There appears to be a great quantity of conceit around, especially
concerning women. The statement was recently set afloat that a well-known
lady had admitted that George Meredith understands women better than any
writer who has preceded him. This may be true, and it may be a wily
statement to again throw men off the track; at any rate it contains the
old assumption of a mystery, practically insoluble, about the gentler
sex. Women generally encourage this notion, and men by their gingerly
treatment of it seemed to accept it. But is it well-founded, is there any
more mystery about women--than about men? Is the feminine nature any more
difficult to understand than the masculine nature? Have women, conscious
of inferior strength, woven this notion of mystery about themselves as a
defense, or have men simply idealized them for fictitious purposes? To
recur to the case cited, is there any evidence that Mr. Meredith
understands human nature--as exhibited in women any better than human
nature--in men, or is more consistent in the production of one than of
the other? Historically it would be interesting to trace the rise of this
notion of woman as an enigma. The savage races do not appear to have it.
A woman to the North American Indian is a simple affair, dealt with
without circumlocution. In the Bible records there is not much mystery
about her; there are many tributes to her noble qualities, and some
pretty severe and uncomplimentary things are said about her, but there is
little affectation of not understanding her. She may be a prophetess, or
a consoler, or a snare, but she is no more “deceitful and desperately
wicked” than anybody else. There is nothing mysterious about her first
recorded performance. Eve trusted the serpent, and Adam trusted Eve. The
mystery was in the serpent. There is no evidence that the ancient
Egyptian woman was more difficult to comprehend than the Egyptian man.
They were both doubtless wily as highly civilized people are apt to be;
the “serpent of old Nile” was in them both. Is it in fact till we come to
mediaeval times, and the chivalric age, that women are set up as being
more incomprehensible than men? That is, less logical, more whimsical,
more uncertain in their mental processes? The play-writers and essayists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “worked” this notion
continually. They always took an investigating and speculating attitude
towards women, that fostered the conceit of their separateness and veiled
personality. Every woman was supposed to be playing a part behind a mask.
Montaigne is always investigating woman as a mystery. It is, for
instance, a mystery he does not relish that, as he says, women commonly
reserve the publication of their vehement affections for their husbands
till they have lost them; then the woful countenance “looks not so much
back as forward, and is intended rather to get a new husband than to
lament the old.” And he tells this story:
“When I was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady who is yet living,
and the widow of a prince, had, I know not what, more ornament in her
dress than our laws of widowhood will well allow, which being reproached
with as a great indecency, she made answer 'that it was because she was
not cultivating more friendships, and would never marry again.'” This
cynical view of woman, as well as the extravagantly complimentary one
sometimes taken by the poets, was based upon the notion that woman was an
unexplainable being. When she herself adopted the idea is uncertain. Of
course all this has a very practical bearing upon modern life, the
position of women in it, and the so-called reforms. If woman is so
different from man, to the extent of being an unexplainable mystery,
science ought to determine the exact state of the case, and ascertain if
there is any remedy for it. If it is only a literary creation, we ought
to know it. Science could tell, for instance, whether there is a
peculiarity in the nervous system, any complications in the nervous
centres, by which the telegraphic action of the will gets crossed, so
that, for example, in reply to a proposal of marriage, the intended “Yes”
gets delivered as “No.” Is it true that the mental process in one sex is
intuitive, and in the other logical, with every link necessary and
visible? Is it true, as the romancers teach, that the mind in one sex
acts indirectly and in the other directly, or is this indirect process
only characteristic of exceptions in both sexes? Investigation ought to
find this out, so that we can adjust the fit occupations for both sexes
on a scientific basis. We are floundering about now in a sea of doubt. As
society becomes more complicated, women will become a greater and greater
mystery, or rather will be regarded so by themselves and be treated so by
men.
Who can tell how much this notion of mystery in the sex stands in the way
of its free advancement all along the line? Suppose the proposal were
made to women to exchange being mysterious for the ballot? Would they do
it? Or have they a sense of power in the possession of this conceded
incomprehensibility that they would not lay down for any visible insignia
of that power? And if the novelists and essayists have raised a mist
about the sex, which it willingly masquerades in, is it not time that the
scientists should determine whether the mystery exists in nature or only
in the imagination?