It can scarcely be disputed, I think, that in the English language there
are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two
unmitigated bores: The Workingman and the Woman. The Workingman and the
Woman, the New Woman, be it remembered, meet us at every page of
literature written in the English tongue; and each is convinced that on
its own special W hangs the future of the world. Both he and she want to
have their values artificially raised and rated, and a status given to
them by favour in lieu of desert. In an age in which persistent clamour
is generally crowned by success they have both obtained considerable
attention; is it offensive to say much more of it than either deserves?
A writer, signing the name of Sarah Grand, has of late written on this
theme; and she avers that the Cow-Woman and the Scum-Woman, man
understands; but that the New Woman is above him. The elegance of these
choice appellatives is not calculated to recommend them to educated
readers of either sex; and as a specimen of style forces one to hint
that the New Woman who, we are told, ‘has been sitting apart in silent
contemplation all these years’ might in all these years have studied
better models of literary composition.
We are farther on told ‘that the dimmest perception that you may be
mistaken, will save you from making an ass of yourself.’ It appears that
even this dimmest perception has never dawned upon the New Woman.
We are farther told that ‘thinking and thinking,’ in her solitary,
sphinx-like contemplation, she solved the problem and prescribed the
remedy (the remedy to a problem!); but what this remedy was we are not
told, nor did the New Woman apparently disclose it to the rest of
womankind, since she still hears them in ‘sudden and violent upheaval’
like ‘children unable to articulate whimpering for they know not what.’
It is sad to reflect that they might have been ‘easily satisfied at that
time’ (at what time?), ‘but society stormed at them until what was a
little wail became convulsive shrieks;’ and we are not told why the New
Woman who had ‘the remedy for the problem,’ did not immediately produce
this remedy. We are not told either in what country or at what epoch
this startling upheaval of volcanic womanhood took place in which ‘man
merely made himself a nuisance with his opinions and advice,’ but
apparently did quell this wailing and gnashing of teeth since it would
seem that he has managed still to remain more masterful than he ought to
be.
We are further informed that women ‘have allowed him to arrange the
whole social system, and manage, or mismanage, it all these ages without
ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering whether his
abilities and his methods were sufficiently good to qualify him for the
task.’
There is something comical in the idea thus suggested, that man has only
been allowed to ‘manage or mismanage’ the world because woman has
graciously refrained from preventing his doing so. But the comic side of
this pompous and solemn assertion does not for a moment offer itself to
the New Woman sitting aloof and aloft in her solitary meditation on the
superiority of her sex. For the New Woman there is no such thing as a
joke. She has listened without a smile to her enemy’s ‘preachments’; she
has ‘endured poignant misery for his sins;’ she has ‘meekly bowed her
head’ when he called her bad names; and she has never asked for ‘any
proof of the superiority’ which could alone have given him a right to
use such naughty expressions. The truth about everything has all along
been in the possession of woman; but strange and sad perversity of
taste! she has ‘cared more for man than for truth, and so the whole
human race has suffered!’
‘All that is over, however,’ we are told, and ‘while on the one hand man
has shrunk to his true proportions’ she has, during the time of this
shrinkage, been herself expanding, and has in a word come to ‘fancy
herself’ extremely, so that he has no longer the slightest chance of
imposing upon her by his game-cock airs.
Man, ‘having no conception of himself as imperfect’ (what would Hamlet
say to this accusation?) will find this difficult to understand at
first; but the New Woman ‘knows his weakness,’ and will ‘help him with
his lesson.’ ‘_Man morally is in his infancy._’ There have been times
when there was a doubt as to whether he was to be raised to her level,
or woman to be lowered to his, but we ‘have turned that corner at last
and now woman holds out a strong hand to the child-man and insists upon
helping him up.’ The child-man (Bismarck? Herbert Spencer? Edison?
Gladstone? Alexander III.? Lord Dufferin? the Duc d’Aumale?)—the
child-man must have his tottering baby steps guided by the New Woman,
and he must be taught to live up to his ideals. To live up to an ideal,
whether our own or somebody else’s, is a painful process; but man must
be made to do it. For, oddly enough, we are assured that despite ‘all
his assumption he does not make the best of himself,’ which is not
wonderful if he be still only in his infancy; and he has the incredible
stupidity to be blind to the fact that ‘woman has self-respect and good
sense,’ whilst he has neither, and that ‘she does not in the least
intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys on the chance of obtaining
others.’
I have written amongst other _pensées éparses_ which will some day see
the light, the following reflection:—
L’école nouvelle des femmes libres oublie qu’on ne puisse pas à la
fois combattre l’homme sur son propre terrain, et attendre de lui des
politesses, des tendresses, et des galantéries. Il ne faut pas au même
moment prendre de l’homme son chaire à l’Université et sa place dans
l’omnibus; si on lui arrâche son gagne-pain on ne peut pas exiger
qu’il offre aussi sa parapluie.
The whole kernel of the question lies in this. The supporters of the New
Woman declare that she will not surrender her present privileges,
_i.e._, though she may usurp his professorial seat, and seize his
salary, she will still expect the man to stand that she may sit; the man
to get wet through that she may use his umbrella. Yet surely if she
retain these privileges she can only do so by an appeal to his chivalry,
_i.e._, by a confession that she is weaker than he. But she does not
want to do this; she wants to get the comforts and concessions due to
feebleness, at the same time as she demands the lion’s share of power
due to superior force alone. It is this overweening and unreasonable
grasping at both positions which will end in making her odious to man
and in her being probably kicked back roughly by him into the seclusion
of a harem.
The New Woman declares that man cannot do without woman. It is a
doubtful postulate. In the finest intellectual and artistic era of the
world women were not necessary to either the pleasures or passions of
men. It is possible that if women make themselves as unlovely and
offensive as they appear likely to become, the preferences of the
Platonic Age may become acknowledged and dominant, and women may be
relegated entirely to the lowest plane as a mere drudge and
child-bearer.
Before me at the moment lies an engraving from an illustrated journal of
a woman’s meeting; whereat a woman is demanding, in the name of her
sovereign sex, the right to vote at political elections. The speaker is
middle-aged and plain of feature; she wears an inverted plate on her
head, tied on with strings under her double-chin; she has
balloon-sleeves, a bodice tight to bursting, a waist of ludicrous
dimensions in proportion to her portly person; her whole attire is
elaborately constructed so as to conceal any physical graces which she
might possess; she is gesticulating with one hand, of which all the
fingers are stuck out in ungraceful defiance of all artistic laws of
gesture. Now, why cannot this orator learn to gesticulate properly and
learn to dress gracefully, instead of clamouring for a franchise? She
violates in her own person every law, alike of common-sense and artistic
fitness, and yet comes forward as a fit and proper person to make laws
for others. She is an exact representative of her sex as it exists at
the dawn of the twentieth century.
There have been few periods in which woman’s attire has been so ugly, so
disfiguring and so preposterous as it is in this year of grace (1894) at
a period when, in newspaper and pamphlet, on platform and in
dining-room, and in the various clubs she has consecrated to herself,
woman is clamouring for her recognition as a being superior to man. She
cannot clothe herself with common sense or common grace, she cannot
resist the dictates of tailors and the example of princesses; she cannot
resist the squaw-like preference for animals’ skins, and slaughtered
birds, and tufts torn out of the living and bleeding creature; she
cannot show to any advantage the natural lines of her form, but
disguises them as grotesquely as mantua-makers bid her to do. She cannot
go into the country without making herself a caricature of man, in coat
and waistcoat and gaiters; she apes all his absurdities, she emulates
all his cruelties and follies; she wears his ugly pot hats, his silly,
stiff collars; she copies his inane club-life and then tells us that
this parody, incapable of initiative, bare of taste and destitute of
common sense, is worthy to be enthroned as the supreme teacher of the
world!
Woman, whether new or old, leaves immense fields of culture untilled,
immense areas of influence wholly neglected. She does almost nothing
with the resources she possesses, because her whole energy is
concentrated on desiring and demanding those she had not. She can write
and print anything she chooses; and she scarcely ever takes the pains to
acquire correct grammar or elegance of style before wasting ink and
paper. She can paint and model any subjects she chooses, but she
imprisons herself in men’s _atéliers_ to endeavour to steal their
technique and their methods, and thus loses any originality she might
possess in art. Her influence on children might be so great that through
them she would practically rule the future of the world; but she
delegates her influence to the vile school boards if she be poor, and if
she be rich to governesses and tutors; nor does she in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred ever attempt to educate or control herself into fitness
for the personal exercise of such influence. Her precept and example in
the treatment of the animal creation might be of infinite use in
mitigating the hideous tyranny of humanity over them, but she does
little or nothing to this effect; she wears dead birds and the skins of
dead creatures; she hunts the hare and shoots the pheasant, she drives
and rides with more brutal recklessness than men; she watches with
delight the struggles of the dying salmon, of the gralloched deer; she
keeps her horses standing in snow and fog for hours, with the muscles of
their heads and necks tied up in the torture of the bearing rein; when
asked to do anything for a stray dog, a lame horse, a poor man’s donkey,
she is very sorry, but she has so many claims on her already; she never
attempts by orders to her household, to her _fóurnisseurs_, to her
dependents, to obtain some degree of mercy in the treatment of sentient
creatures and in the methods of their slaughter, and she continues to
trim her court gowns with the aigrettes of ospreys.
The immense area for good influence which lies open to her in private
life is almost entirely uncultivated, yet she wants to be admitted into
public life. Public life is already overcrowded, verbose, incompetent,
fussy and foolish enough without the addition of her in her sealskin
coat with the dead humming bird on her hat. Women in public life would
exaggerate the failings of men, and would not have even their few
excellencies. Their legislation would be, as that of men is too often,
the offspring of panic or prejudice; and women would not put on the drag
of common-sense as men frequently do in public assemblies. There would
be little to hope from their humanity, nothing from their liberality;
for when they are frightened they are more ferocious than men, and, when
they gain power, more merciless.
‘Men,’ says one of the New Women, ‘deprived us of all proper education
and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge.’ How far is this
based on facts? Could not Lady Jane Grey learn Greek and Latin as she
chose? Could not Hypatia lecture? Was George Sand or Mrs Somerville
withheld from study? Could not in every age every woman choose a Corinna
or a Cordelia as her type? become either Helen or Penelope? If the vast
majority have not the mental or physical gifts to become either, that is
Nature’s fault, not man’s. Aspasia and Adelina Patti were born, not
made. In all eras and all climes a woman of great genius or of great
beauty has done very much what she chose; and if the majority of women
have led obscure lives, so have the majority of men. The chief part of
humanity is insignificant whether it be male or female. In most people
there is very little character indeed, and as little mind. Those who
have much of either never fail to make their mark, be they of which sex
they may.
The unfortunate idea that there is no good education without a college
curriculum is as injurious as it is erroneous. The college education may
have excellencies for men in its friction, its preparation for the
world, its rough destruction of personal conceit; but for women it can
only be hardening and deforming. If study be delightful to a woman, she
will find her way to it as the hart to water brooks. The author of
_Aurora Leigh_ was not only always at home, but she was also for many
years a confirmed invalid; yet she became a fine classic, and found her
path to fame. A college curriculum would have done nothing to improve
her rich and beautiful mind; it might have done much to debase it.
It would be impossible to love and venerate literature of the highest
kind more profoundly than did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, yet she was
the most retiring of women and chained by weakness to her couch until
her starry-eyed and fiery suitor descended on her and bore her away to
Italy. It is difficult to see what the distinction of being called a
wrangler can add to the solid advantage and the intellectual pleasure of
studying mathematics; or what the gaining of a college degree in
classics can add to the delightful culture of Greek and Latin literature
as sought _per se_.
The perpetual contact of men with other men may be good for them, but
the perpetual contact of women with other women is very far from good.
The publicity of a college must be injurious to a young girl of refined
and delicate feeling, whilst the adoration of other women (as in the
late chairing of a wrangler by other girl graduates) is unutterably
pernicious. Nor can I think the present mania for exploration and
incessant adventure beneficial either to the woman or the world.
When a young and good-looking girl chooses to ride or walk all alone
through a wild and unexplored country, it must be admitted that, if the
narrative of her adventures be not sheer fable, she must have
perpetually run the risk of losing what women have hitherto been taught
to consider dearer than life. It is nothing short of courting abuse of
her maiden person to explore all alone mountainous regions and desert
plains inhabited by wild and fierce races of men. One such young
traveller describes, amongst other risky exploits, how she came one
night in the Carpathians upon a deep and lonely pool, made black as the
mouth of Avernus by its contrast with the moonlit rocks around, and of
how, tempted by this blackness, she got down from her saddle, stripped,
plunged and bathed! The stars alone, she says, looked down on this
exploit, but how could this Susannah be sure there were no Elders? And
common sense timidly whispers, how, oh how, did she manage to dry
herself?
Personally, I do not in the least believe in these stories any more than
in those of the noted Munchausen; but they are put into print as sober
facts, and as such we are requested and expected to receive them.
The ‘Scum-Woman’ and the ‘Cow-Woman,’ to quote the elegant phraseology
of the defenders of their sex, are both of them less of a menace to
humankind than the New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested
knowledge, her overweening estimate of her own value, and her fatal want
of all sense of the ridiculous.
When scum comes to the surface it renders a great service to the
substance which it leaves behind it; when the cow yields pure
nourishment to the young and the suffering, her place is blessed in the
realm of nature; but when the New Woman splutters blistering wrath on
mankind she is merely odious and baneful.
The error of the New Woman (as of many an old one) lies in speaking of
women as the victims of men, and entirely ignoring the frequency with
which men are the victims of women. In nine cases out of ten the first
to corrupt the youth is the woman. In nine cases out of ten also she
becomes corrupt herself because she likes it.
When Leonide Leblanc, scorning to adopt the career of a school teacher,
for which her humble family had educated her, walked down the hill from
Montmartre to seek her fortunes in the streets of Paris, she did so
because she liked to do so, which was indeed quite natural in her.
Neither Mephistopheles nor Faust led her down from Montmartre, and its
close little kitchen and common little bedchamber; neither
Mephistopheles nor Faust was wanted, Paris and the boulevards were
attraction enough, and her own beauty and ambition were spurs
sufficiently sharp to make her leave the unlovely past and seek the
dazzling future. The accusation of seduction is very popular with women,
and they excuse everything faulty in their lives with it; but the
accusation is rarely based on actual facts. The youth and the maiden
incline towards each other as naturally as the male and female blossoms
of trees are blown together by the fertilising breeze of spring. An
attraction of a less poetic, of a wholly physical kind, brings together
the boy and girl in the garrets, in the cellars, in the mines, on the
farm lands, in the promiscuous intercourse of the streets. It is nature
which draws the one to the other; and the blame lies less on them than
with the hypocritical morality of a modern world which sees what it
calls sin in Nature.
It is all very well to say that prostitutes were at the beginning of
their career victims of seduction; but it is not probable and it is not
provable. Love of drink and of finery, and a dislike to work, are the
more likely motives and origin of their degradation. It never seems to
occur to the accusers of man that women are just as vicious and as lazy
as he is in nine cases out of ten, and need no invitation from him to
become so.
A worse prostitution than that of the streets, _i.e._, that of loveless
marriages of convenience, are brought about by women, not by men. In
such unions the man always gives much more than he gains, and the woman
in almost every instance is persuaded or driven into it by women: her
mother, her sisters, her acquaintances. It is rarely that the father
interferes to bring about such a marriage.
A rich marriage represents to the woman of culture and position what the
streets represent to the woman of the people. But it is none the less a
loveless sale of self, because its sale is ratified at St Paul’s
Knightsbridge or at S. Philippe du Roule.
In even what is called a well-assorted marriage, the man is frequently
sacrificed to the woman. As I wrote long ago, Andrea del Sarte’s wife
has many sisters; Correggio, dying of the burden of the family, has many
brothers. Men of genius are often pinned to earth by their wives. They
are continually dwarfed and dulled by their female relations, and
rendered absurd by their sons and daughters. In our own day a famous
statesman is made very ridiculous by his wife. Frequently the female
influences brought to bear on him render a man of great and original
powers and disinterested character, a time-server, a conventionalist, a
mere seeker of place. Woman may help man sometimes, but she certainly
more often hinders him. Her self-esteem is immense and her
self-knowledge very small. I view with dread for the future of the world
the power which modern inventions place in the hands of woman. Hitherto
her physical weakness has restrained her in a great measure from violent
action; but a woman can make a bomb and throw it, can fling vitriol, and
fire a repeating revolver as well as any man can. These are precisely
the deadly, secret, easily handled modes of warfare and revenge, which
will commend themselves to her ferocious feebleness.
Jules Rochard has written:
‘J’ai professé de l’anatomie pendant des longues années, j’ai passé
une bonne partie de mavie dans les amphithéâtres, mais je n’en ai pas
moins éprouvé un sentiment pénible en trouvant dans toutes les maisons
d’education des squelettes d’animaux et des mannequins anatomiques
entre les mains des fillettes.’
I suppose this passage will be considered as an effort ‘to withhold
knowledge from women,’ but it is one which is full of true wisdom and
honourable feeling. When you have taken her into the physiological and
chemical laboratories, when you have extinguished pity in her, and given
weapons to her dormant cruelty, which she can use in secret, you will be
hoist with your own petard—your pupil will be your tyrant, and then she
will meet with the ultimate fate of all tyrants.
In the pages of an eminent review a physician has recently lamented the
continually increasing unwillingness of women of the world in the United
States to bear children, and the consequent increase of ill-health;
whilst to avoid child-bearing is being continually preached to the
working classes by those who call themselves their friends.
The elegant epithet of Cow-Woman implies the contempt with which
maternity is viewed by the New Woman, who thinks it something fine to
vote at vestries, and shout at meetings, and lay bare the spine of
living animals, and haul the gasping salmon from the river pool, and
hustle male students off the benches of amphitheatres.
Modesty is no doubt a thing of education or prejudice, a conventionality
artificially stimulated; but it is an exquisite grace, and womanhood
without it loses its most subtle charm. Nothing tends so to destroy
modesty as the publicity and promiscuity of schools, of hotels, of
railway trains and sea voyages. True modesty shrinks from the curious
gaze of other women as from the coarser gaze of man. When a girl has a
common bedchamber and a common bathroom with other girls, she loses the
delicate bloom of her modesty. Exposure to a crowd of women is just as
nasty as exposure to a crowd of men.
Men, moreover, are in all, except the very lowest classes, more careful
of their talk before young girls than women are, or at least were so
until the young women of fashion insisted on their discarding such
scruples. It is very rarely that a man does not respect real innocence;
but women frequently do not. The jest, the allusion, the story which
sullies her mind and awakes her inquisitiveness, will much oftener be
spoken by women than men. It is not from her brothers, nor her brother’s
friends, but from her female companions that she will understand what
the grosser laugh of those around her suggests. The biological and
pathological curricula complete the loveless disflowering of her maiden
soul.
Everything which tends to obliterate the contrast of the sexes, like the
mixture of boys and girls in American common schools, tends also to
destroy the charm of intercourse, the savour and sweetness of life.
Seclusion lends an infinite seduction to the girl, whilst the rude and
bustling publicity of modern life robs woman of her grace. Packed like
herrings in a railway carriage, sleeping in odious vicinity to strangers
on a shelf, going days and nights without a bath, exchanging decency and
privacy for publicity and observation, the women who travel, save those
rich enough to still purchase seclusion, are forced to cast aside all
refinement and delicacy.
It is said that travel enlarges the mind. There are many minds which can
no more be enlarged, by any means whatever, than a nut or a stone. What
have their journeys round the world and their incessant gyrations done
for the innumerable princes of Europe? The fool remains a fool, though
you carry him or her about over the whole surface of the globe, and it
is certain that the promiscuous contact and incessant publicity of
travel, which may not hurt the man, do injure the woman.
Neither men nor women of genius are, I repeat, any criterion for the
rest of their sex; nay, they belong, as Plato placed them, to a third
sex which is above the laws of the multitude. But even whilst they do so
they are always the foremost to recognise that it is the difference, not
the likeness, of sex which makes the charm of human life. Barry Cornwall
wrote long ago,—
As the man beholds the woman,
As the woman sees the man;
Curiously they note each other,
As each other only can.
Never can the man divest her
Of that mystic charm of sex;
Ever must she, gazing on him,
That same mystic charm annex.
That mystic charm will long endure, despite the efforts to destroy it of
orators, in tight stays and balloon sleeves, who scream from platforms,
and the beings so justly abhorred of Mrs Lynn Lynton who smoke in public
carriages and from the waist upward are indistinguishable from the men
they profess to despise.
But every word, whether written or spoken, which urges the woman to
antagonism against the man, every word which is written or spoken to try
and make of her a hybrid, self-contained opponent of men, makes a rift
in the lute to which the world looks for its sweetest music.
The New Woman reminds me of an agriculturist who, discarding a fine farm
of his own, and leaving it to nettles, stones, thistles and wire-worms,
should spend his whole time in demanding neighbouring fields which are
not his. The New Woman will not even look at the extent of ground
indisputably her own, which she leaves unweeded and untilled.
Not to speak of the entire guidance of childhood, which is certainly
already chiefly in the hands of woman (and of which her use does not do
her much honour), so long as she goes to see one of her own sex dancing
in a lion’s den, the lions being meanwhile terrorised by a male brute;
so long as she wears dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats, so
long as she goes to races, steeplechases, coursing and pigeon matches;
so long as she ‘walks with the guns’; so long as she goes to see an
American lashing horses to death in idiotic contest with velocipedes, so
long as she curtsies before princes and emperors who reward the winners
of distance-rides; so long as she receives physiologists in her
drawing-rooms, and trusts to them in her maladies; so long as she
invades literature without culture, and art without talent; so long as
she orders her court-dress in a hurry, regardless of the strain thus
placed on the poor seamstresses; so long as she makes no attempt to
interest herself in her servants, in her animals, in the poor slaves of
her tradespeople; so long as she shows herself, as she does at present,
without scruple at every brutal and debasing spectacle which is
considered fashionable; so long as she understands nothing of the beauty
of meditation, of solitude, of Nature; so long as she is utterly
incapable of keeping her sons out of the shambles of modern sport, and
lifting her daughters above the pestilent miasma of modern society; so
long as she is what she is in the worlds subject to her, she has no
possible title or capacity to demand the place or the privilege of man,
for she shows herself incapable of turning to profit her own place and
her own privilege.