RIEHL ON WOMEN
Not long ago I heard a German professor say that anyone who wanted to
speak with authority about the German family must read _Die Familie_
by W.H. Riehl. He said that, amongst other things, this important work
explained why men went to the _Kneipe_, because they were fond of home
life; and also what was the sphere of women. I thought it would be
useful to have both these points settled; besides, I asked several
wise Germans about the book, and they all nodded their heads and said
it was a good one. So I got it, and was surprised to find it came out
in 1854. I thought ideas about women had advanced since then, even in
Germany, though a German friend had warned me just before my last
visit not to expect much in this way. She made a movement with her
lips as if she was blowing a bit of thistledown from her. "Remember,"
she said, "that is what you will be directly you get there ... nothing
at all." But I had been to Germany so often that I was prepared to be
"nothing at all" for a time, and not to mind it much. What I wanted to
discover was how far German women had arrived at being "something" in
the eyes of their men. In my eyes they had always been a good deal:
admirable wives and mothers, for instance, patient, capable, thrifty,
and self-sacrificing. At first I thought that my friend was wrong,
and that women of late years had made great strides in Germany. I met
single women who had careers and homes of their own and were quite
cheerful. When you are old enough to look back twenty or thirty years,
and remember the blight there used to be on the "old maid," and the
narrow gossiping life she was driven to lead, you must admit that
these contented bachelor women have done a good deal to emancipate
themselves. In England they have been with us for a long time, but
formerly I had not come across them in Germany. On the contrary, I
well remember my amazement as a girl at hearing a sane able-bodied
single woman of sixty say she had naturally not ventured on a summer
journey to Switzerland till some man who looked after her money
affairs, but was in no way related, had given her his consent. I did
once hear a German boast of having struck his wife in order to bring
her to submission. He was not a navvy either, but a merchant of good
standing. He was not a common type, however. German men, on the whole,
treat their womenfolk kindly, but never as their equals. Over and over
again German women have told me they envied the wives of Englishmen,
and I should say that it is impossible for an English woman to be in
Germany without feeling, if she understands what is going on around
her, that she has suddenly lost caste. She is "nothing at all" because
she is a woman: to be treated with gallantry if she is young and
pretty, and as a negligible quantity if she is not. That perhaps is a
bitter description of what really takes place, but after reading Herr
Riehl, and hearing that his ideas are still widely accepted in
Germany, I am not much afraid of being unjust. His own arguments
convict the men of the nation in a measure nothing I could say would.
They are in extreme opposition to the ideas fermenting amongst modern
women there, and the strange fact that they are not regarded as quite
out of date makes them interesting.
Herr Riehl's theory, to put it in a nutshell, is that the family is
all-important, and the individual, if she is a woman, is of no
importance at all. He does not object to her being yoked to a plough,
because then she is working for the family, but he would forbid her,
if he could, to enter any profession that would make her independent
of the family. She is not to practise any art, and if she "commences
author" it is a sure sign that she is ugly, soured, and bitter. In any
country where they are allowed to rule, and even in any country where
they distinguish themselves in art and literature, civilisation as
well as statecraft must be at a standstill. Queen Elizabeth and Maria
Theresa were evidently awkward people for a man laying down this
theory to encounter, so he goes out of his way to say that they were
not women at all, but men in women's clothes. Moreover, he has no
doubt that the Salic law must ultimately prevail everywhere.
A woman has no independent existence: he says she is taught from
childhood to be subordinate to others; she cannot go out by herself
with propriety; she is not a complete creature till she finds a mate.
The unlucky women who never find one (more than 400,000 in Germany)
are not to make any kind of career for themselves, either humble or
glorious. Each one is to search carefully for relatives who will give
her a corner in their house, and allow her to work for them. If no one
wants her she may live with other women and bring up poor children. He
would allow women some education. Far be it from him to think that
women are to remain in compulsory ignorance. But their education is to
be "womanly," and carried on in the family. Women teachers in public
schools he considered a danger to the State, and he would send all
girls till they reach their twelfth or fourteenth year to the
elementary schools, where they would be taught by men and associate
with bare-footed children. Woman, in short, is to learn how to be
woman at home, and how not to be superwoman in school. She may even
have some instruction in art and science, but only a limited
instruction that will not encroach on her duty to the family.
The fate of lonely single women is much on Herr Riehl's mind. What are
we to do with them? he asks despairingly. "What is to become of the
army of innocent creatures, without means, without a craft, doomed to
an aimless, disappointed life. Shall we shut them up in convents?
Shall we buy them into Stifts? Shall we send them to Australia? Shall
we put an end to them?" Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers
his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. He knows
there is no short cut to social regeneration, and he will not
recommend one, not even extirpation. He points out that the working
women of Germany have never asked to be on an equality with men. The
lower you descend in the social scale the less sharply women are
differentiated from men, and the worse time women have in consequence.
The wife of a peasant is only his equal in one respect: she works as
hard as he does. Otherwise she is his serf. The sole public position
allowed to a woman in a village is that of gooseherd; while those
original minds who in other circumstances would take to authorship or
painting have to wait, if they are peasants, till they are old, when
they can take to fortune-telling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits
that the lot of women when they are peasants is not a happy one. He
does not make the admission because he thinks it of much consequence,
but because it illustrates his argument that the less "feminine" women
are the less power they exercise. He has no great fault to find with
the peasant's household, where the wife is a beast of burden in the
field and a slave indoors, bears children in quick succession, is old
before her time, and sacrifices herself body and soul to the family.
But he points out that on a higher social plane, where women are more
unlike men, more distinctively feminine, the position they take is
more honourable. Yet it is these same "superfeminine" women who are
foolishly claiming equality with men.
Herr Riehl's views expressed in English seem a little behind the
times, here and there more than a little brutal. He speaks with
sympathy of suttee, and he quotes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval.
This tribe, it seems, "treat their wives with the most exquisite
patriarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a household duty
courtesy ceases (for the _genius_ of the house is more important than
the personal dignity of the wife), and the sinner is castigated (_wird
tüchtig durchgepeitscht_). The whip used, the household sword and
sceptre, is handed down from generation to generation as a sacred
heirloom." I have translated this passage instead of alluding to it,
because I thought it was an occasion on which Herr Riehl should
literally speak for himself.
It is, however, fair to explain that modern men as well as modern
women come under his censure. All the tendencies and all the habits of
modern life afflict him, and he lashes out at them without
discrimination, and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight
that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen
years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must
admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a
Jeremiad, an exhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the road
to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation is slowly and patiently
girding its loins for that mighty effort; he believes it is blind,
weak, and flighty. If he had lived in England, and a little later, he
would certainly have talked about the Smart Set, Foreign Financiers,
and the Yellow Press. As he lived in Germany fifty years ago, he
scolds his countryfolk for living in flats. He wants to know why a
family cannot herd in one room instead of scattering itself in
several. As for a father who cannot endure the cry of children, that
man should never have been a father, says Herr Riehl. He cannot
approve of the dinner hour being put off till two o'clock. Why not
begin work at five and dine at eleven in the good old German way? He
praises the ruinous elaborate festivals that used to celebrate family
events, and considers that the police help to destroy family life by
fining people who in their opinion spend more than they can afford on
a wedding or a christening. He objects to artificial Christmas trees,
and points out that other nations set a tree in the drawing-room, but
that Germans have it in the nursery, the innermost sanctum of family
life. He arrives at some curious conclusions when he discusses the
German's habit of turning the beer-house into a sort of club that he
calls his _Kneipe_. Other races can drink, he says; _aber bloss die
germanischen können kneipen_--only the Germanic peoples can make
themselves at home in an inn. What does the _Stammgast_, the regular
guest, ask but the ways of home? the same chair every night, the same
corner, the same glass, the same wine; and where there is a
_Stammtisch_ the same companions. He sees that family life is more or
less destroyed when the men of the household spend their leisure
hours, and especially their evenings, at an inn, but he says that the
homelike surroundings of the _Kneipe_ prove the German's love of home.
In fact, he suggests that even the habitual drunkard is often a weak,
amiable creature cut out for family life; only, he has sought it at
the public-house instead of on his own hearth.
Herr Riehl is, in fact, deeply concerned to see amongst his
countryfolk a gradual slackening of family ties, a widespread selfish
individualism amongst women, an abdication of duty and authority
amongst men. His views about women sound outrageous to-day, chiefly
because he wants to apply them to all women without distinction; and
also because they display a total want of consideration for the
welfare and the wishes of women themselves. But his position is
interesting, because with some modifications it is the position still
taken by the majority of German men; naturally, not by the most
advanced and intelligent, but by the average German from the Spree to
the Danube. He thinks that woman was made for man, and that if she has
board, lodging, and raiment, according to the means of her menfolk,
she has all she can possibly ask of life. When her menfolk are
peasants, she must work in the fields; when they belong to the middle
or upper classes, her place is in the kitchen and the nursery. Unless
he is exceptionally intelligent he does not understand that this
simple rule is complicated by modern economic conditions, and by the
enormous number of women thrown on their own resources. He would send
them as Herr Riehl did, to the kitchens and nurseries of other people;
or he would give up the problem in despair, as Herr Riehl did,
admitting with a sigh that modern humanitarianism forbids the
establishment of a lethal chamber for the superfluous members of a
weaker sex.
The most modern German women are in direct opposition to Herr Riehl,
and it must be said that some of their leaders are enthusiastic rather
than sensible. They are drunk with the freedom they claim in a country
where women are not even allowed to attend a political meeting except
with the express consent of the police. In their ravings against the
tyranny of men they lose all historical sense, just as an American
does when he describes a mediæval crime as if it had been committed by
a European with a twentieth-century conscience. They charge men with
keeping half humanity in a degrading state of slavery, and attribute
all the sins of civilisation to the enforced ignorance and
helplessness of women. Their contempt for their masters is almost
beyond the German language to express, eloquently as they use it. They
demand equality of education and opportunity, but they do not want to
be men. Far be such a desire from their minds. They mean to be
something much better. To what a pass have men brought the world, they
ask? How much better would manners and morals and politics be in the
hands of women! They repel with indignation the taunt that women have
no right to govern the State because their bodies are too weak to
defend it. They point out with a gleam of sense and justice that the
mother of children does serve the State in a supremely important way;
and for that matter they are willing to take many State duties on
their shoulders, and to train for them as arduously and regularly as
men train for the wretched business of killing each other. They will
not mate with those poor things--modern men--under the existing
marriage laws. They refuse to be household beasts of burden a day
longer. Life, life to the dregs with all its joys and all its
responsibilities, is what they want, and love if it comes their way.
But not marriage. Young Siegfrieds they ask for, young lions. Here one
bewildered reader rubbed her eyes; for she had just heard Siegfried
and the Götterdämmerung again, and sometimes she reads in the
_Nibelungenlied_; and if ever a man won a woman with his club, by
muscle seemingly, by magic really, but anyhow by sheer bodily
strength, was not that man Siegfried? and was not the woman
Brünnhilde? And what does the Siegfried of the Lied say when his wife
has failed to keep a guard on her tongue--
"Man soll so Frauen ziehen," sprach Siegfried, "der Degen,
Das sie üppig Reden lassen unterwegen.
Verbiet es deinem Weibe; der meinen thu' ich's auch.
Ich schäme mich, wahrlich um solchen übermüthigen Brauch."
And then, just as if he was one of those Volga-Kalmucks admired by
Herr Riehl, he beats poor Kriemhilde black and blue.
"Das hat mich bald gereuet," so sprach das edle Weib;
"Auch hat er so zerblaüet deswegen meinen Leib!
Dass ich es je geredet, beschwerte ihm den Muth:
Das hat gar wohl gerochen der Degen tapfer und gut."
Yet here is the last development in women, the woman who refuses as an
outrage both the theory of masculine superiority and the fact so
evident in Germany of masculine domination, here is the
self-constituted superwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primæval
male. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination refuses to behold
them mated.