If I am right in my view that marriage for woman has always been not
only a trade, but a trade that is practically compulsory, I have at
the same time furnished an explanation of the reason why women, as a
rule, are so much less romantic than men where sexual attraction is
concerned. Where the man can be single-hearted, the woman necessarily
is double-motived. It is, of course, the element of commerce and
compulsion that accounts for this difference of attitude; an impulse
that may have to be discouraged, nurtured or simulated to order—that
is, at any rate, expected, for commercial or social reasons to put
in an appearance as a matter of course and at the right and proper
moment—can never have the same vigor, energy and beauty as an impulse
that is unfettered and unforced.
More than once in my life I have been struck by the beauty of a man’s
honest conception and ideal of love and marriage—a conception and
ideal which one comes across in unexpected and unlikely persons and
which is by no means confined to those whose years are still few in
number and whose hearts are still hot within them. Only a few weeks ago
I heard an elderly gentleman of scientific attainments talk something
which, but for its sincerity, would have seemed to me sheer sentimental
balderdash concerning the relations of men and women. And from other
equally respectable gentlemen I have heard opinions that were beautiful
as well as honest on the relations of the sexes, of a kind that no
woman, being alone with another woman, would ever venture to utter.
For we see the thing differently. I am not so foolish as to imagine
that theory and practice in this or any other matter are in the habit
of walking hand in hand; I know that for men the word love has two
different meanings, and therefore I should be sorry to have to affirm
on oath that the various gentlemen who have, at various times, favoured
me with their views on the marriage question have one and all lived up
to their convictions; but at least their conception of the love and
duty owed by man and woman to each other was a high one, honourable,
not wanting in reverence, not wanting in romance. Over and over again
I have heard women unreticent enough upon the same subject; but, when
they spoke their hearts, the picturesque touch—the flash and fire of
romance—was never nearly so strong and sometimes altogether absent.
And I have never seen love—the sheer passionate and personal
delight in and worship of a being of the other sex—so vividly and
uncontrollably expressed on the face of a woman as on the face of a
man. I have with me, as one of the things not to be forgotten, the
memory of a cheap foreign hotel where, two or three years back, a
little Cockney clerk was making holiday in worshipful attendance on the
girl he was engaged to. At table I used to watch him, being very sure
that he had no eyes for me; and once or twice I had the impulse that
I should like to speak to him and thank him for what he had shown me.
I have seen women in love time after time, but none in whom the fire
burned as it burned in him—consumedly. I used to hope his Cockney
goddess would have understanding at least to reverence the holy thing
that passed the love of women....
How should it be otherwise—this difference in the attitude of man
and woman in their relations to each other? To make them see and
feel more alike in the matter, the conditions under which they live
and bargain must be made more alike. With even the average man love
and marriage may be something of a high adventure, entered upon
whole-heartedly and because he so desires. With the average woman it
is not a high adventure—except in so far as adventure means risk—but
a destiny or necessity. If not a monetary necessity, then a social.
(How many children, I wonder, are born each year merely because their
mothers were afraid of being called old maids? One can imagine no
more inadequate reason for bringing a human being into the world.)
The fact that her destiny, when he arrives, may be all that her heart
desires and deserves does not prevent him from being the thing that,
from her earliest years, she had, for quite other reasons, regarded as
inevitable. Quite consciously and from childhood the “not impossible
he” is looked upon, not simply as an end desirable in himself, but
as a means of subsistence. The marriageable man may seek his elective
affinity until he find her; the task of the marriageable woman is
infinitely more complicated, since her elective affinity has usually to
be combined with her bread and butter. The two do not always grow in
the same place.
What is the real, natural and unbiased attitude of woman towards love
and marriage, it is perfectly impossible for even a woman to guess
at under present conditions, and it will continue to be impossible
for just so long as the natural instincts of her sex are inextricably
interwoven with, thwarted and deflected by, commercial considerations.
When—if ever—the day of woman’s complete social and economic
independence dawns upon her, when she finds herself free and upright
in a new world where no artificial pressure is brought to bear upon
her natural inclinations or disinclinations, then, and then only, will
it be possible to untwist a tangled skein and judge to what extent
and what precise degree she is swayed by those impulses, sexual and
maternal, which are now, to the exclusion of every other factor,
presumed to dominate her existence. And not only to dominate, but to
justify it. (A presumption, by the way, which seems to ignore the
fact—incompatible, surely, with the theory of “incompleteness”—that
celibacy irks the woman less than it does the man.)
What, one wonders, would be the immediate result if the day of
independence and freedom from old restrictions were to dawn suddenly
and at once? Would it be to produce, at first and for a time, a
rapid growth amongst all classes of women of that indifference to,
and almost scorn of, marriage which is so marked a characteristic of
the—alas, small—class who can support themselves in comfort by work
which is congenial to them? Perhaps—for a time, until the revulsion
was over and things righted themselves. (I realize, of course, that
it is quite impossible for a male reader to accept the assertion
that any one woman, much less any class of women, however small its
numbers, can be indifferent to or scornful of marriage—which would be
tantamount to admitting that she could be indifferent to, or scornful
of, himself.—What follows, therefore, can only appear to him as an
ineffectual attempt on the part of an embittered spinster to explain
that the grapes are sour; and he is courteously requested to skip to
the end of the chapter. It would be lost labour on my part to seek
to disturb his deep-rooted conviction that all women who earn decent
incomes in intelligent and interesting ways are too facially unpleasant
to be placed at the head of a dinner-table. I shall not attempt
to disturb that conviction; I make it a rule never to attempt the
impossible.) This new-born attitude of open indifference and contempt,
while perhaps appearing strained and unnatural, is, it seems to me, a
natural one enough for women whose daily lives have falsified every
tradition in which they were born and bred.
For the tradition handed down from generations to those girl children
who now are women grown was, with exceptions few and far between, the
one tradition of marriage—marriage as inevitable as lessons and far
more inevitable than death. Ordering dinner and keeping house: that
we knew well, and from our babyhood was all the future had to give to
us. For the boys there would be other things; wherefore our small
hearts bore a secret grudge against Almighty God that He had not
made us boys—since their long thoughts were our long thoughts, and
together we wallowed in cannibals and waxed clamorous over engines. For
them, being boys, there might be cannibals and engines in the world
beyond; but for us—oh, the flat sameness of it!—was nothing but a
husband, ordering dinner and keeping house. Therefore we dreamed of a
settler for a husband, and of assisting him to shoot savages with a
double-barrelled gun. So might the round of household duties be varied
and most pleasantly enlivened.
Perhaps it was the stolid companionship of the doll, perhaps the
constant repetition of the formula “when you have children of your
own” that precluded any idea of shirking the husband and tackling the
savage off our own bat. For I cannot remember that we ever shirked
him. We selected his profession with an eye to our own interests; he
was at various times a missionary, a sailor and a circus-rider; but
from the first we recognized that he was unavoidable. We planned our
lives and knew that he was lurking vaguely in the background to upset
our best-laid calculations. We were still very young, I think, when we
realized that his shadowy personality was an actual, active factor in
our lives; that it was because of him and his surmised desires that
our turbulent inclinations were thwarted and compressed into narrow
channels, and that we were tamed and curbed as the boys were never
tamed and curbed. When that which the boys might do with impunity
was forbidden to us as a sin of the first water, we knew that it was
because he would not like it. The thought was not so consciously
expressed, perhaps; but it was there and lived with us. So we grew up
under his influence, presuming his wishes, and we learned, because
of him, to say, “I can’t,” where our brothers said, “I can,” and to
believe, as we had been taught, that all things, save a very few (such
as ordering dinner and keeping house) were not for us because we were
not men. (Yet we had our long, long thoughts—we had them, too!) That
was one thing that he desired we should believe; and another was that
only through him could we attain to satisfaction and achievement; that
our every desire that was not centred upon him and upon his children
would be barren and bitter as Dead Sea ashes in the mouth. We believed
that for a long time....
And he was certain to come: the only question was, when? When he came
we should fall in love with him, of course—and he would kiss us—and
there would be a wedding....
Some of us—and those not a few—started life equipped for it after
this fashion; creatures of circumstance who waited to be fallen in
love with. That was indeed all; we stood and waited—on approval. And
then came life itself and rent our mother’s theories to tatters. For
we discovered—those of us, that is, who were driven out to work that
we might eat—we discovered very swiftly that what we had been told
was the impossible was the thing we had to do. That and no other. So
we accomplished it, in fear and trembling, only because we had to; and
with that first achievement of the impossible the horizon widened with
a rush, and the implanted, hampering faith in our own poor parasitic
uselessness began to wither at the root and die. We had learned to say,
“I can.” And as we went on, at first with fear and then with joy, from
impossibility to impossibility, we looked upon the world with new eyes.
To no man, I think, can the world be quite as wonderful as it is to
the woman now alive who has fought free. Those who come after her will
enter by right of birth upon what she attains by right of conquest;
therefore, neither to them will it be the same. The things that to
her brother are common and handed down, to her are new possessions,
treasured because she herself has won them and no other for her. It may
well be that she attaches undue importance to these; it could scarcely
be otherwise. Her traditions have fallen away from her, her standard
of values is gone. The old gods have passed away from her, and as yet
the new gods have spoken with no very certain voice. The world to her
is in the experimental stage. She grew to womanhood weighed down by the
conviction that life held only one thing for her; and she stretches out
her hands to find that it holds many. She grew to womanhood weighed
down by the conviction that her place in the scheme of things was the
place of a parasite; and she knows (for necessity has taught her) that
she has feet which need no support. She is young in the enjoyment of
her new powers and has a pleasure that is childish in the use of them.
By force of circumstances her faith has been wrested from her and the
articles of her new creed have yet to be tested by experience—her own.
Her sphere—whatever it may prove to be—no one but herself can define
for her. Authority to her is a broken reed. Has she not heard and read
solemn disquisitions by men of science on the essential limitations of
woman’s nature and the consequent impossibility of activity in this or
that direction?—knowing, all the while, that what they swear to her
she cannot do she does, is doing day by day!
Some day, no doubt, the pendulum will adjust itself and swing true; a
generation brought up to a wider horizon as a matter of course will
look around it with undazzled eyes and set to work to reconstruct the
fundamental from the ruins of what was once esteemed so. But in the
meantime the new is—new; the independence that was to be as Dead Sea
ashes in our mouth tastes very sweet indeed; and the unsheltered
life that we were taught to shrink from means the fighting of a good
fight....
Selfishness, perhaps—all selfishness—this pleasure in ourselves and
in the late growth of that which our training had denied us. But then,
from our point of view, the sin and crime of woman in the past has been
a selflessness which was ignoble because involuntary. Our creed may be
vague as yet, but one article thereof is fixed: there is no merit in a
sacrifice which is compulsory, no virtue in a gift which is not a gift
but a tribute.