So far as I have treated of the various influences which have been
brought to bear upon women with the object of fitting them for the
trade to which the male half of humanity desired to confine them; and I
have, I hope, made it clear that, to a certain extent, these influences
have defeated their own ends by discouraging the intelligence which
ought to be a necessary qualification for motherhood, even if it is not
a necessary qualification for wifehood. It remains to be considered
what effect this peculiar training for one particular and peculiar
trade has had upon woman’s activity in those departments of the world’s
work which are not connected with marriage and motherhood, how it has
acted upon her capacity for wage-earning and bread-winning on her own
account, how it has affected her power of achievement in every other
direction; what, in short, has been its effect upon woman in the life
that she leads apart from man. (I must ask the male reader to be good
enough to assume, even if he cannot honestly believe, that woman can,
and occasionally does, lead a life apart from man.)
And one notes, to begin with, that the customary training, or lack of
training, for marriage tends almost inevitably to induce that habit and
attitude of mind which is known as amateurishness. And particularly, I
should say, in the large class of society, which we describe roughly as
the middle class; where the uncertainty with regard to the position,
profession and consequent manner of living of the probable husband
is so great as to make a thorough and businesslike training for the
future nearly an impossibility. The element of chance—an element
which plays such a very large part in the life, at any rate, of the
average married woman—may upset all calculations based on the probable
occupation and requirements of the husband, render carefully acquired
accomplishments useless or unnecessary, and call for the acquirement
of others hitherto unwanted and even undreamed of. Two sisters brought
up in exactly the same surroundings and educated in exactly the same
manner may marry, the one a flourishing professional or city man, who
expects her to dress well, talk well, give good dinners and generally
entertain his friends; the other a man whose work lies on the frontier
of civilization where she will find it necessary to learn something of
the management of horses and to manufacture her own soap and candles.
While a third sister in the same family may never marry at all, but
pass her life in furnished apartments, being waited on by landladies.
These may be extreme, but they are not very unusual instances of the
large part taken by sheer chance in the direction of a woman’s life
and the consequent impossibility of mapping out and preparing for the
future. Hence a lack of thoroughness and an attitude towards life of
helplessness and what I have called amateurishness. (The corresponding
male attitude is found in the unskilled labourer of the “odd job”
type.) Hence also the common feminine habit of neglecting more solid
attainments in order to concentrate the energies on an endeavour to be
outwardly attractive.
This concentration of energy on personal adornment, usually attributed
to vanity or overflowing sexuality, is, so far as I can see, largely
the outcome of a sound business instinct. For, be it remembered,
that the one solid fact upon which an ordinary marriageable girl has
to build the edifice of her life is the fact that men are sensitive
to, and swayed by, that quality in woman which is called personal
charm. What else her future husband will demand of her is more or
less guess-work—nothing upon which to raise a solid foundation of
preparation for his requirements and her own. He may require her to sit
at the head of his table and talk fashionable gossip to his friends;
he may require her to saddle horses and boil soap; the only thing she
can be fairly certain of is that he will require her to fulfil his
idea of personal attractiveness. As a matter of business then, and not
purely from vanity, she specializes in personal attractiveness; and
the care, the time and the thoroughness which many women devote to
their own adornment, the choosing of their dresses and the curling of
their hair is thoroughly professional and a complete contrast to their
amateurishness in other respects.
The cultivation of personal charm, sometimes to the neglect of more
solid and valuable attainments, is the more natural, because, as I have
already pointed out, the material rewards of wifehood and motherhood
have no connection at all with excellence in the performance of the
duties of wifehood and motherhood—the wage paid to a married woman
being merely a wage for the possession of her person. That being the
case, the one branch of woman’s work which is likely to bring her a
material reward in the shape of an economically desirable husband is
cultivation of a pleasing exterior and attractive manners; and to this
branch of work she usually, when bent on marriage, applies herself in
the proper professional spirit. A sensible, middle-class mother may
insist on her daughter receiving adequate instruction in the drudgery
of household work and cookery; but if the daughter should be fortunate
enough to marry well such instruction will be practically wasted,
since the scrubbing, the stewing, the frying and the making of beds,
will inevitably be deputed to others. And the sensible, middle-class
mother is quite aware that her daughter’s chance of marrying well and
shirking disagreeable duties does not depend on the excellent manner
in which she performs those duties, but on the quality of her personal
attractions. The cultivation of her personal attractions, therefore, is
really a more important and serious business for the girl who desires
to marry than the acquirement of domestic accomplishments, which may,
or may not, be useful in her after life, and which in themselves are
unlikely to secure her the needful husband. This state of things is
frankly recognized in the upper or wealthier ranks of society. There
the typical domestic arts find practically no place in a girl’s scheme
of training, which is directed solely towards the end of making her
personally attractive and therefore desirable. Which means, of course,
that those women who are in a position to do so concentrate their
energies on the cultivation of those particular outward qualities by
which alone they can hope to satisfy their ambition, their need for
comfort, luxury, etc., or their desire to bring children into the
world. They recognize that however much man may profess to admire
the domestic and maternal qualities in woman, it is not that side of
her which arouses in him the desire for possession, and that the most
effective means of arousing that desire for possession is personal
charm. We have been told that every woman is at heart a rake; it would,
I think, be more correct to say that every woman who desires to attract
some member of the opposite sex so that she may marry and bear children
must, whatever she is at heart, be something of a rake on the surface.
With girls of the working-class, of course, a certain amount of
training in domestic work is usually gone through, since it is obvious
that domestic work will be required of them in after life; but even in
the humblest ranks of society the rule holds good that it is personal
attractiveness and not skill in the duties required of a wife and
mother which make a girl sought after and admired by the opposite sex.
Consequently even working-class wives and mothers, women who have
no chance of deputing their duties to paid servants, are frequently
nothing but amateurs at their trade—which they have only acquired
incidentally. In practically all ranks of society the real expert in
housekeeping or the care and management of infants is the “unattached”
woman who works in other people’s houses and attends to other people’s
children. She is the professional who knows her business and earns her
living by it; the wife and mother, as often as not, being merely the
amateur.
Human nature, and especially male human nature, being what it is, I do
not know whether it is possible or even desirable that this state of
things should be altered. My object in calling attention to it is not
to suggest alteration (I have none to suggest), but simply to point
out that women who are brought up in the expectation of marriage and
nothing but marriage are almost of necessity imbued with that spirit of
amateurishness which makes for inefficiency; and that this spirit has
to be taken into account in estimating their difficulties where they
have to turn their attention to other trades than marriage.
There are several other respects in which the marriage tradition (by
which I mean the practical identification during many generations of
womanhood with wifehood and motherhood) acts as a drag and a hindrance
to the woman who, married or unmarried and with or against her will,
has been swept out of the sacred and narrow sphere of home to compete
for a wage in the open market. (Be it remembered that she is now
numbered not by hundreds or thousands, but by millions.) As I have
already pointed out, the trade of marriage is, by its very nature, an
isolated trade, permitting of practically no organization or common
action amongst the workers; and consequently the marriage-trained woman
(and nearly all women are marriage-trained—or perhaps it would be more
correct to say marriage expectant) enters industrial or commercial life
with no tradition of such organization and common action behind her.
I do not think that the average man realizes how much the average woman
is handicapped by the lack of this tradition, nor does he usually
trouble to investigate the causes of his own undoubted superiority
in the matter of combination and all that combination implies. In
accordance with his usual custom of explaining the shortcomings of
womanhood by an inferiority that is inherent and not artificial and
induced, he assumes that women cannot combine for industrial and other
purposes because it is “natural” for them to be jealous and distrustful
of one another. (This assumption is, of course, an indirect compliment
to himself, since the jealousy and distrust of women for each other
is understood to be inspired solely by their overpowering desire to
attract the admiration of the opposite sex.)
This simple and—to man—flattering explanation of woman’s inferiority
in this respect completely fails to take into account the fact that
the art of combination for a common purpose has been induced in one
half of humanity by influences which have not been brought to bear
upon the other half. I do not suppose that even the firmest and most
hardened believer in woman’s essential disloyalty, treachery and
incapacity for common action, would venture to maintain that if all
the men of past generations had been compelled to earn their living at
isolated forms of labour—say, as lighthouse-keepers or shepherds in
mountainous districts— the faculty of united action for common ends
would be very highly developed amongst them. As I have already tried to
show, in the division of labour between the two sexes man has almost
invariably reserved for himself (having the power to do so, and because
he considered them preferable) those particular occupations which
brought him into frequent contact with his fellows, which entailed
meeting others and working side by side with them; and this frequent
contact with his fellows was, in itself, a form of education which has
been largely denied to the other half of humanity. Woman’s intercourse
with her kind has been much more limited in extent, and very often
purely and narrowly social in character. Until comparatively recent
years it was unusual for women to form one of a large body of persons
working under similar conditions and conscious of similar interests. It
is scarcely to be wondered at that the modern system of industrialism
with its imperative need for co-operation and common effort should
have found her—thanks to her training—unprepared and entirely at a
disadvantage.
It must be remembered also that the generality and mass of women have
never come under the direct influence of two of the most potent factors
in the social education and evolution of man as we know him—war and
politics. However de-civilizing an agency war may appear to-day, it
has not been without its civilizing influence, since it was through
the necessity of standing side by side for purposes of offence and
defence that man first learned the art of combining for a common end,
and acquired the virtues, at first purely military, that, in course
of time and under different circumstances, were to develop into civic
virtues. The camp was the state in embryo, the soldier the citizen in
embryo, and the military tradition the collective and social tradition
of organization for a common purpose and common interests. In the face
of a common peril, such as war, men readily forget their differences
and work shoulder to shoulder. Hence an appeal to the fears or the
warlike spirit of a discontented people is the instinctive refuge of
a government in difficulties, since there is no means so effective
for producing at least a passing phase of unity amongst the jarring
elements of a nation.
Woman, so far as one can judge, is, when occasion arises, just as much
influenced by that necessity of common action in a common danger which
first produced unity of effort and public spirit in man; but for her,
as a rule, occasion has not arisen. Now and again under exceptional
circumstances, such as a desperate and hard-fought siege, she has shown
that the sense of peril acts upon her in exactly the same way as it
acts upon her brethren; but the actual waging of battle has not often,
even in the most turbulent of ages, entered into her life to teach her
(along with other and less desirable lessons) the lesson of united
effort and subordination of individual interest to the common weal.
The exclusion of woman from the arena of politics has barred to
her another method of acquiring the art of combination and the
strength that inevitably springs from it; an exclusion based upon
the deep-rooted masculine conviction that she exists not for her own
benefit and advantage, but for the comfort and convenience of man.
Granted that she came into the world for that purpose only, the right
of effective combination in her own interests is clearly unnecessary
and undesirable, since it might possibly lead to results not altogether
conducive to the comfort and convenience of man. The masculine attitude
in this matter seems quite logical.