This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a
downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.
Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under our
Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy with
repression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in
the long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishable
from disease. You will find some of them described at length in any
handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul
Bjerre, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encountered
under Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressed
revolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial
culture, and this suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means,
produces a complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At
one end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque
adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her
hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put to
use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and
neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and
her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man’s
world. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they are still
enmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos and
sentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least,
to get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest
that yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward social,
political and economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man
who honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at
some time or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a
man.
Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the stupid
masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or
even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human
equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine
that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate,
without the natural instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a
phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous
mammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian
characters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length.
One finds traces of it even in works professedly devoted to disposing
of it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this: “What all the
skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War
failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful
femininity and nobility of soul.” In other words, by her possession of
some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the
ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and
preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not by
magic, but by hard common sense. The problem before her was simply one
of organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of them had failed
stupendously. What she did was to bring her feminine sharpness of wit,
her feminine clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded
quickly, and once it had been brought to order it was easy for other
persons to carry on what she had begun. But the opinion of a man’s
world still prefers to credit her success to some mysterious angelical
quality, unstatable in lucid terms and having no more reality than the
divine inspiration of an archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and
accurate intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the table, and the
amour propre of man is kept inviolate. To confess frankly that she had
more sense than any male Englishman of her generation would be to utter
a truth too harsh to be bearable.
The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already
discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct—that they submit
to the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a powerful effort
of the will, and with the sole object of discharging their duty to
posterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with proper
candour and at due length in a work designed for reading aloud in the
domestic circle; all I can do is to refer the student to the books of
any competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to the
confidences (if they are obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his
acquaintance.