This insistent and deliberate stunting of woman’s intellectual growth
is, as I have already stated, the best proof of her essentially
servile position in the household; and that being the case, it is not
to be wondered at that her code of honour and morals is essentially
a servile code. That is to say, its origin and guiding motive is the
well-being, moral and material, of some one else. Like her stupidity
woman’s morality has been imposed on her, and to a great extent is not
morality at all, in the proper sense of the word, but a code of manners
formulated in the interests of her master.
I wish to make it clear that when I speak of morality in this
connection I am not using the word in the narrow sense in which it is
sometimes employed. By a standard of morality I mean a rule of life
which we adopt as a guide to our conduct, and endeavour, more or less
successfully, to apply to every action—to our dealings with others as
well as to our dealings with our own hearts.
I cannot better explain what I mean by the essential servility of
woman’s code of morals than by quoting Milton’s well-known line—
“He for God only; she for God in him.”
That one brief verse condenses into a nutshell the difference in
the moral position of the two sexes—expresses boldly, simply,
straightforwardly, the man’s belief that he had the right to divert
and distort the moral impulse and growth in woman to serve his own
convenience. No priesthood has ever made a claim more arrogant than
this claim of man to stand between woman and her God, and divert the
spiritual forces of her nature into the channel that served him best.
The real superiority of man consists in this: that he is free to obey
his conscience and to serve his God—if it be in him so to do. Woman
is not. She can serve Him only at second hand—can obey His commands
not directly but only by obeying the will of the man who stands between
her and the Highest, and who has arrogated to himself not merely the
material control of her person and her property, but the spiritual
control of her conscience.
This is no fanciful piece of imagery. There are laws still in
existence—laws of an earlier age—which prove how complete has been
this moral control which we are only now shaking off, since they
presume a man’s entire responsibility for the actions of his wife,
be those actions good or ill. That a woman at her husband’s bidding
should bend her conscience to his will as a reed bends; that, because
he desired it of her, she should break and defy every commandment
of God and man; this seemed to our forefathers a natural thing, and
a course of action befitting her station and place in life. So far
from blaming, they condoned it in her and have expressed that view
of the matter in their law—sometimes with awkward and annoying
results for a later generation. Woman, until she began to feel in
herself the stirrings of independence—woman, when she was just the
wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else, the domestic animal—seems to me to
have been a creature whom you could not have described as being either
moral or immoral. She was just unmoral. Whether she did good or evil
was not, as far as her own individuality went, of very much account
since the standard set up for her was not of her own setting up; it had
been erected for the comfort and well-being of her master. Her virtues
were second-hand virtues, instilled into her for the convenience of
another; and she did what was right in his eyes, not in her own, after
the manner of a child. Therefore she was neither moral nor immoral, but
servile. The motive which guided and impelled her from childhood was
a low one—the desire (disinterestedly or for her own advantage) of
pleasing some one else. (To make others happy, as Mr. Burns expresses
it.) The desire to please being the motive power of her existence,
her code of honour and ethics was founded not on thought, conviction
or even natural impulse, but on observation of the likes and dislikes
of those she had to please. Hence its extraordinary and inconsistent
character, its obvious artificiality and the manifest traces it bears
of having been imposed upon her from without. For instance, no natural
ethical code emanating from within could have summed up woman’s virtue
in _a_ virtue—physical purity. That confusion of one virtue with
virtue in general was certainly of masculine origin arising from the
masculine habit of thinking of woman only in connection with her
relations to himself. To other aspects of her life and character man
was indifferent—they hardly existed for him. And of masculine origin,
too, was that extraordinary article of the code by which it was laid
down that a woman’s “honour” was, to all intents and purposes, a matter
of chance—a thing which she only possessed because no unkind fate had
thrown her in the way of a man sufficiently brutal to deprive her of it
by force. Her honour, in short, was not a moral but a physical quality.
One sees, of course, the advantage from the male point of view, of
this peculiar provision of the code. In a world where the pickpocket
class had the upper hand a somewhat similar regulation would, no doubt,
be in force; and it would be enacted, by a custom stronger than law,
that to have one’s pocket picked was in itself a disgrace which must
on no account be cried aloud upon the housetops or communicated to
the police. To reveal and publish the fact that your purse had been
snatched from you by force would be to make yourself a mark of scorn
and for hissing, to bring upon yourself an obloquy far greater than
that accorded to the active partner in the transaction, whose doings
would be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and the explanation
that pickpockets are pickpockets, and will never be anything but what
nature has made them; and, after all, you must have dangled the purse
temptingly before his eyes. Under these circumstances, with the thief
at liberty to ply his trade, the fact that you had money in your pocket
would be, strictly speaking, an accident; and, to make the parallel
complete, the lack of your money—the fact that it had been taken
from you even against your will—would have to be accounted a black
disgrace, leaving a lasting smear upon your whole life. That, it seems
to me, is the exact position with regard to what is commonly termed a
woman’s “honour.” I should prefer to put it that a woman has no honour;
only an accident.
In such a world as I have described—a world run in the interest of the
light-fingered class—the average and decent man would find it just as
easy and just as difficult to take legal proceedings against the person
who had violently deprived him of his purse as the average and decent
woman would now find it were she to take legal proceedings against the
man who had violently deprived her of her honour. Nominally, of course,
justice would afford him a fair hearing and the process of law would be
at his disposal; actually he would make himself a target for contempt
and scorn, and the very men who tried his case, with every desire to be
unbiassed, would be prejudiced against him because he had not hidden
his disgrace in silence. In most cases the effect of such a public
opinion would be to make him hold his tongue, and practically by his
silence become an abettor and accomplice in the offence wrought upon
himself and by which he himself had suffered. He might, if his mould
were sensitive, choose the river rather than exposure—as women have
done before now.
Honour, as I understand it, is not physical or accidental; is not even
reputation, which is a species of reflection of honour in the minds of
others; it is a state of mind resulting from a voluntary and conscious
adherence to certain rules of life and conduct. As such it is entirely
your own possession and a creation, a thing of which no one can rob
you but yourself; it is at no man’s mercy but your own. It is because
woman, as a rule, has not possessed the power of giving voluntary and
conscious adherence to rules of life and conduct, because the rules of
life and conduct which she follows have been framed in the interests
of others and forced upon her in the interests of others—that she has
been denied any other than a purely physical and accidental “honour.”
One’s mind goes back to two children in the school-room pondering
seriously and in the light of their own unaided logic the puzzling
story of Lucrece—much expurgated and newly acquired during the course
of a Roman history lesson. The expurgated Roman history book had made
it clear that she was a woman greatly to be admired; we sat with
knitted brows and argued why. Something had been done to her—we were
vague as to the nature of the something, but had gathered from the
hurried manner of our instructress that here was a subject on which
you must not ask for precise information. Our ignorance baffled and
aggrieved us since fuller knowledge might have thrown light upon an
otherwise incomprehensible case. Something had been done to her by a
wicked man and against her will—so much we knew. She had tried all
she could to prevent it, but he was the stronger—the expurgated Roman
history had said, “By force.” Therefore, whatever had happened was not
her fault. Yet the next morning she had sent posthaste for her husband
and her father, told them all about it and stabbed herself to the heart
before their eyes! Try as we would to sympathize with this paragon of
Roman virtue, the action seemed inconsequent. It implied remorse where
remorse was not only unnecessary but impossible. If she had stabbed
Sextus Tarquinius, or if Sextus Tarquinius had stabbed himself in a fit
of repentance for his own mysterious ill-doing.... But why needlessly
distress your family by descending into an early grave because some one
else had been mysteriously wicked while you yourself had done no harm
at all? Our sense of logic and justice was shaken to its foundations.
The verdict of admiration recorded in the history book stared us in the
face, conflicting with our own conclusions; and it was our reverence
for the written word alone that prevented the open and outspoken
judgment, “She was silly.”
So two small persons, to whom sex was still a matter of garments,
seriously troubled by their own inability to appreciate a virtue held
up to them for reverence, with views as yet level and unwarped on the
subject of justice, and still in complete ignorance of the “economic”
law that the cost of sin, like the cost of taxation, is always shifted
on to the shoulders of those least able to bear or to resent it.
The key to the curious and inferior position of woman with regard
to breaches, voluntary or involuntary, of the moral law is to be
found in this right of the strongest to avoid payment. It is a right
that is recognized and openly acted upon in the world of business
and of property, that has to be considered and taken into account
by financiers and statesmen in the collection of revenue and the
imposition of taxes. It is the general exercise of this right that
makes the incidence of taxation a study for experts. Roughly its result
is, the weakest pays. Tax the business man and he will set to work to
send up prices, collecting his additional toll in farthings, pence and
shillings from his customers, or to save it by cutting down the wages
of his employees. Tax the landlord, and he sends up rents—perhaps in
the slums. The stronger the position of the capitalist, the more easily
does he avoid payment. If his position is so strong that he is an
actual monopolist he can avoid it with complete ease, simply taking the
amount required from the pockets of those who are unable to refuse his
demands, handing it over to the powers that be and paying himself for
his trouble in doing so.
The incidence of blame in offences against the code which regulates
the sexual relations of men and women is governed by laws similar to
those which govern the incidence of taxation. The stronger party to
the offence, taking advantage of his strength, has refused to pay;
has simply and squarely declined to take his share of the mutual
punishment, and has shifted a double portion thereof on the shoulders
of the weaker party. So far as I can see that is the real and only
reason for the preferential treatment of man under the moral code—a
preferential treatment insisted upon by Adam in the garden of Eden
when he anxiously explained to the Deity that the woman was to blame,
and insisted upon ever since by his descendants. Is it not Adam who
sniggers over spicy stories at his club, retails them to the wife of
his bosom and then gives vent to manly and generous indignation at
the expense of the spinster who repeats them at third hand? while
the extreme reluctance of a purely male electorate to raise what is
termed the age of consent in girls is perhaps the most striking example
of this tendency of the stronger to shift the responsibility of his
misdeeds on to any shoulders but his own,—even on to the shoulders of
a child.
Palpable and obvious hardship dealt out by men to women is usually
defended, if not explained, by that more or less vague reference to
natural law, which is again an attempt to shift responsibility; and
I have heard the position of woman as scapegoat for the sins of the
man justified by her greater importance to the race as the mother of
the next generation. This position of trust and responsibility, it is
urged, makes her fall more blameworthy in itself, since her offence
is not only an offence against her own person. One would feel more
inclined to give ear to this explanation if it could be proved that
it was only in the case of actual infractions of the moral code that
the male was in the habit of availing himself of his opportunities of
shifting the blame that should be his on to the back of the weaker
vessel. But it is not. Why, for instance, when a man who has been
engaged to a woman changes his mind and throws her over against her
will should the woman be regarded as to some extent humiliated and
disgraced by the action of another person, an action over which she
has had no control whatever, which has, in fact, been performed
against her express desire? Yet in such circumstances the woman who
has been left in the lurch is supposed to suffer, quite apart from
the damage to her affection, a sort of moral damage and disgrace from
the heartlessness or fickleness of another person—the man to whom
she has been engaged; and this moral damage is, I believe, taken into
account in actions for breach of promise of marriage (where there is
no question of seduction). In these instances of fickleness on the
side of the one party to the engagement, there is no suggestion of
guilt or offence in the other party—the woman; yet the consequences
of guilt and offence have been transferred to her shoulders, simply,
it seems to me, because the guilty and offending party, being the
stronger, declined to bear them himself. And woman’s code of honour and
morals being essentially a servile code, designed for the benefit of
those in authority over her, she accepts the position without protest
and takes shame to herself for the fault of another person. The first
provision of a wider code—a code drawn up by herself—must be that
she will only accept responsibility for her own actions. Until she
has taken her stand on that principle she cannot hope for a freedom
that is real, even a material freedom. At present her position, in
this respect, is analogous to that of the mediæval whipping-boy or
those slaves of antiquity who were liable to be put to death for the
sins of their masters—a position entirely incompatible with the most
elementary ideas of liberty and justice. The chaste and virtuous
Lucrece whose untimely fate so distraught our youthful brains was not
so much the victim of one man’s evil passions and wrong-doing as of
her own servile code of morals; she was (if she ever existed) a slave
of undoubted and heroic virtue—but certainly a slave and not a free
woman, accountable for her own acts and her own acts alone.
As a matter of fact, if we come to look into them closely, we find
that the virtues that have been enjoined upon woman for generations
are practically all servile virtues—the virtues a man desires in and
enjoins upon those whom he wishes to hold in subjection. Honour, in the
proper sense of the word, truth-telling, independence of thought and
action, self-reliance and courage are the qualities of a free people;
and, because they are the qualities of a free people, they have not
been required of her. Submission, suppleness, coaxing manners, a desire
to please and ingratiate, tact and a capacity for hard work for which
no definite return is to be expected are the qualities encouraged in
a servile or subject race by those in authority over them; and it
is precisely these qualities which have been required of woman. The
ordinary male ideal of a mother is a servile ideal—a person who waits
on others, gives way to others, drudges for others, and only lives
for the convenience of others. The ordinary male ideal of a wife is a
servile ideal—a person with less brains than himself, who is pleasant
to look at, makes him comfortable at home and respects his authority.
And it is the unfortunate fact that she is expected to live down to
this ideal—and very often does—which accounts for that frequent
phenomenon, the rapid mental deterioration of the woman who has
fulfilled her destiny and attained to a completeness that is synonymous
with stagnation.
It is obvious that marriage—the companionship of two reasonable human
beings—ought not, under natural conditions, to have a stupefying
effect upon one of the parties to the arrangement; and, as far as I
can see, where the woman is recognized as a responsible human being
with an individuality and interests of her own, and with a right to her
own opinion, it does not have that effect. The professional woman—a
class which I know fairly well—is not, as a rule, less interesting
and individual after marriage than before it, simply because she
does not usually marry the type of man who would expect her to swamp
her own ideas and personality in his; and the working woman of
another class, who, as the manager and financier of the household,
is obliged to keep her wits sharp, is often an extremely interesting
person with a shrewd and characteristic outlook on life. It is the
woman of the “comfortable” class, with narrow duties and a few petty
responsibilities, who now-a-days most readily conforms to the servile
type of manners and morals set up for her admiration and imitation,
sinks into a nonentity or a busybody, and does her best to gratify and
justify her husband’s predilection for regarding her mental capacity
with contempt.