My intention in writing this book has not been to inveigh against the
institution of marriage, the life companionship of man and woman; all
that I have inveighed against has been the largely compulsory character
of that institution—as far as one-half of humanity is concerned—the
sweated trade element in it, and the glorification of certain qualities
and certain episodes and experiences of life at the expense of all the
others. I believe—because I have seen it in the working—that the
companionship in marriage of self-respecting man and self-respecting
woman is a very perfect thing; but I also believe that, under present
conditions, it is not easy for self-respecting woman to find a mate
with whom she can live on the terms demanded by her self-respect.
Hence a distinct tendency on her part to avoid marriage. Those women
who look at the matter in this light are those who, while not denying
that matrimony may be an excellent thing in itself, realize that there
are some excellent things which may be bought too dear. That is the
position of a good many of us in these latter days. If we are more or
less politely incredulous when we are informed that we are leading an
unnatural existence, it is not because we have no passions, but because
life to us means a great deal more than one of its possible episodes.
If we decline to listen with becoming reverence to disquisitions on the
broadening effect of motherhood upon our lives, the deep and miraculous
understanding that it brings into our hearts, it is not because we
are contemptuous of maternity, but because we have met so many silly
persons who brought babies into the world and remained just as silly
as they were before. We are quite aware, too, that it is, for the most
part, women of our own unmated class, and, likely enough, of our own
way of thinking, who spend their days in teaching bungling mothers how
to rear the children who would otherwise only come into the world in
order to afford employment to the undertaker by going out of it. (A
considerable proportion of the infant population of this country would
be in a parlous state if the “superfluous women” thereof were suddenly
caught up into the air and dumped _en bloc_ in the Sahara.)
And in this connection I feel it necessary to state that I have
hitherto sought in vain in real life for that familiar figure in
fiction—the unmarried woman whose withered existence is passed in
ceaseless and embittered craving for the possession of a child of
her own. The sufferings of this unfortunate creature, as depicted
by masculine writers, have several times brought me to the verge of
tears; it is difficult to believe that they are entirely the result of
vivid masculine imagination; but honesty compels me to admit that I
have never discovered their counterpart in life, in spite of the fact
that my way has led me amongst spinsters of all ages. Young unmarried
women have told me frankly that they would like to bear a child; a
very few elderly unmarried women have told me that they would have
preferred to marry; and quite a number of married women have told me
that they should have done better for themselves by remaining single.
I have known wives who desired maternity as anxiously as others
desired to avoid it; but the spinster whose days are passed in gloomy
contemplation of her lack of olive-branches I have not yet met. I
started by believing in her, just as I started by believing that the
world held nothing for me but marriage and reproduction of my kind.
Later on I discovered that there were more things in heaven and earth
than marriage and reproduction of my kind, and I have no reason to
suppose that I am the only woman who has made that discovery.
The women I have known who lamented their single state as a real evil
have been actuated in their dislike of it by mixed motives. A desire to
bear children has, perhaps, been one; but it has always been interwoven
with the desire to improve their position socially or commercially, and
the corresponding fear of failure or poverty implied by spinsterhood.
So far as my experience goes, the only women who fret passionately at
the lack of children of their own are married women whose husbands are
desirous of children.
I should be the last to deny that many unmarried women have the sense
of maternity strongly developed; but the sense of maternity, as I see
it, is not completely dependent on the accidents of marriage and
child-birth. As I have already said, I believe it is not the physical
side of maternity—the side which appeals so strongly to men—which
appeals most strongly to women; and from the other, and, to me,
infinitely more beautiful side, no unmarried woman is necessarily
debarred. The spinster who devotes herself to permanent lamentation
over her lack of descendants must (if she exists) be a person who has
never risen above the male conception of motherhood as a physical and
instinctive process. Some of the best mothers I have met have never
borne a child; but one does not imagine that it will be counted to them
for unrighteousness that the children who rise up and call them blessed
are not their own. Nor is it childhood alone which enkindles the sense
of maternity in women; the truest mother I know is one who enwraps with
her love a “child” who came into the world before she was thought of.
After all, there is a kinship that is not that of the flesh, and
some of us are very little the children of our parents. The people
who have framed and influenced the conditions under which we live,
whose thoughts have moulded our lives, have also had a share in
our making. It is possible that descendants of Homer walk the earth
to-day—very worthy persons whose existence is of no particular moment
to any but themselves. Shakespeare was married I know, and I believe
he was the father of a family; but of how many that family consisted,
what were their names and what became of them all, I have never even
troubled to inquire. Did Goethe leave descendants, or did he not? I
frankly confess that I don’t know, simply because I have never had
the slightest curiosity on the subject. But Faust has been part of my
life. It matters very little to the world at large what became of the
children whom Jean Jacques Rousseau handed over to the tender mercies
of a foundling hospital; but there are very few people alive to-day to
whom it does not matter that the current of the world’s striving was
turned into a new channel by the spiritual sons of Rousseau—the men
who made the French Revolution. Reproduction is not everything; the
men and women who have striven to shorten the hours of child-labour
have often been possessed of a keener sense of responsibility and
tenderness, a keener sense of fatherhood and motherhood, than the
parents whose children they sought to protect. If I were one of those
who have so striven, I should consider that the help I had given to the
world was no less worthy of honour and commendation than that of the
paterfamilias who marches a family of fourteen to church on Sundays.
If humanity had only been created in order to reproduce its kind, we
might still be dodging cave-bears in the intervals of grubbing up roots
with our nails. It is not only the children who matter: there is the
world into which they are born. Every human being who influences for
the better, however slightly, the conditions under which he lives is
doing something for those who come after; and thus, it seems to me,
that those women who are proving by their lives that marriage is not
a necessity for them, that maternity is not a necessity for them,
are preparing a heritage of fuller humanity for the daughters of
others—who will be daughters of their own in the spirit, if not in
the flesh. The home of the future will be more of an abiding-place and
less of a prison because they have made it obvious that, so far as many
women are concerned, the home can be done without; and if the marriage
of the future is what it ought to be—a voluntary contract on both
sides—it will be because they have proved the right of every woman to
refuse it if she will, by demonstrating that there are other means of
earning a livelihood than bearing children and keeping house. It is
the woman without a husband to support her, the woman who has no home
but such as she makes for herself by her own efforts, who is forcing a
reluctant masculine generation to realize that she is something more
than the breeding factor of the race. By her very existence she is
altering the male conception of her sex.
According to latter-day notions, to speak in praise of celibacy in
man or in woman is tantamount to committing the crime of high treason
against the race. Other centuries—some of them with social systems
quite as scientific as our own—have not been of that way of thinking;
and one is half inclined to suspect that the modern dislike of the
celibate has its root in the natural annoyance of an over-sexed and
mentally lax generation at receiving ocular demonstration of the fact
that the animal passions can be kept under control. It saves such
a lot of trouble to assume at once that they cannot be kept under
control; so, in place of the priest, we have the medicine man, whose
business it is to make pathological excuses for original sin. Myself
I have a good deal of respect for the celibate; not because he has no
children, but because he is capable of self-control—which is a thing
respectable in itself.
At the same time, I do not advocate celibacy except for persons whom it
suits; but I do not see why persons whom it does suit should be ashamed
of acknowledging the fact. I am inclined to think that they are more
numerous than is commonly supposed, and I will admit frankly that I am
exceedingly glad that it seems, in these latter days, to suit so many
women. I am glad, not because the single life appears to me essentially
better than the married, but because I believe that the conditions of
marriage, as they affect women, can only be improved by the women who
do without marriage—and do without it gladly. Other generations have
realized that particular duties could best be performed by persons
without engrossing domestic interests; and I believe that the wives
and mothers of this generation require the aid of women unhampered by
such interests—women who will eventually raise the value of the wife
and mother in the eyes of the husband and father by making it clear
to him that she did not enter the married state solely because there
was nothing else for her to do, and that his child was not born simply
because its mother had no other way of earning a living. There are
women married every day, there are children born every day, for no
better reasons than these.