Marriage being to them not only a trade, but a necessity, it
must follow as the night the day that the acquirement of certain
characteristics—the characteristics required by an average man in an
average wife—has been rendered inevitable for women in general. There
have, of course, always been certain exceptional men who have admired
and desired certain exceptional and eccentric qualities in their wives;
but in estimating a girl’s chances of pleasing—on which depended
her chances of success or a comfortable livelihood—these exceptions
naturally, were taken into but small account, and no specialization in
their tastes and desires was allowed for in her training. The aim and
object of that training was to make her approximate to the standard of
womanhood set up by the largest number of men; since the more widely
she was admired the better were her chances of striking a satisfactory
bargain. The taste and requirements of the average man of her class
having been definitely ascertained, her training and education was
carried on on the principle of cultivating those qualities which he
was likely to admire, and repressing with an iron hand those qualities
to which he was likely to take objection; in short, she was fitted for
her trade by the discouragement of individuality and eccentricity and
the persistent moulding of her whole nature into the form which the
ordinary husband would desire it to take. Her education, unlike her
brothers’, was not directed towards self-development and the bringing
out of natural capabilities, but towards pleasing some one else—was
not for her own benefit, but for that of another person.
No one has better expressed the essential difference between the
education of men and women than Mr. John Burns in a speech delivered
to the “Children of the State” at the North Surrey District School
on February 13, 1909. Addressing the boys the President of the Local
Government Board said, “I want you to be happy craftsmen, because you
are trained to be healthy men.” Addressing the girls he is reported to
have used the following words—
“To keep house, cook, nurse and delight in making others happy is your
mission, duty and livelihood.”
The boys are to be happy themselves; the girls are to make others
happy. No doubt Mr. Burns spoke sincerely; but is he not one of the
“others”? And it is well to note that the “making of others happy”
is not put before the girls as an ideal, but as a duty and means of
livelihood. They are to be self-sacrificing as a matter of business—a
commercial necessity. It is because man realizes that self-sacrifice in
woman is not a matter of free-will, but of necessity, that he gives her
so little thanks for it. Her duty and means of livelihood is to make
others happy—in other words, to please him.
Whether she was trained to be useful or useless that was the object of
her up-bringing. Men in one class of society would be likely to require
wives able to do rough house or field work; so to do rough house or
field work she was trained. Men in another class of society would be
likely to require of their wives an appearance of helpless fragility;
and girls in that particular class were educated to be incapable of
sustained bodily effort.
It is this fact—that their training was a training not in their own,
but in some one else’s requirements—which, to my thinking, makes
women so infinitely more interesting to watch and to analyze than men.
Interesting, I mean, in the sense of exciting. Practically every woman
I know has two distinct natures: a real and an acquired; that which she
has by right of birth and heritage, and that which she has been taught
she ought to have—and often thinks that she has attained to. And it is
quite impossible even for another woman, conscious of the same division
of forces in herself, to forecast which of these two conflicting
temperaments will come uppermost at a given moment.
The average man is a straightforward and simple-minded creature
compared to the average woman, merely because he has been allowed to
develop much more on his own natural lines. He has only one centre of
gravity; the woman has two. To put it in plain English, he usually
knows what he wants; she, much more often than not, does not know
anything of the kind. She is under the impression that she wants
certain things which she has been told from her earliest childhood,
and is being told all the time, are the things she ought to want. That
is as far as she can go with certainty. This also can be said with
certainty: that her first requirement, whether she knows it or not, is
the liberty to discover what she really does require.
Once a man’s character is known and understood it can usually be
predicted with a fair degree of accuracy how he will act in any
particular crisis or emergency—say, under stress of strong emotion or
temptation. With his sister on the other hand you can never foresee
at what point artificiality will break down and nature take command;
which makes it infinitely more difficult, however well you know
her, to predict her course of action under the same circumstances.
The woman whose whole existence, from early dawn to dewy eve, is
regulated by a standard of manners imposed upon her from without, by
a standard of morals imposed upon her from without, whose ideals are
purely artificial and equally reflected, will suddenly, and at an
unexpected moment, reveal another and fundamental side of her nature
of which she herself has probably lived in entire ignorance. And on
the other hand—so ingrained in us all has artificiality become—a
woman of the independent type, with a moral standard and ideals of
her own setting up, may, when the current of her life is swept out of
its ordinary course by emergency or strong emotion, take refuge, just
as suddenly and unexpectedly, in words and actions that are palpably
unnatural to her and inspired by an instilled idea of what, under the
circumstances, a properly constituted woman ought to say or do. Faced
with a difficulty through which her own experience does not serve to
guide her, she falls back on convention and expresses the thoughts of
others in the stilted language that convention has put into her mouth.
I have known this happen more than once, and seen a real human being
of flesh and blood suddenly and unconsciously transformed into one of
those curious creatures, invented by male writers and called women for
lack of any other name, whose sins and whose virtues alike are the
sins and virtues considered by male writers to be suitable and becoming
to the opposite sex.
For generation after generation the lives of women of even the
slightest intelligence and individuality must have been one long and
constant struggle between the forces of nature endeavouring to induce
in them that variety which is another word for progress and their own
enforced strivings to approximate to a single monotonous type—the
type of the standard and ideal set up for them by man, which was the
standard and ideal of his own comfort and enjoyment. However squarely
uncompromising the characteristics of any given woman, the only vacant
space for her occupation was round, and into the round hole she had to
go. Were her soul the soul of a pirate, it had to be encased in a body
which pursued the peaceful avocation of a cook. Even when she kicked
over the traces and gave respectability the go-by, she could only do so
after one particular and foregone fashion—a fashion encouraged if not
openly approved by man. The male sinner might go to the devil in any
way he chose; for her there was only one road to the nethermost hell,
and, dependent even in this, she needed a man to set her feet upon the
path. Her vices, like her virtues, were forced and stereotyped. They
sprang from the same root; vice, with her, was simply an excess of
virtue. Vicious or virtuous, matron or outcast, she was made and not
born.
There must be many attributes and characteristics of the general run of
women which are not really the attributes and characteristics of their
sex, but of their class—a class persistently set apart for the duties
of sexual attraction, house-ordering and the bearing of children. And
the particular qualities that, in the eyes of man, fitted them for the
fulfilment of these particular duties, generation after generation of
women, whatever their natural temperament and inclination, have sought
to acquire—or if not the actual qualities themselves, at least an
outward semblance of them. Without some semblance of those qualities
life would be barred to them.
There are very few women in whom one cannot, now and again, trace
the line of cleavage between real and acquired, natural and class,
characteristics. The same thing, of course, holds good of men, but
in a far less degree since, many vocations being open to them, they
tend naturally and on the whole to fall into the class for which
temperament and inclinations fit them. A man with a taste for an open
air life does not as a rule become a chartered accountant, a student
does not take up deep-sea fishing as a suitable profession. But with
women the endeavour to approximate to a single type has always been
compulsory. It is ridiculous to suppose that nature, who never makes
two blades of grass alike, desired to turn out indefinite millions of
women all cut to the regulation pattern of wifehood: that is to say,
all home-loving, charming, submissive, industrious, unintelligent,
tidy, possessed with a desire to please, well-dressed, jealous of their
own sex, self-sacrificing, cowardly, filled with a burning desire for
maternity, endowed with a talent for cooking, narrowly uninterested in
the world outside their own gates, and capable of sinking their own
identity and interests in the interests and identity of a husband. I
imagine that very few women naturally unite in their single persons
these characteristics of the class wife; but, having been relegated
from birth upwards to the class wife, they had to set to work, with or
against the grain, to acquire some semblance of those that they knew
were lacking.
There being no question of a line of least resistance for woman, it
is fairly obvious that the necessity (in many instances) of making a
silk purse out of a sow’s ear and instilling the qualities of tidiness,
love of home, cowardice, unintelligence, etc., etc., into persons who
were born with quite other capacities and defects must have resulted
in a pitiable waste of good material, sacrificed upon the altar of a
domesticity arranged in the interests of the husband. But infinitely
worse in its effect upon womanhood in general was the insincerity
which, in many cases, was the prime lesson and result of a girl’s
education and upbringing. I do not mean, of course, that the generality
of girls were consciously, of set purpose, and in so many words taught
to be insincere; but it seems fairly certain to me that generations of
mothers have tacitly instructed their daughters to assume virtues (or
the reverse) which they had not.
It could not be otherwise. Success in the marriage-market demanded
certain qualifications; and, as a matter of economic and social
necessity, if those qualifications were lacking, their counterfeit
presentment was assumed. When helplessness and fragility were the
fashion amongst wives, the girl child who was naturally as plucky as
her brothers was schooled into an affected and false timidity. Men were
understood to admire and reverence the maternal instinct in women; so
the girl who had no especial interest in children affected a mechanical
delight in, petted, fondled and made much of them. (I myself have seen
this done on more than one occasion; of course in the presence of men.)
And—worst and most treacherous insincerity of all—since men were
understood to dislike clever women, the girl who had brains, capacity,
intellect, sought to conceal, denied possession of them, so that her
future husband might enjoy, unchallenged, the pleasurable conviction of
her mental inferiority to himself.
Of all the wrongs that have been inflicted upon woman there has been
none like unto this—the enforced arrest of her mental growth—and none
which bears more bitter and eloquent testimony to the complete and
essential servility of her position. For her the eleventh commandment
was an insult—“Thou shalt not think”; and the most iniquitous
condition of her marriage bargain this—that her husband, from the
height of his self-satisfaction, should be permitted to esteem her a
fool.
It was not only that, from one generation to another, woman was without
encouragement to use her higher mental qualities—that her life was
lacking in the stimulus of emulation so far as they were concerned,
that her own particular trade made very few demands upon them. As if
these things in themselves were not discouragement enough, she was
directly forbidden to cultivate the small share of intellect she was
understood to possess. Science was closed to her and art degraded to
a series of “parlor tricks.” It was not enough that she should be
debarred from material possessions; from possessions that were not
material, from the things of the spirit, she must be debarred as well.
Nothing more plainly illustrates the fact that man has always regarded
her as existing not for herself and for her own benefit, but for his
use and pleasure solely. His use for her was the gratification of his
own desire, the menial services she rendered without payment; his
pleasure was in her flesh, not in her spirit; therefore the things of
the spirit were not for her.
One wonders what it has meant for the race—this persistent desire of
the man to despise his wife, this economic need of countless women
to arrest their mental growth? It has amounted to this—that one of
the principal qualifications for motherhood has been a low standard
of intelligence. We hear a very great deal about the beauty and
sanctity of motherhood; we might, for a change, hear something about
the degradation thereof—which has been very real. To stunt one’s
brain in order that one may bear a son does not seem to me a process
essentially sacred or noble in itself; yet millions of mothers have
instructed their daughters in foolishness so that they, in their turn,
might please, marry and bear children. Most of those daughters, no
doubt—humanity being in the main slothful and indifferent—endured the
process with equanimity; but there must always have been some, and
those not the least worthy, who suffered piteously under the systematic
thwarting of definite instincts and vague ambitions. In every
generation there must have been women who desired life at first hand,
and in whom the crushing of initiative and inquiry and the substitution
of servile for independent qualities, must have caused infinite misery.
In every generation there must have been women who had something to
give to those who lived outside the narrowing walls of their home; and
who were not permitted to give it. They soured and stifled; but they
were not permitted to give it.
But, after all, the suffering of individual women under the law of
imposed stupidity is a very small thing compared with the effect of
that law upon humanity as a whole. The sex which reserved to itself
the luxury of thinking appears to have been somewhat neglectful of
its advantages in that respect, since it failed to draw the obvious
conclusion that sons were the sons of their mothers as well as of
their fathers. Yet it is a commonplace that exceptional men are born
of exceptional women—that is to say, of women in whom the natural
instinct towards self-expansion and self-expression is too strong to be
crushed and thwarted out of existence by the law of imposed stupidity.
That law has reacted inevitably upon those who framed and imposed it;
since it is truth and not a jest that the mission in life of many women
has been to suckle fools—of both sexes. Women have been trained to be
unintelligent breeding-machines until they have become unintelligent
breeding-machines—how unintelligent witness the infant death-rate
from improper feeding. Judging by that and other things, the process
of transforming the natural woman into flesh without informing spirit
would appear, in a good many instance, to have been attended by a fair
amount of success. In some classes she still breeds brainlessly. That
is what she is there for, not to think of the consequences. Has she
not been expressly forbidden to think? If she is a failure as a wife
and mother, it is because she is nothing else. And those of us who are
now alive might be better men and women, seeing more light where now
we strive and slip in darkness, if our fathers had not insisted so
strongly and so steadfastly upon their right to despise the women they
made their wives—who were our mothers.
I have said that this condemnation to intellectual barrenness is the
strongest proof of the essential servility of woman’s position in the
eyes of man, and I repeat that statement. It cannot be repeated too
often. So long as you deprive a human being of the right to make use
of its own mental property, so long do you keep that human being in
a state of serfdom. You may disguise the fact even from yourself by
an outward show of deference and respect, the lifting of a hat or the
ceding of a pathway; but the fact remains. Wherever and whenever man
has desired to degrade his fellow and tread him under foot, he has
denied him, first of all, the right to think, the means of education
and inquiry. Every despotism since the world began has recognized
that it can only work in secret—that its ways must not be known. No
material tyranny can hope to establish itself firmly and for long
unless it has at its disposal the means to establish also a tyranny
that is spiritual and intellectual. When you hold a man’s mind in
thrall you can do what you will with his body; you possess it and not
he. Always those who desired power over their fellows have found it a
sheer necessity to possess their bodies through their souls; and for
this reason, when you have stripped a man of everything except his
soul, you have to go on and strip him of that too, lest, having it
left to him, he ask questions, ponder the answers and revolt. In all
ages the aim of despotism, small or great, material or intellectual,
has been to keep its subjects in ignorance and darkness; since, in all
ages, discontent and rebellion have come with the spread of knowledge,
light and understanding. So soon as a human being is intelligent enough
to doubt, and frame the question, “Why is this?” he can no longer be
satisfied with the answer, “Because I wish it.” That is an answer which
inevitably provokes the rejoinder, “But I do not”—which is the essence
and foundation of heresy and high treason.
Those in high places—that is to say, those who desired power over
others—have, as a condition of their existence in high places, fought
steadfastly against the spread of the means of enlightenment. No
right has been more bitterly denied than the right of a man to think
honestly and to communicate his thoughts to his fellows. Persons who
claimed that right have been at various times (and for the edification
of other persons who might be tempted to go and do likewise) stoned,
devoured by wild beasts, excommunicated, shut up in dungeons, burned at
the stake and hanged, drawn, and quartered. In spite, however, of these
drastic penalties—and other lesser ones too numerous to mention—there
has always been a section of humanity which has stubbornly persisted,
even at the risk of roasting or dismemberment, in thinking its own
thoughts on some particular subject and saying what they were. To
persons of this frame of mind it probably did not much matter how soon
they had done with an existence which they had to look at through other
people’s eyes and talk about in suitable phrases arranged for them by
other people. So they risked the penalty and said what they wanted to.
The history of the world has been a succession of demands, more or less
spasmodic, more or less insistent, on the part of subjected classes,
nations and sects, to be allowed to see things in their own way and
with an eye to their own interests, spiritual or material. Which is why
a free press and a free pulpit have often seemed worth dying for.
Wherever civilization exists various classes, sects and nations of men
have, one by one, claimed the right to that examination of things for
themselves which is called education. They have never attained to it
without opposition; and one of the most frequent and specious forms
of that opposition is embodied in the argument that education would
not only be useless to them, but would unfit them for their duties.
No doubt this argument was often put forward in all honesty as the
outcome of a conviction that was none the less sincere because it was
prompted by self-interest. That conviction had its roots in the common
and widespread inability to realize the actual human identity of other
persons—in the habit of summing them up and estimating them in the
light only of the salient (and often superficial) characteristics which
affect ourselves. I can best explain what I mean by saying that to many
of us the word “clerk” does not summon up the mental representation of
an actual man who spends some of his time writing, but of something in
the shape of a man that is continuously occupied in driving a pen. In
other words, we lose sight of the man himself in one of his attributes;
and the same with a miner, a sailor, etc. Thus to the persons in high
places who opposed the education of the agricultural labourer, the
agricultural labourer was not an actual man, but a hoe or a harrow in
human shape; and they were quite honestly and logically unable to see
what this animated implement of agricultural toil could want with the
inside of a book. Practically, however, they were denying humanity to
the labourer and sinking his identity in one particular quality—the
physical capacity for field-work.
This, as I have explained elsewhere, is the manner in which woman, as a
rule, is still regarded—not as a human being with certain physical and
mental qualities which enable her to bring children into the world and
cook a dinner, but as a breeding-machine and the necessary adjunct to a
frying-pan. So regarded, independence of thought and anything beyond a
very limited degree of mental cultivation are unnecessary to her, even
harmful, since they might possibly result in the acquirement of other
attributes quite out of place in the adjunct to a frying-pan.
V
With the advance of civilization one subject class after another has
risen in revolt, more or less violent, more or less peaceful, and
asserted its right to inquire, to think in its own way—that is to
say, it has asserted its humanity. But it is a proof of my statement
that woman has never been regarded as fully human, that the successive
classes of men who have, in turn, asserted their own humanity have
totally forgotten to assert hers, have left her, whatever her rank, in
a class apart, and continued to treat her as a domestic animal whose
needs were only the needs of a domestic animal.
The aristocratic instinct is by no means confined to those born in
the purple. (Some of the most startlingly aristocratic sentiments I
have ever heard came from the lips of persons believed by themselves
to entertain ultra-democratic ideas.) The sense of power over others
is just as attractive to the many as it is to the few; and thus it
has happened that men, in every class, have taken a pleasure in the
dependence and subjection of their womenfolk, and, lest their power
over them should be undermined, have refused to their womenfolk
the right to think for themselves. The essential cruelty of that
refusal they disguised from themselves by explaining that women could
not think even if they tried. We have all heard the definition of
woman—episcopal, I think—as a creature who cannot reason and pokes
the fire from the top.
This disbelief in the existence of reasoning powers in woman is still,
it seems to me, a very real thing—at least, I have run up against it
a good many times in the course of my life, and I do not suppose that
I am an exception in that respect. And the really interesting thing
about this contemptuous attitude of mind is that it has led to the
adoption, by those who maintain it, of a very curious subterfuge. It
is, of course, quite impossible to deny that a woman’s mind does go
through certain processes which control and inspire her actions and
conclusions— sometimes very swiftly and effectively; but to these
mental processes, which in men are called reason, they give, in woman,
the title of intuition.
Now the word “intuition,” when used in connection with woman, conveys
to the average male mind a meaning closely akin to that of the word
instinct—as opposed to reason. (In this insistence on the instinctive
character of our mental processes the average man is, of course,
quite consistent; since he imagines that we exist only for the
gratification of two instincts, the sexual and the maternal, it does
not seem unreasonable on his part to conclude that we also think by
instinct.) I am certain that I am right as to this masculine habit of
confusing intuition with instinct; since on every occasion on which I
have been more or less politely—but always firmly—informed that I
had no intellect, but could console myself for the deficiency by the
reflection that I possessed the usual feminine quality of intuition, I
have made a point of bringing the person who made the remark to book by
insisting upon an exact definition of the term. In every single case
within my own experience the exact definition—as I have been careful
to point out—has been not insight, but instinct. Our mental processes,
in short, are supposed to be on the same level as the mental process
which starts the newly-hatched gosling on its waddle to the nearest
pond. We are supposed to know what we want without knowing why we want
it—just like the gosling, which does not make a bee-line for the
water because it has carefully examined its feet, discovered that they
are webbed, and drawn the inference that webbed feet are suitable for
progress in water.
This question of the intuitive or instinctive powers of woman is one
that has always interested me extremely; and as soon as I realized
that my mind was supposed to work in a different way from a man’s
mind, and that I was supposed to arrive at conclusions by a series of
disconnected and frog-like jumps, I promptly set to work to discover
if that was really the case by the simple expedient of examining the
manner in which I did arrive at conclusions. I believe that (on certain
subjects, at any rate) I think more rapidly than most people—which
does not mean, of course, that I think more correctly. It does mean,
however, that I very often have to explain to other people the process
by which I have arrived at my conclusions (which might otherwise appear
intuitive); therefore I may be called a good subject for investigation.
I can honestly say that I have never been at a loss for such an
explanation. I can trace the progress of my thought, step by step, just
as a man can trace his. I may reason wrongly, but I do not reason in
hops. And I have yet to meet the woman who does. I have met many women
who were in the habit of coming to conclusions that were altogether
ridiculous and illogical; but they were conclusions—drawn from
insufficient data—and not guesses. No sane human being regulates—or
does not regulate—its life, as we are supposed to do, by a series of
vague and uncontrolled guesses.
I imagine that the idea that women do so control their lives must
have had its origin in the fact that men and women usually turn their
mental energy into entirely different channels. On subjects that are
familiar to us we think quickly, and acquire a mental dexterity akin
to the manual dexterity of a skilled artisan. But the subjects upon
which women exercise this mental dexterity are not, as a rule, the same
as those upon which men exercise theirs; the latter have usually left
narrow social and domestic matters alone, and it is in narrow social
and domestic matters that we are accustomed to think quickly. We are
swifter than they are, of course, at drawing the small inferences
from which we judge what a man will like or dislike; but then, for
generations the business of our lives has been to find out what a man
will like or dislike, and it would be rather extraordinary if we had
not, in the course of ages, acquired in it a measure of that rapid
skill which in any other business would be called mechanical, but in
ours is called intuitive.
This theory of intuition or instinct, then, I take, as I have already
said, to be in the nature of a subterfuge on the part of the male—a
sop to his conscience, and a plausible excuse for assuming that we have
not the intelligence which (if it were once admitted that we possessed
it) we should have the right to cultivate by independent thinking. But
to admit the right of a human being to independent thinking is also to
admit something else far more important and unpleasant—his right to
sit in judgment upon you. That right every despotism that ever existed
has steadily denied to its subjects; therefore, there is nothing
extraordinary in the fact that man has steadily denied it to woman.
He has always preferred that she should be too ignorant to sit in
judgment upon him, punishing her with ostracism if she was rash enough
to attempt to dispel her own ignorance. One of her highest virtues, in
his eyes, was a childish and undeveloped quality about which he threw
a halo of romance when he called it by the name of innocence. So far
has this insistence on ignorance or innocence in a wife been carried,
that even in these days many women who marry young have but a very
vague idea of what they are doing; while certain risks attaching to the
estate of marriage are, in some ranks of life at any rate, sedulously
concealed from them as things which it is unfit for them to know.
It is a subject that is both difficult and unpleasant to touch upon;
but while it will always be unpleasant, it ought not to be difficult,
and I should be false to my beliefs if I apologized for touching upon
it. Women, like men, when they enter upon a calling, have a perfect
right to know exactly what are the dangers and drawbacks attached
to their calling; you do not, when you turn a man into a pottery or
a dynamite factory, sedulously conceal from him the fact that there
are such things as lead-poisoning or combustion. On the contrary, you
warn him—as women are seldom warned. I have been astonished at the
number of women I have met who seem to have hardly more than a vague
inkling—and some not even that—of the tangible, physical consequence
of loose living.
I have not the faintest intention of inditing a sermon on masculine
morals. If the average man chooses to dispense with morals as
we understand them, that is his affair and a matter for his own
conscience; if he is so constituted physically that he cannot live
as we do, and has practically no choice in the matter, that is his
misfortune. But I do say this: that the average woman has a perfect
right to know what are the results of loose living in so far as those
results may affect her and her children. If marriage is a trade we
ought to know its risks—concerning which there exists a conspiracy of
silence. Is the cause to which I have alluded ever mentioned, except in
technical publications, in connection with the infant death-rate?
Those of us who have discovered that there are risks attaching to the
profession of marriage other than the natural ones of childbirth, have
very often made the discovery by accident—which ought not to be. I
made the discovery in that way myself while I was still very young—by
the idle opening of a book which, because it was a book, was a thing
to be opened and looked into. I was puzzled at first, and then the
thing stared me in the face—a simple matter of bald statement and
statistics. I remember the thought which flashed into my mind—we are
told we have got to be married, but we are never told _that_! It was my
first conscious revolt against the compulsory nature of the trade of
marriage.