I have insisted so strongly upon what I believe to be the attitude
towards life of the independent woman mainly with the object of
proving my assertion that there are other faculties in our nature
besides those which have hitherto been forced under a hothouse system
of cultivation—sex and motherhood. It is quite possible that a woman
thinking, feeling and living in a manner I have described may be dubbed
unsexed; but even if she be what is technically termed unsexed, it does
not follow therefore that she is either unnatural or unwomanly. Sex is
only one of the ingredients of the natural woman—an ingredient which
has assumed undue and exaggerated proportions in her life owing to the
fact that it has for many generations furnished her with the means of
livelihood.
In sexual matters it would appear that the whole trend and tendency of
man’s relations to woman has been to make refusal impossible and to
cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire.
His motive in concentrating all her energy upon the trade of marriage
was to deny it any other outlet. The original motive was doubtless
strengthened, as time went on, by an objection to allowing her to come
into economic competition with him; but this was probably a secondary
or derivative cause of his persistent refusal to allow her new spheres
of activity, having its primary root in the consciousness that economic
independence would bring with it the power of refusal.
The uncompromising and rather brutal attitude which man has
consistently adopted towards the spinster is, to my mind, a
confirmation of this theory. (The corresponding attitude of the married
woman towards her unmarried sister I take to be merely servile and
imitative.) It was not only that the creature was chaste and therefore
inhuman. That would have justified neglect and contempt on his part,
but not the active dislike he always appears to have entertained for
her. That active and somewhat savage dislike must have had its origin
in the consciousness that the perpetual virgin was a witness, however
reluctantly, to the unpalatable fact that sexual intercourse was not
for every woman an absolute necessity; and this uneasy consciousness
on his part accounts for the systematic manner in which he placed
the spinster outside the pale of a chivalry, upon which, from her
unprotected position, one would have expected her to have an especial
claim.
If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a
trade on the part of woman—the exchange of her person for the means
of subsistence—it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which
that trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in
the matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market.
Which brings us at once to the fact—arising from the compulsory
nature of the profession—that it is carried on under disadvantages
unknown and unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods.
For the regulations governing compulsory service—the institution of
slavery and the like—are always framed, not in the interests of the
worker, but in the interests of those who impose his work upon him.
The regulations governing exchange and barter in the marriage market,
therefore, are necessarily framed in the interests of the employer—the
male.
The position is this. Marriage, with its accompaniments and
consequences—the ordering of a man’s house, the bearing and rearing
of his children—has, by the long consent of ages, been established
as practically the only means whereby woman, with honesty and honour,
shall earn her daily bread. Her every attempt to enter any other
profession has been greeted at first with scorn and opposition; her
sole outlook was to be dependence upon man. Yet the one trade to which
she is destined, the one means of earning her bread to which she is
confined, she may not openly profess. No other worker stands on the
same footing. The man who has his bread to earn, with hands, or brains,
or tools, goes out to seek for the work to which he is trained; his
livelihood depending on it, he offers his skill and services without
shame or thought of reproach. But with woman it is not so; she is
expected to express unwillingness for the very work for which she has
been taught and trained. She has been brought up in the belief that
her profession is marriage and motherhood; yet though poverty may be
pressing upon her—though she may be faced with actual lack of the
necessities of life—she must not openly express her desire to enter
that profession, and earn her bread in the only way for which she is
fitted. She must stand aside and wait—indefinitely; and attain to her
destined livelihood by appearing to despise it.
That, of course, is the outcome of something more than a convention
imposed on her by man; nature, from the beginning, has made her
more fastidious and reluctant than the male. But with this natural
fastidiousness and reluctance the commercialism imposed upon her by
her economic needs is constantly at clash and at conflict, urging
her to get her bread as best she can in the only market open to her.
Theoretically—since by her wares she lives—she has a perfect right to
cry those wares and seek to push them to the best advantage. That is to
say, she has a perfect right to seek, with frankness and with openness,
the man who, in her judgment, can most fittingly provide her with the
means of support.
This freedom of bargaining to the best advantage, permitted as a matter
of course to every other worker, is denied to her. It is, of course,
claimed and exercised by the prostitute class—a class which has pushed
to its logical conclusion the principle that woman exists by virtue of
a wage paid her in return for the possession of her person; but it is
interesting to note that the “unfortunate” enters the open market with
the hand of the law extended threateningly above her head. The fact
is curious if inquired into: since the theory that woman should live
by physical attraction of the opposite sex has never been seriously
denied, but rather insisted upon, by men, upon what principle is
solicitation, or open offer of such attraction, made a legal offence?
(Not because the woman is a danger to the community, since the male
sensualist is an equal source of danger.) Only, apparently, because
the advance comes from the wrong side. I speak under correction, but
cannot, unaided, light upon any other explanation; and mine seems to
be borne out by the fact that, in other ranks of life, custom, like
the above-mentioned law, strenuously represses any open advance on the
part of the woman. So emphatic, indeed, is this unwritten law, that
one cannot help suspecting that it was needful it should be emphatic,
lest woman, adapting herself to her economic position, should take the
initiative in a matter on which her livelihood depended, and deprive
her employer not only of the pleasure of the chase, but of the illusion
that their common bargain was as much a matter of romance and volition
on her part as on his.
As a matter of fact, that law that the first advances must come from
the side of the man is, as was only to be expected, broken and broken
every day; sometimes directly, but far more often indirectly. The woman
bent on matrimony is constantly on the alert to evade its workings,
conscious that in her attempt to do so she can nearly always count on
the ready, if unspoken, co-operation of her sisters. This statement
is, I know, in flat contravention of the firmly-rooted masculine
belief that one woman regards another as an enemy to be depreciated
consistently in masculine eyes, and that women spend their lives in
one long struggle to gratify an uncontrollable desire for admiration at
each other’s expense. (I have myself been told by a man that he would
never be so foolishly discourteous as to praise one woman in another’s
hearing. I, on my part, desirous also of being wisely courteous, did
not attempt to shake the magnificent belief in his own importance to
me which the statement betrayed.) Admiration is a very real passion
in some women, as it is a very real passion in some men; but what, in
women, is often mistaken for it is ambition, a desire to get on and
achieve success in life in the only way in which it is open to a woman
to achieve it—through the favour of man. Which is only another way
of saying what I have insisted on before—that a good many feminine
actions which are commonly and superficially attributed to sexual
impulse have their root in the commercial instinct.
It is because women, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the
commercial nature of the undertaking that they interest themselves so
strongly in the business of match-making, other than their own. Men
have admitted that interest, of course—the thing is too self-evident
to be denied—and, as their manner is, attributed it to an exuberant
sexuality which overflows on to its surroundings; steadfastly declining
to take into account the “professional” element in its composition,
since that would necessarily imply the existence of an _esprit de
corps_ amongst women.
I myself cannot doubt that there does exist a spirit of practical, if
largely unconscious, trade unionism in a class engaged in extracting,
under many difficulties and by devious ways, its livelihood from
the employer, man. (I need scarcely point out that man, like every
other wage-payer, has done his level best and utmost to suppress the
spirit of combination, and encourage distrust and division, amongst
the wage-earners in the matrimonial market; and that the trade of
marriage, owing to the isolation of the workers, has offered unexampled
opportunities for such suppression of unity and encouragement of
distrust and division.) But, in spite of this, women in general
recognize the economic necessity of marriage for each other, and in
a spirit of instinctive comradeship seek to forward it by every
means in their power. There must be something extraordinarily and
unnaturally contemptible about a woman who, her own bargain made and
means of livelihood secured, will not help another to secure hers; and
it is that motive, and not a rapturous content in their own unclouded
destiny, not an unhesitating conviction that their lot has fallen in
a fair ground, which makes of so many married women industrious and
confirmed match-makers. What has been termed the “huge conspiracy
of married women” is, in fact, nothing but a huge trade union whose
members recognize the right of others to their bread. To my mind,
one of the best proofs of the reality of this spirit of unconscious
trade unionism among women is the existence of that other feminine
conspiracy of silence which surrounds the man at whom a woman, for
purely mercenary reasons, is making a “dead set.” In such a case, the
only women who will interfere and warn the intended victim will be his
own relatives—a mother or a sister; others, while under no delusions
as to the interested nature of the motives by which the pursuer is
actuated, will hold their tongues, and even go so far as to offer
facilities for the chase. They realize that their fellow has a right to
her chance—that she must follow her trade as best she can, and would
no more dream of giving her away than the average decent workman would
dream of going to an employer and informing him that one of his mates
was not up to his job and should, therefore, be discharged. In these
emergencies a man must look to a man for help; the sympathies of the
practical and unromantic sex will be on the other side.
I shall not deny, of course, that there is active and bitter
competition amongst women for the favour not only of particular men,
but of men in general; but, from what I have said already, it will
be gathered that I consider that competition to be largely economic
and artificial. Where it is economic, it is produced by the same
cause which produces active and bitter competition in other branches
of industry—the overcrowding of the labour market. Where it is
artificial, as distinct from purely economic, it is produced by the
compulsory concentration of energy on one particular object, and the
lack of facilities for dispersing that energy in other directions. It
is not the woman with an interest in life who spends her whole time in
competing with her otherwise unoccupied sisters for the smiles of a
man.