There is no new Frenchwoman; but the real Frenchwoman is new to America,
and it may be of interest to American women to learn something of what
she is really like.
In saying that the real Frenchwoman is new to America I do not intend to
draw the old familiar contrast between the so-called "real Frenchwoman"
and the Frenchwoman of fiction and the stage. Americans have been told a
good many thousand times in the last four years that the real
Frenchwoman is totally different from the person depicted under that
name by French novelists and dramatists; but in truth every literature,
in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for
whom, and about whom, it is written--and none more so than French
literature, the freest and frankest of all.
The statement that the real Frenchwoman is new to America simply means
that America has never before taken the trouble to look at her and try
to understand her. She has always been there, waiting to be understood,
and a little tired, perhaps, of being either caricatured or idealised.
It would be easy enough to palm her off as a "new" Frenchwoman because
the war has caused her to live a new life and do unfamiliar jobs; but
one need only look at the illustrated papers to see what she looks like
as a tram-conductor, a taxi-driver or a munition-maker. It is certain,
even now, that all these new experiences are going to modify her
character, and to enlarge her view of life; but that is not the point
with which these papers are concerned. The first thing for the American
woman to do is to learn to know _the Frenchwoman_ as she has always
been; to try to find out what she is, and why she is what she is. After
that it will be easy to see why the war has developed in her certain
qualities rather than others, and what its after-effects on her are
likely to be.
First of all, she is, in nearly all respects, as different as possible
from the average American woman. That proposition is fairly evident,
though not always easy to explain. Is it because she dresses better, or
knows more about cooking, or is more "coquettish," or more "feminine,"
or more excitable, or more emotional, or more immoral? All these reasons
have been often suggested, but none of them seems to furnish a complete
answer. Millions of American women are, to the best of their ability
(which is not small), coquettish, feminine, emotional, and all the rest
of it; a good many dress as well as Frenchwomen; some even know a little
about cooking--and the real reason is quite different, and not nearly as
flattering to our national vanity. It is simply that, like the men of
her race, the Frenchwoman is _grown up_.
Compared with the women of France the average American woman is still
in the kindergarten. The world she lives in is exactly like the most
improved and advanced and scientifically equipped Montessori-method
baby-school. At first sight it may seem preposterous to compare the
American woman's independent and resonant activities--her "boards" and
clubs and sororities, her public investigation of everything under the
heavens from "the social evil" to baking-powder, and from "physical
culture" to the newest esoteric religion--to compare such free and busy
and seemingly influential lives with the artless exercises of an infant
class. But what is the fundamental principle of the Montessori system?
It is the development of the child's individuality, unrestricted by the
traditional nursery discipline: a Montessori school is a baby world
where, shut up together in the most improved hygienic surroundings, a
number of infants noisily develop their individuality.
The reason why American women are not really "grown up" in comparison
with the women of the most highly civilised countries--such as
France--is that all their semblance of freedom, activity and authority
bears not much more likeness to real living than the exercises of the
Montessori infant. Real living, in any but the most elementary sense of
the word, is a deep and complex and slowly-developed thing, the outcome
of an old and rich social experience. It cannot be "got up" like
gymnastics, or a proficiency in foreign languages; it has its roots in
the fundamental things, and above all in close and constant and
interesting and important relations between men and women.
It is because American women are each other's only audience, and to a
great extent each other's only companions, that they seem, compared to
women who play an intellectual and social part in the lives of men, like
children in a baby-school. They are "developing their individuality,"
but developing it in the void, without the checks, the stimulus, and the
discipline that comes of contact with the stronger masculine
individuality. And it is not only because the man is the stronger and
the closer to reality that his influence is necessary to develop woman
to real womanhood; it is because the two sexes complete each other
mentally as well as physiologically that no modern civilisation has been
really rich or deep, or stimulating to other civilisations, which has
not been based on the recognised interaction of influences between men
and women.
There are several ways in which the Frenchwoman's relations with men may
be called more important than those of her American sister. In the first
place, in the commercial class, the Frenchwoman is always her husband's
business partner. The lives of the French bourgeois couple are based on
the primary necessity of getting enough money to live on, and of giving
their children educational and material advantages. In small businesses
the woman is always her husband's book-keeper or clerk, or both; above
all, she is his business adviser. France, as you know, is held up to
all other countries as a model of thrift, of wise and prudent saving and
spending. No other country in the world has such immense financial
vitality, such powers of recuperation from national calamity. After the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when France, beaten to earth, her armies
lost, half her territory occupied, and with all Europe holding aloof,
and not a single ally to defend her interests--when France was called on
by her conquerors to pay an indemnity of five thousand million francs in
order to free her territory of the enemy, she raised the sum, and paid
it off, _eighteen months sooner than the date agreed upon_: to the rage
and disappointment of Germany, and the amazement and admiration of the
rest of the world.
Every economist knows that if France was able to make that incredible
effort it was because, all over the country, millions of Frenchwomen,
labourers' wives, farmers' wives, small shopkeepers' wives, wives of big
manufacturers and commission-merchants and bankers, were to all intents
and purposes their husbands' business-partners, and had had a direct
interest in saving and investing the millions and millions piled up to
pay France's ransom in her day of need. At every stage in French
history, in war, in politics, in literature, in art and in religion,
women have played a splendid and a decisive part; but none more splendid
or more decisive than the obscure part played by the millions of wives
and mothers whose thrift and prudence silently built up her salvation in
1872.
When it is said that the Frenchwoman of the middle class is her
husband's business partner the statement must not be taken in too
literal a sense. The French wife has less legal independence than the
American or English wife, and is subject to a good many legal
disqualifications from which women have freed themselves in other
countries. That is the technical situation; but what is the practical
fact? That the Frenchwoman has gone straight through these theoretical
restrictions to the heart of reality, and become her husband's
associate, because, for her children's sake if not for her own, her
heart is in his job, and because he has long since learned that the best
business partner a man can have is one who has the same interests at
stake as himself.
It is not only because she saves him a salesman's salary, or a
book-keeper' salary, or both, that the French tradesman associates his
wife with his business; it is because he has the sense to see that no
hired assistant will have so keen a perception of his interests, that
none will receive his customers so pleasantly, and that none will so
patiently and willingly work over hours when it is necessary to do so.
There is no drudgery in this kind of partnership, because it is
voluntary, and because each partner is stimulated by exactly the same
aspirations. And it is this practical, personal and daily participation
in her husband's job that makes the Frenchwoman more grown up than
others. She has a more interesting and more living life, and therefore
she develops more quickly.
It may be objected that money-making is not the most interesting thing
in life, and that the "higher ideals" seem to have little place in this
conception of feminine efficiency. The answer to such a criticism is to
be found by considering once more the difference between the French and
the American views as to the main object of money-making--a point to
which any study of the two races inevitably leads one back.
Americans are too prone to consider money-making as interesting in
itself: they regard the fact that a man has made money as something
intrinsically meritorious. But money-making is interesting only in
proportion as its object is interesting. If a man piles up millions in
order to pile them up, having already all he needs to live humanly and
decently, his occupation is neither interesting in itself, nor conducive
to any sort of real social development in the money-maker or in those
about him. No life is more sterile than one into which nothing enters
to balance such an output of energy. To see how different is the French
view of the object of money-making one must put one's self in the place
of the average French household. For the immense majority of the French
it is a far more modest ambition, and consists simply in the effort to
earn one's living and put by enough for sickness, old age, and a good
start in life for the children.
This conception of "business" may seem a tame one to Americans; but its
advantages are worth considering. In the first place, it has the immense
superiority of leaving time for living, time for men and women both. The
average French business man at the end of his life may not have made as
much money as the American; but meanwhile he has had, every day,
something the American has not had: Time. Time, in the middle of the
day, to sit down to an excellent luncheon, to eat it quietly with his
family, and to read his paper afterward; time to go off on Sundays and
holidays on long pleasant country rambles; time, almost any day, to feel
fresh and free enough for an evening at the theatre, after a dinner as
good and leisurely as his luncheon. And there is one thing certain: the
great mass of men and women grow up and reach real maturity only through
their contact with the material realities of living, with business, with
industry, with all the great bread-winning activities; but the growth
and the maturing take place _in the intervals between these activities_:
and in lives where there are no such intervals there will be no real
growth.
That is why the "slow" French business methods so irritating to the
American business man produce, in the long run, results which he is
often the first to marvel at and admire. Every intelligent American who
has seen something of France and French life has had a first moment of
bewilderment on trying to explain the seeming contradiction between the
slow, fumbling, timid French business methods and the rounded
completeness of French civilisation. How is it that a country which
seems to have almost everything to learn in the way of "up-to-date"
business has almost everything to teach, not only in the way of art and
literature, and all the graces of life, but also in the way of municipal
order, state administration, agriculture, forestry, engineering, and the
whole harmonious running of the vast national machine? The answer is the
last the American business man is likely to think of until he has had
time to study France somewhat closely: it is that France is what she is
because every Frenchman and every Frenchwoman takes time to live, and
has an extraordinarily clear and sound sense of what constitutes _real
living_.
We are too ready to estimate business successes by their individual
results: a point of view revealed in our national awe of large fortunes.
That is an immature and even childish way of estimating success. In
terms of civilisation it is the total and ultimate result of a nation's
business effort that matters, not the fact of Mr. Smith's being able to
build a marble villa in place of his wooden cottage. If the collective
life which results from our individual money-making is not richer, more
interesting and more stimulating than that of countries where the
individual effort is less intense, then it looks as if there were
something wrong about our method.
This parenthesis may seem to have wandered rather far from the
Frenchwoman who heads the chapter; but in reality she is at its very
heart. For if Frenchmen care too much about other things to care as much
as we do about making money, the chief reason is largely because their
relations with women are more interesting. The Frenchwoman rules French
life, and she rules it under a triple crown, as a business woman, as a
mother, and above all as an artist. To explain the sense in which the
last word is used it is necessary to go back to the contention that the
greatness of France lies in her sense of the beauty and importance of
living. As life is an art in France, so woman is an artist. She does not
teach man, but she inspires him. As the Frenchwoman of the bread-winning
class influences her husband, and inspires in him a respect for her
judgment and her wishes, so the Frenchwoman of the rich and educated
class is admired and held in regard for other qualities. But in this
class of society her influence naturally extends much farther. The more
civilised a society is, the wider is the range of each woman's influence
over men, and of each man's influence over women. Intelligent and
cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing
with their own households. Men and women equally, when they have the
range of interests that real cultivation gives, need the stimulus of
different points of view, the refreshment of new ideas as well as of new
faces. The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America
concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and
women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in
America.
Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life,
in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education
that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above
all forms judgment. This is the kind of civilisation of which France has
always been the foremost model: it is because she possesses its secret
that she has led the world so long not only in art and taste and
elegance, but in ideas and in ideals. For it must never be forgotten
that if the fashion of our note-paper and the cut of our dresses come
from France, so do the conceptions of liberty and justice on which our
republican institutions are based. No nation can have grown-up ideas
till it has a ruling caste of grown-up men and women; and it is possible
to have a ruling caste of grown-up men and women only in a civilisation
where the power of each sex is balanced by that of the other.
It may seem strange to draw precisely this comparison between France,
the country of all the old sex-conventions, and America, which is
supposedly the country of the greatest sex-freedom; and the American
reader may ask: "But where is there so much freedom of intercourse
between men and women as in America?" The misconception arises from the
confusion between two words, and two states of being that are
fundamentally different. In America there is complete freedom of
intercourse between boys and girls, but not between men and women; and
there is a general notion that, in essentials, a girl and a woman are
the same thing. It is true, in essentials, that a boy and a man are very
much the same thing; but a girl and a woman--a married woman--are
totally different beings. Marriage, union with a man, completes and
transforms a woman's character, her point of view, her sense of the
relative importance of things, far more thoroughly than a boy's nature
is changed by the same experience. A girl is only a sketch; a married
woman is the finished picture. And it is only the married woman who
counts as a social factor.
Now it is precisely at the moment when her experience is rounded by
marriage, motherhood, and the responsibilities, cares and interests of
her own household, that the average American woman is, so to speak,
"withdrawn from circulation." It is true that this does not apply to the
small minority of wealthy and fashionable women who lead an artificial
cosmopolitan life, and therefore represent no particular national
tendency. It is not to them that the country looks for the development
of its social civilisation, but to the average woman who is sufficiently
free from bread-winning cares to act as an incentive to other women and
as an influence upon men. In America this woman, in the immense majority
of cases, has roamed through life in absolute freedom of communion with
young men until the day when the rounding-out of her own experience by
marriage puts her in a position to become a social influence; and from
that day she is cut off from men's society in all but the most formal
and intermittent ways. On her wedding-day she ceases, in any open, frank
and recognised manner, to be an influence in the lives of the men of the
community to which she belongs.
In France, the case is just the contrary. France, hitherto, has kept
young girls under restrictions at which Americans have often smiled, and
which have certainly, in some respects, been a bar to their growth. The
doing away of these restrictions will be one of the few benefits of the
war: the French young girl, even in the most exclusive and most
tradition-loving society, will never again be the prisoner she has been
in the past. But this is relatively unimportant, for the French have
always recognised that, as a social factor, a woman does not count till
she is married; and in the well-to-do classes girls marry extremely
young, and the married woman has always had extraordinary social
freedom. The famous French "Salon," the best school of talk and of
ideas that the modern world has known, was based on the belief that the
most stimulating conversation in the world is that between intelligent
men and women who see each other often enough to be on terms of frank
and easy friendship. The great wave of intellectual and social
liberation that preceded the French revolution and prepared the way, not
for its horrors but for its benefits, originated in the drawing-rooms of
French wives and mothers, who received every day the most thoughtful and
the most brilliant men of the time, who shared their talk, and often
directed it. Think what an asset to the mental life of any country such
a group of women forms! And in France they were not then, and they are
not now, limited to the small class of the wealthy and fashionable. In
France, as soon as a woman has a personality, social circumstances
permit her to make it felt. What does it matter if she had spent her
girlhood in seclusion, provided she is free to emerge from it at the
moment when she is fitted to become a real factor in social life?
It may, of course, be asked at this point, how the French freedom of
intercourse between married men and women affects domestic life, and the
happiness of a woman's husband and children. It is hard to say what kind
of census could be devised to ascertain the relative percentage of happy
marriages in the countries where different social systems prevail. Until
such a census can be taken, it is, at any rate, rash to assert that the
French system is less favourable to domestic happiness than the
Anglo-Saxon. At any rate, it acts as a greater incentive to the husband,
since it rests with him to keep his wife's admiration and affection by
making himself so agreeable to her, and by taking so much trouble to
appear at an advantage in the presence of her men friends, that no rival
shall supplant him. It would not occur to any Frenchman of the
cultivated class to object to his wife's friendship with other men, and
the mere fact that he has the influence of other men to compete with is
likely to conduce to considerate treatment of his wife, and courteous
relations in the household.
It must also be remembered that a man who comes home to a wife who has
been talking with intelligent men will probably find her companionship
more stimulating than if she has spent all her time with other women. No
matter how intelligent women are individually, they tend, collectively,
to narrow down their interests, and take a feminine, or even a female,
rather than a broadly human view of things. The woman whose mind is
attuned to men's minds has a much larger view of the world, and attaches
much less importance to trifles, because men, being usually brought by
circumstances into closer contact with reality, insensibly communicate
their breadth of view to women. A "man's woman" is never fussy and
seldom spiteful, because she breathes too free an air, and is having too
good a time.
If, then, being "grown up" consists in having a larger and more liberal
experience of life, in being less concerned with trifles, and less
afraid of strong feelings, passions and risks, then the French woman is
distinctly more grown up than her American sister; and she is so because
she plays a much larger and more interesting part in men's lives.
It may, of course, also be asked whether the fact of playing this
part--which implies all the dangers implied by taking the open seas
instead of staying in port--whether such a fact is conducive to the
eventual welfare of woman and of society. Well--the answer to-day is:
_France!_ Look at her as she has stood before the world for the last
four years and a half, uncomplaining, undiscouraged, undaunted, holding
up the banner of liberty: liberty of speech, liberty of thought, liberty
of conscience, all the liberties that we of the western world have been
taught to revere as the only things worth living for--look at her, as
the world has beheld her since August, 1914, fearless, tearless,
indestructible, in face of the most ruthless and formidable enemy the
world has ever known, determined to fight on to the end for the
principles she has always lived for. Such she is to-day; such are the
millions of men who have spent their best years in her trenches, and the
millions of brave, uncomplaining, self-denying mothers and wives and
sisters who sent them forth smiling, who waited for them patiently and
courageously, or who are mourning them silently and unflinchingly, and
not one of whom, at the end of the most awful struggle in history, is
ever heard to say that the cost has been too great or the trial too
bitter to be borne.
No one who has seen Frenchwomen since the war can doubt that their great
influence on French life, French thought, French imagination and French
sensibility, is one of the strongest elements in the attitude that
France holds before the world to-day.