THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD
In due course we shall have to discuss the little that is yet known and
to discuss the much that is asserted by both sides, for this or that
end, regarding the differences between men and women. By this we mean,
of course, the natural as distinguished from the nurtural
differences--to use the antithetic terms so usefully adapted by Sir
Francis Galton from Shakespeare. Our task, we shall soon discover, is
not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of
nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical,
of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two
factors. The sharp allotment of this or that feature to nature or to
nurture alone is therefore always wholly wrong: and the nice estimation
of the relative importance of the natural as compared with the nurtural
factors must necessarily be difficult, especially for the case of
mankind, where critical observation, on a large scale, and with due
control, of the effects of environment upon natural potentialities is
still lacking.
But here, at least, we may unhesitatingly declare and insist upon, and
shall hereafter invariably argue from, _the_ one indisputable and
all-important distinction between man and woman. We must not commit the
error of regarding this distinction as qualitative so much as
quantitative: by which is meant that it really is neither more nor less
than a difference in the proportions of two kinds of vital expenditure.
Nor must we commit the still graver error of asserting, without
qualification, that such and such, and that only, is the ideal of
womanhood, and that all women who do not conform to this type are
morbid, or, at least, abnormal. It takes all sorts to make a world, we
must remember. Further, the more we learn, especially thanks to the
modern experimental study of heredity, regarding the constitution of the
individual of either sex, the more we perceive how immensely complex and
how infinitely variable that constitution is. Nay more, the evidence
regarding both the higher animals and the higher plants inclines us to
the view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more
complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary
within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to
the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more
complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary
atoms, so to say, than man.
And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not
enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion
of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to
state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should
be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of
men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is
still generally believed--in consequence of that universal confusion
between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already
referred--that women are less variable than men, that they vary within
much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or
average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men. A vast
amount of idle evidence is quoted in favour of a proposition which seems
to have some _a priori_ plausibility. It is said--of course, without any
allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity--that such
extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than
women: and then that the male sex also furnishes an undue proportion of
the insane--as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and
syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two sexes.
Nevertheless, observant members of either sex will either contradict one
another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or
will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally
than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the
facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences
in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among
women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as
our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either sex being,
in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that
variety--in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made
by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the
higher forms of life--the more abundant, the higher the form. So vast,
as yet quite incalculably vast, is the number of factors of the
individual, and such are the laws of their transmission in the
germ-cells, that the mere mathematical chances of a second identical
throw, so to speak, resulting in a second individual like any other, are
practically infinitely small. The greater physiological complexity of
woman, as compared with man, lends especial force to the argument in her
case. The remarkable phenomena of "identical twins," who alone of human
beings are substantially identical, lend great support to this
proposition of the uniqueness of every individual: for we find that this
unexampled identity depends upon the fact that the single cell from
which every individual is developed, having divided into two, was at
that stage actually separated into two independent cells, thus producing
two complete individuals of absolutely identical germinal constitution.
In no other case can this be asserted; and thus this unique identity
confirms the doctrine that otherwise all individuals are indeed unique.
It is necessary to state this point clearly in the forefront of our
argument, both lest the reader should suppose that some foolish ideal of
feminine uniformity is to be argued for, and also in the interests of
the argument as it proceeds, lest we should be ourselves tempted to
forget the inevitable necessity--and, as will appear, the eminent
desirability--of feminine, no less than of masculine, variety.
Nevertheless, there remains the fact that, in the variety which is
normally included within the female sex, there is yet a certain
character, or combination of characters, upon which, indeed, distinctive
femaleness depends. It may in due course be our business to discuss the
subordinate and relatively trivial differences between the sexes,
whether native or acquired; but we shall encounter nothing of any moment
compared with the distinction now to be insisted upon.
One may well suggest that insistence is necessary, for never, it may be
supposed, in the history of civilization was there so widespread or so
effective a tendency to declare that, in point of fact, there are no
differences between men and women except that, as Plato declared, woman
is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great
writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently
worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions
of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously
absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any
writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were
correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is
practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If
a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those
women--themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for
this view--who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the
identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is
twofold.
In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we shall
afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and
womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological
tendencies--notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the
lower type of man looks upon fatherhood. It requires closer and more
intimate study of this type than we can spare space for--more, even,
than the state of our knowledge yet permits--in order to demonstrate how
absurd is the claim of women thus peculiarly constituted to speak for
their sex as a whole.
But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the
identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be
hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound
distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized
woman--but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine
of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that
only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially
identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be
regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain
us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the
time is towards accepting it--the recent biological proof of the
fundamental and absolute difference between the sexes being unknown as
yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even
were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to
suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal
one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of
course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some
of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.
The one party seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa
Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have
written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because
she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not
share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial.
The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact,
men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole
incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this
party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not
man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does
things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at
all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole
silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's
party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in
some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those
peculiar to one shall be ignored.
It is my most solemn conviction that the cause of woman, which is the
cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely
and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this doctrine of
sex-identity. It might serve some turn for a time, as many another
error has done, were it not so palpably and egregiously false. Advocated
as it is mainly by either masculine women or unmanly men, its advocates,
though in their own persons offering some sort of evidence for it, are
of a kind which is highly repugnant to less abnormal individuals of both
sexes. Hosts of women of the highest type, who are doing the silent work
of the world, which is nothing less than the creation of the life of the
world to come, are not merely dissuaded from any support of the women's
cause by the spectacle of these palpably aberrant and unfeminine women,
but are further dissuaded by the profound conviction arising out of
their woman's nature, that the doctrine of sex-identity is absurd. Many
of them would rather accept their existing status of social inferiority,
with its thousand disabilities and injustices, than have anything to do
with women who preach "Rouse yourselves, women, and be men!" and who
themselves illustrate only too fearsomely the consequences of this
doctrine.
Certainly not less disastrous, as a consequence of this most unfortunate
error of fact and of logic, is the alienation from the woman's cause of
not a few men whose support is exceptionally worth having. There are men
who desire nothing in the world so much as the exaltation of womanhood,
and who would devote their lives to this cause, but would vastly rather
have things as they are than aid the movement of "Woman in
Transition"--if it be transition from womanhood to something which is
certainly not womanhood and at best a very poor parody of manhood except
in cases almost infinitely rare. I have in my mind a case of a
well-known writer, a man of the highest type in every respect, well
worth enlisting in the army that fights for womanhood to-day, whose
organic repugnance to the defeminized woman is so intense, and whose
perception of the distinctive characters of real womanhood and of their
supreme excellence is so acute that, so far from aiding the cause of,
for instance, woman's suffrage, he is one of its most bitter and
unremitting enemies. There must be many such--to whom the doctrine of
sex-identity, involving the repudiation of the excellences, distinctive
and precious, of women, is an offence which they can never forgive.
One may be permitted a little longer to delay the discussion of the
distinctive purpose and character of womanhood, because the foregoing
has already stated in outline the teaching which biology and physiology
so abundantly warrant. For here we must briefly refer to the work of a
very remarkable woman, scarcely known at all to the reading public,
either in Great Britain or in America, and never alluded to by the
feminist leaders in those countries, though her works are very widely
known on the Continent of Europe, and, with the whole weight of
biological fact behind them, are bound to become more widely known and
more effective as the years go on. I refer to the Swedish writer, Ellen
Key, one of whose works, though by no means her best, has at last been
translated into English. All her books are translated into German from
the Swedish, and are very widely read and deeply influential in
determining the course of the woman's movement in Germany. At this
early stage in our argument I earnestly commend the reader of any age or
sex to study Ellen Key's "Century of the Child." It is necessary and
right to draw particular attention to the teaching of this woman since
it is urgently needed in Anglo-Saxon countries at this very time, and
almost wholly unknown, but for this minor work of hers and an occasional
allusion--as in an article contributed by Dr. Havelock Ellis to the
_Fortnightly Review_ some few years ago. Especial importance attaches to
such teaching as hers when it proceeds from a woman whose fidelity to
the highest interests, even to the unchallenged autonomy, of her sex
cannot be questioned, attested as it is by a lifetime of splendid work.
The present controversy in Great Britain would be profoundly modified in
its course and in its character if either party were aware of Ellen
Key's work. The most questionable doctrines of the English feminists
would be already abandoned by themselves if either the wisest among
them, or their opponents, were able to cite the evidence of this great
Swedish feminist, who is certainly at this moment the most powerful and
the wisest living protagonist of her sex. From a single chapter of the
book, to which it may be hoped that the reader will refer, there may be
quoted a few sentences which will suffice to indicate the reasons why
Ellen Key dissociated herself some ten years ago from the general
feminist movement, and will also serve as an introduction from the
practical and instinctive point of view to the scientific argument
regarding the nature and purpose of womanhood, which must next concern
us. Hear Ellen Key:--
"Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman,
turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were
occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was
employed--these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the
woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration
of feminine capacities, nature and environment.
"The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman
had become a butcher, 'Go thou and do likewise,' and an American
young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection,
characteristic phenomena.
"In our programme of civilization, we must start out with the
conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of
woman, and the way in which she carries out this profession is of
value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which
more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and
are robbing children of the care of a mother.
"I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to
follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary
woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to
go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have
always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.
"From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am
trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the
individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest
vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of
motherhood.
"But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only
be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and
man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin
together to bring up the new generation out of which some day
society will be formed. In it the completed man--the superman--will
be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the
horizon of to-day."