revolution; for
the good endures, while the effects of the massacres and devastation are
fast passing away.” If that could be said of the Terror cannot it be even
more positively said of the comparatively innocuous “militancy” of recent
years? The good endures, while the evil is temporary and passes away, is
as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.
MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE
_Homo_—Human principles of government—Unscientific scientific
men—Our masters vii
INTRODUCTION. By Mrs. Fawcett xi
CHAPTER I
CAUSES OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
Woman becomes articulate—Why the movement has become political
in England—Women’s handicap—The need for concentration—Two
kinds of change: education, industrialisation—Adaptation
essential—Solidarity of women 1
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT?
Is it chaotic?—Knowledge and scope—What the world is losing—The
spirit of the time a scientific one; women must share it—Action
will follow knowledge—Is it to be thwarted action? 14
CHAPTER III
THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
Importance of motherhood—Vocational training of women for
motherhood a mistake—Whole human beings—Full development
under Men’s domination impossible—Sentimentalists and
Brutalitarians—Subjection degrading—Are women mentally inferior
to men?—An irrelevant question—Opportunity for development 20
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL FORCE
Man’s undoubted superiority—The handicap of motherhood—Woman’s
battle a spiritual one—Domination by force is bad
business—Foreign policy and war—Equality of service and equality
of sacrifice—War not the only business 31
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
Mr. Frederic Harrison and Prof. Dicey—Difficulties of governing
others—Civil rights depend upon political rights—Illiberal
arguments against women’s suffrage—Safety a delusion—Progress
due to control of physical force by mind—Law of diminishing
returns on compulsion—Opinions and interests of voter 42
CHAPTER VI
VOTES
Effects of the denial of the vote—Legislation,
administration, taxation—Status—The intolerable slur of
disfranchisement—Direct effect of the vote—What women want—How
Bills are made—Peaceful penetration—Indirect effect of
the vote—Responsibility, independence, co-operation 59
CHAPTER VII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (1) THE WAGE-EARNER
The domination of economic force—Woman’s natural
handicap, motherhood—Woman’s artificial handicap, law and
custom—_Laissez-faire_ abandoned—Case of the pit-brow
girls—Opening up of trades and professions—A living wage—Danger
of sweated womanhood 69
CHAPTER VIII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (2) THE MOTHER
Neglected motherhood—King Log and King Stork—The
Englishman’s almost absolute power over his wife—Socialistic
legislation—Endowment of motherhood—Payment of wives—Man’s
outlook mainly personal, not racial—Woman’s outlook 78
CHAPTER IX
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (3) THE HOUSEWIFE
The mother is generally the housewife—Convenient and
economical—Bad conditions of housework—No reform
without discontent—Motherhood and housewifery not
inextricable—Co-operative housekeeping—Divorce of producer and
consumer—Advertisement and speculation—Waste, adulteration, and
ugliness—Specialisation needed in the consumer; also collective
effort and political action 89
CHAPTER X
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (4) THE PROSTITUTE
Prostitution the most commercially profitable of women’s
trades—Definition—Extent—Is it an evil?—Is it (1) necessary for
health, or (2) necessary consequence of evil nature and evil
institutions?—Professions and performances—What is wrong with
men, women, and marriage?—A complex evil requiring many
remedies—Education—Self-respect—Wages—Brutality—Housing—
Alcohol—Cruelty—Rescue 99
CHAPTER XI
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (5) COMMERCIALISED VICE
Women’s crusade against prostitution, alcoholism, and
war—Decay of Empires—Originally appetites, have become
trades—Advertisement and finance—Vested interest in
alcohol—Traffic in women—Chicago Vice Commission—More facts
wanted—Enormous profits—Trade controlled by men—Ignorance and
indifference—Traffic in war 117
CHAPTER XII
THE MAN’S WOMAN: WOMANLY
Two ideals—Motherly qualities do not attract men—Weakness and
dependence are not motherly—Women distrust men’s judgment of
women—Women’s wiles—Social value of women’s qualities—Florence
Nightingale—Women must combine and organise—Inarticulate
women 126
CHAPTER XIII
THE WOMAN’S WOMAN: A PERSON
Ideal, Normal, and Average woman—Procrustes’ bed—Motherhood
not everything—Genius and motherhood—Scientific men constantly
overlook the mind—Breeding _versus_ environment 138
CHAPTER XIV
SEX-ANTAGONISM: (1) MAN’S PART
No permanent opposition of sexes—Mr. Heape’s theory—Primitive
man and woman are opposed—Men and women not the “same” nor
“equal”—Effect of luxury—Mr. Heape’s nightmare: Men “brute
beasts,” maidens “waste products”—Love the reconciling
force—Adaptation of the Human to environment—Women not all
sex—The literature of abuse—Are men fit for judicial powers? 156
CHAPTER XV
SEX-ANTAGONISM: (2) WOMAN’S PART
Women’s war—Is men’s need greater?—War open and articulate—The
Ladies’ Gallery—Sir Charles Grandison on the enemies of
women—Militancy and the machine—The mob spirit—A revival
due—Press, purse, and party—The good and the evil of
militancy—Is it War or Martyrdom?—Men’s hypocrisy about women’s
violence—The weapon of femininity—The responsibility of the
Government—Exasperation is not statesmanship 173
CHAPTER XVI
THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW
Adaptation—A man’s world difficult for women to live in—Men’s
needs—The double standard—The child’s needs—Health of
girls—Co-education—Teaching of sex—Parasitic daughters—The
birth-rate—Women the natural protectors of children; therefore
they should be given power to protect—Men should help women—The
experience of Finland—Comradeship—Faith 193
THE FUTURE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I
CAUSES OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
“New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.”
J. R. LOWELL.
The world is full of books about women,—most often alluded to in such
books as “Woman.” The vast majority of these books have been written by
men, and until quite lately the few women who wrote about women confined
themselves to repeating the precepts laid down by men. There were
remarkable exceptions, of course: Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft,
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
spoke as women and not as echoes of men. Quite recently women have
suddenly broken the long silence, and there is a flood of exposition
which is likely, from its volume and force, to make confusion take the
place of silence. Ellen Key in Sweden, Rosa Mayreder in Austria, Mrs.
Gilman in America and Olive Schreiner in South Africa are a few of the
most distinguished writers; but there are troops of others who, in books
and magazines and papers, strive to deliver their souls. This little
book aims merely at being a brief survey of the women’s movement and of
the directions it appears to be taking; a survey which shall deal with
principles and the broad aspect of things rather than with details, and
that will rather suggest what are the difficulties and in what spirit
they should be approached, than offer a universal solution for the
deepest and most complex problem that has been set before the human race.
The women’s movement in Great Britain has for the last seven years been
directed so considerably into political channels, the struggle for the
parliamentary vote has absorbed so much of the active, organised and
thinking women of the nation, that one hears people talk sometimes as
if the suffrage movement _were_ the women’s movement, and as if, when
the vote shall be won, there will be no more women’s movement. One would
have to be very shallow and very insular, too, to think so. And what a
tragedy it would be! What! Shall all these sacrifices be made to get the
vote and then nothing be done with it? Shall the vote be at once the
record of the progress of women and its grave? The women’s movement is
world-wide, and whether or no it has taken a political turn depends on
the circumstances of each several nation. That it will be of political
import some day everywhere is unquestionable to us who believe that it
will not die, but that it _is_ life and “holds a promise for the race
that was not at our rising.” A condition of virtuous anarchy may be the
highest of all ideals; no one, it is to be imagined, regards government,
laws and compulsion as good in themselves; but so long as governments
exist, so long are social reforms at their mercy, and no civilisation
is internally stable until it has moulded the body politic into harmony
with itself. This is not to say that no progress can be made except by
law-making; it is to say that the time comes in the development of every
civilisation when laws and the administration of social affairs must
change to meet the growing needs of the people. It is because British men
have in the main acknowledged this, that the history of Great Britain has
been in the main a peaceful history.
The women’s movement is felt in all departments of life. In the education
and training of girls, and, since men are the sons and mates of women,
in the education and training of boys; in social, economic, religious
and political matters. Custom, opinion and prejudice are as important as
legislation; administration of law is sometimes vastly more important
than law-making. On all these lines, then, march the women, but not on
the old beaten paths. Roadmakers they are, and besides the toil of making
the roads, they have not infrequently to endure the harassment of the
stones and dirt which are hurled at them by those who are sitting in the
old track, and who resent their divergence from it.
In England the intensity of the political struggle is due to the fact
that women have made such great advances along the lines of personal and
social effort, while the recognition of them within the Constitution
is still withheld. Moreover, the causes of this continued exclusion
have been of late so merely political, so entirely the result of an
artificial party system, that the women who desire enfranchisement for
no party reasons at all, but from their consciousness of a deep human
need, are exasperated by the pettiness and futility of politicians, who
subordinate a great issue of social right and wrong to the miserable
party game of recrimination and retaliation, of power and office, of ins
and outs. The women who had for forty-six years been steadily building up
a majority in the House of Commons, and had kept a majority unbroken for
twenty-six years (a feat which can be recorded of no other reform party
in parliamentary history), found themselves apparently no nearer the
attainment of their object, for the morally insufficient but politically
overwhelming reason that their majority was composed of men from all
parts of the House.
I do not propose to give the history of the English suffrage movement
during the administration of the last three Parliaments; to be clear
and comprehensible, this would take a considerable volume in itself. I
wish only to point out that these women have been driven to throw their
energies more and more into a political direction because they have
been made to feel that their majority in Parliament would not act until
political pressure was put upon them to compel them to act. “I have been
a suffragist all my life,” was the plaintive wail of the politician;
“what more do you want?” Well, the women in the movement want the vote,
and they are realising more and more, with every year that passes and
nothing done, that they must concentrate upon winning the vote. It is
hard enough at any time to get measures through Parliament unless there
is a party advantage to be made out of them. Conceive how much this
difficulty is multiplied when, besides the absence of party support, the
reform is urged by women who have the powers of the purse and the press
to contend with, and who have not one single vote wherewith to get the
vote! Newspapers are owned, edited and written very largely by men and
very largely for men; even what is known as the Woman’s Page has, till
recently, been contrived in the interests of tradesmen, for purposes
of advertisement. Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who
figures as a rich woman is often merely an _article de luxe_ for the man
who provides for her, and, though he may hang her neck with jewels, he
does not readily give her a cheque for her suffrage society. All the
more need, then, for concentration, and the fact that these Englishwomen
have, on a very moderate estimate, raised and spent in twelve months
a sum of £100,000 in working for the vote alone, may be taken as some
evidence of the intensity of their demand and of the wantonness of
infliction upon them of further delay and further sacrifice.[1]
I have said that in England women have made great progress on the lines
of personal and social effort. There are reactionaries so consistent as
to deny that there has been any progress at all, and in almost every
direction of change it is possible to find people who think it was bad.
The change in the lives of Englishwomen has been so rapid, however, that
it stares us all in the face and cries out for recognition. Vainly we
wail about the dedicated ways of womanhood, when scarcely a living woman
is to be found there.
Much of the great change has been due to deliberate and devoted effort
on the part of men as well as women, who, at any rate, thought they were
making for progress. The great impulse towards the education of the
people which characterised the nineteenth century made a far greater
revolution in the lives of women than of men. Not only did elementary
education put all the young girls of the working class on something like
an equality with boys, but the foundation of public day schools and
the decisions of Charity Commissioners gave girls of the middle class
a chance of education in school subjects, and, what was of at least as
much importance, removed them from the hothouse air of the home and
the seminary and gave them the discipline of knowing their fellows and
finding their level. The great movement for the higher education of girls
secured, step by step, their instruction in the universities, their
admission to degree examinations and, finally, their admission to degrees
in all but the two most conservative universities. Of more recent growth
is the inevitable development of postgraduate research among women. All
these changes were deliberate and were regarded by those who initiated
them as great reforms. So also were the efforts made, largely by the
same group of people, to open careers to qualified women. All the world
knows of the foundation of the great modern career of sick-nursing; of
the more bitter and prolonged struggle of women to be allowed to study
medicine and surgery and qualify as practitioners therein; of the gradual
introduction of women into State service as clerks, inspectors and
commissioners. All these changes had, to a greater or less degree, to be
fought for by those who desired them. They represented improvements in
the status of women, increase in power, in knowledge and in earnings.
People resisted them with more or less tenacity, and used against the
reformers the sort of arguments they are still using against further
emancipation; but few can be found now who do not admit that, broadly
speaking, they represented improvements. There are, of course, some
Orientalists even in England, who think in their hearts that it was a
great mistake to teach women to read. But most people now accept the
principle that women should have the best education available, and only
differ as to what that education should be.
Other vast changes have, however, been made in the lives of women
which no women or friends of women consciously strove for, which no
one regarded as great reforms, which were, in fact, the unintended and
unforeseen results of man’s invention and man’s commercial and financial
enterprise, directed solely towards the increase of purchaseable
commodities and the manipulation of these in markets; not by any means
directed towards the improvement of the lives of women and the home,
towards the easing of labour, or the increase of beauty, peace and
health. With the introduction of machinery there came the usual talk
about its lightening the lot of the worker and so forth, but when one
reads the history of the first factories, of child-labour and monstrous
hours of work, inhuman and foul conditions and vast fortunes made in a
few months by exploitation and speculation, one is forced to recognise
that the passing of work out of the home, and of the woman into the
factory was accomplished without thought of social consequences, and
that, of all creatures on earth, the women were the most helpless to
resist this change, had they wished to do so.
These, then, are the two great classes of revolution that have come
over the lives of Englishwomen during the past hundred years. One
blind, unintended, inexorable, whether for good or evil; the other
fought and striven for with the highest idealism and devotion. Both
wrong and disastrous in the eyes of some. Both, whether right or wrong,
accomplishments, hard facts, which the sociologist must meet and either
repeal or amend. The one thing he must not do is idly to bewail the
revolution and refuse either to adapt persons to conditions or conditions
to persons.
Pathetic people lament the disappearance of the woman of a hundred years
ago, and some reproach the present generation with being rude to its
great-grandmother. But surely any great-grandmother of sense would not
wish the twentieth-century man to be mated with a nineteenth-century
woman. Even regarding women merely as complements to men, it is desirable
that the wife should be of the same generation as the husband. And it is
nothing short of cruelty to desire to see an early Victorian lady under
modern conditions; it would be like nothing so much as the liberation of
a cage-bred canary into a flock of ravenous starlings.
The industrial revolution did extraordinary things to women. It drove
them out of the shelter and subordination of the home and bluntly told
them that they must compete for their lives in the open market with men.
It taught them (a lesson which is hard indeed for women to learn, and
which they are only learning very slowly) that only by the combination
of individuals can progress be made in a world where no individuals,
no loves count, and where there are no considerations but economic
considerations. At the same time it gave them wages in hard cash for the
work they had hitherto done as parts of the family organism, without
wages in cash. These wages, for the most part shamefully inadequate for a
human existence, have yet been unconditional and have produced in working
women a sense of independence and a desire for “spending money” that, for
good or evil, is having an immense effect in the comparison they make
in their hearts between wage-earning and non-wage-earning employments.
Lastly, the use of political pressure by working men, to further their
industrial purposes, has slowly roused working women to desire power to
put that same pressure on for their purposes.
All these effects have been slow in emerging and even slower in becoming
clear; the aroused interest of more fortunate women has greatly helped in
clarifying thought and bringing it to a practical issue. It is sometimes
brought up against the suffrage movement that it is a middle-class
movement, in the sense that women of education and some leisure were its
pioneers. Undoubtedly it was so, in its inception. How could it have
been otherwise? It is so no longer and it never was so, in the sense
that middle-class women wished to secure something for themselves from
which working women should be excluded; the very reverse was and is true,
for, in demanding the franchise for all women on the same terms as men,
privileged women are deliberately asking to be allowed to abandon some of
their privileges. They are asking that the privileges of social influence
which they now possess, and which the charwoman and the factory worker
are without, shall be compensated for, to some extent at least, by the
granting of a democratic franchise to less privileged women.
The entrance of women into money-earning employments has had two further
effects of considerable importance. The Married Women’s Property Act
was in part a result; for whereas it was plausible to hold that a woman
had only a courtesy title to wealth which had been made and given or
bequeathed to her by some man, it revolted everyone’s sense of fairness
that, when a man had said at the altar, “With all my worldly goods I thee
endow,” he should become entitled to the wages of the charwoman or the
copyright of the novelist whom he had married. Another effect was that
women began more consciously to compare their work with men’s work. So
long as men always went out as “bread-winners” and women stayed in the
home, it was possible to entertain extravagant notions of the arduousness
of a man’s toil. Now that women are book-keepers, clerks, doctors and
inspectors, they have a measure that they had not formerly, and to
many women the peace, order, simplicity and convenience of office or
factory may well have appeared in favourable contrast with the exacting
and conflicting claims of the household, run too often with inadequate
supplies, shortage of labour and antiquated tools.
Enough has been said in this very hasty survey to show the gigantic
changes in the lives of women, the necessity for clear and unprejudiced
thinking about those lives, and for a certain courage in experimenting
with them. The women are thinking. What are they thinking about? About
education and training; about marriage and parentage and prostitution;
about custom and opinion and prejudice; about the economic and moral
and religious side of all questions; about organisation and agitation,
about politics and representation in politics; about laws and the
administration of laws.
And the movement is world-wide. I shall speak mainly of the forms it has
taken in England. They vary in every country. But the world is now so
well in touch that the experience of one country becomes the experience
of all, and what women undergo in one country smites the hearts of all
women and rouses in them the sense of personal pride, of womanly dignity,
of faith in woman’s work and soul. The women’s movement has brought about
a solidarity unmatched by any other, a solidarity which represents a very
high ideal of civilisation, a civilisation based upon the law of love and
the knowledge of truth. As the president of the Woman Suffrage Alliance
said at Budapest, women feel now that by the degradation of some women,
all women are cheapened; that what is injurious to the human race is
wrong, whether it be perpetrated in Chicago, in Singapore or in Brussels.
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT?
“Ole Uncle S., sez he, ‘I guess
It is a fact,’ sez he,
‘The surest plan to make a Man
Is, Think him so, J. B.,
Ez much ez you or me!’”
J. R. LOWELL.
It is often said that the women’s movement is chaotic, that no one knows
whither the modern woman is going, nor even whither she wants to go;
woman is, in fact, adrift, having lost her helm (or perhaps only the
helmsman), and is going, full steam, all round the compass.
It is very much easier to make such assertions, at least they sound
less preposterous, if one keeps to the rhetorical singular and begs
the whole question at issue by assuming that women are one in need,
capacity and character, and that this eternal feminine has been once
for all dissected, understood and catalogued, and that all variations
are merely caprice. But let us drop the singular and we shall see that
although women want as many different things as there are different
women, there are two things which the women in the movement consciously
desire and strive for beyond all others, and these are knowledge and
scope. The women’s movement is one to open the doors of the world to
women: that they may know the nature of their own bodies (to every mother
her workshop), and the bodies of men, their mates, not according to the
teaching of the schools and churches, but in the light of modern science;
that they may have in their ranks women who know the condition of law
and medicine and affairs; that the mind and character of women shall be
enabled to play upon these matters with knowledge, and shall present to
the world the complementary view to that given by the mind and character
of men.
In so far as the deepest needs of men and women are one, men suffer as
well as women from the ignorance or degradation of women; a stream cannot
rise higher than its source, and men are the sons of women. In so far as
the bodies and minds, the lives and experiences of men and women differ,
in so far do both men and women suffer, if the specifically feminine
character is unillumined by science, the specifically feminine activity
hampered and checked by external law or economic necessity.
In this striving for knowledge and scope the women are in sympathy with
the spirit of the time. Scientific men have abandoned the invention of
worlds and have betaken themselves to the study of the world presented to
them, in most matters except those in which sex plays a part. Here there
are still some who talk about “Ideal Woman,” or “Normal Woman,” of being
unsexed by knowledge and liberty, as if by nature women were unwomanly,
and nothing but the stern restraints of darkness and bondage could keep
them natural. In asking that these restraints should be removed, women
are demanding the only conditions under which any really scientific
generalisations can be made about woman’s sphere and woman’s nature.
As lately as the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Norton wrote:—
“He has made me dream that it was meant for a higher and
stronger purpose, that gift which came not from man but from
God! It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others,
to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws, to ask
the nation of gallant gentlemen whose countrywoman I am, for
once to hear a woman’s pleading on the subject. Not because
I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know,
on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than
I,—more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,—have
watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that
in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others.
Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs,
but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the
power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong, which
few women are able to do.”
Mrs. Norton knew what was the state of the law, having suffered cruelly
from it, and there was, in her day, very little chance of any women
knowing the law, except through just such personal bitter suffering. Few
women, as she truly said, could combine this knowledge with the powers
of exposition, agitation and eloquence which so distinguished her. This
is less true now than it was then. Progressive women are determined that
it shall cease to be true altogether. They are increasingly devoting
themselves to studying the complex social system into which they are born
and are themselves introducing new lives; they are supplementing the
intuitions of motherhood with the reasonings of science; they are finding
in the knowledge of racial poisons justification for what has hitherto
been simple racial instinct. The defilement or the abuse of marriage by
men, which has hitherto been regarded as venial, because the wife and
child were property, acquire quite a different colour when women as well
as men know the effects upon the race. It is possible to tell devoted
ignorant wives that it is their part to endure all and never to refuse.
Medical men have kept silence, priests have preached and lawyers have
advised submission, and ignorant mothers have handed on these precepts
to their daughters. “La femme est née pour souffrir,” says one mother of
daughters; and the more woman suffers, the more truly womanly she is.
“Entbehren sollst du,” quotes the anti-suffragist,—to women only,—and
sacrifice, _quâ_ sacrifice, has been made the woman’s idol. But when
she gets to know that the sacrifice is depriving her of motherhood or
poisoning the children to come, how then? Will she be so much in love
with sacrifice? Can anyone believe that a woman will retain the old
attitude towards marriage after she has learnt the causes of many of
the congenital diseases of children, or of what are ironically termed
“diseases of women”? Whatever the view of enlightened women will be (and
I decline altogether to prophesy), of one thing we may be quite certain,
their view will be prodigiously changed by the light.
Women will not only obscurely feel, they will know; when they know, there
is no power on earth that can prevent them from acting. The only question
is whether they shall act freely, or whether their informed energy shall
be thwarted, diverted and suppressed to the point of explosiveness and
to the embitterment of their lives and characters. In Great Britain, at
the present time, this question is acute; but it is being put all the
world over, and different nations are answering it in different ways, and
finding it amazingly difficult to learn from each other’s experience. Do
we not even find English people prophesying direst results if the causes
for divorce are made equal as between men and women, and these people are
left open-mouthed when informed that in the northern portion of Great
Britain they are so? While others declare that the mere notion of a woman
being a Member of Parliament, of a jury, or of the police force, must be
the cause of inextinguishable laughter, thereby convicting themselves of
bad manners towards two European nations and the United States of America.
The wisest among those who educate the young are disbelieving in the
doctrine of original sin; they no longer regard education as violently
forcing a child into moulds; they believe that in giving scope for
natural energy the teacher is doing almost all that a teacher can
profitably do; they think that as the human race has evolved into two
sexes which are indispensable to one another, the better they understand
one another the closer will be their sympathy and co-operation with each
other, and that, therefore, the segregation of the sexes is bad. The
subjection of one sex to the other is also bad, since the slave-owner
never can really know the slave, while the knowledge the slave has of
her owner is bitter fruit. In the art of medicine, doctors are more and
more setting themselves to remove obstructions to health. Even the penal
codes of the world are slowly becoming less and less retributive. Women,
therefore, are in the direct line of progressive thought when they demand
that their vital force shall not be circumscribed and shackled, but that
men shall give them the same scope as they claim for themselves. And
progressive women declare that liberty will tend to assuage the war of
the sexes, which is as old as the domination of man.
CHAPTER III
THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.
I have said that the women who are in the movement are craving two
things, knowledge and scope. Many of those who are obstructing the
movement are loud in their professions that they, too, want women to know
more—about “womanly” matters; that they, too, desire that women should be
allowed to do—what they are “fit” for. And when the inquirer asks what
is womanly, and who is to be the arbiter, the reactionary replies, with
a pitying smile, that it is surely not necessary at this period in the
world’s history to ask what is womanly, and that the inquirer is rather
perverse than honest; that human nature is the same all the world over,
and much more particularly female human nature; that wise men down all
the ages have written books showing that women are instinctive rather
than logical, governed by the emotions, devoted to the individual and
regardless of the whole, incapable of concerted action; and that these
properties of woman, at any rate of normal woman, are specially devised
by Nature for the making of good mothers and for nothing else, and that,
moreover, the burden of motherhood which Nature has imposed upon women is
so great that they have, or should have, no time or capacity for anything
outside the exercise of that function.
I wish to declare at the outset that in my opinion any speculations about
women, any schemes for their education and their life-conditions which do
not take into account the fact that they alone can be the mothers of the
race, are thereby rendered worthless and foolish. We have not to consider
one generation only; even if some philosophers desire to do so, and if
individuals here and there, as they do and always will, achieve it, the
greatest of all impulses will drive to reproduction, and the strongest
of all desires, after those for self-preservation and self-fulfilment
(and frequently even before these), will be the desire of re-living in
the children and re-living better than now. I use the word re-living not
to mean that there is any survival of the conscious personality of the
individual in successive generations, but to suggest the imaginative and
purely altruistic contemplation of future generations which shall reap
where we have sown; this, I believe, is one of the deepest and purest
of those motive forces which lie beyond explanation or justification.
And when I have said this is my opinion, I wish to add that in a large
and varied experience of the so-called feminist movement, in England and
abroad, I have found the importance of motherhood more fully understood
and more religiously proclaimed by the women in the movement than by
any other women. That they are in revolt against much that law and
custom have laid upon motherhood is undoubted; also that they understand
motherhood in a far wider sense than the vulgar one, and that they do not
regard it as a specialised or vocational affair. It has been customary to
divide female humans into women and mothers; this is altogether false.
Women should not be trained to be mothers; to do so at once introduces
all sorts of arbitrary limitations and restrictions and hampers the very
mission it is designed to serve. Women should be trained to be whole
human beings; the measure of a woman’s motherhood, like the measure of
her love, is the measure of her whole nature. Cramp her nature, limit her
activities, and you cramp and limit her love and her motherhood.
Of course the reactionary replies that we are demanding for women more
than men have. That, if women have this great burden of motherhood, which
men have not, the rest of the load must be lightened in proportion. We
may all heartily agree that the load should be lightened, but who is
to decide upon that portion of it from which women are to be exempt?
Men only? Do we not find that reactionaries describe as a burden and a
care what progressives regard as a tool or a weapon? There are people
now, who, knowing that men have thought the franchise of such supreme
importance that they have rioted and fought and died during centuries of
the world’s history for the right to choose who should be their rulers,
yet assert that to give women an equal share in that choice would be to
impose a fresh burden upon them! In effect these people claim that women
do their work better when it is left to men to decide what that work
shall be and under what conditions it shall be performed; that, although
woman is the guardian of the race, and bears the burden of motherhood, it
is still to be left to man to dictate the terms of motherhood.
To us, on the other hand, it seems that no distinction of race or class
is so fundamental and ineradicable as the distinction of sex. Breeds may
be mixed, a rich man may become poor, or a poor man rich; a man may begin
life as an employed person, and end it as an employer, or _vice versa_;
alone from the cradle to the grave, man is man and woman is woman. When I
insist on this I do not overlook all the interesting and as yet unproven
speculations that are made as to the varying degrees of maleness and
femaleness that there may be in different individuals, nor do I subscribe
to the endless cocksure generalisings upon sexual variation (for until
we can separate acquired from inherited characteristics, we shall never
get very far); I am content to base the essential differences between
men and women upon the known fact that their share in reproduction is
different and produces difference of life, needs and temperament. How is
it possible then, more peculiarly in sex-relations, for men alone wisely
to prescribe to women?
For example. Because willingness to sacrifice is one of the attributes of
motherhood, it is too often assumed that the sacrifice of the woman must
be for the good of the race. Nature gives to each child two parents; man
in his wisdom makes the laws which assign one only, mother or father, as
may be most expedient for him,—never both,—and when he discusses racial
problems, he is very apt to attribute any shortcomings to the woman, who
“has only one task to perform and performs that badly.” He forgets that
the child may inherit not only personal qualities but racial poisons
from the father as from the mother, and that the liberty he denies the
woman in sexual relations (giving as his reason the sacredness of the
home and the family) has too often been used by him to the great damage
of the race. He forgets, too, that whereas fatherhood is voluntary,
motherhood by far too often is not. He adds laws to laws, dealing with
factories and workshops, and leaves the mother’s factory—the home—to take
its chance in the _sauve-qui-peut_ of industrialism. In Great Britain
he contrives a National Health Insurance Act and leaves out altogether
from its compulsory provisions the health of the mother in the home,
except for maternity benefit. In this same Insurance Act he arranges that
the maidens shall pay for the widows, and the women shall pay for the
unmarried mothers. And when death has removed the one parent whom the
law allows, public provision and private charity alike have seldom any
consolation to offer the widow who has lost her dearest, but to remove
from her motherly care all or some of the children left to her (now
undisputed) ownership. All these cruelties and absurdities are possible
because of the subjection of women.
Reactionaries on the women’s question may be divided into sentimental
and brutal reactionaries. The sentimentalists declare (very often in the
same breath) that women are not in subjection, and that they like being
in subjection, that progress lies along the lines of specialisation,
and that women should not “interfere” with men’s work. Women, they
aver, are not inferior to men, but true economy is shown by increased
division of labour: man’s to command, woman’s to obey. There is to be a
specialisation in the virtues, too. “Can we ever have,” asks Mr. Frederic
Harrison pathetically, “too much sympathy, generosity, tenderness and
purity? Can self-devotion, long-suffering and affection ever be a drug in
the market? Can our homes ever be too cheerful, too refined, too sweet
and affectionate? And is it degrading the sex of woman to dedicate her
specially to this task?”[2] (To me it seems “degrading the sex” of man
to suggest that he has no need to practise all these fine qualities,
but that he will practise them vicariously through woman, who is to be
dedicated specially to them.) The sentimentalists suggest that this
willing service women have for centuries rendered to men, and been happy
and good. The bold bad feminists have wantonly stirred up revolt, and
peace and happiness will only return when they have been routed and the
“awful rule and right supremacy” of man re-established.
I think we may dismiss without much argument the assertion that women are
not in subjection, and indeed, sooner or later, the reactionary always
gets tripped up on this ground. It is not possible to study our social
institutions without coming to the conclusion that they are the result
of the subjection of women and that many of them tend to perpetuate
that subjection. It is inconceivable that women, of their free and
enlightened will, would have chosen this position. That some women are
found to maintain that it is not subjection and they like it, is only a
proof of the mental and moral effects of subjection upon them. There is
a brave spirit which declares that “Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,” and much of women’s work has been done in that
spirit. Exceptional women have triumphed over their prison (at what
cost the life of the Brontës may show), but the world is not composed
of exceptional women, and the mass of women have been degraded by the
narrowness and irresponsibility of their lives. One is familiar with the
idealistic assertion that no one can injure you except you yourself. It
is a fine thing to hold to your sovereign will and force it to command
your life, but who can look round on the world as it is and not see
everywhere signs of how men and women degrade their fellows by cruelty,
carelessness and greed? It sounds like cant to tell the girl and boy who
have been reared in a slum and have never known decency that they need
not have allowed themselves to be degraded. It sounds like cant to tell
a woman she is not in subjection to men’s law when this law does not
allow that she is the parent of the child she has borne, and when men can
at any time, and do, deprive her of the inviolability of her own body
and of the right to earn an honest livelihood. No, it is not arguable
whether women nearly all over the world (and certainly in England) are in
subjection, and I do not intend to argue it. The only questions are, How
came they so? Are the causes eternal and irremovable? Would it be well if
they were removed?
I confess to a much higher regard for the honest brutalitarian than for
the sentimentalist; for the man or woman who says candidly that women
are subject to men because they are inferior to men, either physically,
or intellectually, or both. Even among these there is a tendency to
allow, with a shrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left
wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or
for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for
a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole
way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a
whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than
men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence
is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical
superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and
moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly
conducted entirely by the light of one’s predispositions, and which leads
nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it
except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those
who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force
they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly
the faults encouraged by subjection. Men’s standards have been applied
to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have
been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have
evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while.
It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman
has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be
that women’s lack of genius in the arts is due to some inferiority of
mind, or it may be due to an essential incapacity for or an artificial
prohibition of the passionate, concentrated egoism, which alone can
produce the greatest works of imagination. The special pleader against
women will declare that if they had any capacity at all, it would have
shown itself in music and painting, for young ladies have always been
encouraged to sing and to play and to sketch. And as for poetry, it is
only necessary to have pencil and paper and—genius. As if the kind of
parlour tricks that used to be expected of marriageable young ladies had
any relation at all to creative art! The eighteenth century or early
Victorian parent had a short way with any daughter who wished to take any
art seriously. We know how Maria Edgworth humbly submitted to have her
work blue-pencilled by her affectionate but inferior father, how Harriet
Martineau suffered from the endless task of shirt-making, how Jane Austen
hid her compositions under fancy work, lest visitors should suspect she
was that unsexed thing, an artist.
But the whole discussion whether women are mentally inferior to men is
indeed impertinent to the practical issue whether or no women should
have their lives and work controlled by men. Only by liberty of action
and scope for our powers can we develop healthily and harmoniously, and
the fact that so much of a woman’s life and experience lies altogether
outside what a man can experience should surely make men a little
diffident about dictating conditions. The opportunity to develop is not
a reward of virtue nor a prize for genius. Women, as well as men, should
have the fullest possible opportunities for development, not because
they are “equal” to men (a most unfortunate phrase), but because it is
good business, socially speaking, to develop all your human as well as
your material resources. The developed person will be more useful, more
companionable, more reasonable, more happy and more amusing than the
undeveloped. And if man be really the intellectual superior of woman, why
should he fear her competition?
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL FORCE
“He will not read her good,
Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
Through that dense hood:
Through terror, through distrust;
The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:
Through all that makes of him a sensitive
Abhorring dust.”
GEORGE MEREDITH.
In the last chapter the question was put whether women are intellectually
and morally inferior to men, and the conclusion was that this was a
question incapable of solution, certainly now, and probably always;
furthermore, that, even if it were answered in the affirmative, this
would be no reason for denying to women opportunities for their fullest
development. We now come to another sort of superiority, which is
capable of proof, which has been proved to demonstration and which of
itself accounts perfectly for the subjection of women during the ages of
human development in the past. This is, of course, the superiority of
men as a whole, over women as a whole, in size, weight and muscle. It
seems doubtful whether, among races where women have the same physical
discipline as men, they are any less enduring of fatigue, and there are
some hardships, such as shortage of food, broken nights and severe pain,
which women seem better adapted to bear than men. Again, of men and women
engaged in the same employment, such as the teaching profession—in which
no one can say that women have the lighter task, for which women are
much less highly paid, and which very rarely represents the whole of the
work the woman teacher is expected to get through in the day—the women
live longer than the men. The superiority of the male over the female in
size, weight and muscle seems the only one established beyond doubt, and
as this superiority is seen in most of the animals, there is a strong
presumption that it is not entirely due to artificial conditions of
feeding, exercise and so forth. The extraordinary increase in the average
size of British girls during the last hundred or even fifty years shows,
however, that semi-starvation, lack of exercise and of the nervous energy
which comes from hope and a purpose in life, were the purely artificial
causes of the extreme weakness of the weaker sex during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments that have been made in
the reaction-time and relative sensibility of boys and girls, suffer
from the circumstance that the subjects experimented upon could not be
scientifically treated, and all that the experiments prove is that boys,
often fed and always reared differently from girls, showed slightly
quicker reaction-time, and, in a few cases, slightly more developed
sensibility. Anyone who has begun to realise the extremely complex causes
of good and bad nutrition and its close dependence on mental states will
put himself the question whether the confined, thwarted, and monotonous
lives of girls have not counted for very much in the imperfect nutrition
of their nerves and therefore in their lack of initiative and response.
But now, of this undoubted muscular superiority of men. What has it led
to? In early stages of civilisation, Might was Right. A man took what
he could and kept it if he could. Nations and governments were founded
on the same principle of self-protection and self-aggrandisement, and
empires followed. Women did not escape this law of the strongest. In
addition to what seems a congenital muscular inferiority, women had the
enormous handicap (for fighting purposes) of motherhood. The nine months
of gestation and the succeeding period of nourishing and cherishing the
infant were, and are, and always will be sufficient reason why women
cannot successfully resist men by force. Not infrequently have I heard
women, and much more frequently men, say on public platforms that it is
not true that women cannot fight; that some women are stronger than some
men, and that women are only prevented by men from enrolling in the army
and defending their country. This always seems to me the silliest stuff.
How could men prevent women from fighting if women wanted to fight and
were as strong as men? If women were as strong as men and as fond of
using their strength in fight, and if they desired their enfranchisement,
how is it that they have not fought for it and won it long ago? But the
women’s battle is a far harder one: it is to induce men to give up the
primary impulses of animal nature at the command of reason and knowledge;
to refrain from taking what they _can_ take, from commanding where they
can enforce obedience. And this is a battle which was begun ages ago, and
in every age has had its victories,—victories due, not to the pitting of
physical force against physical force, but, first, to man’s deep need
of woman, which prevented him from destroying her, as he destroyed all
other weaker creatures when he had no use for them, and, second, to the
mutual love of man and woman and their common bond in the child. Physical
force is a great and vastly important part of the forces wielded by man,
but it never has been the only one, and it is increasingly being brought
under the dominion and guidance of other forces. Women, too, have their
physical force, without which the race would be extinguished; and, in the
last resort, if we could imagine the brutality of man contemplating a war
_à outrance_ against women, their strength would be found to lie, not in
the fact that they could conquer men in a physical conflict, but that
they could die. For those who can only read what is explicit, I hasten
to add that I do not believe such a state of things could ever arise,
although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of
exterminating the enemy’s women.
If we find some of the women’s champions a little hazy on this matter,
their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of
some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of
anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance
of physical force as a “regrettable fact,” do lip-service to the gospel
of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and
probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and
heartfelt declaration that it was “only just and right that men, who
alone can enforce the law, should make the law.” Now, if it is right and
just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is
not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is
not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based
upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral
sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny
the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This
is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that
man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all
over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such
domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist
does not deny that nations can wage wars; what he says is that war, at
the present time, and between civilised countries, is “bad business.” I
do not deny that most men could knock most women down; I say it would
be bad business to use this power, and I believe that most civilised
men would agree that it would be bad business, that they have no desire
to rule women in this way, and that society will be much healthier and
happier when men as a whole abandon the practice altogether. And the
anti-suffragists who make such statements about men have so low an
opinion of them that I am ashamed for them.
Another frequent absurdity of anti-suffrage argument is the assertion
that we wish to destroy physical force, and that if we succeed, we shall
become the easy prey of other less foolish nations. Now, to wish that
physical force shall be controlled by knowledge, intelligence and right
is not to desire its destruction; on the contrary. There is no enemy of
health and vigour so subtle and so strong as ignorance and incontinence.
It is not love and kindness, temperance, soberness and chastity which sap
a nation’s strength and make its young men to fail when tested; it is
ignorance, or disregard of nature’s laws, the sweating and overcrowding
of millions, the slackness and self-indulgence of those whom their more
fortunate conditions should have made leaders of men. It is to the
interest of men that women should do their work well, and under the
dominion of physical force, of fear and compulsion, women can never do
their best work.
Women are making great claims: they are not only claiming that the men
of their own land shall not govern them by physical force alone, but
they are making what, to some quite honest people, seems an outrageous
claim,—that they should have a right to an equal share with men in
deciding foreign policy and the question of war. They claim this right,
because they believe that it would be for the good of the State, and
because they think the State owes it to them because they are citizens
and not parasites; because they are doing an absolutely indispensable
work and making sacrifices which are at least equal to the sacrifices men
make for the safety, honour and welfare of the State. Let us examine into
the grounds of this plea.
At an open-air meeting a man approached the speaker with what he
evidently regarded as a poser: “If you get a man’s rights, will you
women fulfil a man’s responsibilities?” It was a good question to ask
at an open-air meeting, where close reasoning is almost impossible,
and the answer, “No,” brought a sneering, “Ah, I _thought_ not!” and a
round of applause from the youths round the cart, who didn’t look as if
they had thought much about even a lad’s responsibilities. The heckler
was, of course, begging the question. By talking of “a man’s rights”
he did not merely mean the rights which a man can now by law exercise;
he implied that a man held these rights by virtue of certain services
rendered by him, and that, if women claimed these same rights, they must
be prepared to render these same services. I will deal in a subsequent
chapter with the question whether, as a matter of fact, voting rights
are, in modern England, dependent upon the military service or upon the
physical force of the men who exercise them. For the moment I wish to
discuss the ethical and social consequences of asserting that only one
kind of service entitles a person to liberty, and that service being the
taking of life, women, whose service consists in the giving of life,
are not entitled to liberty. “A man’s responsibilities!” Let us take
them at their very hardest. Let us contemplate the ideal world of the
anti-suffragist, where man goes out daily to his toil in the cruel world—
“commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
while woman lies “warm at home, secure and safe.” He, if fighting is to
be done, fights for home and country; she has no more arduous part than
to weep, while he is away, and welcome home the victor. But stay! This
version of affairs always assumes that the man is the victor. Have not
the vanquished wives, too? Study the picture of any war, even the most
modern and the most “civilised.” Are the women of the vanquished, the
invaded country, “secure and safe”? From the tale of the Trojan women
to the latest reports of Bulgarian or Servian atrocities, we find all
truthful records give the lie to this rosy picture. Men who go to war
have the honour and the glory, the bands and the banners, the stars and
medals and monuments and maybe the glorious death. Women die, and see
their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame
unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their
lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all
that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to
administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are
killed, are their “responsibilities” killed with them? When the flower
of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and
beget the men of the future?
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,
The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,
Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
These are only some few of the questions that surge up in a woman’s
mind when men talk as if war concerned men only. But after all, in a
modern civilised state, is war the only thing that counts? Is soldiering
the only national service? Mr. Kipling’s grandiloquent phrase about
woman’s hindering hand on the warrior’s bridle rein makes men and women
who are mentally alive smile at its ludicrous inappropriateness to the
greater part of life as we live it. And if we admit that, fighting being
a man’s business, the details of how best to fight are properly left
to men to determine, can we refuse to admit that, child-bearing and
rearing being a woman’s business, the details of how to bear and rear
children are properly left to women to determine? And if the amount of
freedom persons possess depends on the amount of service they render
to the State (a principle which, as I have shown in Chapter II., I do
not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in
offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the
human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and
sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would
assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in
modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life.
Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding
reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion
which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation
I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to
advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they
shifted man’s claim to superiority from his military to his economic
qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people
are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that
will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will
ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.
In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption
that one frequently finds implicit in much of the feminist talk of the
present day—the assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved
physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising.
There are no signs of this in literature or history. If men have enjoyed
fighting, and gloried in bloodshed, as many still do, that is because
their blood was hot within them, and the women of their age and race
loved them for it. The experiences of men and women have each made for
civilisation, and women have not the man’s obvious temptation with
fists to try conclusions, since they are for the most part foregone
conclusions. If motherhood has been for much in the education of the
race, so have science and the love of the arts and beauty. Agriculture,
manufacture, commerce, even finance have engaged men’s hearts, and
more often than not turned them from war. War is waste and the women’s
movement may be taken as the type of all the great conflicts there have
been between coercion and development, bullying and understanding, love
and hate. What has been good in war has been the life-forces, the energy,
the joy that men have put into it. They are finding other conflicts than
those with their fellow-men, into which they can put these forces, and
the women’s movement, in part the cause, is also in great measure the
effect of the disappearance of barbarism.
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for
elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy
is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower
and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction
between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges
and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—WALT
WHITMAN, _Democratic Vistas_.
Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of
physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and
always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they
are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral
courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists
for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this
domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best.
They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is
undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance
with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that
of women. I have already touched upon the lack of foundation for this
assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and
far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic
Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his
profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the
women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics
common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes
such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual
and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes
that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting
in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the
failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards
persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common
sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good
women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by
a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to
men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying,
spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much
over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s
very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments
“untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very
like this in the course of the Dreyfus case, when it became a reproach
to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women,
according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself
away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been
alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh
all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions
and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely
balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the
effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair
impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect
for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “_The women’s
vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side._” (Italics
mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable
is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair
and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular
quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have
endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose
something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest
themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about
the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine
Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of
roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterous
views and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us
that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man
(save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and
wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used
by men of each other in political controversy.
We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of
women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority
of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in
government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based
their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are,
broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding
the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there
is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs
of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves
could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these
difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from
cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,”
he writes,[3] “any considerable body of persons who are not represented
in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as
England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through
selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters
and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that,
even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which
they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they
deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by
philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from
overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire
of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist
could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.
How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels
and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man!
Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the
claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another
mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail
at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and
know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be
advised by them,” say the reactionaries. “Yes. And also you may not,”
is the reply. Professor Dicey makes much of the distinction between
civil, as distinct from political, rights. He speaks of reconciling
his “enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and
education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in
sovereign power.” But the male electorate is not all so enlightened as
Professor Dicey, and civil rights depend upon political rights. Men
less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in
their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to
fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education
(and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women’s side),
and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they
have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men
will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their
minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married
Women’s Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and
unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to
suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for
evermore men will feel like women?
Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon
things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing
and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when
people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external
pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In
truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the
sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we
asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we
do not. The very existence of customs and laws and governments proves
that men believe humanity needs these motives in addition to moral ones,
and, unless you are an anarchist, you must agree that they do. When
men get altogether away from women they forget women. It is natural.
Therefore women, who suffer from being forgotten when their lives are at
stake, require that men shall not in future be able to get altogether
away from them when they are employed in governing them, as they do
now in Parliament. Mr. Harrison gives us an interesting and touching
little bit of information when he says, “To speak the truth, I only know
one woman whom I would always trust to come to a right decision”; but
this fact has really no general interest or value, and even if women
did not, on the whole, represent the views of Mr. Harrison, this would
not prevent them from representing their own, which is what matters in
representative government. Mr. Harrison becomes appealing when he says,
“Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman to decide these
complex issues”; because that is just how _we_ feel! _We_ do not trust
the average man to decide these complex issues. A fellow feeling makes us
wondrous kind, and perhaps when Mr. Harrison has grasped this feeling of
ours, he will see that the proper thing is for neither man nor woman to
attempt to decide these complex issues alone.
We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out
of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible
it is for a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as
long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable
gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of
this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to
result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s
to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous
expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women
are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men
think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy
fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part
in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite;
women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and
long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work
and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property
and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration
amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the
things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about.
We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone
and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures
neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who
make money and take life. “Things are in the saddle,” says Emerson, “and
ride mankind.”
Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England
“the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a
balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is,
of course, entirely without foundation. The vote is _not_ given to the
family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote is
_not_ refused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to
one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even
if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and
that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which
represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a
country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are
greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the
permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for
what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where
he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track
the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the
burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the
voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the
English women at home.
The possession, by the people, of the parliamentary vote does not make
a democracy. Many other things are necessary for that. But the vote
is a piece of the machinery of democracy without which it cannot work,
and it is lamentable to hear men who call themselves Liberals, and who
use all the old catchwords of the democratic party, refusing to apply
their Liberalism to women and bringing against the enfranchisement of
women all the ragged old arguments which used to be brought against
men’s enfranchisement and which are ragged from the shot wherewith the
old reformers riddled them. “Men know better than women what is good
for women!” Yes, and the slave-owner knew what was good for his slaves;
and the employer knew what was good for his employees; and the landlord
knew what was good for his tenants! But the slave and the employee and
the tenant did not think so then, and no one dares say so now. The
women’s day is coming too, and the people of the future will deride
those Liberals of the early twentieth century who talked of the Will of
the People and forgot the mothers; who boasted of their intention to
enfranchise every person “of full age and competent understanding” and
left out half the people; who declared that “citizenship” should be the
basis of voting rights and denied these rights to all women, thereby
admitting (what the women had been rebuked for asserting) that Britons,
when they happened to be female Britons, _were_ slaves. No external
defeats could have so sapped the prestige of the political Liberal party
as the fact that it failed altogether, as a party, to recognise the
force and the progressive idealism of the women’s movement. There is
now in England no movement that can compare in vigour, intelligence and
devotion with the women’s movement. When the Liberal party acknowledges
this and identifies itself with the movement, it will once more step into
the line of progress; until then it is true to say that the progressive
women and the Labour party which supports them are the only democrats.
Moreover, the penalty of supporting reaction in one direction is that
the logic of events drives men into the logic of thought. Many a Liberal
who hoped he could restrict his illiberalism to women, is finding
himself forced into general principles of reaction which will sooner or
later—horrible to contemplate!—overwhelm men too.
On the other hand, the effect upon women of the agitation for the vote
has been enlarging beyond even the most sanguine expectations. I myself
have seen women of the middle class, who began by desiring the vote from
a personal and quite legitimate sense of their own worth and claims,
led, from a sense of justice, to entertain the claims of other less
fortunate women, and by degrees find their desire redoubled on behalf of
these women, whose needs, experience and sympathy gradually demonstrated
as far exceeding their own. No less remarkable is the enlargement of
the lives of these less fortunate women, by the growth of sympathy and
understanding between the different classes and by the linking up of
public and private duties and aims. “Since she’s been a suffragist,” I
have heard a man say, “my wife has seemed to take more interest in the
home. It hasn’t taken her thoughts off; it has only made her think more.”
And I have heard a middle-aged woman use the pathetic phrase, “Since I
began to think,” meaning, “Since I joined the suffrage movement.”
Is it all unmixed good, then? Is the women’s movement singular in this,
that it is perfect? Will women make no mistakes? By no means. Who could
be so foolish as to think so? But by mistakes we learn. If you wish to
learn a new language you must blunder in it first. One of the reasons of
women’s slow development is that men are so afraid women will make fools
of themselves. We all have a divine right to make fools of ourselves,
because the force that created us decreed that only so could we learn,
and the convention by which a woman is never allowed to be a fool all to
herself, as an individual, but is made to sin for her whole sex, is an
anti-progressive convention which must go. A woman fires a building and
we are told “Woman” has disgraced herself, “She” is unfit for the vote.
But men sack empires and burn cities to the ground and no one says “Man”
has disgraced himself, “He” is unfit for the vote.
I think I hear the horror-stricken Anti declare, “A right to make a fool
of yourself? But it is _our_ Empire that you are asking for,—to play
with! Our Empire which we made ourselves and which is so complex, so
delicate, so nicely poised, that one push from a foolish woman’s little
finger will send it reeling to destruction.” The Anti wants to make
our flesh creep; but it refuses. We don’t for a moment admit that the
Empire, with its millions of men and women, belongs to men any more than
it belongs to women. We can’t believe, either, that the Empire is in so
shockingly delicate a condition as the Antis make out. The cry is for
safety. Only Death is safe.
“Permanence hangs by the grave;
Sits by the grave green-grassed,
On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.”
Life is never safe, yet the happy warrior prefers life. The Empire was
certainly not made by people who chattered of safety and permanence, nor
will it be kept by such people.
The direction in which reactionaries anticipate most trouble is one where
I believe it would be last to show itself. It is in foreign affairs, in
the relations with other countries, in the issues of peace and war that
they see most danger, if women shared responsibility with men. I do not
believe it, because for one thing these matters are exceedingly remote
from the electorate, and in the vague way in which popular sentiment
makes itself felt it is highly improbable that women’s sentiment would
on any particular issue differ from men’s. It is difficult to conceive
of Englishwomen loving Germans while Englishmen were burning to cut
their throats. What is possible is that women may gradually help men
to see what very bad business war is, simply because it is obviously
and always such bad business for women, and while undoubtedly some men
trade in war, no women do. The idea is freely expressed that men would
resent women having power to control the forces of the army and navy,
when women cannot themselves serve in the army and navy. It does not seem
clear why they should, for they do not seem to resent women helping to
control the police force, although women do not serve in the police. In
this latter case the matter comes much more closely home to everyday life
and yet we have no trouble. Sometimes the difficulty is put in another
way. We in England, it is asserted, may be willing that women should
share in the control of their own lives, but if we allow this, we shall
lose the respect of more “virile” countries. But the “feminisation” of
politics (to use their phrase) will not give the country one man less,
nor will it make one man weaker or less virile. If really the respect
of other countries depends upon the amount of our physical force, that
force will still be there, undiminished, and in course of time, as we
fervently believe, through better and humaner conditions, will be greatly
increased. We do not find the Scandinavian races nor our Australian
cousins to be particularly womanish, yet Norway and Australia have given
all their women the vote.
My theme hitherto has been that the domination of physical force has
been the cause of the subjection of women, and that it is contrary to
progress and civilisation that physical force should dominate moral
and intellectual force. But, of course, physical force has never been
entirely dominant, otherwise the mind of man never would have emerged
from the mind of the beast. All progress is due to the growth of mind
controlling physical forces, and the anti-suffragists who assert that
the vote has been and is merely the counter which represents the
physical force of the voters, and that no one would dream of obeying a
law if he once suspected that it were not made by those who possessed
the preponderance of physical force, are making an assertion which not
only reflects quite undeservedly on the intelligence of men, but which
is patently contrary to facts. Things may be bad; they might be much
better; but physical force, in this crude sense, never has entirely
ruled the world since prehistoric times. The idea at the back of the
anti-suffragist contention is, as far as one can make it out, that you
cannot compel a man to do a thing _against his will_, if he feels that
he has the strength to resist. We must admit that. But there are many
ways of moving the will besides the crude way of physical force; there
are various kinds of compulsion and various forms of resistance. The
Antis at one moment declare the intellectual superiority of men over
women, and the next moment involve themselves in a line of argument which
presupposes man’s entire deafness to reason. Man is, however, gradually
discovering that he may get more out of his fellow-man (and _à fortiori_
out of his fellow-woman) by agreement than by compulsion, and the
resistance offered by out-and-out striking is only an extreme case of
the moral law of diminishing returns upon increased compulsion. It has
been found that slave-labour is the least productive labour; it is slowly
getting to be believed that overwork means under-production. The degree
of physical force used by men against women has not been sufficient at
any period to destroy women, but it has crippled them; it has resulted in
not getting the best out of them. Though stupid men and blackguards have
not understood this, the better sort always have, and the great mass of
men have never even dreamed of applying their force to its utmost against
women. It is quite true that Government rests on physical force in the
sense that Governments dispose of physical force; but those who form
the Government are not chosen for their personal possession of physical
force, nor even with any thought that they represent the physical force
of the community. In a country with representative institutions the
Government is supposed to represent the _opinions_ and _interests_ (not
the physical force) of the majority of the electors. Before the modern
extensions of the franchise, the country was actually ruled by the votes
of men who were few relatively to the whole population, and, therefore,
by no means represented the physical force of the community, and before
the days of parliamentary government a small oligarchy or even an
autocracy ruled. Democratic government has, in fact, come to birth and
steadily grown with the steady decline of the rule of physical force.
And it will be seen that this must be so, when once we have grasped the
fact that the unmoral use of physical force may here and there profit an
individual but is always bad business for the community.
If we abandon the visions of the Antis, we shall see that, as a matter
of prosaic fact, the vote in England is given to a man not as a reward
of virtue (as the assertion, “woman has disgraced herself,” would seem
to imply), nor as a prize for intellectual ability (as those who speak
slightingly of women’s intellect would suggest), nor as the guerdon of
physical prowess (as the physical force party declare), nor does it
depend upon his being a husband and father. An Englishman who has, by
debauchery, ruined body, mind and spirit, and who has neither wife nor
child, may yet have the necessary qualifications to vote, for these are
a confused and illogical jumble of accretions, but, such as they are,
they depend on the possession of property. It is proposed by Liberals to
abolish these and to enfranchise a man in virtue of his manhood. Once you
see the immorality, the waste and the stupidity of the physical force
argument, there is no possible ground for refusing to enfranchise a woman
in virtue of her womanhood.
CHAPTER VI
VOTES
Who made the law thet hurts, John,
_Heads I win,—ditto tails_?
“J. B.” was on his shirts, John,
Onless my memory fails.
Ole Uncle S., sez he, “I guess
(I’m good at thet),” sez he,
“Thet sauce for goose ain’t _jest_ the juice
For ganders with J. B.,
No more than you or me.”
J. R. LOWELL.
We come now to the question, what is the use of the vote, about which
women are making such a bobbery? Not more bobbery, be it well understood,
than men have made; not nearly as much, if we are to take as a measure
the amount of suffering that men have been willing to inflict and the
crimes they were willing to perpetrate in pursuit of the franchise.
We exaggerate the _use_ of the vote, say the Antis. Well, even if it is
possible to exaggerate the use of the vote, it is scarcely possible to
exaggerate the significance of the continued denial of the vote. To the
awakened, organised, articulate women who are demanding the vote, the
shifts and excuses and dodges of politicians, the exhibitions of mob
spirit and the revelations of passions and motives usually hidden have
been startling. Women, whose private lives were fortunate, have been
taught that they were living in a fool’s paradise concerning the lives
of other women. The sight of woman-baiting by a mob of her political
masters; the listening to debates in the House of Commons; above all, the
arguments used by anti-suffragists have made women infinitely keener and
more conscious of their position than they were before. Many of these
things have been as startling as a blow in the face. The letter of Sir
Almroth Wright, the verses published by Mr. Rudyard Kipling under the
title, _The Female of the Species_, the animus of Mr. Belfort Bax and
the vulgarities and shallows of Mr. Harold Owen and the _Anti-Suffrage
Review_ must have converted thousands of men and women who before had
refused to believe that such views were at the back of the opposition to
women’s enfranchisement.
But do we exaggerate the value of the vote? People often talk as if the
vote were only of use for making more and more laws, and ascribe to
women the desire to “make men good by Act of Parliament.” They forget
that votes may also be of use to resist and to modify legislation; that,
through Parliament, attention is called to the administration of public
affairs; that Bills are capable of amendment, if the electors will be
keen and united enough for their amendment; above all, that Parliament
raises money by taxation of women as well as of men, and that Parliament
alone decides how this money shall be spent. Three million women and
nine million men profit by the Insurance Act. Is this not sufficient
commentary on the assertion that a woman’s chief business is to mind the
baby and that men protect her in that business? The only medical care
that she gets from the Insurance Act (barring maternity benefit) is when
she refuses to mind the baby or has no baby to mind.
There are two ways in which the possession of the vote will benefit
women: first, by raising their status, and, second, by giving them
power to influence Parliament directly through their representatives.
The matter of status seems to me by far the more important of the two,
but because it is intangible, people with no imagination cannot grasp
it. Yet men from the days of ancient Greece and Rome to now have very
passionately clung to the badge of citizenship. We find magistrates
now in England adjusting their sentences so as to avoid adding the
humiliation of disfranchisement to other penalties of the law; we find
Parliament debating earnestly how relief may be given to poor men without
involving them in pauperisation, which means the loss of the vote; we
remember how Members of Parliament pleaded for the coloured man in South
Africa that “the intolerable slur of disfranchisement” should not be
cast upon him, and we note with burning indignation that these Members
are quite placidly content that this intolerable slur should remain upon
their own mothers and wives. It is only an idea. Yet ideas have moved
the world, and this idea that women are not born to be the slaves of men
has rankled for ages; now that it has found expression, it rankles no
longer, it has become an inspiration to millions of lives, not only of
women but of men too.
As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite
ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote
is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or
insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does
not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever
will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds
of politicians when any women’s problem is presented to them: it is, to
prohibit. As Miss Gore-Booth has remarked, politicians of the type of Mr.
John Burns cry out periodically, “Go and see what the women are doing
and tell them not to!” It is always done, ostensibly, in the interests
of the mothers and their children, but women know that what the mothers
want is the means and freedom to do their work, not prohibition. What is
the matter with the poor is their poverty, says Mr. Shaw. What is the
matter with the mothers is their poverty and the ignorance that comes
out of poverty. Remove the poverty and the ignorance and you will have
done vastly more to check the infant death-rate and the manufacture of
unemployables than you will by prohibiting all the mothers in the land
from earning (not from working! No one ever proposes really to relieve
them from toil!) and putting them absolutely into the power of men.
The influence of the women’s vote would be felt by no means only at
election times. In the countries where it exists it has not so much
affected the balance of parties; that is to say, it has not had just that
element of fighting that so interests the sensation lover and that is
so fundamentally contrary to real progress. There has been no apparent
opposition of interests and no sex-war, but politics have been peacefully
penetrated by the women’s point of view. Women without the vote can do
something to form public opinion; but women with the vote will find
public opinion far easier to move. Acts of Parliament do not spring
full-grown from the minds of politicians; we see how different interests
are at work moulding them, before they are even presented as Bills,
and it is the voters who are listened to, the voters whom the Minister
in charge addresses and persuades and treats with, the voters whose
amendments are first taken. I do not deny that politicians do sometimes
consult women, but what women? Some say they consult their own wives;
who selected these wives, and for what qualities? It is farcical, when
democracy insists that men shall choose their own rulers, to tell women
that they get the equivalent when men choose what and how many women they
will “consult.” Voting women may be expected to influence Bills both in
their introduction and in their passage through Parliament. Members have
repeatedly stated that they could have voted for certain amendments or
measures if they had felt that they owed their seat in Parliament in part
to the votes of women who favoured these measures. A member represents
only his constituents, and in the long-run he votes in accordance with
the views of his constituents. If he does not, it is their fault for
electing him.
There are, moreover, the indirect effects of the possession of the
vote. The politician who is also a statesman should know that Acts of
Parliament only work well with the intelligent co-operation of the
people. Who can expect the women to co-operate intelligently in working
Acts about which they were never consulted, and which no one ever takes
the trouble to explain to them? Men say they were never consulted about
the Insurance Act. But it was their own fault if they allowed themselves
to be overridden. The women could not help themselves. In addition to
the certainty of better co-operation, there is the increased sense of
responsibility, the stimulus to thought and organisation, the fact
that politicians and reformers all concentrate on educating the voter
or the potential voter. We all know the candidate who will only answer
questions from electors, and any woman who has not been permitted to ask
her own question, but has been compelled to put men up to ask it, knows
with what pathetic ease such men are fobbed off. Men are not educated
in women’s questions as they should be, and the women themselves are
not educated and independent. In his fine speech in the House on 6th
May 1913, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said: “I share the opinion of those who
say that the mere granting of the votes to women would not directly
increase wages, and so on. But the difficulty we have got is that when
we try to increase women’s wages there is a sort of subordinate frame of
mind in which women approach all these points. They are careless. They
will not organise. They will not take pains and trouble to look after
themselves. What is the reason? The reason is that they have always been
accustomed to shuffle responsibility for their own actions upon somebody
else’s shoulders. The very argument which the Prime Minister used this
afternoon, that we were doing so well for women, was the most humiliating
argument that any Liberal could use against such a reform as we are
asking for. We want women to do these things for themselves, because they
can do them a great deal better than men can do them. We want to get them
into the frame of mind of independent and self-respecting citizens who
will co-operate with us, and not merely ask us to do things for them,
when they can do them much better for themselves. What would happen if
the franchise were given would be this: Women would take a far keener
interest in such questions as wages, a far keener interest in their place
in the factory or workshop. Women as enfranchised citizens would join the
unions, would make their economic demands with far more advantage, with
far more spirit, with a much more rigid backbone than they do now. Up
would go wages as an indirect consequence of the vote having been given
to them.” So we come back to status after all as the most important of
all the effects of enfranchisement. I hope to return later on to this
matter of low status, and show how it has been responsible for other
evils than political evils.
Many opponents of women’s suffrage are really anti-suffragists in a
far wider sense than they will admit; the arguments which many of
them use are arguments against the franchise altogether. But if the
anti-suffragist happens to be a candidate for Parliament, he dare not
speak his mind about the existing male electors, lest they should not
return, to represent them, a man who expresses so frank a contempt
for them; he does not, therefore, express it. But some of the women
anti-suffragists do, and we may learn a good deal from them as to
the hidden sentiments of the men like-minded with them. One of the
fallacies into which they most frequently drop is the confusion between
legislating and electing legislators. They become eloquent about the
disaster that would follow if women voters decided matters of foreign
policy and high finance, and some cheap fun is made at the notion of
the charwoman negotiating a loan, and the society beauty delimiting a
frontier. But the male voters do not perform these functions, and the
women voters would not be called upon to do so. The strongest argument
against the Referendum is that the great mass of the people cannot and
never will be fit to judge of matters requiring specialisation, nor to
conduct negotiations requiring secrecy and despatch. Popular election
means that the people chooses its rulers, chooses those—whom it should
then trust—who shall carry out in detail the policy whose broad lines
the people approve. Free press, free speech, open debates are the
safeguards and opportunities for criticism and revision, but not for
legislation and administration, which are the functions of governments
and not of electors. There is no system conceivable that will work if the
people will not work it. Men, unfortunately, are to be found who expend
their ingenuity in discovering how best they can make representative
institutions unworkable, and these men are by no means on one side of the
House only. A great deal of the preposterous machinery of Parliament has
been set up to circumvent the wreckers, who are, in practice, whatever
they may call themselves, anti-democratic. But no machinery can take the
place of common sense. It is the belief of the progressives that women
have at least as much common sense as men, and that they have proved
themselves far better diplomatists, perhaps because they have never had
the same temptations as men to rely upon physical force as an “argument.”
The conclusion is, that to be without representation in a country
professedly governed by representative institutions, is to be perilously
near to a state of slavery. If women were given the vote, England would
be a better place, not because women are better than men, but because
conduct is not right or wrong independently of its effects, and the
effects of slavery are bad both for slave and for owner.
CHAPTER VII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(1) THE WAGE-EARNER
“And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend,
That all is done in reverent care of her;
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night;
And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
_The Taming of the Shrew_, IV. i.
The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what
are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course,
very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly
through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering
of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of
dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more
difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force.
It is difficult to believe in the intellectual honesty of those feminists
who declare that women must fight men on an equality in the economic
world. I have read articles insisting that women must not only bear
the child, but make provision for the child, unaided by men, either
individually or collectively. Such proposals depend on the evolution
of a race of Superwomen unlike any the world has seen, and no one has
demonstrated, or even suggested, how such a race is to be formed. The
women who dream these dreams are very attractive visionaries, but I do
not propose to follow them into their Utopia, for the reason that I am
more interested in the world of reality. In this world of reality, we
must face the fact that women, for every child they bear in health and
strength, are made less capable of producing exchange value (called
wealth), and that not only motherhood, but potential motherhood, affects
and always will affect the market value of a woman’s work. The people
who do not admit this are exceedingly few; but those who do admit it are
sharply divided in their views as to how the resultant evils are to be
met, and even those who believe most earnestly in the women’s movement,
differ in their solutions of the economic problem. Yet the economic
slavery of women is worse and more difficult to deal with than any other
slavery, and it cannot be met by machinery only; it must be met by a
change of heart, a change as needful in women themselves as in men. Women
must have pride and belief in themselves and their work, and men must
leave off applying to women a cash standard wholly inappropriate to that
part of the community whose work is so largely work for the future.
I have preferred to begin with this statement of the women’s economic
handicap, because I find the great and ineluctable weight of it more
often under-rated by women in the movement than by those I have called
reactionaries. The queer thing is, that the reactionaries who make such
play with the burden of woman, are those who propose to pile on to the
necessary burden of the child the totally unnecessary additional burdens
of ignorance and lack of training, and a thousand restrictions of law and
custom, while still making no serious attempt to remove all necessity
for earning. Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the
picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast,
one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed
with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting
rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same
rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free.
Women are notoriously paid less than men, and the reactionaries are very
fond of giving us a somewhat superfluous lesson in elementary economics,
to account for these lower wages. They say that wages depend on the
demand for, and supply of, labour, and that these depend on the amount
of skill required, the pleasantness and healthiness of the work, the
amount and the cost of training for it, and so forth. They say that
women’s work is less efficient than men’s, partly on account of their
essential inferiority (one instance of this being their greater liability
to sickness), and partly because of their expectation of matrimony, which
makes their work less constant and makes their parents less willing
to expend money in training them. Finally, they say that women have
other sources of income than their labour, and that their wages being
supplemented from these sources, they are able and willing to take lower
wages than men, able and willing in many cases to accept wages upon which
one woman cannot live. These sources are twofold: their male relations
partly keep them, so that their wage is only a pocket-money wage; or
other men partly keep them, in return for their favours.
With the exception of the somewhat sweeping assertions about the
essential inferiority of women’s work, I am prepared to admit all these
statements as being manifestly in accordance with facts as they are. This
does not increase my enthusiasm for facts as they are; on the contrary,
it makes me cast about for means of changing them, and some of them seem
to be already in course of rapid change. As for the greater incidence
of sickness among women making their work less valuable, it would be
interesting to inquire how much of that sickness is due to the low
standard of living, caused by low wages: by overwork from having to do
housework and needlework when the day’s wage-work is done, by poor food,
lack of rational pleasures, and the depression of knowing that, however
hard they work, there is no future before them; a woman cannot rise.
There is another cause of depression, in the nature of the “dependents”
a woman generally has. A man’s “dependents” mostly include a wife, who
nurses and looks after him, and children, in whom he can have hope and
pride. A woman’s dependents are the crippled husband, the old mother,
the invalid sister for whom there is no hope. When a woman falls sick,
there is frequently no one to give her the little comforts and help
which may prevent the sickness from becoming serious. It is more than
doubtful whether women’s greater liability to sickness is not simply the
result of conditions too hard and depressing for the health of anyone,
man or woman. Perhaps men would break down far sooner than women, under
the strain of a life as joyless as that which most women are expected to
endure.
Of the essential inferiority of women’s work, I will only say that,
except in the matter of muscular power, it is entirely unproven. Many
employers prefer women, saying they are quieter, cleaner, more sober,
more trustworthy, than men; others disagree. The willingness of parents
to allow time and money for the training of their girls is being
considerably modified, and it is in the power of public opinion to
modify it much further. The liability of women to marry and pass out of
wage-earning is a drawback which will always exist to some extent, but
which would be greatly reduced by better organisation. The existence of
a class of pocket-money workers has been very much exaggerated, and there
is no reason why women should not, by judicious combination, practically
eliminate this peculiarly obnoxious type of blackleg. The supplementing
of wages by prostitution is a more difficult problem, to which I will
return in a later chapter.
Are there no other causes for women’s low wages? Let us see. Demand and
Supply regulate wages, they say. Then anything that tends to restrict the
field of labour wherein a group of persons may compete, lowers the wages
of that group of persons. So long as by law women cannot be lawyers,
chartered accountants, or clergymen of the Church of England; so long as,
by administrative action, women are excluded from all the well-paid posts
in the Civil Service, and married women tied out from teaching and the
post office; so long as, by custom and the action of men’s trade unions,
women are either directly refused admission into trades or indirectly
refused by being denied apprenticeship; so long as all these artificial
restrictions of women’s labour exist, will the supply of women’s labour
in other directions be artificially increased and their wages lowered.
So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are
determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and
Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of
these being political forces, which have established fair wages clauses
for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many
of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned
the principle of _laissez-faire_ some half a century ago, and most of us
have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free
industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is
that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and
not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall
not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown
that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly.
A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal
dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton
or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal
waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother
of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her
confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been
invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all
for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for
their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who
would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found
was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust
and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when
gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be
protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same
colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary,
language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear
were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is
that, in this instance, as in many others, the work was to be taken away
from the women because some men wanted it, and they were not ashamed to
use their political power to try to filch the work from the women, though
they were ashamed to own up to the reason. Their intention was thwarted,
because there were men in Parliament and out who refused to be convinced
by the pretension that the restriction was for the women’s good, and
because the women made a tremendous fuss, came up to London, held
meetings of protest, and roused the country and the press. But this was
the third battle over this one position; and why should women be called
upon to defend their right to earn their livelihood in honest, necessary
labour? If women were to demand legislation to prohibit men from
following the “unmanly” and “unhealthy” occupation of selling sarsanet
over a counter, or writing accounts in a book, and “taking the bread out
of the mouths of the women,” there would be more to be said for it than
there has been for many restrictions men have made on women’s work.
What the women in the movement want is the opening up of trades and
professions to women. We should then find what women could do, and it
would be unnecessary to prohibit them from doing what they could not
do. If, further, a living wage were insisted on, those who did the work
best, whether men or women, would be employed, and those who were not
worth a living wage to any employer would drop out of employment and be
dealt with by the State. It is bad business for man to treat woman as a
competitor in the labour market, whom he will grind down and grind out
altogether if he can. A sweated and degraded womanhood is as great a
danger to the community as a sweated and degraded manhood.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(2) THE MOTHER
“In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man;
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth;
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.”
JOHN MASEFIELD.
The neglected motherhood of England cried out for attention, and it is
getting attention with a vengeance. A veritable Babel is being raised on
the subject of mothers. Progressive women are all for more recognition
and support of motherhood, but the difference between the reactionaries
and them is that they hold the first thing necessary, to give intelligent
support and recognition, is the liberation of the mother from all the
antiquated rubbish of coverture law and from some of the worst results
of economic servitude. Else indeed may women find that they have only
exchanged King Log for King Stork. While King Log is reigning, little is
done for the mothers directly by the State. Women, when they marry, are
merged into their husbands, who hold them as property, and have towards
them certain legal responsibilities, of a nature somewhat analogous to
those they have towards other living and sentient pieces of property, The
State has always dimly known that in the quality of its citizens lay its
true and lasting wealth; but penal laws, which used actually to mutilate
men and women, and which still tend to reduce their vitality and to drive
them to imbecility and madness, are plain witnesses of how imperfectly
this truth has been grasped. Improvements in these respects are, however,
on the way. This is said to be the age of the child, and through the
child it is becoming also the age of the mother.
In England, at the present day, a working man has almost absolute power
over his wife. That he uses this power in the main as humanely as he
does, is a proof of how much better men are than the laws which they
make or tolerate, and of how much real affection there is between men
and women. The fact remains that, especially among working people, where
the woman can have no money of her own unless she is in a position to
earn it, the husband has the most awful powers of inflicting torture and
wretchedness upon his whole family, and that it is distinctly safer for a
working woman not to be married to the man she lives with. That working
women so greatly prefer being married, again shows how strong in them is
idealism and the love of social order. What may an Englishman do with his
wife? His physical force is supported by law as regards his “marital
rights.” He can insist on his wife’s faithfulness to him, while using
complete licence himself. He is supposed to maintain her in accordance
with his station in life, but if he fails, it is very difficult for her
to find redress. She can pledge his credit if he has any, but it may
be refused, and she can then only get maintenance from him by leaving
him and taking the children with her and throwing herself on the rates.
The Parish will then take action, not for the sake of the woman or her
children, but to save the rates! That is to say, she must become a pauper
before she can get what he is supposed by law to give her. Even when the
law has given her a maintenance order, the recovery of the money is made
vastly difficult and precarious, and if the husband absconds, it is no
one’s business to find him, unless, again, the woman becomes a pauper.
What would men say of a law which only allowed them to recover their
debts on the same terms?
The husband can prevent his wife from earning, and he can claim any money
she saves out of the housekeeping. He can bring up the children as he
pleases, and control them even after his death, by will. He can leave
the whole of his property as he pleases, even if it has been accumulated
by the joint-work of his wife and himself, and if by doing so he leaves
her and her children destitute. If he is wilfully idle and refuses to
maintain her, she can “have the law of him,” and send him to prison:
much good that does her! The latitude allowed by the law in the matter of
personal chastisement of the wife has been a byword ever since _Truth_
published its weekly list. I have read this list on and off for over
twenty years and I see no change. One week is very like another. Flogging
a wife till she is covered with bruises, driving her out of the house on
a winter’s night in her nightgown, kicking her when she is with child,
and other assaults too abominable to mention have been held insufficient
to entitle the wife to a separation. I repeat, it is _safer_ for the
woman to need no separation because she has never tied the knot.
By far the greater number of men do not by any means do what the law
allows them, but are kind, toiling and fond husbands and fathers. But
even when the father is the best of fellows, it happens in millions of
cases that he is not able, under modern conditions, to make adequate
provision for his family, and no working men can make adequate provision
for the widows and young children they may leave. The State began to
make serious provision when it introduced free elementary education. The
next step was free meals for the needy, and this was rapidly followed by
free medical inspection and treatment of children in schools. All these
developments are undoubtedly socialistic, and involve the principle
of giving, not according to deserts, but according to needs. And the
interesting situation arises that—although we go on saying that the man
supports his family, and must, therefore, have a much larger wage than
the woman—when the State pays for education, food, doctoring, nursing,
it does so from the rates, which are paid by women as well as by men.
No rate-collector troubles whether his rate is levied on a woman or a
man; nor does he inquire whether the woman is supporting a family or no.
Our experience of socialistic legislation so far goes to show that male
politicians are disposed to say to women, “What’s yours is mine; what’s
mine’s my own.” The Insurance Act is perhaps the most flagrant example
of this, for by its provisions the State’s weekly twopence goes to nine
million men and three million women; it is paid for out of the pockets
of the taxpayers, and so is the whole of the cost of administering the
Act. Practically all women feel the weight of taxation, yet here the men
profit three times as much as the women, and by an extraordinary irony,
the women who are selected to be left out of sickness benefit are the
very women who are doing the admittedly womanly work of making a home,
and nearly all women are left out of unemployment benefit.
It is easy to see how these anomalies arise. It is not by any means
easy to provide a remedy for them. One scheme, propounded by Mr. H.
G. Wells, and with a few ardent supporters, is the State endowment of
motherhood. If this were adopted, the individual man would be relieved
of the necessity of providing for his child, and the individual woman
would be relieved of her economic dependence on her husband. There
has been markedly little support for this proposal as yet among women
in England, although Ellen Key in Sweden is a warm advocate, seeing
in it the opportunity of women to do their life-work well. So far as
the scheme applies to women who have lost their husbands, there is a
considerable measure of approval; it has sometimes been described as
“boarding out children with their mothers,” and is, to a very limited
and inadequate extent, actually practised by some Poor Law authorities.
A small beginning, too, has been made in the maternity benefit, and now
that it has been made payable to the mother, it may be considered a true
experiment in the direction of endowment.
In the abstract there is a great deal to be said for the notion that,
since children are not properly held to be the property of their
parents, and since the welfare of the children is the highest interest
and the gravest concern of the State, it is the State as a whole that
should shoulder the responsibility of the children, and they should
not be at the mercy of the vicissitudes of one single life. The women
should have the responsibility of bearing and rearing the children,
and the men should have the responsibility of providing maintenance
for the children and their guardians; but the men should pool their
responsibilities, and, out of taxation levied upon all men, the children
and child-bearing women should be supported. In this way it is claimed
that the personal relations of men and women would be relieved of the
economic incubus: the husband would be the woman’s mate, but would
cease to be necessarily her employer. If she chose to keep his house,
that would be a piece of voluntary service, to be paid for by him like
other voluntary service; for cooking and cleaning and blacking grates
is not a part of motherhood. Under such a system, each sex would really
make the contribution characteristic of that sex, and the question of a
“family wage” would be solved. A man would be able equitably to claim
a higher wage than a woman for the same work, on the ground that, as a
man, he was taxed as women were not, for his share of supporting the
human family, and the widows and spinsters would cease to be burdened out
of their smaller wages with rates and taxes to pay for the unfulfilled
duties of men. The proposal has, in fact, so many theoretical advantages
that it is curious so few women can be found to look at it favourably.
The reactionary would naturally not do so, because all changes are
abhorrent to her. The progressive women are, some of them, oppressed by
the dreary details in which Mr. Wells has revelled, and by the awful
prospects of standardisation and inspection, and red tape. Utopias are
always so appalling to all but their creators, and when I read Mr. Wells’
enthusiastic description of how his endowed mothers will live, my soul is
filled with “an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.”
Is this, I ask myself, an instinct which it would be folly to suppress?
Or is it merely that the idea is too new for me, progressive though I
like to think myself? I don’t know.
I cannot agree that there would be anything derogatory to womanhood in
the maintenance by men of women whose motherhood prevented them from
maintaining themselves. The actuarial standard, of which we heard so much
during the debates on the Insurance Bill, is totally inapplicable to
mothers. They have a claim on the State and should be proud to make it.
Too often, the poor woman trembles to confess that she is with child, and
is tempted or even compelled to destroy it unborn. This is an abomination
and a most grievous injury to both women and men. But the supporters of
the scheme have not yet given a consistent reply to those who ask what is
to be done for the mother when the children are grown up. Is she to be
pensioned? It is not enough to say that she can return to wage-earning,
for this is generally not true. By marriage she is often compelled to
leave the place of her employment, and every year taken from wage-earning
makes it more difficult to return to it.
This is a much greater practical difficulty than the fear of
over-population which some people raise. People are always in a panic
about the birth-rate; it is always too high for some and too low for
others. They suggest that if the endowment of motherhood were instituted,
and a man altogether relieved of the individual duty of maintaining
his offspring, there would be no limit to that offspring. It is quite
possible that a free womanhood would in itself provide the natural and
right limit. Those who talk as if women would deliberately have as many
children as possible, so as to go on earning motherhood grants, overlook
the fact that at present the women who have the largest families are
those who are the least able to support them, and suffer most from
having too many. It is a well-established fact that increased comfort
and refinement decrease fertility, at the same time that they decrease
infant mortality. Furthermore, it might be hoped that the endowment of
motherhood might make it possible for many men who now remain single and
are a great danger to the community, to marry.
It is not my task, and it would be an impossible one, to say whether
the women of the future will develop the family along individualist or
socialist lines. That they will not be content with things as they are
is one certainty. Another is that they ought to be made free to reform
conditions in full consultation and agreement with men. Lady Aberconway
has suggested that men should be obliged by law to give their wives a
fixed proportion of their incomes, and there appear to be in England more
followers of this idea than of the endowment of motherhood. It should
certainly be possible for a wife to sue for maintenance, without being
compelled to go on the rates, but the fixed payment of wives has very
many and very great practical difficulties, and it would not help the
millions of cases where the man’s total earnings are inadequate. Many
men, even now, give not a proportion, but practically the whole of their
wages to the wife to administer. A fixed proportion of one wage may be
enough, and the same proportion of another too little, and a small family
may easily be brought up on what would be penury for a large one.
What is urgently needed is, that the problem should be dealt with by
men and women not in the spirit of bargaining, or endeavouring each to
best the other, but with a single endeavour to do right by one another
and by the child. Nature has so arranged matters that the women cannot
evade a considerable portion of the burden of parentage. Men can,
and not infrequently do, evade the whole of the burden of parentage.
Together all good men and women should so contrive their body politic
that every child shall have the care and nurture it requires. Hitherto
man’s outlook as regards marriage has been personal rather than racial.
When the inequality of the marriage law with regard to infidelity is
objected to, he has, for ages past, explained that he has made infidelity
a more serious fault in a woman than in a man, because the result of it
in a woman might be that her husband would have to support another man’s
child. This is so, of course, but it is generally a far less serious
injury to the race than the results of a man’s infidelity are. It seems
to be a law of nature that some of the present must always be sacrificed
for the future. The woman may have to sacrifice liberty, genius, life
itself. Neither can the man with impunity evade his sacrifice. And he may
not regard it as a gift or a favour to the woman, for which she must, in
return, be subservient. It is his toll to the future, the future of his
world as well as hers.
CHAPTER IX
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(3) THE HOUSEWIFE
O the soap vat is a common thing!
The pickle-tub is low!
The loom and wheel have lost their grace
In falling from the dwelling-place
To mills where all may go!
The bread-tray needeth not your love;
The wash-tub wide doth roam;
Even the oven free may rove;
But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
The Altar of the Home!
C. P. GILMAN.
In the great majority of households the wife and mother is also the
housewife. In the great majority of households this arrangement is the
most economical and suitable in every sense. So long as families live
each in a separate home there will be a vast amount of domestic work
to be done in the home, and a great deal of this work being suited to
women’s strength and capacities, it seems more appropriate, as well as
more economical, that each woman should do the domestic work of her
own home, and do it to her liking among her own children and her own
possessions, rather than go out and do another woman’s work for wages.
Further, a woman who is attending to the needs of young children is
perforce a great deal in the home with the children, and therefore it
is again economical that whatever work she does, in addition to caring
for the children, should be work that can be done in the intervals, and
that does not require her to waste time and strength in leaving the
home. A large part of the function of child nurture is merely to be
there, on guard and for emergencies. The child is both better and happier
that is not too much interfered with; that lies kicking and crowing on
a mattress, making acquaintance with its toes, and as it grows older,
finds its own games and delights, in copying the arts and crafts of its
elders. In sickness the whole of the guardian’s attention may be taken,
but in health it is a fact that a woman can best develop the child by
being herself occupied, so long, be it well understood, as the occupation
does not take the whole of her attention. Babies must be talked to and
sympathised with, and as they grow older the busy guardian must not be
so busy that she cannot play their plays with them. The sort of work
which occupies the hands and only a portion of the head is obviously the
sort of work which is appropriate to the child-minder. A floor can be
scrubbed, a grate blacked, bread made, and clothes mended with a baby on
a mattress in the room, and a couple of tinies playing shop in a corner.
It is not an easy life, and the mother may often feel she “doesn’t
know which way to turn”; but if children were not too many and houses
were more convenient, and all housekeeping tools more adequate, and the
housekeeping money sufficient, the life of the mother who is also the
housewife would be a happy and healthy life; she could hope to do her
work really well, and most women would prefer it to any other.
What are the causes of the present discontents among housewives? Many
indeed. They feel that the woman who is not only bearing and rearing
the children, but also buying and cooking and washing and cleaning and
mending for the whole family, should have some of that independence which
comes from handling the money she has earned and saved. I remember a man
at a street-corner meeting once heckling me with the question whether a
woman had not all that she required if she had “love an’ her keep.” He
was a candid fellow, and when I asked him whether “love an’ his keep”
would satisfy _him_, and whether he did not like to have some of the
money he had earned as “spending money,” to do what he pleased with, go
to a football match,—or even make his wife a present,—he laughed and
said, “Well it takes a woman to think of such things! Of course I do,—I
never looked at it in that light before.” The mother while she is bearing
children should be “kept” in health and strength; the woman who is making
wealth by personal services just as much as any other worker, should be
paid for her services. If this is not done, if a woman only gets her
keep as any other domestic animal does, it is likely that, in modern
times, she will be tempted to go out to work, when it would be better
for all concerned that she should stay at home and work. Very often, of
course, she is not merely tempted, but forced to go. The result is that
we see women with the treble burden of child-bearing, wage-earning out of
the home, and housework within the home. Small wonder when each of these
is ill-done. The marvel is how well done they often are.
Sometimes, again, by the conditions under which the men choose to work,
a monstrous burden is piled upon the housewife. The men who have been
most persistent and most successful in obtaining an eight-hour day for
themselves, have been those who have laid the heaviest burden upon the
women. In the cottage of a miner you will sometimes find men working on
each of the three shifts, and one housewife to do for them all. This
means four sets of meals (where there are young children as well), and
three sets of hot baths, and that condition of things which a good
housewife detests more than any other, of never being “tidied up.” A
canvasser reports how she found a housewife of this class looking so
worn out over her ironing that the visitor remarked on it, and the
patient housewife replied, “You see, I’ve not been rightly to bed for a
fortnight.” It is these men, too, some of them, who were so outraged
at the suggested “indignity” of compulsory baths at the pithead. The
freeborn Briton reserves to himself the right to bring his coal dust
home to the scrubbed boards and washed pillows of his domestic drudge,
and when he secures his eight-hour day, does not dream of employing some
other woman to help his wife with her extra shifts, so that she, as well
as he, may go “rightly to bed.”
Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately
hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful
inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in
drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It
is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working
women look old at thirty.
The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is
purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike
against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and
arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often
sunk in indifference. When people criticise the “folly” of teaching
girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable
conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves
or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied,
I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star of hope for the
housewives of the future. For it is quite certain that if the women
are not dissatisfied, the men never will be, and things will never
improve. It is difficult to find the beginning of the vicious circle in
which domestic affairs now are. You are no craftsman if you do not take
pride and joy in your tools, and is it not mockery to ask the English
cottager to take pride in her tools? Think of the crowded condition of
the rooms, so that the Sunday clothes must be kept in the parlour, and
there is no room whatever for storing perishable food, to say nothing of
groceries! Think of the extravagant, ramshackle grates on which these
women are expected to cook appetising food, without which the men will
go to the public-house! Think of the washing on a wet day! The man gets
out of the place as soon as ever he can, and we do not wonder nor blame
him. It seems to me indecent to blame the woman if she succumbs to such
conditions. When she revolts from them, she ought to have the hearty help
and sympathy of every reformer in the land.
So it is not housework that so many women are revolting from. It is
largely the horrible conditions under which so much housework has to be
done. But it is also this: that it is not wise to put all women under one
harrow, and particularly it is foolish to insist on mixing up the notions
of motherhood and housewifery into an inextricable tangle. Because, in
individual homes in the past the woman who bore the children had to cook
and clean and housekeep, it does not follow at all that this must always
be so for ever and ever. Some women who are by no means clever at child
nurture, and who detest housewifery, are capable of bearing excellent
children, beautiful and strong. It would be to impoverish the race to
say such women should not have children (and they and the men who love
them would laugh at you if you did). It would be stupid to sacrifice the
welfare of the children to the incompetent rearing of such women, and
one can only pity the men who have to eat the dinners they cook. Why not
admit frankly that women differ, and always will differ? Why try to press
them all into the same mould? If a woman has been a highly trained and
very competent class-teacher before her marriage, is it wisdom or economy
to declare that, after her marriage, she must abandon all her special
training, her natural and acquired gifts, and black her husband’s boots
and cook his dinner? Even if she has babies, is that any reason why she
should become a general servant?
Slowly, very slowly, because everything to do with women is so hedged
round with fears and tabus of all kinds, there is arising the possibility
of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative nurseries. To some
intensely individualistic women these will be a terror; they would
rather slave themselves to death than have a common kitchen or a common
dining-room; and some would not for the world miss one cry of the baby,
one clutch of its little grasping hands. Let these women have their babes
and their households to themselves; why not? But why should the other
women not also have what they want, and do what they can? No one, looking
round the world of men and women, can honestly say that men do as a
matter of fact choose their wives from the girls who love baby-minding,
cooking and cleaning beyond all things. Young men are not thinking
about such things at all when courting, and they go for nothing in the
sex-attraction a girl possesses. We women, if we have lived a good while,
have all known scores of girls left unwed who would have made better
mothers and better housekeepers than those who have married, and in some
cases “could have married a dozen times” as the saying goes. The fact is
that the perfect wife, mother, nurse, teacher and housekeeper is very
rarely one person.
Girls are less domesticated now, largely because the development of
industry has made them less so. Bread, jams, pickles, candles, hams,
yarn, cloth and clothes that used to be made in the home are now made in
the factory. It seems to me perfectly clear that by degrees much of the
cooking and laundering, even of the poor, will be done on a large scale
by those who receive wages for doing it. The discomfort and unhealthiness
of laundry work in a small cottage, and the waste of time and fuel in
cookery, are manifest to everyone who has ever seen them. There will be
a development of the crèche or day nursery in all towns, and eventually
those who love the individualist life will find it best in country
districts, while the towns will be given over to the men and women of
co-operative and gregarious temperaments.
These developments will, of course, bring with them their characteristic
dangers and disadvantages. Neither progress nor stagnation is safe; but
the one is life, the other is death. What is necessary is to face things
as they are and not go on eternally pretending that the world is what it
is not: that women all have sheltered happy homes, if only they would
stay in them; that it is only idleness or perversity which prevents women
from making their own bread (without a suitable oven) and stocking their
own jam (without even a shelf to put it on). We have seen enough of the
very serious disadvantages of modern industrialism to have a shrewd idea
of what the dangers of further development will be, and it would be the
wisest thing for sociologists not to attempt to sweep back the tide, but
to direct its channels for the future.
The divorce of the producer and the consumer has had many bad effects as
well as some good. While people prepared their own food and made their
own clothes and furniture, there was a direct personal incentive to make
them good. This incentive must be replaced by one as strong, or quality
will drop. The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his
enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement,
that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and
helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power
of finance, of trusts and combinations, to beat out competitors and to
rig the market, acts more often than not in direct opposition to the
real interests of the consumer. Hence enormous waste of material wealth,
adulteration and shoddy, and the ugliness that comes from bad material
and bad workmanship overlaid with vulgar ornament.
The fact is that, like everything else, housewifery is becoming a matter
of much greater specialisation on the one hand, and on the other the
modern state of affairs requires a modern mind. Collective effort and
political action are in these complicated conditions necessary, and the
purely individualistic attitude of mind is hopelessly old-fashioned. If
woman is to be the housewife of the future, it is the woman of the future
and not of the past who must tackle these questions, and men must give
the woman of the future her head.
CHAPTER X
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(4) THE PROSTITUTE
“Jenny, you know the city now.
A child can tell the tale there, how
Some things which are not yet enroll’d
In market lists are bought and sold
Even till the early Sunday light,
When Saturday night is market-night
Everywhere, be it dry or wet,
And market-night in the Haymarket.
…
Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.”
D. G. ROSSETTI.
When considering the reasons for women’s lower wages, reference was made
to the fact that women had other sources of income than those derived
from their work; and no discussion of the economic position of women
would be honest which did not take into account the undoubted fact that
women can make more money by the sale of their bodies than in any other
way. This may sound an extreme statement, but it is advisedly made.
Kings have given their mistresses titles, and have made their sons
peers. How many women have been ennobled for any other services? While
a first-class university woman rarely gets a higher salary than five
hundred pounds a year, an illiterate courtesan, if she plays her cards
well and has luck, may dip her hands into millions. The two cynical
volumes of Emil Reich, entitled, _Woman through the Ages_, give proof of
those qualities in woman which man has chosen to reward with the highest
titles and the greatest riches. Every poor sweated girl knows she can in
one night double her week’s wage if she chooses. This is a fact. If we do
not fearlessly face it, we may as well give up talking about the women’s
movement, for it will only be play. The clearest knowledge, the closest
thinking, are wanted on the part of women and men; hitherto, except for
those personally involved either as buyers or sellers, knowledge has been
confined to the police (almost entirely occupied with penalising one
only of the two parties to the transactions), to doctors and nurses and
officials of workhouses and asylums of many sorts, and to a small body of
rescue-workers. The list is significant.
It is to be wished that this subject could be approached free from the
falseness of sentimentality. It is not possible, nor is it desirable
to abolish all feeling when we come to act. Feeling is the property of
sentient beings, and actions are not right or wrong quite independently
of their effects on feeling. Women do well to feel intensely in matters
so closely affecting themselves, their sisters, their children and
their husbands. We are sometimes told that women must be kept out of
dealing with these things, because of their emotionalism: yet is it
not the passions and appetites of men which largely create the whole
problem, and are we to believe that men, when they come to making laws
and regulations, forget their passions and appetites, and become as
gods? We all know they do not, and the feeling of women is every bit as
respectable and deserving of attention. So we must feel, and we do well
to feel, when we come to act; but when we are studying the facts,—the
deeds of men and of women, and their consequences,—it is well to banish
feeling for a time, so that we may _know_ first.
It has been the easy custom of most men to divide women crudely into good
and bad. The good woman is superhuman, and she is a very homogeneous and
monotonous sort of person; the bad woman is subhuman, but often very
amusing and attractive. The good woman is put on a pedestal, where she
finds life very restricted and dull; the bad woman is segregated, either
literally or metaphorically, into compounds, where the delusion is nursed
that she will not infect the good woman, either with her wickedness or
her diseases. This is all unreal and tiresome and stupid and harmful
enough, but there is little to choose between it and a view of woman
which is too often put forward by women themselves, and that is the
view that all women are angels, and so angelic that nothing can corrupt
them. We may reverence the soul in every living person, we may keep our
faith strong in the miraculous power of recovery, we may humbly own that
none of us is entitled to cast a stone, we may even have come to see
that stone-throwing has not a reforming influence, and yet, if we are
honest, we must admit that there are women who have no personal pride
and no reverence for the body: covetous women; cold women, who do not
know the purification of passion; sensual women, who know only appetite;
lazy women; vain women; cowardly women. It is cant to insist that we
must reverence such women, any more than we would reverence covetous,
cold, sensual, lazy, vain or cowardly men. The life of prostitution tends
to encourage all these vices; that is one of the strongest reasons for
hating the life; but, undoubtedly, some persons have more aptitude for it
than others.
The questions we must ask ourselves are: (1) What is prostitution? (2) Is
it an evil? (3) Is it necessary? (4) If it is not necessary, how can it
be checked or prevented?
It is not easy to find a definition of prostitution which will be
accepted by all. I propose to define it as the yielding up for material
advantages only of something which should be given for other purposes.
A man prostitutes his pen if he takes money for writing lies; it is no
prostitution if he accepts money for writing what he believes to be
truth. A woman prostitutes her body when she yields it to a man for
whom she has no love, in return for money; it is not prostitution if
she accepts money from the man she loves. Many other definitions are
possible, but if we take this one, we have to admit that there is a vast
deal of prostitution within the marriage state, and here, in addition to
material advantage, there is often the added sop of social position. Even
when not entered into for gain, the marriage is often persisted in for
that motive. The effects on men and women and children are bad, but no
one has even suggested that reform should be introduced by any methods
other than educational ones: to give every girl the means of earning a
decent livelihood, so that she is not forced into marriage as into a
trade; to encourage reverence for the body and faith in the clean passion
of love in both men and women; to create a healthy public opinion in
which traffic in the appetites is regarded as repulsive, so that it will
be thought as shameful for men to buy as for women to sell gratification;
these are the only possible ways of dealing with loveless marriages. What
is commonly known as prostitution is, however, carried on outside of
marriage, and is promiscuous. It arises from the fact that large numbers
of men either have no wife or find one woman insufficient for their
gratification.
I have said that there are large numbers. Estimates vary enormously
as to what proportion of men resort to prostitutes. More facts are
badly wanted, but the Chicago Vice Commission of 1911, a commission
instituted and carried out by the municipality, states that the number
of prostitutes in the city _who do nothing else_ is approximately 5000.
It is impossible even to estimate the number of casual and clandestine
prostitutes, but they are certainly many. To arrive at some estimate,
the commission takes only the 1012 inmates of certain houses, from whose
books it appeared that there was a nightly average of _fifteen men per
inmate_,[4] and this gives the total of 5,540,700 visits per year.
It does not seem likely that Chicago is singular, and until we have
trustworthy evidence to the contrary, these facts form almost the only
basis for estimating the extent of these practices.
When we come to the question whether prostitution is an evil, we shall
find that some of the consequences are evil in themselves, and some are
evil because of the way society treats them. There can be no possible
doubt that the practice is of the greatest injury to the health of the
women engaged in it. Those who persist in it die young, though here the
Chicago Commission suggests there has been exaggeration. The injury
to the health of the men might be decreased if there were no disgrace
attached to the practice, and if medical advice were always invoked and
carefully followed; there would still, however, be considerable risk to
the health of the men, even if excess were not added, as a cause of
disease. The injury to the health of wives is very grave indeed, and
those who will take the trouble to consult such books as _Social Diseases
and Marriage_, by Prince A. Morrow, M.D., or _Hygiene and Morality_, by
Lavinia L. Dock (Secretary of the International Council of Nurses), will
find there justification enough for the statement that prostitution is
not only _an_ evil, but it is _the_ evil which is felt most disastrously
by women of all ages and classes. It affects the children, who are
afflicted with many ghastly diseases, as a result of their father’s
conduct; it affects the wives, who, besides the moral suffering they
may endure, are frequently rendered barren, and themselves diseased;
it affects all women wage-earners and, through them, men wage-earners.
Concerning the moral evil, a whole book might and I hope will be written,
from a modern standpoint. A great deal of purity-preaching fails because
it is out of touch with modern minds. If you want men to have a horror
of using a woman merely “as a convenience,” if you want women to resent
such a use of themselves, you will have to replace semi-savage tabus with
science. And this is not to say that religion has nothing to do here. For
those who believe in a God who made things must believe He meant us to
find out His law. There is a sense in which the sneer of the Pharisee is
bare truth, and “this people that knoweth not the law _is_ accursed.”
People have called it a “necessary evil,” and we shall do well to inquire
what they mean by “necessary,” for they generally use it in at least two
senses: (1) necessary for the health of men; (2) a necessary consequence
of the evil nature of men and women. It is impossible to believe that,
if it is necessary for the health of men, it can also be evil. It is
impossible to believe that a state of affairs can be natural in which
the health of men can only be secured by the degradation, barrenness,
disease and early death of women and children. Prostitution in itself
is degrading to both sexes, and cannot be necessary. What people mean
is that sexual intercourse is necessary for the health of men, and that
if they cannot have enough of it within marriage, it is necessary that
they should have it outside marriage. If we regard marriage as a divine
institution, it is impossible to believe that a good God would have made
it necessary to desecrate this divine institution. If we regard marriage
as a human institution, it is for us to adapt it to human needs and so
arrange society that men and women should have the intercourse necessary
for their health. The truth is that sexual intercourse is as necessary
for women as for men, and the opportunity of bearing children just as
much part of the wider scope that we desire for women as opportunities
for education and wage-earning. Because women have always been in
subjection, however, their needs have always been overlooked, and not
only law but custom has ignored them.
If one wife were not sufficient for a man, we should recognise the fact
and not outlaw the women who are rendering a service. There are about 3⅛
millions of unmarried men over 20 in England. Since we know that a very
large proportion of them do not forgo sexual intercourse, this argues
an immense discrepancy between our professions with regard to marriage
and our performance. If social conditions were altered, should we not
find that a large number of women at present unmarried would be willing
to enter into relations of love and affection with men, and might not
this greatly diminish the “necessity” for prostitutes? We can most of us
imagine a state of things infinitely preferable to the present, in which
the virginity of some 3¼ millions of women is secured by the holocaust
of the remaining quarter of a million, and all the attendant evils and
disasters to the rest of humanity. What does the bachelor condition of so
many men betoken? That they cannot, or will not undertake marriage. Is
it not time that some serious thought were given to finding out what is
wrong with marriage, or with women, or with men, or with all three?
But when “necessary” is used to signify the “necessary consequence of
evil human nature,” there is some truth in that; if we add, “and of
evil human institutions,” we may say that we have got the whole truth.
If human nature and human institutions are evil in this direction, can
we not alter them? Women certainly will not be content, with their
new knowledge and their growing powers, to sit down helpless before
these evils. We may be quite certain that they are going to move very
seriously, and it is to the interests of men and of the whole community
that there should be sympathy and understanding and co-operation between
men and women reformers. Women must beware of allowing themselves to be
infected, when they obtain more power, with the brutality which has for
ages robbed law of its moral sanctions, or with the legalism which has
robbed conduct of the grace of the spirit. The social evil is largely
the result of brutality, and brutal punishments are no remedy, even if
you can persuade men to inflict them. We do relapse periodically into
brutality, such as the introducing of flogging into a recent Act. But
it is remarkable that this particular lapse occurred in a measure that
had been hung up for a very long time and that was terribly overdue;
therefore feeling was exasperated and the measure was finally pushed
through on a wave of emotionalism when Members of Parliament scarcely
dared oppose the flogging, lest they should be accused of sympathy with
the offenders. One could not help feeling that a good many men found, in
the easy enactment of flogging, relief from the necessity of thinking
out and carrying out the far more difficult and searching reforms which
might have some permanent effect. The flogging clause was detestable,
both for what it did and for what it prevented being done. It is a matter
for regret that women did not oppose it, as women; but brutality has
had its effect on them too. If women were admitted to full citizenship
there might be more hope that reforms could be carried gradually and
thoughtfully. As it is, women must be excused for seizing any temporary
breeze of emotionalism (such as was caused by the death of W. T. Stead)
to move on their ship of reform from the doldrums where it lies neglected.
It is not reasonable to say off-hand that legislation can do nothing to
diminish the social evil, and a good deal of nonsense is talked about not
making men good by Act of Parliament. The causes of prostitution are very
many and complex, and though direct repressive legislation has always
been worse than useless, because its only effect has been to harry and
persecute and degrade still further the unhappy women, yet there are many
directions in which legislation could touch the causes.
The movement, now already strongly on the way, for further knowledge
is one of the most hopeful of all. Most thinking people are now agreed
that children should be taught the nature of their bodies, and respect
and care for them, and the only questions are how to give the teaching,
by whom and at what age. Adult women, as well as men, should also know
something of the pathology of sex, so that they can guard themselves, and
so that men may realise more than they do now the fearful suffering which
their excesses entail on the innocent. Purity has been preached to boys
and men far too much as a vague ideal. If the results of lust appeared
to them in their true form of hideous cruelty and cowardice, it would
make the most thoughtless pause. Girls must no longer be taught that
subservience and sacrifice to men is woman’s virtue; boys must be taught
to take a pride in a woman’s pride, achievement and independence. The
incredibly mean jealousy of these which we frequently see, has its roots
far back in childish days when “only a girl” was a phrase that passed
unrebuked by the mother. If a girl has not learned to value herself,
to respect her own body and soul, and dedicate them to some worthy
purpose, what wonder if she sells for cash that for which she herself
has so little value? The cult of the “womanly” woman is for much in the
venality of women. Besides this property of whispering humbleness, she is
to be all softness and weakness and yielding grace, and she is to be so
unlettered and inexperienced that the veriest scoundrel can impose upon
her. The law does much to encourage this low status of women, and until
women have attained full citizenship, it is not to be wondered at if
young men grow up with a slight contempt for them.
The fact that a woman can sell herself tends, as we have seen, to keep
women’s wages down, and the temptation to add to her income is increased
by the low wages. This is a vicious circle, from which escape can only
be made by raising wages, since you cannot directly stop prostitution.
The fact that men will probably always be richer than women, and that
men very much desire women, will perhaps always prevent the total
disappearance of prostitution, but at least we know that if we make
it possible for every woman to live decently, there will be an immense
reduction. It is in the highest degree unlikely that there are many women
who would deliberately choose the horrible life. They drift, fall and
are pushed into it and then cannot get out. One hears stories of actual
starvation leading to it. These may be true, but there are far more cases
(and this is proved by the fact that domestic servants and daughters
at home form the largest classes of recruits) where the natural love
of pleasure and finery, the natural sex attraction, and in many cases
aversion from hard or monotonous work have been the temptations. It is an
appalling thought that these, which are, at worst, faults and weaknesses,
should be seized hold of by men, to make, of what should be a woman—
“A cipher of man’s changeless sum
Of lust, past, present and to come,”
a creature whom law and society combine to treat as subhuman, a thing,
not a person.
Much indiscriminate abuse is hurled by sentimentalists at the
mistresses of households who discharge a servant leading an immoral or
irregular life, and many most worthy mistresses, feeling acutely their
responsibilities for young maids, and knowing of many temptations,
endeavour, by severe restrictions, to keep the girls straight. Both
seem to me mistaken. Employers of male labour do not keep workmen and
pay them good wages when they do their work badly. Especially not when
their delinquencies are voluntary. And the mistress of a household has
not only to consider the amount of work she is getting in return for the
wages she pays, she has also the grave responsibility of considering all
the other inmates of her house, the fellow-servants and her own family,
and the effect upon them of the presence, as a member of the household,
of a woman of loose character or conduct. It is almost always the best
thing for the woman herself to make a change in her life. But when we
come to the efforts of so many mistresses to keep their girls straight by
denying them pleasure, or prescribing to them the exact kind of pleasure
and refusing them liberty, these efforts appear often pathetically
misdirected, and only increase the contrast between the girl’s actual
life and what the tempter promises her. It is natural for a girl, whether
she be a servant or a young lady, to “have a young man.” The young lady
can see her young man as much as she likes, in drawing-rooms and at
legitimate entertainments; the servant, too often, can see her young man
only by stealth, alone, in the dark roads, on the bench of a park, or in
houses where there is little of the control of normal family life. And
her interviews with him are full of angry revolt against her mistress’s
prohibition, and of plots with him as to how to circumvent the tyrant.
The said tyrant is often desperately perplexed and anxious, but worse
than helpless, because of her ignorance and her sometimes wilful refusal
to admit the facts of human nature. I have known a woman who said, “I
don’t allow my girl to go anywhere without me, except to church and to
the G.F.S.”; but I had myself met the girl in a variety of other places.
Another employer, with two daughters who often went to dances, refused to
allow her pretty parlourmaid (who helped to dress the young ladies) to
go to a ball which her friends and brothers were attending. The employer
thought balls were not good “for that class of person.” Another lady, who
was constantly seen at dinner parties, theatres and receptions, said,
when asked that her servant should be allowed to join a social club,
where there was singing and dancing and acting and billiards, “I don’t
believe you can help that class of people except through religion.” Such
employers as these, and they are very many, bring into disrepute not
only the employment of domestic service, but the whole of the standard
of morals which they imagine themselves to be upholding. Young people
will have pleasure if they can get it, and to make their lives dreary and
lonely is to drive them underground for pleasure and for companionship.
The desolate loneliness of many domestic servants, far from home and
friends, and with well-meaning, puritanical mistresses, is a cause
perhaps quite as effective as service in a disorderly house or with an
immoral master. The living-in system is full of difficulties, and I
believe it is one of the systems which will have to go; but the only
chance of success is either to make the girl a part of the family she
serves, or to give her opportunities for a cheerful life of her own.
Another contributory cause, whose effect it is very difficult to
estimate, is the low state of public opinion, encouraged by the law, with
regard to physical brutality. Science recognises the close connection
between the lusts of cruelty and of sex. Public opinion must be brought
to support far more truly protective law for women and for little
children. We hear much just now of the segregation of feeble-minded
women, but we need, just as much, the segregation of men who have become
a danger to women and children. When women make public opinion much
more than they do now, and if only they will steer clear of retaliatory
brutality, we shall move much faster.
Again, consider what endless ripples of effects there will be when once
we begin seriously to tackle the housing question. What is the use of
talking about decency, when a girl or boy has never known it? When the
conditions of their daily life from childhood have been such as to make
decency and continence things never experienced?
Alcohol taken in excess loosens all the powers of inhibition, and
increases the appetites. When by improvements in the living conditions of
the masses we have tackled the disease of alcoholism, we shall find we
have made some way in other directions too.
It is a frequent easy generalisation that a “bad” woman is much worse
than a “bad” man. It is said that there is always hope for a fallen man
and none for a fallen woman. We shall have to be given far more proof of
this than we have ever had, before we will believe that it is a property
inherent in the sexes. If we must admit that we do not know how much of
the virtue of women is due to the severe penalties on vice, we must also
admit that we do not know how much of the incurable badness of women is
due to these severe penalties; for society makes it next to impossible
for a “fallen” woman to rise, whereas society does not trouble itself
even to know whether a man is “fallen” or not. When women think these
matters out, they will come to the conclusion that where it takes two to
commit an offence, the one who escapes scot-free and attempts to leave
the other to bear the double penalty, is perhaps the greater criminal of
the two. If two boys steal apples together and A escapes, leaving B to be
birched, public opinion is apt to think A rather a mean lad. If, instead
of receiving one birching, B were flogged daily for the rest of his life
because of A’s delinquency, what would public opinion say of A? or of the
wisdom of the schoolmaster? Prostitution will diminish when it is made
possible for women to recover lost ground; when a silly girl, who has
been enticed away by some man watching for her day of weakness, is not
treated as a pariah or expected to lead a life of penitential expiation
for ever after. The tone which some rescue-workers adopt towards such
girls makes one almost despair. It is an unfortunate thing that, owing
to the painful and distasteful nature of what is called rescue work,
so much of it is in the hands of women of a devoted and often exalted
temperament, which has almost no points of contact with that of the girl
who has drifted into an irregular life. Rescue work should be done by men
and women who realise that the appetite for pleasure is not an unhealthy
appetite, and that affection and a normal family life are the most
hopeful engines of rescue.
CHAPTER XI
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(5) COMMERCIALISED VICE
“And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’”
_The Mask of Anarchy_, P. B. SHELLEY.
Emil Reich, writing in 1908, said (_Woman through the Ages_, vol. ii.
p. 247): “The women of the East lie under an adamant yoke of complete
severity. It is in the West that the only movement comes, a movement—at
its mistaken best—which makes a crusade against prostitution, alcoholism,
and war; all of which must exist as hideous necessities and which, if
they could be swept away, would, in their disappearance, utterly upset
the balance of civilisation.” On the previous page he has asserted that
“the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of Empire.”
Many women will also see in the enslavement of women the chief cause
of the decay of Empires, and will hold that a civilisation which is
balanced on prostitution, alcoholism and war is in a state of unstable
equilibrium. They will be confirmed in this belief by the extraordinary
state of panic into which Imperialists so often get about the Empire,
which is so delicate that it must be sheltered from every breath of
popular opinion. A healthy Empire should normally be in a condition of
stable equilibrium, to which it returns after any shocks, and there is no
manner of doubt that women want to abolish the notoriously rickety three
legs of which Dr. Reich was so proud.
In themselves no one is found to recommend these three objects of man’s
solicitude. Even Dr. Reich calls them “hideous.” It is, then, merely the
impossibility of abolishing them that we are invited to accept, and it is
too much to ask energetic and active women to accept “hideous” things,
without ever having been given the chance of abolishing them, or even
seriously diminishing them, especially when it is women who bear by far
the greater weight of this hideous burden.
Now these three things are in their origin due to human appetites; these
appetites have, by indulgence, by stimulation, and by exploitation,
become lusts which, far more truly than any reform, do threaten the
extinction of the Empires which are allowing themselves to be eaten up
with them. It is with the stimulation and exploitation that this chapter
more especially deals. Natural appetite may be gross, may even be brutal,
but in simple communities where each individual must rely on his own
strength for his own livelihood, it tends to return to a norm which is
that of health. Appetite, stimulated with every artifice of advertisement
and allurement, exploited by every financial and commercial profiteer,
becomes in crowded communities a gnawing ulcer, destroying bone and
nerve and tissue, body and soul. To walk the streets and frequent the
amusements of any great modern town—London or Vienna or Paris—is to find
oneself in the midst of a perfect obsession of the lusts of the flesh. An
enormous amount of what passes for art has no design but that of inciting
appetite. Music halls and musical comedies, farces, picture-palaces,
advertisement posters, repeat the same tedious, banal, hideous assaults.
If you are incapable of responding, you are nauseated and bored beyond
expression; but it is clear that the jaded nerves of many people can be
whipped into response. There are many people who are so flaccid that they
invariably succumb to the fixed idea. The profiteer knows this, and the
idea is fixed by every device that capital can contrive.
Take the lust of alcoholism. What chance has the feeble will to escape
its lure? Have we not given “The Trade” a solidarity which must be the
envy of mere purveyors of necessities? (Mr. Justice Channell said
before the Jury Commission that a special jury very often consists
half of publicans.) Have we not connected light and entertainment and
conviviality with the vice of drunkenness? Have we not refused to allow
people even the right to protect themselves against the unwelcome
intrusion of the temptation into their neighbourhood? Do not our plays
exhibit drunkenness as laughable and lovable in men? (It is significant
that they are not so in women.) We have allowed the traffic in alcohol
to become a vested interest which controls the lives of the people,
and it is to the interest of this traffic that the people should not
become sober. Will the traffickers not use their control to prevent the
people becoming sober? “You cannot make men and women sober by Act of
Parliament?” Perhaps not. Need you give such vast power to those whose
profit lies in making men and women drunk?
Take the lust of sex. If alcoholism is stimulated in many ways, it is
as nothing compared with the incessant appeals to lust. We all hear of
the profits from the drink traffic. We are only beginning to hear of the
profits from the traffic in women, which are often closely bound up with
the profits of drink. But we must insist on knowing very much more than
we do about these profits. The Chicago Commission asserts that in their
belief Chicago “is far better proportionately to its population than most
of the other large cities of the country,” and this statement is based
upon a careful study of fifty-two of the largest cities. In this city of
Chicago (with a population of two millions) prostitution, they assert,
is a “Commercialised Business of large proportions with tremendous
profits of more than fifteen million dollars (over £3,000,000) per year,
controlled largely by men, not women. Separate the male exploiter from
the problem and we minimise its extent and abate its flagrant outward
expression. In addition we check an artificial stimulus which has been
given to the _business_ so that larger profits may be made by the men
exploiters.”
A Committee of Fourteen, which made inquiry in New York City, declared:
“Some of the profit-sharers must be dispensed with through the force
of public opinion or by means of heavy penalties, before the growth of
vice can be checked. These include those who profit off the place—the
landlord, agent, janitor, amusement dealer, brewer, and furniture dealer;
those who profit off the act—the keeper, procurer, druggist, physician,
midwife, police officer, and politician; those who profit off the
children—employers, procurers, and public service corporations; those
who deal in the futures of vice—publishers, manufacturers, and vendors
of vicious pictures and articles; those who exploit the unemployed—the
employment agent and employers; a group of no less than _nineteen_,
middle-men, who are profit-sharers in vice.” It is evident that if
so many people can make a profit, this constitutes a temptation to
exploiters, and if the business could be made unprofitable, it would be
greatly reduced. Demand creates supply. Some of the demand comes from the
natural lustfulness of men. But this is immensely stimulated by those
who make profits, and the supply is secured very largely by fraud and
deception, by persistent siege, by the ruining of girls under promise of
marriage. In Chicago the average wage of a shop girl is six dollars a
week; it takes at least eight dollars a week to support life there; the
prostitute can make twenty-five dollars a week. Yet even so, she could
not be secured in sufficient numbers without the carefully calculated
traffic. A prominent social worker in Chicago said in his evidence: “A
lot can be done, if we believe that a very large percentage of those who
pass through a period of prostitution are capable of climbing upward
instead of downward by the momentum of their own better nature. We will
have to change our theory about the woman criminal, if we are going to
save her. And if the woman is a prostitute, it is only through (1) the
uncontrolled passion of youth, and (2) financial stress. To my mind
she can fight both of these, but she can’t fight those and the added
damnation of the saloon and the cool, sagacious business man, who simply
stands by and drains her for profit. She could break through the economic
dangers and the physical temptations if you will give her a chance, but
when you make her fight alcohol and capitalisation, she has no show.”
We see from these accounts, then, that the demand comes from men, and
that the supply is largely procured by men for business purposes. In
England when a procurer is caught, he or she is sent to jail, but the men
who finance the procurer and the men who are her clients are shielded.
Who can doubt that when women know these things and are admitted to full
citizenship, there will be a change of public opinion all along the lines
that feed the supply—economic and educational? The Chicago Commission
in apportioning the blame, says: “The Commission has refrained from
unnecessary criticism of public officials. Present-day conditions are
better in respect to open vice than the city has known in many years.
But they are by no means a credit to Chicago. However, this must be
remembered, they are not unique in the history of the city. Present-day
public officials are no more lax in their handling of the problem than
their predecessors for years; as a matter of fact, the regulations
respecting flagrant and open prostitution under the present police
administration, are more strict in tone, and repressive in execution
than have been issued or put in operation for many years. Public opinion
has made no united demand for a change in the situation. The Commission
feels, therefore, that all public officials who are equally responsible
for the present conditions are equally open to criticism. Further,
that _the greatest criticism is due the citizens of Chicago_ (italics
mine), first, for the constant evasion of the problem, second, for their
ignorance and indifference to the situation, and third, for their lack
of united effort in demanding a change in the intolerable conditions as
they now exist.” If ignorance and indifference in the mass of citizens
are the ultimate causes, may we not find in the fact that only men are
citizens one of the causes of this ignorance and indifference? You can
rouse the country on an election cry of “slavery,” if it is the slavery
of men. The far worse slavery of women is no profitable election cry. Do
our anti-suffrage politicians never think of the reason for this? It is a
fine commentary on the “Chivalry” of which they prate.
And, lastly, we come to the traffic in war. The recent exposure in
Germany of such traffic among armament manufacturers—an international
traffic like that in women—has reminded us of the extraordinary folly
of allowing private firms to manufacture the actual implements of war.
Of course there are many other necessities of war over which it is
impossible to have control, but at least the manufacture of warships and
guns and ammunition should not be let out of the hands of the government.
Here again the sovereign remedy, as in so many other matters, is light,
knowledge. When the working man, who is regarded as food for powder,
knows in whose interests wars are made, how contrived, financed, and
timed, it will not be so easy to catch him with the bait of rhetoric. It
will be still less easy to catch women. In the _Labour Leader_ of 24th
July 1913 there appeared an article giving a list of thirty-five aviation
companies, many of which expect to share in the boom that will be given
to the trade by orders from the war-departments of various governments.
Here we have a baby industry reposing most of its hopes of profit not on
the use men may make of this wonderful discovery for the enlargement of
life, but for the spreading of death. Truly it looks as if the glorious
inventions of the sovereign mind of man would continue to be accursed
until man acknowledges his fellow-sovereign.
CHAPTER XII
THE MAN’S WOMAN: WOMANLY
“A woman capable at all points to bear children, to guard them,
to teach them, to turn them out strong and healthy citizens
of the great world, stands at the farthest remove from the
finnikin doll or the meek drudge whom man by a kind of false
sexual selection has through many centuries evolved as his
ideal.”—EDWARD CARPENTER.
What new contribution have women to offer the world in return for their
emancipation? In the women’s movement there is a strong feeling that
under the influence of the dominant male, women have had to conform to
an ideal not their own, and that this forcible compression of all women
into one mould—and that a mould not of their own choosing—has been bad
for women, and therefore bad for women’s work, and in the end bad for
men. In order to come to a clearer view of whether this is so or not, I
propose in this chapter and the next to treat of the man’s woman and the
woman’s woman. Everybody would probably agree that there is a very great
distinction, and that, taking them in the mass, the qualities which women
love and admire in women are not the same as those which, in the past,
have most attracted men. This does not matter so much if the conditions
of society be such as to make it possible for women to be independent of
their attraction of men. But if women are kept dependent upon men for any
scope or freedom or joy of life, then there may be imposed upon them an
alien standard which may very seriously cripple them. It is unnecessary
to labour the point that in sexual relations the qualities which make
each sex attractive to the other will always be of importance. What the
progressive women deprecate is that all their chances in life should be
dependent on sexual charm, and some of them badly crave for a rest from
sex, and they desire to be just broadly human.
Generally speaking, the conception of women which is the relic of
barbarism is that they are not themselves human beings, but only related
to human beings. In his sacred books man has taken care to suggest that
woman was an afterthought of the Creator, and that she was “given” to man
in a sense in which man was not “given” to woman. He could have her and
hold her by force, and what he asked of her were the qualities agreeable
to himself. Since every man has been a child and has some slight memories
of childhood, the notion of certain motherly qualities being desirable in
woman has existed side by side with the notion of other qualities more
adapted to adult requirements; but since memory is faint, and present
desire strong, the motherly qualities in a woman are of secondary
attractive force to most men in determining their choice, though,
undoubtedly, once mated, a man finds the motherly qualities invaluable.
Men write books and poems about the beauty and sacredness of motherhood,
but if one looks round the world one lives in, one finds that men are,
for the most part, not charmed by the motherly qualities in women, and
that the women upon whom men have in the past lavished titles and jewels
and wealth are not the motherly type at all. Every woman who has lived
long in the world has known many women most richly endowed for motherhood
who have not attracted any men worthy to be their mates, and has known
other women, with few of the qualities needed for motherhood, who have
strung the hearts of a score of men round their necks as trophies. One
might make a very good case to show that, in relation to men, there are
really three types of women: (1) those who attract men, (2) those by whom
men say they are attracted, (3) those by whom men ought (for the greatest
happiness of the greatest number) to be attracted.
Ask the average man what he means by a “womanly” woman—take Mr. Austen
Chamberlain: “Their qualities which we most admire are their lofty
devotion to ideals, _their dependence upon others_, upon husband, or
brother, or the hero of their imaginations, their _willingness to yield
their opinions_, their almost _passionate desire for self-sacrifice_,
often, it must be admitted, on behalf of objects very little worthy of
their great devotion” (12th July 1910, Debate on the Second Reading of
the Conciliation Bill). He proceeded to declare that these were not
“_political_ virtues,” and added, “God forbid that they should abandon
their qualities, which are our pride and theirs!” It seems clear that if
women generally are willing to yield their opinions to unworthy persons,
it is safer not to give this disastrous tendency much practical scope,
but what is really illuminating is Mr. Chamberlain’s naïve confession
that he _likes_ women to be this sort of fools. These are the qualities
that are agreeable to himself, provided he can prevent women from
exercising their dangerous preference for unworthy objects. One wonders
if it has never occurred to Mr. Chamberlain that one reason why women
crave direct representation is that they recognise that men are often
devoted to women who are “very little worthy,” and that when men tell
them they “consult women,” and we inquire “what women?” we discover
that they are not those whom women themselves would consult or trust or
follow. There is this foundation at least for the frequent statement that
women “do not wish to be ruled by women.” They do not wish to be ruled by
women who have been selected by men, because they know from experience
that a man’s woman and a woman’s woman are not the same.
If we examine the qualities of Mr. Chamberlain’s womanly woman, we find
that they are quite frankly selected for his own satisfaction, and not
because they are of any use either to woman herself or to the world. He
likes a woman to be dependent on a man; he likes her to give up her own
opinions; he likes her to sacrifice herself, even although it be often on
unworthy objects. What does the dependence of a woman on a man and her
yielding of her opinions to him involve? It involves the misunderstanding
and neglect of all the specifically womanly sides of life. The woman who
yields her belief to a man, not by conviction, but by submission, is
shirking her work, and is a traitor to the future of which she is the
guardian. She is, in fact, the _un_womanly woman, for she has yielded the
fruits of her instinct, her knowledge, her experience as a woman, and has
adopted, to command, a man’s opinion based on man’s instinct, knowledge
and experience. She is “aping man” and is (what the reactionaries falsely
call the progressive woman), in truth, a “feeble imitation.”
Dependence of this sort means degradation. There is a sense, of course,
in which we are all, of necessity, dependent upon each other, men upon
women and women upon men. But the sort of dependence which means that
men do all they do for women as grace and favour, but that women do all
they do for men from subjection and compulsion,—because they can’t help
themselves,—is degrading to both men and women. One knows the exquisite
delight there is in serving or being served by a beloved person; but all
women do not love all men, and there is no joy whatever in dependence
upon those whom you do not love. Even the pleasure to be derived from
dependence on a loved one is a purely personal matter, and varies with
individuals and with times, and is not proper matter upon which to base
institutions.
As a matter of fact, women down all the ages have escaped from the
degradation of entirely becoming faint echoes of men by the lesser
degradation of humbugging and lying to men. Men have wanted them to
yield their opinions? Very well, they would pretend to do so. But the
true woman never did. She was true to the greater reality of sex. Now
women are revolting against the necessity of telling even the lesser
lie, and are insisting that they want to do their work unhampered by
ignorance and meddling. If we take a large part of women’s work as being
essentially social, the bearing and rearing of children, education and
the care of the human family in all its wide interests of health and
morality, how can anyone in their senses assert that a woman who has not
the education and culture to know and appreciate facts is as helpful as
one who has them? Yet progressives have had to fight reactionaries for
every bit of education and culture. How can anyone think that a woman
who suppresses her deep and peculiar knowledge of childhood is as good
a mother, teacher, nurse as the woman who bravely follows the light? Or
with the sympathy and insight that women have into sickness of souls
and bodies, can anyone really believe that the world’s work of healing
and redemption is best done if the fruits of this sympathy and insight
are packed into baskets and handed over to men who, with all the other
matters about which they are so much keener on their hands, will just
forget the baskets and allow the fruits to rot?
There is in women—no one can doubt it who has studied their works—a
peculiar combination of idealism and practicality. The one without the
other is either vapid or dry: the two together can move mountains. What
distinguished the work of Elizabeth Fry, of Florence Nightingale, of
Octavia Hill, of Lady Henry Somerset is just this combination. What makes
the reports of the women factory inspectors so much more interesting than
those of the men is again the same combination. When men in the House of
Commons discuss the Housing Question, or what they call Education, the
dulness of the debate is enough to send one to sleep. Why is it so dull?
Because it lacks both actuality and ideality. Once the speakers have lost
sight altogether of the child, and can begin to fight each other on the
so-called religious question, they are at home, and the House fills; once
they can leave off talking about the houses which are the homes of the
people and the workshops of the mothers, and get to quarrelling about
some party cry, they begin to revive. The fact is, that anyone worth his
or her salt is keen about his or her job. The more you separate your
legislative and executive powers from your intelligence department the
more you weaken those powers, and men’s legislation and administration is
largely divorced from women’s intelligence.
When the fight has been made and has been justified by its success, we
are all ready to acclaim the fighter, but we seem unable to grasp the
principle which the fight ought to have established. Florence Nightingale
was invited to go to Scutari by a broad-minded man who had faith in
what she could do; but when she got out there, she found the usual
reactionaries, and unless she had insisted upon having a position of
undisputed authority, she would have accomplished only a small fraction
of her great work. She braved the authorities, and broke open the cases
of stores which were sealed with red tape. We are all ready now—probably
even Mr. Austen Chamberlain—to acclaim Florence Nightingale as a womanly
woman. But where was her “dependence,” her “willingness to yield her
opinions”? And another point is most deserving of note. This is, that
when men do get a real live woman, born “to warn, to comfort and command”
among them, and have had time to get over the first little shock to their
prejudices, they find what an admirable colleague or chief they have
gotten, and are generous in their service and co-operation. Men are, in
fact, almost always better far than their apologists will allow them to
be.
In private life men must have always experienced the value of the
strong-natured woman. Only some are still faithless about the value of
such women in public life. They are afraid, afraid for their masculine
prerogative, afraid (as I have heard it expressed) that women “will
legislate men out of existence.” Well, the antidote to that is surely
more co-operation between men and women, not less; more knowledge and
understanding of each other’s point of view, not less. So many men are at
present greatly concerned to keep women to their duty; perhaps many women
are also too much concerned to keep men to their duty. There is all to be
gained by putting together these aspirations for the improvement of—other
people!
In an earlier chapter I have shown the danger that there lies in the low
status of women in their not having pride in themselves and confidence in
their work. The clinging dependence, the softness, the approachableness,
the complaisance which men find so attractive in women also have their
very great dangers. Women who have devoted themselves to the salving of
the wrecks of womanhood know that often it has been this very softness
of fibre which has been the cause of a girl’s undoing. “Be weak!” men
cry; “we love you for it. It makes us feel superior!” And when they
have “loved” after their fashion, they leave the human wreckage their
“love” has made and pass on to “love” again elsewhere. It is as you love
duckling, and cry, “Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed!” Now women are
increasingly feeling that it is not womanly to be weak, it is womanly to
be strong, strong for work and love and understanding.
The individual man may want individual woman to be weak for him only, but
the laws which men together make require women to be strong, not even
as women, but as superwomen. Because men have experienced the use of
women as individuals, because they still have relics of the old barbaric
ownership feeling, they desire still to keep women individual, isolated,
unorganised. Now even if a woman, by her mother wit, influence and powers
of cajoling and tormenting, may be supposed capable of dealing with her
individual man, the situation becomes very different when man begins to
band himself together with man in guilds, unions, corporations, parties
and armies. He can then proceed to crush women by his organisations.
The individual appeal of love and family is powerless against the
impersonality of law, the combination of millions of persons all of
one sex. It is curious to note that, though men have been organising
themselves for centuries, and for the most part rigidly excluding women
from their organisations, yet women have not complained, nor suggested
that this was “anti-woman”; on the contrary, they have universally done
what they could to help the men’s organisations. But now that women are
beginning to organise themselves, there is raised here and there and
everywhere the alarm cry of “Anti-man!” and sentimental appeals are made
to women which are totally inappropriate in this connection.
Mr. Harold Owen falls into this mistake when he says (_Woman Adrift_,
p. 234): “The relations between man and woman are not political or even
social, they are personal in the highest degree, and in a kind that
exists in no other relation of life whatever.” Such a mistake, like
another of which mention has already been made, is only possible by the
use of the rhetorical singular, and even then it does not follow that,
because _a_ man and _a_ woman may have personal relations, there are not
social and political matters of the greatest moment involved in those
relations. That there are, man has acknowledged ages back, by making laws
to regulate the relations of men and women. We know that a woman has no
personal relations at all with the millions of men who govern the world
she has to live in, and we resent the misplaced appeal to sentiment of a
personal kind in such a connection. Social, political, racial sentiment
there may be, but personal sentiment can only exist between individuals,
and all sentiment is not good either,—the sentiment of power and
ownership, for instance, when they are held over human beings.
The reactionary man is very fond of asserting that women don’t want
this, that or the other. He generally can give no reason for this
statement; enough that he knows it. When it is pointed out to him that
all articulate and organised women do want it and say so, he declares
contemptuously that these women don’t count. It is not womanly to
organise. Everyone knows that the traditional woman, the womanly woman,
can’t organise. Therefore these hundreds of thousands of organised women
are unsexed, negligible, not to be listened to. The only woman to be
listened to is “the quiet woman in the home,” and man will go forth into
the world and proclaim what that quiet woman wants, and will give it to
her. It does not seem to dawn upon him that it is more than a little
suspicious that he should pronounce all those to be negligible who can
speak for themselves.
CHAPTER XIII
THE WOMAN’S WOMAN: A PERSON
“… And, if we think of it, what does civilisation itself rest
upon—and what object has it, with its religions, arts, schools,
etc., but rich, luxuriant, varied Personalism? To that all
bends, and it is because toward such result Democracy alone, on
anything like Nature’s scale, breaks up the limitless fallows
of humankind, and plants the seed, and gives fair play, that
its claims now precede the rest.”—WALT WHITMAN, _Democratic
Vistas_.
In the last chapter mention was made of the tyranny of an ideal. Man
thinks of the qualities he finds desirable in a woman and compounds an
ideal woman out of these qualities, and then proceeds to call “unsexed”
the real women of flesh and blood who do not conform or pretend to
conform to this ideal. The older women have very naturally helped him to
maintain these ideals; they were reared in them, and they have feared
lest it might be difficult to find provision for their daughters, unless
they kept the daughters strictly to the dedicated ways. They were wrong,
as timid people nearly always are wrong. The free woman, with a character
and a will of her own, is not only happier and more useful, but she is
proving herself far more attractive than the colourless submissive ideal.
We have been wearied out with talk of the ideal woman, and now there
comes a change, but it is more apparent than real. We hear now a good
deal about a person called by the name of Normal Woman. Men who have done
good work in some particular corner of scientific research have been
largely responsible for the respect with which this talk about Normal
Woman has been received, but when you come to look at her, you will find
that she is merely Ideal Woman dressed up in scientific terms, and that
the author of her being is no other than the Old Adam. It often seems
to me that the common people, with no notion of general principles or
of scientific and philosophic methods, cannot wander so fantastically
far from truth and justice and common humanity as your man of science,
when his sex-vanity has been hurt or his prerogative of pure egoism has
been disturbed. The denunciations of scientific men have, fortunately,
been robbed of many of their terrors by the work of women in biology and
medicine. It would be only human if scientific women showed traces of
their sex in their work, just as men do, but that these are very slight
is suggested by the complaint of Sir Almroth Wright, who declared, in
his widely read letter to _The Times_ (March 1912), that medical women
violated the “modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has
been built up,” by putting above these their scientific “desire for
knowledge.” One has seldom read a more splendid tribute to the courage
and candour of women,—a tribute all the more splendid because so entirely
involuntary,—for women know how scientific men of the type of Sir Almroth
Wright have made the path of scientific knowledge a very Calvary for
modest women. It is nothing to men of this type that the modesties of our
civilisation should in the past have led to our women being handled and
examined in hospital by youths of the sort common among medical students;
that the reticences of this same civilisation should have led to many
men and nearly all women being ignorant of all that goes to the building
of a healthy and moral nation. Sir Almroth declares that man “cannot and
does not wish to work side by side with women.” Some men may not, but Sir
Almroth is slandering his own sex when he makes the assertion for all
mankind. The pioneer work of women of science was made possible by the
existence of large numbers of scientific men willing to teach women. We
may make a pretty shrewd guess at the reasons why some scientific men do
not wish women to study science, for have not the medical and scientific
women already, by their work, exploded many of the old fictions about
women, and so put heart and hope into millions of women who felt their
powers, but hardly dared believe in them, because of the dead weight of
what they were told was science? They have now learned that all that is
put forth by a scientific man is not science, and that when sex comes
into his calculations it is apt to be a very serious disturbance to
clear thought. It seems to be a fact that men are as a rule far more
conscious than women of the existence of sex in every relation of life,
and if there be something in the speculations of biologists concerning
the presence of male and female elements in the human female, there may
be a very profound reason for this difference in outlook; but it seems
like midsummer madness to say that the one of the two sexes who is most
homogeneous in the elements of sex shall be the only one who shall have
freedom to know and speculate and experiment, for it is clear that that
one would be the one less likely to have sympathies wide enough to
include both sexes.
What is the line the scientific reactionaries adopt? They abandon Ideal
Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation,
to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is
peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women;
they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed
to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained.
When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that
woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly
the logical result of this tyranny of thought. It simplifies the side
of life which has no obvious reference to themselves if they can make
pigeon-holes all of one size and shape, label them Normal Woman and
stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste
is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes’ bed was
for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then
found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and
children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be
those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence
on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn’t exist; she is
a figment of men’s minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree
from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the
biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or
exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has
only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Brontë, of the
limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had
so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and
of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman
loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Brontë did not love children;
yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them,
and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have
been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Brontë had been given
the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was
a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she
herself might have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn
courage of this woman of genius during years of soul-imprisonment and
starvation should surely help to break down these stupid and wasteful
cruelties.
The enthusiasts for Normal Woman do not entirely deny that here and
there an exceptional woman may suffer from the restrictions of a woman’s
life, but they suggest that these sufferings are exaggerated, and affect
only the exceptional women, and in any case only matter to the sufferer
herself. It is wonderful with what complacency people can contemplate the
sufferings of others; wonderful, too, the assumption that “exceptional”
women are negligible, as if it were not, after all, only among the
exceptional that we might hope to find genius. These people will tell
you that women have never done anything which the world would have
missed, except the one work of mothering the race. Therefore to this work
they should be restricted. Women will never, so they say, be anything
but third-rate in arts or sciences or crafts; they can be superlative
mothers; let them concentrate on that. If they do not, it is darkly
suggested that they will lose even the capacity for mothering, and then,
where will they be? And, what is worse, where will men be?
Sometimes these views are advanced with all the thunders of an angry
prophet; sometimes, more in sorrow than in anger, it is suggested that
woman will sooner or later return to weep on the breast of man, and
beg to be allowed, like Katharine, the Shrew, to lay her hand beneath
his foot. To do otherwise would argue in the fair sex (to use the
denunciatory language of Sir James FitzJames Stephen) a “base, mutinous
disposition,” which we sincerely hope she has not. In the words of Mr.
Garvin (_Pall Mall Gazette_, 30th July 1913), “we can only hope that,
whatever the woman of the future may prove to be, some of the womanliness
which we knew when Victoria was Queen will remain in her, and that, when
the first force of revolt is spent, she will once more realise the full
glory of wifehood and motherhood. On that point we have no great fear,
for, whatever her vagaries, woman will remain woman at heart.” I should
like to rescue this exquisite piece of fatuity from oblivion, to make
merry the hearts of future generations of men and women.
Now, as regards genius, we may know how much genius women have in some
hundreds of years, when they have been free to develop according to
their natures. The kind of emotional tyranny to which women have been
subjected is the most crushing of all, and men have never had to undergo
this particular sort of tyranny, so that it is not in the least true to
say that if women had had any genius it would have overcome tyranny, as
men’s genius has done. No man has ever known what it is to be born of
the more sensitive, sympathetic, conscientious and affectionate sex,
and to be reared in an atmosphere where insult and hate followed on
any expression of genius, where cold discouragement was the best that
a woman could expect from her own people, and where the wooing from
her own work has taken that most insidious of all forms for duty-loving
woman—the claims of others to her care and service. Those who hold the
theory of the norm would, however, exclaim “God forbid that women should
become geniuses! We don’t _like_ women geniuses, and, moreover, genius
will interfere with motherhood.” If one of the necessities for genius
is intense egotism (because no great work can be done without intense
concentration, and this is impossible if the attention is perpetually
switched off in order to do other people’s bidding), there is something
to be said for the notion that genius will interfere with motherhood;
that is to say, with the capacity or the desire of the genius to fulfil
the ordinary functions of motherhood. It is a common assertion that a
woman fulfils herself completely in motherhood, but this is manifestly
not true of the woman who wants to think about the higher mathematics, or
who has a genius for organising masses. This does not dismay me at all.
Why, after all, should the genius be a mother? And if she be, could she
not find motherly women to bring up the children? It is mere delusion
to insist that in all cases, without exception, the mother is the best
person to tend the babies, and no one even suggests that the mother
should be the sole educator of children when they have passed babyhood. I
am not apprehensive that the mass of women will ever become geniuses and
so cease to provide the men and women of the future. It seems clear to
common sense that geniuses will be few, and that it is mere cant for men,
who contemplate quite serenely the existence of several million spinsters
in England, to cry out in dismay at the notion of a singular genius, here
and there, as the mysterious forces of nature may provide. The existence
of these millions of spinsters _is_ an exceedingly serious matter,
because many of them probably desire intensely to be mothers, and would
be good ones; but it is only when the egoistic man fears that the unmated
woman may be active and content, that his sensitive vanity is up in arms,
and he is dismayed at the notion of a woman, of her free choice, forgoing
man. He is content there should be millions of spinsters, if only they
are unhappy.
Perhaps a eugenist will here intervene and say that we want the best
women to be mothers, and therefore the potential genius should sacrifice
her individual opportunity, in order to become the possible mother of
male geniuses. But it will not be easy to persuade the woman of the
future that she should resist the inspiration which she knows she feels,
in order to produce children who may not, and, in fact, probably will
not, possess the inspiration. It is very natural for man to say to woman,
“You shall give me not only your love, you shall give me your genius”;
but she cannot do it, for in the very dark and difficult problems which
heredity presents to us, it is rare indeed to find a genius the son of a
genius. If George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never written
a line, we may doubt exceedingly whether the work of Maurice or of Robert
Barrett would have been any better than it was. I once heard a youthful
politician, now in Parliament, gravely oppose the eligibility of women
to Parliament, on the ground that, if women went into Parliament, their
babies would tumble into the fire. Now, quite apart from the circumstance
that very few of the wives of existing Members of Parliament act all day
and night as fireguards, there was this absurdity that there are only six
hundred and seventy Members of Parliament, and, if they were every one of
them women, there would still be many millions of mothers left to look
after the babies. It might—we may grant this to the alarmists—be very
uncomfortable if all women were, or tried to be, geniuses and Members
of Parliament, but the mere fact that they are not forbidden will not
make them all throw their energies in these directions, any more than it
afflicts men so.
Like so much of the talk about women, this about genius is very little
relevant to any practical problem. Even if it were true that women had
never shown, and never would show, genius in art or abstract science,
this is no reason for preventing them from using what ability they
have in the directions they prefer, and it seems very likely that they
have genius in directions hitherto almost forbidden to them; I mean
in organisation, and leadership, and in the power to govern. They
have certainly demonstrated their possession of many of the qualities
upon which the strength of the community is founded, and it is to the
advantage of the community that they should be allowed the free exercise
of those qualities.
Reactionary men of science try to frighten us, however, by maintaining
that the energetic use of any of woman’s strength is contrary to healthy
and efficient motherhood. They go on making these assertions, in spite
of the fact that women who live a laborious life, provided they are
not starved or neglected when they bring forth children, do it with
far greater ease than women who live in luxury and idleness. They talk
of metabolism and the necessity of a young girl storing up nourishment
during the years of her adolescence, as if a human creature were nothing
but a chemical factory and warehouse rolled into one. By the persistent
and wilful neglect of the mind, they are able to arrive at the most
astounding conclusions, and one wishes one could send them back half a
century to the nursery of those days, and make them learn that “Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” It is not only idle
hands, but idle hearts and minds that are a danger. If a girl’s mind is
caged and her education concentrated upon sex, it is not mothers you are
rearing, but lunatics, deficients, hystericals, and anæmics. The people
who talk as if a girl should be trained from childhood up for motherhood,
quite overlook the very real possibility of tiring out the instinct
before its time of fruition. There are very many girls who would have
had quite a healthy and natural fondness for babies, but who have had
the feeling literally worn out by premature exercise or by sentimental
pawing. A girl-child is not a small woman, and just as we should all
disapprove any attempt to make “little fathers” of the boys, so we should
disapprove the unhealthy endeavour to make “little mothers” of the girls.
If there is something pathetic about the small girl drudge, stunted with
carrying about heavy babies, there is something peculiarly offensive
about the prim little girl who rebukes her brothers for tearing their
clothes or dirtying their hands, when she ought herself to be likewise
engaged.
From the Census reports it appears that in England and Wales there are
nearly three and a half million spinsters over twenty years of age;
many of these will never marry, and the cruelty of bringing them up
to a vocation, which they will never be called upon to fulfil, should
be repugnant to all decent feeling, even if it would not in itself
constitute a danger. Such considerations do not trouble the sciolist
with a theory to run, for he calls the maidens a “superfluous portion
of the population,” or “waste products of our female population,”[5]
and proceeds to talk as if they could be set aside. But this piece of
Podsnappery would bring its own punishment, if it were widely adopted,
for undoubtedly the parasitic woman would be, in the future, as she has
been in the past, the most deadly enemy of man. The only sex-antagonism
that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to
repress or to get the better of the other. There is, in fact, absolutely
no practicable issue for this way of thinking except the simple plan of
the lethal chamber for the “waste products.”
The training of women as breeders only, would involve the complete
subjection of women to men, and consequently their complete dependence
on men; it would involve the return to pre-factory days (in itself,
perhaps, no bad thing, only no one knows how to do it), and to a state of
things which has been partly remedied by the Married Women’s Property and
Custody of Children Acts; a state in which it was possible to pass and
to administer the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts. It would mean that
women would no longer have university education and would be compelled,
as they used to be, to accept the assertions of men with regard to the
state of the law and the construction of their own bodies. It means
the withdrawal of women from the work of local councils and poor law
administration, from inspection, and from teaching. It means a state of
things which has never existed anywhere on this earth, and to avoid which
most women would prefer a thousand deaths. All this for the purpose of
producing finer children; but since the girl children would be of use
only for further breeding purposes, one may say that women would make
all these tremendous sacrifices for the sake of producing finer men. It
is a stiff demand to make even of the self-sacrificing sex! But would it
have the anticipated results?
The question brings us to the well-fought battle-ground of breeding
_versus_ environment. When a suffragist procession in the States
carried a banner declaring, “We prepare our children for the world;
we must prepare the world for our children,” there was an outcry from
some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a
nutshell: the first was woman’s job, the second was man’s. It was for
woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment.
A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further
division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do.
But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce
the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even
if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with
a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental
health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child
all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of
the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of
the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the
course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select
her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So that the first
part of the division of labour manifestly cannot take place. The man must
take part in preparing our children for the world. Can we really say that
man alone does or can prepare the world for our children? It is too late
in the day to tell us that, when every year that passes shows us more
plainly the injurious effects upon the race of the industrial system,
which is so largely the product of men’s minds, and of the great social
evils which were treated of in Chapters X. and XI., and which men have
so largely agreed to consider “necessary.” The theory of the cow-woman,
who shall do nothing but bear and suckle babies, is not, as some people
would have us believe, a revival of what once was and may be again. It
never was. The masses of women have always worked very hard indeed. Nor
will women be brought to accept it for the future. Degraded as women
often have been, they have always had the one safeguard of work, even
if it were not the work they would have chosen, and may have had to be
done under unfavourable conditions. In complex modern society the work
of women is even more necessary than in simpler days; only now there is
more need than ever there was of intelligence, adaptability, scientific
knowledge and organisation among women, for they cannot even be efficient
mothers under modern conditions if their minds do not keep pace with
knowledge and the arts of living.
Important, even of vital importance, as the work of physical motherhood
is, and disastrous as everyone must admit would be any social
developments which impaired this, it is a monstrous distortion to talk
as if physical motherhood were the only work of women. The maidens, the
widows, the women who are having no more children, have endless natural
spheres of usefulness and happiness, if only men will leave them free.
There is a good deal to be said for the view that a large number of
unmarried women were needed to get the women’s movement well going. As
a matter of fact, the leaders of the three chief suffrage societies are
married women, and there are of course a very large number of wives in
the women’s movement; but women with young children can scarcely see the
wood for the trees, and such a gigantic piece of work as the organisation
of the hitherto unorganised half of humanity has been one which has,
of necessity, taken all the time and energy of very many women. Never
again, in all probability, will there be such need for many women who
can travel light. It is admitted that marriage may often be a brake on
the man pioneer; much more must it be so for the woman pioneer. It will
not take us a hundredth part of the time to use our liberty that it has
taken to win our liberty. Many a man, one is proud to record, has done
his utmost to strengthen the hands of his wife in the movement which
they both believe in; but the husband is not unknown who likes to see
all the other women progressive, only not _his_ wife. And, of course,
there are very many mothers whose children absorb, while they are young,
the greater part of their energies. Children grow up and the mothers
very often have two-score years to put in after the babies have left
off coming. As women’s lives widen, there will be fewer of the mothers
who bore their grown-up sons and nag their grown-up daughters. The work
of such experienced matrons in the great organised work of mothering,
care committees, schools for mothers, guardians of the poor, education
authorities, is invaluable. But so long as the idiotic restrictions upon
the civic work of women exist, and so long as women have not the means
of independence, this work will still only be done by few of those who
could do it so well. And the rest will still be like paddle-wheels out of
water, wasting energy in a great whirring.
The men who speak of the maidens as waste products might also be invited
to consider the millions of unmarried men, and to ask themselves whether
these men really could marry, and whether there are not already very many
men, who can marry only because they have devoted sisters who shoulder
the burden of the old folk and the invalids; nay, more, who help, out of
their difficult earnings, to keep their nephews and their nieces.
The conclusion is that not men alone, and not women alone, can either
prepare children for the world or the world for children. But both
together can. The analogy of division of labour won’t work when it is
human beings that are being made. “Male and female created He them,” and
both are indispensable. Therefore both must be equipped with knowledge
and given liberty.
“What will the women do then?” cry the faithless. Nobody knows, and that
is one of the things that make life so hugely interesting.
“… That roar,
‘What seek you?’ is of tyrants in all days.”
CHAPTER XIV
SEX-ANTAGONISM
(1) MAN’S PART
“God said to Adam: Thou shalt have dominion over all beasts;
and herein would seem to consist his advantage and superiority.
Now, since man has dominion also over woman, who can be so mad
as to deny that woman is rather a beast than a Man?
…
“I think I have shown by fifty irrefragable testimonies from
Holy Writ that woman does not belong to the same species as
man, and is therefore incapable of eternal life.”—HORATIO PLATA
(quoted by W. H. BEVERIDGE, in _John and Irene_).
In the last chapter it was asserted that the only sex-antagonism that
really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to repress
or get the better of the other. This is, in effect, to deny that the
interests of the two sexes can be permanently opposed, and that, however
much individuals, from the fallibility of human nature, may fall short of
a proper treatment of each other, there is any excuse whatever for laws
and institutions, which should be based on ethical considerations, being,
as they still are, discriminative against one sex. So strong indeed is
the notion still that the interests of the sexes really are opposed,
that any suggestion for legislation in the interests of women is met by
the outcry that it is against men. The recent debates on the Maternity
Benefit are admirable illustrations of this. When it was proposed that
the thirty shillings, to be devoted to the care of the mother, should
be given direct to the mother, there were some men who exclaimed that
this was “interfering between husband and wife,” and others, that it was
“legislating against men.” This shows an extraordinary confusion of mind;
for the only men “legislated against” in such a provision are the bad
men, who would, if they were given the chance, steal the woman’s benefit.
No good husband would be aggrieved at his wife’s own money being given
into her own hands. As why indeed should he? No woman feels aggrieved
that her husband should have his wages paid into his own hands. If anyone
thinks that the money is in reality his, because of the paltry fourpences
that he has paid (and of which the working housewife has, by her work,
contributed at least half), he should read the words of Medea—
“And then, forsooth, ’tis they that face the call
Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all
Peril!—False mocking! Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
Than bear one child.”
While civilisation is young, and human beings still scarcely conscious,
it is natural for the stronger to have the illusion that he will be the
gainer by using his strength, even tyrannically, against the creature
with whom his life is inextricably entwined. It is human to be selfish;
women as well as men feel the temptation; but men, by their greater
strength, have more often had the power to follow their impulses, even if
they were injurious to women.
There is a queer kind of apologist for brutality, who suggests that
“men are so,” and that nothing better need ever be expected of them,
thereby showing himself blind to all the improvements which knowledge
and intelligence have already made in men’s treatment of women. Does
it not matter to men that women should be injured? To read a recent
volume, entitled _Sex Antagonism_, by Walter Heape, F.R.S., one would
indeed suppose that it did not. Seven chapters of this book are devoted
to a criticism of Dr. Frazer’s theories on totemism and exogamy. These
are matters for experts, and I do not propose to express an opinion
upon them, further than to say that Mr. Heape has made out a very good
case for his views on the origin of these two institutions of primitive
man. He does not, however, make one wish to hand over the relations of
the sexes in the world we live in to even the most expert of expert
biologists, for his very concentration on particular points makes him
unfit for a wide view. It is to Mr. Heape’s eighth and last chapter, on
“Primitive and Modern Sex Antagonism,” that I wish to take exception, and
this can be done without calling into question the greater part of the
book, with which it has scarcely any necessary connection.
I need not quarrel with his assertion of the original difference between
man and woman with regard to sexual relations. “I think,” he writes, “it
cannot be denied that while sexual passions and sexual gratification are
of far more moment to the Male, the idea of the family is, in its turn,
essentially a Female sentiment. The former inculcates and stimulates
the roving freedom which is characteristic of the Male, the latter
consolidates the family, and for the first time establishes the Female
as an essential part of a social structure.” (The last sentence is dark
to me, but let it pass.) The statement may be taken as broadly true of
primitive man. Further, it is quite clear that Mr. Heape is uttering
almost a platitude, when he states (p. 195) that “The Male and Female
are complementary; they are in no sense the same, and in no sense equal
to one another; the accurate adjustment of society depends upon proper
observance of this fact.” No one thinks Male and Female are “the same,”
nor when people speak of “equality” do they in fact use the word in a
mathematical sense. What people do wrap up, in confused and misleading
terms, is, that although women are not the same as men, they have many
of the same properties and therefore many of the same requirements.
Shylock’s plea for the Jew has been quoted with much force by women and
on behalf of women: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian
is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?”
Men cannot deny that women need food, like men, and that women
catch infectious diseases, like men, and that women, like men, need
satisfaction for their sexual nature, although by their actions men
sometimes do not demonstrate their knowledge. But there are other
needs—of the human spirit—less demonstrable, which women have as much
as men: the need for freedom and joy, for pride in themselves and their
work, for consciousness that the sacrifices they make are willing, not
enforced. And, when women demand “equality” with men, what they are
asking is, that they shall have equal opportunities to do the things they
feel able to do, and also that they should have for their peculiarly
feminine work—the work which men cannot do—more help, more training, more
expenditure of public money, and more scope altogether to do it in ways
adapted to the modern world they live in.
We start out, then, with the recognition of the difference between men
and women, and I wish I could see in Mr. Heape a recognition also of the
likeness and of the common interests. But this is where he comes to grief
so badly. He asserts (p. 199) that “increase of luxury tends to reduce
both the inclination to breed and the power of producing offspring among
women, while it increases the sexual activity of men.” This is not the
place to make an exhaustive analysis of this assertion, but stated
roundly, like this, it seems to me to need considerable modification.
If, however, we take it as proved, it would represent a serious state of
things, requiring the most earnest consideration and determination on
the part of all civilised men and women to face it in all its results
for the whole human family. It would seem to thoughtful persons that any
social condition leading to a marked widening between the reciprocal
desires of the sexes was, by that very fact, a bad condition, and that
if luxury really widens the breach between men and women and causes
sex-antagonism, this is a very strong reason for discouraging luxury in
a far more determined way than has ever been attempted. Mr. Heape has
himself insisted that the female is concerned for the race and the male
is only concerned for his appetitive satisfaction. His contribution to
the difficult problem he has himself propounded is, to suggest that women
(solely concerned for the race, mind you!) must be overridden by men;
that what he calls the “errant male” should freely roam and satisfy his
ever-growing appetites where and how he can; and that women should on no
account be given “extended power” to face these difficulties together
with men. In fact, having made out that the situation is infinitely more
difficult and extreme than it is, he does his little best to envenom
and embitter it by passages of this kind: “Thus extended power given
to women threatens to result in legislation for the advantage of that
relatively small class of spinsters who are in reality but _a superfluous
portion of the population_ (italics mine); and since their interests are
directly antagonistic to the interests of the woman who is concerned in
the production of children, legislation enacted on their behalf will tend
to be opposed to the interests of the mothers themselves.” This dark
saying is nowhere explained or illustrated, and as I am quite unable to
imagine what it means, I can only suppose that Mr. Heape is using the old
device of trying to sow dissension in the enemy’s ranks. For there is no
mistake at all about the fact that, to Mr. Heape, woman is the enemy.
But he will find it hard to convince the women in the movement that the
interests of maidens are opposed to the interests of wives. It will be
even more difficult than to convince us that our interests are really
opposed to those of men. We think that this is “The Great Illusion,”
and the other is too patently absurd, since a maiden is liable at any
moment to become a wife, and, in these days, it is becoming increasingly
difficult to say at what age this liability ceases. Progressive women
do not for one moment admit that marriage unsexes a woman, and that the
moment she secures a husband she becomes hostile to the maidens, or
ceases to understand them. If Mr. Heape would look at the world he is
actually living in, he would see that some of the needs of the mothers
in the administration of the Insurance Act were more effectively put and
urged by unmarried women than by married men. I knew a woman who had a
very warm discussion with a man on sex questions, what time his wife sat
silent by. The man constantly declaimed about “what women wanted, what
women thought,” and still the wife never spoke. Later, when the two women
were alone, the one expressed a hope that she had not spoken too strongly
and offended the wife, who replied, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that
you said what you did. You see, I can’t, _because I’m his wife_.”
Mr. Heape proceeds in this elegant style: “Those of us who are strongly
in favour of gaining assistance from women who are qualified to give
it may well be drastically opposed to the claims made by those who are
responsible for the present agitation; for we are thus confronted with
the probability that extended power given to women will result in _the
waste products of our Female population_ gaining power to order the
habits and regulate the work of those women who are of real value to us
as a nation” (italics mine). In the next paragraph he declares that he
finds it difficult to “refer with equanimity” to the books and pamphlets
of the women’s movement, and he mentions one odd publication, which he
appears to attribute to feminists and which, he avers, holds up man to
execration as “the brute beast.” We are bound to believe that Mr. Heape
has seen such a pamphlet, and that he did not write it himself, but the
description he himself gives of man in his book would entirely warrant
the use of such a term. Men in the mass are _not_ what Mr. Heape makes
them out to be,—lascivious animals with no regard for the State, the
race, the child or the woman; it is a libel on manhood. But a writer
who can speak of the unmarried women as “waste products” is in a queer
position to protest against his own caricature of man being called a
“brute beast.” That is precisely what Mr. Heape’s man is and what the
real man is not. In fact, while progressive women are always being
accused of abusing men, I have never heard a woman utter such slanders on
mankind as those contained in this book. Another curious instance of how
men will exceed anything women ever say in condemnation of men is to be
found in a remark made by a magistrate at the Sandwich Quarter Sessions
in October 1912, that criminal assault by adult men on baby girls was
“just one of the things that the very best people in every class of life
were apt in an unguarded moment to commit.” Mr. Heape describes women as
having a nervous constitution ever on the verge of hysteria and impulsive
insanity; but if we are to believe him, and the Sandwich magistrate,
men are far more dangerous lunatics and should certainly be put under
restraint.
Let us get out of this nightmare and come to the real world as we know
it. Certainly there are some blackguards and some lunatics of both sexes.
Certainly there is, and perhaps always has been, some antagonism between
the sexes. It is the most constant endeavour and the most firm faith of
progressive men and women that this antagonism should cease. We do not
believe it to be necessary and we do believe it to be altogether bad.
A great deal too much is made of the differences between men and women
under civilised conditions. Mr. Heape’s bogey-man is depicted as a sort
of Saturn devouring his children, regardless of their welfare, desiring
woman simply as the instrument of his pleasure, possessing no personal,
national or racial love. Woman, on the other hand, is pictured to us
as having no personal feelings towards her mate, desiring him only for
the purpose of motherhood, and desiring even motherhood so faintly that
the least thing will put her off it. It is difficult to have patience
with a description so preposterously untrue to ordinary life. And Mr.
Heape’s recommendations for dealing with this appalling condition are
the most extraordinary part of the whole queer affair. For he would
have us “rattle into barbarism” with open eyes. According to him, all
civilisation, all the united efforts of persons to make a more endurable
dwelling-place on earth, all care for the future of the race, is by
origin womanly, and yet—and yet—the all-devouring male is to abandon this
hardly acquired civilisation, to cease to learn of the woman, and once
more to roam the world and leave his squaw to take her chance with the
papooses!
To suggest that man can go on modifying his material conditions, piling
luxury on luxury, and yet need not adapt himself and his sexual life to
these conditions, but can remain primitive brute beast, is wilfully to
blind oneself to facts, and such blindness, if it were common, would
indeed be the cause of race suicide. So long as either sex preys upon
the other, or enslaves the other, we are in danger of finding that man,
having conquered the world, becomes his own victim.
In the writings of reactionaries on this subject there is to be found
an extraordinary contradiction. Their plea for the subjection of women
and for the entire dedication of women to the sexual life has to be
based upon the supposed truth of the assertion that, in women, sex is
the predominant factor, nay, the only factor of importance. It ought to
be, they think; and it is, they assert; whereas, to man, sex is only a
passing gratification, and he goes on his way and forgets all about it.
Yet if it be suggested that, in the interests of the race, men might
learn to control their impulses,—have, in fact, to a certain extent done
so,—and that they have all the beauty and work of the world to fill their
minds, these same reactionaries fill the air with cries at the sufferings
and damage which such self-restraint will impose upon men. Mr. Heape
himself asserts that disuse does not impair men’s sexual powers, and that
it does impair those of women; yet his conclusion appears to be that men
alone are not to be required to exercise self-control. Now, if sex is
so tremendously strong in women, it cannot be necessary artificially to
nurse it and to render all other activities impossible; if it is not so
predominant after all, but women are whole human beings, just as men are,
with all sorts of capacities, then it is cruel to endeavour to restrict
them against their nature, and must, in the long-run, be injurious to
them and to the whole of society. It is not consonant with the dignity
of the Human that either male or female should be treated as a thing.
Primitive men may treat women as “conveniences”; primitive women may
exploit men for their own purposes; so long as they act in this primitive
manner there will exist a state of war. The hope for the race lies in the
Human growing up. Adult man will abandon the Great Illusion.
With regard to the supposed absence of personal feeling on the part of
the woman, the supposition is altogether out of accord with the facts
of life as one knows it. Women fall in love quite as whole-heartedly
as men, and when a woman falls in love with a man, the sentiments that
fill her being are not in the first instance consciously racial; they
are personal. She desires union with her lover, just as he desires union
with her, and the completest union has no use for compulsion in any form
whatsoever. Those who personify vital forces are very fond of saying
that “Nature” uses the love of man and woman “to further her purposes”
(meaning the reproduction of the species), and there is often a sort of
half-suggestion that man and woman are in reality helpless puppets whom
“Nature” deludes with the mirage of love. Nothing is more misleading
than these personifications of forces. Love is no delusion at all; it
is the one condition under which personal appetite and racial purpose
become fused into the force most productive of joy and health and beauty.
Scientific men who try to reduce the relations of the sexes to mere
animal appetite, and leave out of account the passion of love and the
sentiment of affection are in truth less scientific than the merest girl.
The growth of love is the one security for the adaptation of the Human to
his environment.
Perhaps some people would say, “You talk of love, but men will not
love the progressive women. It is no use arguing that they should;
they don’t, as a matter of fact, and they never will.” It is true that
one does not love because one should. Nothing kills love more surely
than compulsion, and that is the basis of my whole plea for liberty. I
have no fear whatever that women will cease to attract men, but women
should not have to rely upon their power of sexual attraction for a
free and varied existence. I often marvel at the lack of pride and of
self-confidence in the men who advocate what amounts to starving women
into sexual relations. If there are women who are unlovable, the proper
penalty is to leave them unloved; it is not the proper penalty to
starve them. If some women are unlovable, so, in truth, are some men,
and coercion will not help them. On the contrary; what might be good
comradeship is turned into hatred by coercion. And it is not only the
injured person who hates; there is no hate like that of the tyrant for
the object of his repression, and the literature of the world is full of
this strange and terrible hatred of men for women. The early fathers of
the Christian Church forgot their Master in the most scurrilous attacks
on that half of humanity to which Jesus most fully revealed Himself.
The gibbering fear of women showed itself in the witch trials and in
the monstrous inventions of perverted monks. In recent times a little
anthology entitled, _Come learn of Me what Woman is_, and a still more
recent one by Mr. W. H. Beveridge, entitled _John and Irene_, show a
record of literature of abuse by men which has no counterpart whatever in
the writings and speeches of women. In their desperate seeking for safety
there is no doubt that primitive women had to defend themselves by any
device they could invent; and since men made a wicked mystery of them,
they would mystify men as far as they could, for their own purposes. One
sees women still doing this, and sees the traces of the old fear in the
less civilised modern man’s shoulder-shrug at the incalculable female.
Men have done a vast amount of speculation and theorising about women,
and have remained for the most part quite remote from the reality,
which is very much simpler than all their inventions. The fact is that
many of those who have poured out their venom upon women have been men
whose unregulated appetites have led them to consort with women either
naturally or artificially adapted to them, and they have then proceeded
to expound the eternal feminine in terms of the prostitute. Many of the
theories about Woman, of which we hear so much just now, are really based
upon a more or less intimate acquaintance with prostitutes, and it is one
of the ugliest sides of this ugly traffic that the men who buy the women
seem to hate and despise them so, and they then proceed to generalise
about all women on the data of the hated and despised ones. Progressive
women do not hate the prostitute, but they recognise that, by weakness
or by choice, she has committed a great sin against the spirit, and they
rightly resent generalising about all women from knowledge (and only the
most partial knowledge) of these unhappiest. Reading Schopenhauer, or
Weininger, or Strindberg, one can only exclaim, “What company have these
men kept!” They and a few scientific specialists appear to be the modern
descendants of the authors of _Malleus Maleficarum_.
Owing to sex-obsession, some of these men are permanently unable to
understand women, and their way of treating women is vitiated by this
incapacity. It may be admitted, with reserves, that the characteristic
of the love passion in woman is receptivity, but this is by no means
the characteristic of woman in all relations. If one takes only the
maternal impulses in women, who would deny that they were active, nay,
even sometimes belligerent, if it comes to defending their children? And
the coolness towards all men except the one with whom she is in love
makes a woman not only peculiarly capable of friendship, but also makes
her extremely intolerant of sentimental appeals to the passivity which
is associated with the love passion. Women are moved by sexual impulses
towards particular men, not towards men as a whole, and men will never
understand women so long as they do not recognise this.
This does not mean, of course, that women feel the same towards men as
they do towards each other. The differences of mind and life and outlook
between men and women make the society of each vastly stimulating to the
other, provided always that the women are not artificially cramped, and
make a mixed society far wider and humaner than the society of either
sex alone. Men scarcely yet know the extent to which they impoverish
their own lives by denying a full life to women, and thereby dulling and
stupefying women.
And consider, too, how hopelessly unfit man has proved himself for a
judicial attitude towards woman! He has allowed his own sex-impulses
entirely to obscure his judgment about women. If he is much too hard on
the good women, he tries to propitiate his feminine critics by pointing
out how much too lenient he is with the bad ones. He makes the law (I
speak of England); he is judge and advocate and jury, policeman and
jailer. When a woman is arraigned for soliciting his custom, he imprisons
her, and keeps his own share of the transaction secret. When, in her
despair, she abandons the child he too has abandoned, he again punishes
her.
Who set man in judgment over woman?
CHAPTER XV
SEX-ANTAGONISM
(2) WOMAN’S PART
“They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,—
They rightly do inherit Heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
If men have made the mistake of attempting to repress women, we must
admit that women have taken their share of the sex war in attempting
to get the better of men. Men have insisted that women shall live by
their sex alone, and women have used their sex in every conceivable way
to accomplish their ends. Men have drawn ring-fences round women and
then twitted them with their narrowness. Men have had to bow to the
necessity of women bearing and rearing children, but whereas this is a
work requiring the broadest culture and the widest sympathies, men have
for ages restricted women’s culture and cramped women’s sympathies. Full
of vitality and personality, women have felt the heavy hand of brute
force upon them, and like all live persons, they have either fretted
and rebelled (which, when it is done by a woman, is called nagging), or
they have circumvented the oppressor by wiles and lies. True, women have
impotently raged against men, and, true, it is a pity. If you are weak
and ignorant, your rage will, half the time, be not only impotent, but
directed against the wrong things and the wrong persons. True, women
have lied to men and cheated them, and some of these women have been the
most successful in twisting men round their little fingers, while the
incurably honest women have looked on in disgust and despair. But no one
can say that women have abused men more than men have abused women—all
literature and history proves the reverse. No one can say that women have
lied to men more than men have lied to women; the deserted girl-mothers
are the witnesses.
All these mistakes are due to selfishness, and this is a human, not a
sex characteristic. It is always a difficult matter for each individual
person to determine when self-expression and self-development merge into
selfishness, and there is no short way and no simple rule by which it can
be determined. One must allow that men have greater natural temptations
to be selfish, owing to physical differences between them and women,
and the education of boys, instead of, as now, enhancing the force
of these temptations, should be directed to counteracting them. The
physical circumstances of motherhood, for instance, do not allow a woman
to escape the consequences of the sexual act as a man can. It requires
more imagination for a man to realise the cruelty of deserting a baby
than it does for a woman to realise it. The baby reminds her. So we find
that women less often desert their babies than men do. A healthy public
opinion would stimulate the man’s imagination in this direction. Again,
man’s greater physical strength makes it more easy for him to bully a
woman than for her to bully him. When, by chance, a woman is physically
stronger than a man, she does not always refrain from using her force
unchivalrously. If it be true that a man has stronger appetites than a
woman, this again increases his temptations; but one must, if one allows
this circumstance, also allow that it may give the woman an advantage,
and so tempt her to bully the man in her way, and there is no doubt some
women yield to this temptation. I sometimes see, in the very cruelty of
men to women, a hidden agony of fear lest, ultimately, women should need
men less than men need women. If this be true on the purely animal plane,
nothing could be further from the truth, if we take the whole human
creature into account, and men who, by brutality (the result of fear and
the cause of fear, too), kill the higher attractions of which they are
capable, are making a tremendous miscalculation; for they might attain
by the one what they altogether miss by the other; and this is going in
the future to be more so, not less. The women of the future will have men
on terms, or go without, and the terms must be the only honourable terms,
of love and liberty and mutual service. A man will find he has no need to
preach wifely submission to the woman whose love he has won, and he will
find that he does not want it either.
Alarmists declare that the women’s movement has caused sex-antagonism.
The preceding chapter has, I think, disposed of such an absurd
contention, and most thoughtful persons do not defend a statement so
easily refuted by literature and history. Others, with more evidence,
maintain that sex-antagonism was there, a kind of sleeping dog, which
the women’s movement has now aroused to vicious attack. It is contended
that the progressive women have stirred up normal women to rebellion,
which they never would, of themselves, have contemplated; that the
progressives are mischief-makers, who have put dangerous ideas into the
heads of people quite unable to carry them out, and the only result
will be unrest, disputes, discomfort for men, misery for women, and a
final vindication of the supreme authority of man. The progressives
will probably suffer severe castigation, but the normal women will be
kissed and forgiven, for, after all, they are only women and not quite
accountable for their actions; and, besides, men are really rather fond
of the silly things. This is the style of the commoner leader-writer in
the anti-suffrage newspapers.
We may grant at once that the women’s movement would not be where it is
but for its leaders. This is no less true of the women’s than of all
other movements. A movement does not really get going until leaders
have arisen from the ranks; the absurd mistake is to suppose that a
movement can be _kept_ going for any prolonged time by the leaders only,
without support from the ranks. For many years, the women found it
exceedingly difficult to raise up leaders from their own ranks, and a
very considerable lead was, as a matter of fact, given by men. But until
women had arisen who could carry on the leadership, progress was slow,
partial and almost entirely academic. If John Stuart Mill’s searching
analysis of women’s position had not made women think for themselves; if
his disgust and shame had raised no answering disgust and shame in women,
they would have proved themselves fit for the position they were in, and
would never have begun to stir out of it. And about that time there were
other men too, ready to help, William Lloyd Garrison and Walt Whitman and
Mazzini and Stansfeld and Henry Sidgwick, and all the other people who
did the pioneer work of helping the women to get education and training,
and of opening up careers to them. Then, although the active reformers
among men have been comparatively recent, there have been great artists,
from the earliest times, who have held the mirror up to man and shown him
his deeds towards woman. No feminist tract can compare for propaganda
purposes with _The Trojan Women_, or _Medea_. Tell a woman she has no
concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give
her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try
to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning
the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as
history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times
who have read its causes. If it were not so, we might despair of the true
causes ever appearing to all.
If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their
superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of
women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the
power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of
the war on the women’s side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to
believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who
have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable
contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature.
It is a sorry picture that is presented to us, of the “womanly” woman
cajoling and bamboozling a man into complaisance, and that state of
things cannot be described as peace, while the present state of friction
is called war. There are elements of warfare in both, but the first was
underhand and corrupting, while the foolish elements of the present
condition are patent and, as I believe, temporary. I believe this because
I feel pretty sure that there is enough fairness in the mass of men for
them not permanently to resist what is just in the women’s claim, once
the women make it plain; and secondly, because what has been foolish or
wrong in the women’s movement is the result of the old folly and wrong
which the movement as a whole is directed against: the folly of trying to
make legislative action precede education, and the wrong of fighting evil
with evil, the age-long error of retaliation.
One must grant that one hears a great deal more of sex-antagonism now
than one did even ten years ago; certainly much more than one did a
quarter of a century ago. But if anyone will take the trouble to compare
the debates in the House of Commons twenty-five years ago with the
debates now, and note the difference of tone when women are mentioned,
he cannot avoid being struck by the fact that the thing is getting
more talked about now, just because it is going. The old contempt for
women has largely gone, and has been replaced by a most serious, if
considerably bewildered effort to understand what the women would be
at. It does not lie in the mouths of men who built or maintained in the
House the monkey cage, which goes by the euphemistic name of the Ladies’
Gallery, to assert that there was no antagonism; those men both feared
and despised women. The cage will go when Englishmen realise (it takes
them some time) how ridiculous they appear to all the world by exhibiting
themselves as in terror of their own women.
In many other ways women feel the antagonism less, and one improvement of
the utmost importance to them is the enormous increase in their liberty
of going about without molestation from men. When I was a girl, it was
considered rather a bold thing for a lady to walk unescorted within the
precincts of the City of London, and there were very few restaurants
where she would have been safe from rudeness. Consider who offered this
rudeness: men. And why? because, though the woman was doing an absolutely
harmless thing, she was singular, and it was assumed that she did it
from an improper motive and was therefore fair game; or still more
simply, because the cruel lust of tormenting a helpless creature was
irresistible. What woman who has moved an inch out of shelter, but has
encountered this?
Still, the antagonism is much less than it was. How is it that we hear
more of it? The chief reason is a very simple one: women’s griefs have
become reasoned and articulate. Whereas women were fighting man by wiles
and arts, they are now appealing to his reason and finding words for
their appeal, while a few, exasperated, are hitting out rather wildly
with man’s own weapons. In order to appeal to men’s reason, women have
had to find words for their grievances and their differences, and to
give words to a thing always makes it ten times as important as it was.
The unreasonable man points to the inarticulate women and invites you to
note how satisfied they are; he then points to the articulate ones and
cries shame on them for fomenting sex-war. To the unreasonable man, it
is impossible ever to demonstrate women’s grievances, for to do so is at
once to be reproached with being “anti-man”; yet surely even he might
admit that to err is human. If he had a little of the gift of humour,
he might profitably consider the eighteenth-century treatment of women,
and ask himself if it is really not rather funny that he should be so
hurt when women at last find tongue to say what they think of the rare
old sport of woman-baiting. When the admirable Sir Charles Grandison
ejaculates, “Were it not, my dear ladies, for male protectors, to what
insults, to what outrages, would not your sex be subject?” he was not
overstating the case against the men of that day. It was not against
the other forces of nature, against hunger or cold, or wild beasts that
women most needed protection; it was against insult and outrage from
man. Man was, by far, woman’s most formidable enemy and most terrible
danger. Women are frequently invited to bewail the death of chivalry.
What chivalry meant, in these days, was the protection by individual men
of their own women against the depredations of other men. If a woman had
no “protector” of her own, or if he chanced to be a tyrant, she remained
unprotected by the State. The growth of a healthier opinion among men
has now greatly reduced the number of men who desire to “outrage and
insult” women, and has greatly increased the State protection of women.
There will perhaps always be some few men of primeval instincts, or what
is worse, of primeval instincts corrupted by modernity; but it is for
civilised men to reduce them as far as they can, to control those that
cannot be civilised, and surely not to become their apologists.
The development in England that is known as militancy is, so far,
peculiar to England, and is the result of the political situation and
of the temperament and character of two women, Mrs. Pankhurst and her
daughter Christabel, acting upon it. The fiery and self-willed nature of
Mrs. Pankhurst made her a person to whom half-measures and compromises
have always been repugnant. Her deep and passionate sex-pride gave her
an eloquence and an attractive force which drew thousands of women to
her. She voiced in a language new to the timid and the ladylike, all
the revolt that was gnawing at the hearts of women. To many women it
must have seemed that their deepest unuttered thoughts and the unuttered
thoughts of generations of women had found expression, and anyone who
has had this experience, knows what intense devotion is felt towards
the person who has the courage and the genius to utter the words. If
Mrs. Pankhurst alone had inspired the militant movement, it would have
been at once a nobler and a more terrible thing than it has proved. The
machine, that wonderful engine of advertisement and ingenuity, was the
work of other minds. Doubtless it was the machine which served to make
the lightning progress of the militant movement in its first years;
it has been the machine, however, which has largely been responsible
for the disasters of recent times. What was great and noble has become
inextricably entangled with what the public has come to regard as a
gigantic fake, and consequently the attitude of the public is either
one of amusement, to see what fresh trick ingenuity will invent, what
fresh show will be presented to the gaping crowd, or of exasperation
at what seems to them like pointless mischief. The clever exploiting
of the psychology of mobs did not go deep enough, and was, in truth,
far too cynical. There is an appalling amount of mob spirit (not by any
means confined to the common people, but to be seen even in the House of
Commons), and many of the militant devices have successfully appealed to
this; but no reform worth having was ever won from the mob, and it is the
tragic truth that much of the deeper meaning of the most selfless and
devoted sacrifice on the part of individual women has been hidden by the
very advertisement which it has received.
When the Women’s Social and Political Union sprang into public view some
eight years ago, the time was certainly ripe for a revival. Some people
still think that the Union has done nothing but harm. This has always
seemed to me an unreasonable opinion. Undoubtedly they made other work
extraordinarily difficult in some ways, and for a time. They captured
the press, but, since they did not win the approval of the press for
their object, but only secured notices by their sensationalism, it was,
for some years, actually more difficult for other workers to get any
publicity at all for their views or their work. The report of a street
row always gets precedence of the report of a peaceful meeting, and the
result of this was that, for some years, the newspapers were filled with
reports of militancy, while their columns showed nothing of the great
and steady growth of the non-militant movement, nor did they even do
justice to the educational side of the militants’ work. This condition
of things was in itself intensely provocative, and nothing is a more
striking example of women’s level-headedness and far-sightedness than the
fact that the enormous mass of suffragists refused to be provoked to any
unconsidered act of retaliation. Some of them had the political sense to
note that the newspapers which gave most prominence to militancy were
those most hostile to women’s suffrage.
It would take very much more space than I have, thoroughly to argue the
pros and cons of militancy, to distinguish its different forms, and to
disentangle its motives. Like all great movements, this one contains
people who have joined it for very different motives, and some of the
arguments by which it has been defended are mutually destructive. Its
greatest achievement in my opinion is that it woke people up and opened
their purses, in a way totally unprecedented. It made those who had never
cared realise that some women cared intensely, and made them ask why. It
made those who had been working for long years realise that there were
many yet untried methods, and that some of them were good. Above all,
it made many women feel that, if they desired the enfranchisement of
women, and if they did not like the methods of the W.S.P.U., the only
respectable thing to do was to work as hard, and give as much for what
they thought right, as these other women did. To the constitutional
suffragists, it is a matter of complete indifference who gets the credit,
when the vote is won; but it is a matter of the utmost import to them,
not only that the vote should be won, but that both women and men should
be prepared to make the best use of so great a reform.
Something can, of course, be done by telling people they _are_ ready.
This is what the early militants did. There was no real opposition in the
country; there was a very large favourable majority in the House, and
there had been a majority since 1886. One can quite conceive a revival
which would in a few years have carried mere inertia. What happened
was that the W.S.P.U. inflamed a party against the movement, and this
party was the one which by its first principles was actually pledged to
support the movement. Temper, party advantage, personal loyalties were
all aroused; but, instead of being aroused for the suffrage movement,
they were inflamed against it. It was to be war. All possible peaceful
methods had, we were told, been tried and had failed. (This was, of
course, the great and fundamental untruth. The work up to that time had
not had anything like the popular appeal of recent years.) At first, by
skilful advertisement, it almost seemed as if elections might be lost and
won by these means, and some alarm was felt in party circles; but it did
not take long to show that there were very few men who were going to vote
against their party at the command of the militant suffragists, and the
cry of “Keep the Liberal out!” became ineffective. It caused the maximum
of irritation and the minimum of effect.
The militant campaign would have succeeded if the majority of women, even
perhaps if the majority of suffragists, had backed it. I am not afraid
of making this concession, holding, as I do, that the enormous majority
of women kept out of the militant movement from ethical considerations.
It is not easy to bring the ethical case against the militants, because
they themselves waver incessantly between two positions. Sometimes they
are soldiers, fighting a battle, inflicting damage, having a “siege of
Whitehall” (to quote from one of their posters), “proving that women
can fight.” Sometimes they are martyrs, who do injury to no one but
themselves; who merely refuse to be governed without their consent; who
have adopted the Oriental device of dying on their enemy’s doorstep. Now
this second policy is the very reverse of the first, and the only thing
that can be said against it is, that it is an extreme measure which
should on no account be undertaken, until ordinary methods of education
and organisation have been fully tried. To become a martyr as soon as
you can’t get your own way, is a form of spiritual bullying that is
extraordinarily exasperating.
But the first policy cuts away the whole ground upon which the women’s
demand is based; upon this ground not only would men infallibly beat
women, but the great mass of women, as well as men, would feel that the
militant women had invited defeat. When Mrs. Leigh adjures her women
hearers to use their nails upon the eyes of men who attempt to arrest
them, does she not know that this could only succeed for as long as the
men disbelieved the women’s intentions? As soon as the men apprehended
real danger, they could effectively dispose of the women. Even if it
were not wrong, it would be futile in the extreme. But it is wrong,
inexcusably wrong, on the part of women, whose experience of life ought
to have proved to them that for women to invite physical force against
themselves is to provoke all the forces of reaction against which their
movement is, in reality, directed. Long years ago, men threw stones and
filth at women who asked for enfranchisement. Gradually public opinion
killed out this hooliganism. Then came the militants, and, by smashing
windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that,
for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from
men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can
see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the
virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how
ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by,
turn to see it ugly in themselves.
It is hypocrisy, of course, for men to say that they refuse women’s
claims because some women have been violent, firstly, because they
refused them just the same, before women became violent; secondly,
because only a few women have been violent; thirdly, because the vote was
not given to men as a reward for their abstinence from violence. In fact,
the brutalities of anti-suffragists might make the more sensitive Antis
cease, for very shame, to reproach the other side with violence, their
own side having been guilty of personal assaults of the most disgusting
nature.
Men have not yet given women the vote, partly because they are very slow
to move and indifferent about women’s questions; partly because they
are still somewhat fearful of what women may do; but chiefly because no
political party has yet seen a clear party gain to be made by it. This
last, which has been the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of this
reform, will be its great safeguard once it has been won. The women’s
vote would be on a precarious tenure if it were won by one party in the
teeth of the bitter opposition of the whole of the other party. The
peaceful and fruitful use of the vote depends upon a general conversion
of the country to the principles involved. Representative institutions
can only work well by common consent and goodwill.
Militants sometimes defend their violence by saying how trivial, after
all, it has been. This, of course, is true. But what a strange argument
to use in defence of war! “See how little damage our guns do!” And
although I am convinced that they refrain from more serious crime,
because their consciences revolt from it, they lay themselves open to the
unthinking retort that they only do not do more because they can’t; a
retort not only untrue, but provocative, to people sufficiently childish
to be “dared” into action. What women have to do is to make their demand
a formidable demand, and they cannot do this by adopting methods which
the enormous mass of women will never whole-heartedly apply. By continued
education, by well-considered and thoroughly prepared political action,
by constant readiness for negotiation, by taking men always on their best
side, and by making the help of women worth having, suffragists will
enlist an ever-growing mass of women to hard work and sacrifice, and,
what is more, they will convince men of the constructive ability of
women, and of the possibility of men and women working together in the
future.
In the course of the militant movement, one has seen a vast amount of
femininity using the old weapons, which one hopes will be gradually laid
aside. Defiance alternating with injured innocence. The smashing of a
window by a woman, who cries, when a man apprehends her, “You mustn’t
touch me! I’m a woman!” The frequent inexcusable untruth that “women
are being imprisoned for daring to ask for the vote,” and that the Home
Secretary is starving women in prison. It would have been too wonderful
if women, in their fight for liberty, had proved themselves perfect.
We have not. We have shown human foibles, like men, partisanship and
violence, like men, and we have shown some faults which, though not
specifically feminine, are the faults natural to subjected persons.
When all is said about the mistakes and faults and follies of
suffragists, those of the Government have been far greater. They
belittled the women’s movement, and treated it with the sort of sneering
contempt which is more provocative than anything in the world. They
magnified the first importunities into crimes. The early militants
were treated with monstrous and disproportionate severity, and this
contributed largely to their early popularity. They were treated like the
worst criminals, for mere impropriety, or for the technical offence of
obstruction. They were subjected to the most abominable brutalities when
they asked questions at meetings. (It was a most unhappy thought which
struck them, when they found out how easy men’s nerves and men’s passions
make it for a woman to break up a meeting.) Two Acts of Parliament and
innumerable special orders have been devised to deal with them, and
have failed. Everybody with the slightest political insight knows that
the reform must come. When Mr. Asquith (House of Commons, 6th May 1913)
attempted to define what he meant by a demand for the vote, he said—
“I mean a demand which proceeds from a real, deep-seated, and
widely diffused sense of grievance and discontent. I do not
think that my honourable Friends will dispute that that is a
fair statement of the case. Of course, I do not deny for one
moment—who could?—that there are women, and many women in this
country, including some of the most gifted, most accomplished,
most high-minded of their sex, who do feel in that way. It
would be absurd and ridiculous to disguise the facts of the
case. So, again, and this is a very serious consideration, it
is clear from the phenomena of what is called militancy, to
which I am not going to make any further reference, that there
are women whose temperaments are such that this same sense of
wrong, twisted, perverted, inflamed, as I think in their case
it is, the same sense of wrong leads to anti-social courses
which men and even women find it difficult to conceive.”
This was, in fact, a complete abandonment of the anti-suffrage position,
and a recognition that the reform must come, and come soon. If many of
the best women feel a real and deep sense of grievance, and if other
women are being “twisted, perverted, and inflamed” by this sense of
wrong, it is quite plain that it is not statesmanship, still less is
it Liberal statesmanship, by delay and coercion to make the sense of
grievance more deeply seated and more widely diffused. It is not even
humane. For who feels the grievance? Women. And against whom must they
feel it? Men. Does any man in his senses _wish_ that the grievance
shall be so deeply inbitten that it will take generations to heal? I
believe not. I believe too that every bit of work that is done to get
the vote ought to be done in such a way as to make the use of the vote
run smoothly, when at last it is attained. Militant methods, whether of
martyrdom or war, are useless for that.
CHAPTER XVI
THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW
“Decay,” said Seithenyn, “is one thing, and danger is another.
Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old,
I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I
will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I
do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works
well: it keeps out the water from the land and it lets in
the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cup-bearer,
fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their
wisdom; and, if we were to be so rash as to try to mend it, we
should only mar it.”
“The stonework,” said Teithrin, “is sapped and mined: the piles
are rotten, broken and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices
are leaky and creaky.”
“That is the beauty of it,” said Seithenyn. “Some parts of it
are rotten, and some parts of it are sound.”
“It is well,” said Elphin, “that some parts are sound: it were
better that all were so.”
“So I have heard some people say before,” said Seithenyn;
“perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very
unamiable sort of people who are in the habit of indulging
their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give
elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity,
elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by
its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the
rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity.
There is nothing so dangerous as innovation.”—THOMAS LOVE
PEACOCK, _The Misfortunes of Elphin_.
The women’s movement is a great movement of adaptation. It is not
directed against the community, nor against any section of the
community. It is not anti-man: no movement for the liberation of woman
can do man anything but good; for modern men to try to keep women in
the old ways, while they go ahead, is a ridiculous attempt to produce
an anachronism which is foredoomed. It is not anti-social: when people
bring this accusation against it, they generally mean that it is
anti-maternal; but the progressive women desire that motherhood should
be as free and beneficent and instructed as human effort can make it,
and they desire, too, that it shall be possible for far more women to
have the opportunity of motherhood. It is not anti-democratic; for the
extension of liberty and representation to the masses of women will
diminish the privileges of the few. It is the anti-suffragists who are
anti-democratic. They tell us that the opposition of women to their own
enfranchisement is unprecedented and proves that there must be some
great harm in liberty, which women feel, while men have never resisted
their own enfranchisement. This is not true. Slaves, even male slaves,
have been known to object to manumission. But, as a matter of fact, if
you will inquire, you will find that nearly all the opposition of women
is directed against the enfranchisement of other women, not themselves.
Most anti-suffragists will agree that some women are fit for the vote.
Scarcely any woman thinks that she herself is unfit; it is _the other
women_ who are unfit. When Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks of the incurable
political ignorance of women, she does not mean that _she_ is ignorant.
_It is the other women who are ignorant._ Men have been every bit as
strongly convinced that _other men_ should not have the vote. It is
undemocratic, it is arrogant, it is profoundly selfish, but it is human,
not feminine, to endeavour to maintain privilege.
We are in for very big changes—social, economic and political. No one
can doubt it. In what spirit are we going to make those changes? They
are long overdue, and the amount of needless suffering caused by our
slowness in adaptation is appalling. Dead creeds cumber the ground in
all directions, and men make no serious effort either to resuscitate or
decently to bury them. We say one thing and we do the other, and we merit
the certificate given to us by international acclamation, of being the
most canting nation on earth. Some of us do not like change. When did
older people ever like change? Change implies thinking, and if there is
one thing the majority of people hate more than another it is thinking.
There is always in most of us a pathetic hope that some day we shall come
to a state where the machinery of life will go of itself and we shall
be safe and free from the necessity—so exhausting—of eternal vigilance.
Free also from the terrible necessity of judging for ourselves and from
the difficult task of loving our neighbour as ourselves. But those who
hate change—the catlike people with whom I have every sympathy—should
ask themselves, “Am I going to stop just here? And, if so, why? Is this
really the warmest, prettiest spot, and is there room for the others
here?” Most people who know even a corner of life, as it is for the less
fortunate, would admit that the present does not offer the most perfect
conditions imaginable for all. “But it might be worse, and so we will not
move, for fear of worse befalling. All the efforts of our forefathers,
all their mistakes and sacrifices and heroisms we will accept, but this
generation will not add one brave deed to the record of time.” If this
opinion were universal, this generation would be dead, and rotting fast.
A certain type of man is never tired of boasting that this is a “man’s
world” and that men have made it. They certainly have made many things,
some good and some bad. But whatever they have made of the world, this
type of man expects woman to be an impossible She,—impossible in the
world he has chosen to make around her. This kind of man professes to
admire beauty, peace, the amenities of life, and these are to be given
him, if you please, by woman. He does not see that man has himself
largely destroyed the beauty, peace and amenity of life. He has created
the modern industrial system; he has taken women’s work out of the
home; he has filled the air with smoke and clangour; he has polluted
the rivers; he has based the growth of millions of pounds upon the
destruction of millions of human bodies; he has driven the humane spirit
out of his activities, and then he has called upon woman to maintain it
alone. She cannot do it alone. It is not reasonable to expect women to
be capable of what Whitman finely calls “sane, athletic motherhood,” in
the midst of the noise and cruelty and dirt and meanness in which the
daughters of the poor are reared, or of the futility and silliness to
which so many of the daughters of the rich are heirs.
Women may not have produced great works of art, but they are artists in
life. They are often said to be nearer nature than men. Certainly they
seem to have a keener sense of reality and of essentials. They can be
the greatest inspiration, when they are intellectually alive, when they
have joy and freedom. In families where the women’s movement has opened
the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women:
jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes
make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and
honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of
them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship
of sexes, classes and ages.
It is this genius for living that must be altogether liberated, and with
it we shall see an immense liberation of the organising and governing
power of women. The union of practicality and ideality, of which I have
already spoken, must be used to its utmost. Women are less pompous and
less wasteful than men. They “cut the cackle” and get to business sooner;
I cannot conceive of a body of women tolerating the sort of thing that
goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating
themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they
are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up
with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their
concern.
The growth of humaner notions is both the fruit and the promise of
comradeship; it is seen in the change of ideas about education and about
crime and will appear in the ideas about war. People are realising that
many vices are the result of the absence of healthy pleasures. We shall
not need to punish so much for cruelty, drink, and sexual offences, when
we have given people other things to think about and live for; nor for
idleness and theft, when we have made employment safe. The reforms of
the future are going to be constructive, not punitive, and in all these
women’s gifts will be priceless.
Men who wish to keep women in subjection justify themselves by two
claims: (1) Those of men, their needs and appetites; (2) those of
children. With regard to the needs of men, it is certainly essential that
women should understand them, else they will be as stupid about men as
men have been about women, and few conditions are so fertile in suffering
as stupidity. The men, therefore, who, like Sir Almroth Wright, declare
that men will not tolerate epicene institutions, are hopelessly wrong,
for if there are to be two worlds, the man’s and the woman’s, and if all
their work and their thinking are to be done apart, and if men are all
the same to go on arranging the lives of women, with whom they have no
relations but physical relations of sex, there will be less and less of
that understanding, without which there can never be peace. Men who say
greedily, “This world is ours, and we will give you just so much of it as
we please, and it is for you to be thankful,” are blaspheming. The world
is not theirs to give, and although woman cannot fight man with physical
force, let man not think that to give woman her liberty is to confer a
favour upon her. It is only to do his duty, as a man is bound to do.
The men who are afraid women will not see eye to eye with them on the
matter of men’s temptations, use a double-edged argument, when they
declare that there must be a double standard of sexual morality. It is
sometimes based upon the physiological fact that a man can “have” a
hundred children in the time that it takes a woman to “have” one. But
this is to misuse words. A man does not have a child, nor does a woman:
a man and woman together have a child. And, if we even conceded that
promiscuity in a man would not be wrong, provided he could be promiscuous
by himself, how can anyone defend promiscuity in a man, if it infallibly
involves the corruption of women? Those who wish to defend promiscuity
must find a better weapon than the double standard; for if promiscuity
is bad in a woman, it must be bad that a man should corrupt a woman, and
there is the added stain on this particular badness that it is mean and
cowardly as well, for when he has corrupted her in this way, he not only
deserts her, but he hales her before his tribunals and punishes her.
When men advocate the subjection of women for the sake of the child,
it is difficult to speak with patience of the monumental conceit and
arrogance of the notion. Women do not sentimentalise so much about
children, because they are a part of women’s work, and you do not
sentimentalise about your work. I have said (Chapter XIII.) that
girls ought not to be expressly trained to be mothers, and to prevent
misunderstanding, it may be well to touch upon positive education.
Nothing in all the circumstances of a girl’s upbringing ought to be
allowed to injure her health, and, in consequence, her physical capacity
to bear healthy children. Much of the anxiety expressed as to whether
a girl may be perfectly healthy, as an individual, and yet unable to
bear children, is misplaced. It is quite true that the finest types of
women are likely to be less prolific than the more degraded type. The
feeble-minded are the most prolific of all. It seems you cannot have
both quantity and quality. But the great need of the world is precisely
quality. Healthy girls are not sterile, and the causes of sterility
are not to be found in the women’s movement; they are to be found in
idleness and luxury on the one hand, and in poverty on the other; beyond
everything, they are to be found in vice and excess. The miserable health
of the women of our working classes—the enormous majority of our women,
that is to say—is one of the greatest dangers and social crimes of the
day. But even all middle-class girls are not as healthy as they might be.
There is a certain amount of overpressure in lessons and in games, and
one knows of many cases where girls at home are worried into sickness
by the conflicting claims upon them. Sometimes one hears of grotesque
ignorance on the part of school- and house-mistresses, even on the part
of mothers, of the very elements of personal hygiene. Girls should be
taught from an early age to practise the hygiene of their own bodies, and
to take a pride in being and keeping fit, and they should not think shame
of easing off when they are not fit. It is most important in schools
to get a sensible public opinion that encourages neither slackness
nor prudery, and it is for the teachers to be well enough grounded in
physiology to know how to direct and maintain this public opinion. A
considerable amount of toughening is good for girls as for boys. Looking
into the causes of overpressure, both mental and physical, one sees that
most of it would never have occurred, if men had not made it so hard for
women to get opportunities. Men have in the past so often argued that
women and girls should have the desired opportunities, if they could
fulfil the same conditions as boys and men, and I can remember in my
schooldays a tremendous pressure to show that girls could fulfil the
same conditions as boys. The women of the future will claim freedom and
endowment when they fulfil the conditions suitable for women and girls.
Girls, as well as boys, should, _before puberty_, be taught the simple
facts of sex, and this should be done in connection with other simple
science teaching. They will accept these facts quite serenely, if they
are not greatly stressed and differentiated from other knowledge. They
should not be troubled with pathology until they are full grown. Boys and
girls should be brought up together, and the barrack system of living
should be entirely abolished for both sexes. This does not mean that boys
and girls should do all the same things, either in work or play; these
should be adapted to the ascertained capacities of the individuals and
not arranged on rigid _a priori_ schemes. If the girl has grown to young
womanhood with a healthy and active body and mind, she will have all the
essentials for good motherhood, and if she wishes to learn the details of
mothercraft, by all means give her opportunity to do so. But it is not
necessary, or even desirable, to force every young woman to do this. If
she is broadly developed as a human being, she can learn mothercraft when
she is about to marry. Then, indeed, she should learn it, and the man who
is about to marry should also study the duties of parentage.
It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a
girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has
left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work.
This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good
mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless,
vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her
parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all
her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic
daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get
it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising
to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by
their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to
their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage
purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.
Women, who bear the children, will be increasingly concerned, as they
grow in mental stature, with the quality of the children produced.
Theirs, it is said, is the task of handing on the torch of life. They
must ask themselves, with ever deepening sense of responsibility, what
is the life they are making? Is it worthy? And, while sterility will
rightly trouble them, because it is the result of disease, they will not
allow themselves to be frightened by the smaller birth-rate per woman.
They will perhaps think that the best remedy would be to make motherhood
possible for the millions of maidens, now childless against their will.
As they know more, they will recognise with joy that a woman’s natural
instinct to give herself when she loves and not otherwise, is a sound
racial instinct, and that many problems will be solved when the action of
natural selection is counter-balanced by sexual selection. When invited
by reactionaries to widen still further the breach between men and women,
and to admire the effects of specialisation and division of labour, women
will perhaps ask themselves what these have done, even in the industrial
world, and question whether they desire the same results in the family.
The worker has lost his old joy in the work; the product of his work has
lost beauty and excellence; the relations between employer and employee
have become inhuman. Do we really wish, we women, to see these results in
the home? Do men?
And woman not only bears the child, but she is its natural protector
and guardian. In the way civilised men regard assaults on children, in
their helplessness to protect the child from bad men,—and women,—in the
monstrous absurdity of the phrase “the criminal child,” and all the
cruelties and stupidities involved in that phrase, one sees how men,
with the best intentions, have failed, because they would insist upon
doing women’s work. Man is legally, by the laws man has made, the only
parent of the child, and the condition of the child truly reflects this
legal fiction. When men go abroad for a living, for adventure, for glory
or for plunder, what becomes of their regard for the child? They beget
everywhere, children, surely the most deserted on earth, who have neither
father nor country, and they leave the problem of half-breeds as a most
bitter inheritance for their children’s children. Letourneau says that
legal monogamy has for its object the regulation of succession and the
division of property; so Hagar and Ishmael in all times and nations have
been repudiated.
Now, at last, there are signs that the light is breaking. Knowledge is
showing men that neither their own happiness nor the welfare of the child
can ever be served by the subjection, the crippling or the thwarting
of women. And intelligent men are coming over in their thousands. Even
a very rough crowd in the Midlands, that had been stoning the women’s
suffrage pilgrims, because they were supposed to be militants, cried
out to them as they went home, after a meeting, “We are all for it!”
meaning they were all for the enfranchisement of women, although they
felt so shocked at the violence of the militants that they felt impelled
themselves to resort to worse violence.
Men have said to us over and over again, “You are quite right. You ought
to get it, and you will get it. Go on fighting. It is a woman’s question,
and you women must solve it for yourselves.” It is strange to women that
such men have not seen the baseness of this attitude. It is strange that
they cannot see that they alone have the power, and that, under their
fair words, they are in effect saying, “Get it, if you can,” for all the
world like a bullying big boy who has stolen the smaller boy’s bread. It
is strange that they should be willing in this matter to show themselves
so inferior to women; for when did women ever say to their menfolk: “Your
freedom, your dignity, your ideals are nothing to me. These are men’s
questions; let them settle their affairs without our help”? Just as
women have carried men in their arms, when they were weak and whimpering
and ugly, till they could run alone; just as women have nourished the
babes at their breasts, and given their lives for them, so have we women
(in the words of Miss Anna Shaw) “carried all the weak causes in our
arms, until they were strong and could run alone, and then—then—they
forgot us!” In the French Revolution, at Peterloo, in the American
crusade against slavery, among the Boers in South Africa, in the Chinese
revolution, in Ireland now, when did women ever separate their lives and
interests from those of men?
There is this excuse for the men: first, that they are by nature slower
than women, and are only now awakening to the fact that, while men’s
lives have changed greatly during the past century, women’s lives have
changed immensely more, and that something like a complete revolution
has taken place in the education and industrial position of women,
and they cannot be expected to be the same as they were before these
changes; and, secondly, that unlimited power is more demoralising even
than subjection. Where men are treating women as equally human, the
sense of comradeship is growing. One of the most moving speeches made at
Budapest, at the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance
in June 1913, was a very simple statement by Miss Jenny af Forselles,
a Finnish Member of Parliament. She said that, in the great national
sorrow and the terrible struggle with a less civilised nation, their
solace and inspiration was the comradeship between the women and men.
Those who heard her will not forget the quiet thrill of her aspiration,
expressed in her Biblical, slightly archaic German—“_Wir wollen seyn ein
einig Volk_,” and the hope it gave, that in some distant day the union of
peoples might be a union of the whole _free_ people.
I have refrained as much as possible from dogmatism about the true nature
of Woman and about what women will do. I know some people confidently
assert that women are better than men, and that women are going to
perform miracles. Well, some of us think that the movement itself, now,
is miraculous, and have had ample reward in the comradeship of men in the
movement.
“Divinity hath surely touched my heart;
I have possessed more joy than earth can lend;
I may attain what time shall never spend.
Only let not my duller days destroy
The memory of thy witness and my joy.”
Our faith would be weak if it could be dashed by the human faults in
women, and of women in the movement as well as all the other women. It is
cowardice, merely, to turn from the complex, fascinating, troublesome,
real woman to a vapid ideal, or a devitalised norm. We must understand
the real women and the real men, and have faith in them. Fear and
distrust are no leaders for brave folk. The prayer which the worker in
human material must ever have at heart is, “Lord, I believe; help Thou
mine unbelief.”
_Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh_
FOOTNOTES
[1] The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in twelve months
raised, at headquarters and among its affiliated societies, £42,000. I
have assumed that the Women’s Social and Political Union raised as much.
It seems likely that if we add together all the other societies (thirty
odd), and also reckon the immense amount of money spent in travelling and
so forth by voluntary workers, the total of £100,000 is well within the
mark.
[2] _Realities and Ideals: The Work of Woman_, by Frederic Harrison, p.
125.
[3] _Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women_, by A. V. Dicey, K.C.,
LL.D., Hon. D.C.L.
[4] _The Social Evil in Chicago_, p. 114.
[5] _Sex Antagonism_, by Walter Heape, F.R.S.
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