LYSISTRATA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
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_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_
By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_
_NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes_
By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_
By Dr F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_
By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defense of Chemical Warfare_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_
By Dora Russell (Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_
By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_In Preparation_
_PERSEUS, of Dragons_
By H. F. Scott Stokes, MA.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_
By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_
By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_Other Volumes in Preparation._
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+E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY+
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LYSISTRATA
OR
Woman’s Future and
Future Woman
BY
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI
_Author of “Woman: a Vindication,” “A
Defence of Aristocracy”; etc._
WITH FOREWORD BY
NORMAN HAIRE, CH.M., M.B.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1925
By E. P. DUTTΟΝ & COMPANY
-------
_All Rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
LETTER FROM DR NORMAN HAIRE
MY DEAR LUDOVICI,
It has been a great pleasure for me to read _Lysistrata_—it is so
stimulating. Whether one agrees with your views or not (and I disagree
with many of them), the book impels one to re-examine one’s standards of
value, and that is the highest function a book can perform.
Perhaps I am prejudiced, but to me you seem very hard on the medical
profession. With the present idiotic system of paying the doctor better
for illness than for health the wonder is, not that we doctors have so
many faults, but that we have so few. In a saner age we shall get a
retaining fee for keeping each person or group of persons well, and so,
in order to avoid excessive work, if for no higher motive, we shall aim
at preventing disease rather than at alleviating it. To a large extent
we do that now, in spite of the fact that it takes money out of our
pockets.
Your exhortation to breast-feed babies is backed by all but a few
cranks, and I find your suggestion to make confinement easier by proper
diet during pregnancy very interesting. I remember that at the obstetric
hospital at which I was trained we used to notice that patients who had
been on special treatment for albuminuria had, in general, easy
confinements. It is very significant, from the standpoint of your
suggestions, that in the diet of these patients the protein element had
been very greatly reduced. I shall follow up your idea and let you know
the result.
I am sure you are right when you say “Sound and desirable women cannot
be happy unmated.” The fact that there are some women who can does not
invalidate the general truth—they are atypical.
Another of your phrases I would that you should trumpet forth in a voice
that should reach to the uttermost ends of the earth: “Strictly
speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological
depravity.” I am confident that as Science advances the former will be
found always to depend on the latter.
In speaking of the unfit, infanticide, and concubinage, your frankness
is splendid, though on my pet subject, Birth-Control, I disagree with
you. There can be no doubt that much of our present-day
“humanitarianism” only results in wasting on the hopelessly unfit money
and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping
alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of
sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at
birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and
sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual
potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only
at a more advanced age. Contraception will be used mainly to ensure an
optimum interval between births in the interest of both mother and
child, and to limit the offspring to a (variable) number most suitable
in the individual, financial, and social circumstances of each family.
Some modification of our present marriage-arrangement is inevitable, and
concubinage seems quite a probable solution. At present we pretend to be
a monogamous people in spite of widespread fornication and adultery,
overtly with prostitutes and covertly with “amateurs.” But sooner or
later we shall have to drop the pretence and admit that men are
polygamous. (A few men are monogamous, and a few women polyandrous, but
both are exceptions.) Surely it would be better to allow every woman to
have half a husband, if she wants to, and remain respectable, than to
give half the women a whole husband and the others no share in a husband
at all.
For this book you will probably be denounced as a daring and fantastic
visionary, and I shall be blamed as an aider and abettor, but that
doesn’t matter. It will have stimulated many unthinking people to a
re-examination of their table of values.
Ever yours,
NORMAN HAIRE
_90, Harley Street, W._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
VALUES DIRECT SCIENCE
FROM a brief survey of his fellow-countrymen, there are many strange
lessons to be learnt in England to-day, by anyone who keeps his eyes
open and is on his guard against taking too much for granted.
The observer has only to exchange a few words with the men, women, and
children he passes by, and to look into their faces—no more is required
to tell him all he wishes to know. Nor will he need to have a very high
standard of human beauty to feel disappointed by the features of the
great majority, while the most elementary knowledge of psychology and
hygiene will enable him to see from their behaviour and expressions that
they are very largely harassed, unhealthy and badly fed (_i.e._, not
starving, but improperly nourished).
But among the first of the curious facts he will notice is this—that
large masses of his fellow-countrymen appear to have become so
thoroughly accustomed to living their lives with the help of every
variety of artificial aids that the latter no longer provoke either
shame or concern.
For instance, men and women—young and old—constantly pass by wearing
glasses, and they look quite cheerfully and confidently up through these
optical aids when they are addressed. To speak to others in the crowd,
and to see them smile, is to recognize instantly that some or all of
their teeth are bad or false. But they smile with just as much
conviction, whether their dentition happens to be natural or
manufactured. Numbers of the younger adults and children about have upon
their faces, in the region of their eyes and brows, certain tiny, almost
imperceptible, scars, revealing the fact that they were brought into the
world by means of obstetric instruments. And countless others there are
whose birth was just as artificial, though they bear no marks to show
it. But no one seems to trouble, or to inquire how such frequent
interference with a natural function might be avoided. Everywhere people
are seen shaking hands, and sincerely proclaiming themselves “Quite
well,” when that very morning, and many previous mornings, their
intestines have functioned only through the agency of some widely
advertized artificial aid. But none of them feels guilty of any grave
inaccuracy in declaring himself well in the circumstances.
Mothers can be seen by the hundred thousand, serenely wheeling in
perambulators, or leading by the hand, infants and children, not one of
whom has ever put its lips to a human breast. The advertisements
recommending the artificial foods on which these infants and children
have been reared can be read on every boarding. But it never occurs
either to the mothers themselves, or to the children, or to the
onlookers, to consider whether this state of affairs is of a kind that
justifies so much self-complacency, good cheer, indifference, and
apparent contentment.
These indications of a highly standardized life, revealing almost
universal imperfections of some kind in our bodies and their functions,
are now so common, so much a commonplace in our midst, that nobody
notices them, nobody mentions them as odd, and certainly nobody seems to
show any concern or alarm about their monotonous frequency.
Mention might be made of other less obvious aids to normal functions
which are in daily use among the population of these islands; but, since
we are speaking of the lessons that may be learned by an ordinary
observer who keeps his eyes and ears open in our streets and lanes, we
may well confine ourselves to the obvious.
Now, since all marked uniformity can result only from holding similar
fundamental views, similar general principles, in common, if our
wanderer wishes to pursue his observations he may be led to inquire from
what substratum of guiding rules, from what basic values, this
uniformity arises. If he is right in concluding that the population he
sees about him—the people who are regarded as well and healthy, not the
people who crowd our hospitals, asylums, and homes for cripples and
incurables!—are largely sub-normal, or sub-human, in the sense that they
are neither complete bodily nor capable of functioning without
artificial aids; if, moreover, he is right in thinking that they do not
seem to be much perturbed about their sub-humanity, he may wish to know
the nature of the atmosphere in which their thoughts and ideals are
formed. Their readiness to declare themselves “quite well,” or “quite
fit,” simply on the strength of their not being under a doctor, or on a
sick-bed, is singular. The question they ask themselves is not “Am I
really quite fit or well?” but “Am I just able to discharge my daily
duties, walk about, shop, have a family, and take ordinary meals?” If
they can answer this question in the affirmative, they reply with no
conscious insincerity that they are quite fit.
Evidently, then, among this population of to-day there is no severe
standard of good bodily condition, no cultivated taste about it. Or, if
there is, it is surprisingly low.
Defective functioning and incomplete bodily equipment no longer debars
anybody from regarding himself, or from being regarded by others, as
desirable and normal. Even in the vital matter of mating, this is so—how
much more customary it must be, therefore, in less vital matters! Stand
up, smile, and agitate your four limbs to indicate that they are intact
and still movable, and that is enough. The bias against a whole list of
defects and blemishes has completely disappeared.
Moral depravity is still stigmatized. About physiological depravity,
however, the world is frivolously indifferent. In the popular novels,
which best reflect the spirit of the age, the heroine rejects a suitor,
not because he has false teeth or chronic dyspepsia or varicose
veins—such things are so common that they are never mentioned; but
because he is “selfish,” or lacking in chivalry, or in “a sense of
humour.” The hero whom she accepts may be less healthy, less complete
anatomically than the man she rejects. He may also function less
normally, have two or three false teeth and a furred tongue—in fact, he
may be in every respect a much less desirable potential sire; but she
considers his “soul,” as the expression goes; and every reader is
satisfied that she behaves in the best possible way.
The spiritual atmosphere of our population, therefore, is one in which
all stress seems to be laid on the soul, in which the severe standards
are soul standards, and in which the importance of the body and its
completeness are almost entirely overlooked. As an instance of this, it
is interesting to note that there is no such thing to-day as a guilty
conscience about bodily depravity. The results of hundreds of years of
steady moralization has ended at last in the condition known as “guilty
conscience” becoming restricted entirely to the soul and to the moral
life. To say that so-and-so “can’t help it,” immediately stifles
criticism and arrests nausea. This alone shows how purely moral our
outlook is. Least of all are people able to despise themselves when
their own teeth are false, or when they habitually assist normal
functioning by means of artificial aids.
And in all these matters the unanimity of the modern civilized world is
so striking that the conclusion is forced upon us that here we are
confronted with the outcome of certain ruling and fundamental values
which must be common to all the people we have been discussing. From the
nature of the uniform attitude to which these values have led, we are
also obliged to infer that they must have taught at least two very
definite doctrines with unswerving consistency—(a) the over-emphasis of
the importance of the soul, and (b) the contempt and general slander of
the body. Or, to put it less offensively, they must have taught mankind
not only to place soul always before body, but also to leave the body
out of the reckoning when valuing the quality of human beings.
So much we know must have occurred, and we come to this conclusion
merely from judging the results which we see about us to-day. When,
however, we set out to inquire into the history of our population, and
attempt to discover whether such values have indeed operated in forming
their spiritual atmosphere, then, not only are our suspicions abundantly
confirmed, but we are actually able to lay our finger on the body of
doctrine containing the values whose existence we posited _a priori_.
Having attained this end, while we may still continue to deplore the
results we see about us, we can no longer wonder at them. Indeed, we
should marvel if, in such an atmosphere, we had failed to degenerate, or
ceased from degenerating. The wonder is, not that we have become a
nation of decadents and crocks, but that it should have taken all this
time to make us such a nation.
If our values had not for scores of generations turned us away from
strict standards concerning the body, it is inconceivable that we should
have become what we are; it is inconceivable that this atmosphere of
toleration and indifference towards bodily defects should have become so
universal. A nation ultimately becomes the image of its values. The
values are the die, the nation is the coin. From the face of the coin we
judge the die. From the faces of modern English people we can judge
their values.
Moreover, these values must have been so deeply rooted that they now
mould opinion without those whose opinion is moulded by them being
conscious of the source of their mental attitude. The best illustration
of this is that, although these values ultimately derive from a great
religion, the most irreligious people of the modern world share with the
religious the spiritual atmosphere we have been describing. People no
longer believing in the soul from the religious standpoint, nevertheless
show by their tolerance towards bodily defects, in themselves and
others, that they are being unconsciously influenced by the same
atmosphere. They may even have ceased to identify their opinions with
any fundamental values whatsoever, and regard their attitude as quite
original, as many, particularly women, do. No matter! Let them reveal
just that significant difference of standards in their judgment of human
“fitness” and their judgment of the “fitness” of animals, and we know
the ancestry of their mental attitude.
For this reason it is surely somewhat muddle-headed on the part of a
writer like Dean Inge, situated as he is, to plead with such vehemence
on behalf of Eugenics. For how can we hope for a reaction in favour of
the body as long as the values which lay all stress on the soul and
despise the body abide as an influence among us? Are they not the values
by which he stands, and which he is officially expected to inculcate
upon his generation?[1]
Footnote 1:
Mr. G. K. Chesterton is more consistent here, and shows a deeper
understanding of his true position. He, like Dean Inge, accepts the
fundamental values which by slow degrees have brought the modern world
into existence, and he therefore very rationally rejects Eugenics.
If ever these values are proved before the whole world to be false, and
cease to exercise any influence, no eugenic effort will then be
required. Because, the moment we begin to value people according to
their physiological _as well as_ their spiritual worth—the moment, that
is to say, we value them according to the promise which they give in
their own bodies and minds of guaranteeing the survival of human life in
a desirable form, eugenic mating will become quite as common and
instinctive as dysgenic mating is to-day.
Dean Inge, while recognizing the widespread degeneracy and physiological
botchedness to which allusion has been made, does not seem to perceive,
as our observer has, the singular readiness with which all modern people
overlook or condone it in themselves and others, and he argues,
plausibly enough, that our regrettable physical condition is due to our
industrialism and hypertrophic urbanism.
But this is tantamount to regarding the latest accompanying symptom of
our condition as its chief cause. For, in the first place, it is
extremely doubtful whether the Industrial Revolution could ever have
come about without that contempt for the body and its needs which lies
embedded in our ruling values. Secondly, does Dean Inge find no signs of
that contempt of the body before the Industrial Age? How about the
Middle Ages? How about the Great Rebellion in England? The present
writer once went to the pains of tracing all the Puritan contempt for
the body, and the fatal consequences it had for the English people, to
the values that Dean Inge upholds. He was even able to show that,
without those values, the seeds of modern industrialism could hardly
have been sown, as they were in the middle of the seventeenth
century.[2] Was not this before the so-called Industrial Revolution?
Footnote 2:
_Vide_ _A Defence of Aristocracy_ (Constable and Co., London: 1915).
How could the food-conditions in this country ever have become as
appalling as they are without an old tradition involving the neglect of
bodily concerns? These things antecede the Industrial Revolution, as the
present writer has shown elsewhere, by hundreds of years. Evidently,
then, strict standards about the body had already gone long before the
Industrial Age. And, when the latter came, it found no barriers in the
English people’s prejudices regarding the body and health: otherwise it
could never have proceeded as successfully as it did to a further
debilitation of the national physique.
We may take it, then, that the spiritual environment of all modern
sub-human people is the outcome of our fundamental values, as is also
their sub-humanity; and that this spiritual environment is characterized
by a tendency to neglect and despise the body and bodily considerations.
At all events, to put it in the mildest and most moderate terms, it is
impossible _altogether to absolve these fundamental values from
responsibility in the matter_; and to ignore their influence, and to
join the Eugenic movement, without first reckoning with their power, as
Dean Inge has done, is to be guilty of a confusion of thought unworthy
of anyone who professes to guide public opinion.
Now what is the material environment of our population?—Quite clearly,
it is one in which the mechanical elaboration of daily life has been
carried to a degree entirely bewildering. These sub-human people of the
twentieth century live among marvels of technical skill and ingenuity;
and the appliances, apparatus, and general equipment of their every-day
life have reached a complexity and perfection quite unprecedented in
history. Far from having learnt any lesson from the doctrines Darwin
taught last century, all our energy and skill have been concentrated in
precisely the opposite direction. Progressive evolution is no longer a
fact with us; for, as a species we are steadily falling back to a level
below that attained by our race in former ages. While we ourselves,
however, steadily recede along the scale of quality, our environmental
conditions, our tools, our means, acquire ever greater perfection.
The onus of evolution has, as it were, been transferred from our own
shoulders to the shoulders of our environment. Blinded by the dazzling
achievements of the mechanical and other sciences, we still speak about
ourselves as if it were we, as living organisms, who were continuing to
evolve. But, truth to tell, it is nothing of the sort. Even in the
sphere of intellectual powers, we are miserably below standards already
achieved.
To the bulk of unobservant and unthinking mankind, this state of affairs
is largely hidden; because, while science increases the efficiency of
our extra-corporeal equipment, it has also, _pari passu_ with our
degeneration, provided us with the means of keeping our corporeal
equipment going. Almost as fast as we have wanted them, the sciences of
chemistry and of medicine have given us the means of replacing lost
parts of our bodies, and of supplementing failing functions. A whole
sphere of activity—indeed a whole world of interests and ingenuity—has
been created by modern physical degeneracy. The patent-medicine,
patent-appliance, and patent-food industries, alone represent some of
the largest going concerns in the land. In fact, it might be said that
these industries themselves are but the reverse of the medal
representing our fundamental values. Where you have values such as ours,
you will necessarily possess a huge and flourishing medical profession
and a vast army of dentists, chemists, and osteopaths, daily directing
their wits towards making good the increasing defects of the human body.
You will also be compelled to have your patent-drug, patent-appliance,
and patent-food magnates, who, taking advantage of the universal
physiological depravity of their contemporaries, amass large fortunes in
merely offering “salvation” at popular prices to the physiologically
depraved.
To be strictly logical, even the nature of scientific research should be
added to the consequences of a people’s ruling values; because the
ultimate goal of scientific investigation is necessarily determined by
the desiderata implicit in values. If the values of an age tend more and
more towards tolerating bodily defects, and towards securing
satisfaction merely by patching or artificially replacing them,
scientific research will concentrate ever more and more on those
discoveries which promise either to alleviate physical degeneration or
else to conceal it. And, as fast as we slough off further parts of our
bodies, or lose further powers of functioning, we may rely upon science
being ever ready with artificial aids, to make our lives just possible
notwithstanding.
In this way, _values direct science_. If we altered our ruling values,
we should find that the direction of science was also altered, because
the desiderata always implicit in ruling values would then have changed.
“But,” cry the modernists _à outrance_, “if science is ever ready, and
will continue to be ever ready, with artificial aids to make good the
losses in our corporeal equipment and efficiency, why all this fuss and
pother? Why worry?”
Now this view, tacitly held or openly professed by the bulk of modern
mankind to-day, would be all very well, and would justify a certain
modicum of optimistic contentment, if we could act and think, and
continue to reproduce our kind in a desirable form, independently of our
bodies. But, unfortunately for the modern man, this is impossible. Not
only that, but a good many of life’s joys—some of its greatest and most
lasting—are connected precisely with the reproduction of our kind, with
the maintenance of our bodily efficiency, and with happy functioning.
The moment physiological serenity goes, the moment a function ceases to
be a pleasure, the body becomes the most tyrannical and insistent
pleader against Life. It constantly sets the most formidable
question-mark against the value of Life.
The pleasures of the healthily functioning body are very real pleasures.
They constitute a very large proportion of the sum of joy on earth. And
nothing can be more obvious than that Nature means them to contribute
largely to this sum of joy. To eat with false teeth is not as pleasant
as to eat with natural teeth. Artificially to promote either appetite or
digestion soon proves but a poor and delusive imitation of Nature’s way.
To wear glasses is not as good as to be without them. Neither is the
face or the expression of one who always wears glasses as attractive as
the face and the expression of one who does not. To a mother, the
hand-feeding of her infant child is not the unforgettable experience
that breast-feeding is. And, in the deepest and most rapturous
transports of love, where a large proportion of the ecstasy depends upon
the bodily savouriness and sweetness of the couple involved, natural and
normal physiological equipment is of paramount importance. A clean
mouth, full of natural teeth, firmly set in unimpaired gums; a clean
fresh tongue, not even slightly furred by incipient chronic indigestion;
a sweet breath, and the natural fragrance of a healthily functioning
body!—who knows love as Nature intended him to know it if he has not
known these things?
And yet, how many modern men and women ever can know love in this form?
How is it possible?
Can it be wondered at, therefore, that modern mankind as a whole are
beginning to suspect that the _joie de vivre_ is grossly over-rated? Can
it be wondered at that the bulk of mankind are beginning to feel that
life can well be lived without love?
This, then, is the disillusionment that follows on the heels of the
values directing our scientific progress. While, through them, we are
content to exist despite our defective bodily equipment, we are
gradually weaned from our love of life and from our deepest convictions
concerning the value of life. For not only does our debilitated or
incomplete body itself give us but second-rate joys, but the science
that comes to our aid offers us only substitutes, and we are apt to
measure the value of life according to those second-rate joys, and
according also to the level of happiness attained by means of these
substitutes.
Thus the values that revile both life and the body in the end succeed in
making both life and the body vile.
So much for the æsthetic side, which is important, because life is very
largely an æsthetic phenomenon. But there are even more serious
consequences than these. For instance, it is highly improbable that our
vitality and intellectuality can fail to suffer depreciation when once
normal functioning has been interfered with. So intricate and
inter-dependent are the various parts and functions of the superior
mammal’s body, that it is hardly possible to disturb the balance of one
part or one function without impairing the whole. Thus it is not
unlikely, in these latter days when ninety-nine per cent. of the
population of highly civilized countries is suffering from some kind of
defective function or bodily part, that all of us are sub-human in
spirit as well as in body. It is even conceivable that the hopeless pass
at which we are arriving in Western civilization is but the inevitable
outcome of our chronic sub-normality or sub-humanity, and that nothing
but a reform of our bodies can possibly help us out.
Nor is it any longer valid to argue that this view is materialistic. We
thank Dean Inge _en passant_ for his able reply to those who, objecting
to the standpoint that has just been advanced, are ready to accuse those
who hold it of materialism.
At all events we can honestly deny that we are materialists, and do not
believe that we are any the less religious or spiritual for having
fought hard for our heterodox religious views through years of
metaphysical study and thought. Secondly, we repudiate the suggestion
that to preach the care and maintenance of the beauty and health of the
body is necessarily material; for it is the invalid, the sick man, the
man of this age, who calls himself “well,” who is constantly reminded of
his body. A healthily functioning body can be forgotten. Thanks to its
serenity, its muteness in efficiency, it allows its owner to indulge in
every variety of spiritual exercise.
While, therefore, we accuse the values which for centuries have cast a
slur on life and the human body of being the cause of modern decadence,
we do not thereby proclaim ourselves either irreligious or
materialistic; for, let those who would too hastily presume both our
irreligiosity and materialism remember that there are other religions
besides that which first created the body-despising values to which we
allude.
And, when we challenge the modern age to prove that it can be anything
else than materialistic, with its countless millions of sick or
deficient bodies; when we challenge it to show in what manner the two
thousand years of body-contempt and body-neglect have led us to a
loftier spirituality, the very grossness of modern life, the very
besottedness of the modern mind, and the very system of government in
the modern world, _Democracy_, which is materialism in politics
(estimating the value of an idea or policy by measuring the
_body-weight_ behind it, not by measuring the authority, ability, or
competence behind it)—all rise before us in their ugliness, leaving us
but few qualms concerning the danger that we, of our persuasion, run, of
falling into materialism by questioning the values that have brought us
thus far.
The masses are materialistic to-day because, in the first place, lowered
vitality and defective functioning depress the spirit and dull the wits,
thus unfitting the mind for all lofty pursuits; and, secondly, because
at every moment of their lives their attention is either riveted upon
their own halting functions or else distracted by similar disturbances
in those among whom their lot is cast.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT POSITION OF WOMEN
(I) THE UNMARRIED
WE have seen that the disillusionment that dogs the heels of the values
directing our civilization and its alleged progress consists in our
ultimate discovery that Life, as seen through the optics of our impaired
and science-aided bodies, appears to have lost a substantial portion of
its reputed value. The _joie de vivre_ becomes an antiquated myth, no
longer a present experience.
If, however, this is true from the standpoint of modern men, how very
much more true it must be from that of modern women! For, if it is right
to claim that some of Life’s greatest and most lasting joys are
connected with the maintenance of the species, woman, whose share in
reproduction is much greater than man’s, must necessarily be the greater
sufferer when the corporeal equipment of the race becomes defective.
In these degenerate days of fourth-rate bodily joys, therefore, when the
corporeal equipment of man and woman has to be scientifically completed
with the help of elaborate extra-corporeal aids, it is among the women
of the species that we should expect to find the greatest revolt against
the old notions concerning Life, Motherhood, and Domesticity.
For man’s degeneracy in itself contributes an added woe to woman’s
impaired physical life, by depriving her of the very extra-corporeal
equipment (supplied by Nature herself in this case) for the urgent needs
of her body. Or, if it does not altogether deprive her of this
equipment, it gives it to her in a form so atonic, fireless, and
un-ideal that the misery of modern women, even when they are married, is
very great. Hence, we believe, the huge development of the modern novel,
the demand for which has been created almost entirely by the female
population. For only people whose lives are unsatisfying endeavour to
enjoy life vicariously in the unreal world of fiction.
Perhaps it was the recognition of this fact, that the value of life for
woman depends to a great extent on her physical efficiency and health,
which led the ancients to feel so much concern about the physical
condition of their womenfolk, and this probably explains why such
careful instructions are to be found in sacred books—like that of Manu,
for instance—regarding a father’s duty towards his daughters.
Manu goes so far as to say: “Reprehensible is the father who gives not
his daughter in marriage at the proper time.” And he adds: “To a
distinguished handsome suitor should a father give his daughter.... But
the maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s
house until death than that he should ever give her to a man destitute
of good qualities.”
In _Ecclesiasticus_ we read the following exhortation to fathers: “Hast
thou daughters? Have a care of their body.”[3]
Footnote 3:
It might be argued against the line taken in the Introduction that
here is an instance of the care of the body in the literature from
which the body-despising values are alleged to hail. But this is a
misunderstanding. Not only is _Ecclesiasticus_ apocryphal, but also,
as everybody must know, the Old Testament and the New are quite
different in their attitude towards the body. In the New Dispensation,
and certainly in traditional Christianity, it is never suggested, as
it is in Judaic law, that a man who is bodily defective defiles the
sanctuary of the Lord when he approaches it. This healthy attitude to
the body, which constantly recurs in the Old Testament, can be found
neither in the New Testament nor in historical Christianity.
And in Aristophanes we find the following sentiment expressed by a
married woman: “Καὶ Θἠμέτερον μὲν ἐᾶτε; περὶ των δὲ χορῶν ἐν τοῖς
θαλάμοις γηρασχουσῶν ἀνιῶμαι” (But do not let us complain about
ourselves. What breaks my heart is the sight of all these young girls
who will grow old sleeping alone.) Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, ll.
592-3.
Evidently these exhortations and sentiments hail from an age preceding
that in which the body-despising values were created, for they breathe a
different atmosphere, and ring strangely in our ears.
As late as the sixteenth century in England, when, it may be supposed, a
vestige of the old pagan spirit still lingered among our people, there
is indeed a tender allusion to the female body; and, strange to say, it
occurs in our _Book of Common Prayer_. But the very oddness of the
sentiment to our modern ears shows how completely foreign it is to the
atmosphere created by our values, and we may be sure that it is seldom
read, or, if read, seldom understood, at a modern marriage service. It
is as follows:
“For the husband is the head of the wife ... and he is the
Saviour of the body.”
We have lost all sympathy with this attitude. We no longer consider the
physical side of our daughters’ and sisters’ lives. We may wish them to
have a “good time”; or, if we are poor, we wish them to be
self-supporting. But bodily considerations scarcely enter into the first
wish, and into the second—never!
Coupled, however, with our attitude of callous indifference to the young
female’s body is also the increasing doubt which is spreading among all
classes regarding the actual value of the normal and natural life for
woman. Impaired physical efficiency has turned so many of the joys and
beauties of the natural life to pain and horror that there is no longer
that certainty which Manu felt about the desirability of motherhood for
women. And, even when motherhood is not regarded as a greatly over-rated
pleasure, the mates by means of whom motherhood can be experienced are,
as a rule, such poor shadows of men that the whole of Manu’s attitude
has begun to be discredited. The Feminist Movement, in fact, is actively
engaged in discrediting it, and that is why the Feminist Movement itself
may be regarded as a remote off-shoot of the body-despising values.
Indeed, things have come to such a pass in this country that at present
rich and poor alike are far more concerned about giving their daughters
a calling than a mate; and, when once this has been done, it is felt
that parents have discharged their responsibility.
The most convincing demonstration of the prevalence of this attitude was
the uproar that arose a year or two ago, when one or two imprudent
journalists inadvertently referred to our 2,000,000 excess of women over
men as “surplus women.” The daily press was immediately flooded by
indignant letters from women of all classes, protesting that, as a large
proportion of these 2,000,000 were self-supporting and ample room
existed for the remainder in our industries and professions, it was
absurd to speak of them as “surplus.” Articles soon followed, in which
the same views were expressed, though possibly more magisterially. But
there was no reference to the bodily destiny of these 2,000,000
females—not a hint that the word “surplus” might have some relevancy if
they were looked at in relation to the available males, or that a
civilization which condemns one-sixth of its adult females to celibacy
must be very wrong!
It was for all the world as if being self-supporting and useful in
industry or the professions were the sole and unique object of human
life, and nobody seemed to see that, in this case, there was no
conceivable reason why human beings should have been created or become
male and female. Of course the howl of indignation that arose at the
word “surplus” was greatest among those women who are frankly hostile to
men, and who are keenest about making the bodily destiny of their sex a
matter of no consequence. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the attitude
adopted by all was never actually felt as cruelty by anyone, because the
very people responsible for those articles and letters would have been
the last to suspect themselves, or to be suspected by others, of any
trace of inhumanity. All they wanted to imply, and wished everybody else
to believe, was that a human life can be full and can be lived
adequately _without that_!
And yet to anyone who reveres the body, and who knows how the spirit is
tortured by a body unsatisfied and neglected, how thoroughly unfounded
does this claim appear! A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside. It
seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff. True sublimation, except
through whole-hearted and unremitting religious practices, is rare. What
then is the fate of these 2,000,000 women? Can we reckon with certainty
on their all being so much below even the common standard of their
married sisters that they will have no instincts to thwart? There is an
inclination abroad to adopt this comforting view. So accustomed have we
become to the spectacle of our omnibuses, trams, and trains being filled
each morning with unmarried female workers, that we are easily led to
the erroneous conclusion that, as time goes on, these female workers
will grow as used to filling their lives by means of self-support as we
have grown accustomed to seeing them.
And, indeed, there would be something to be said for this view if, by a
kind of unemotional parthenogenesis, these spinster workers could breed
their own kind, each generation of whom would be ever more perfectly
adapted. But unfortunately this cannot be so. People forget that each
generation of them is born from mothers who, in an uninterrupted line
reaching right back to our anthropoid ancestors, have filled their lives
with something more than self-support and business usefulness. Each
generation of these unmated women-workers is born from mothers who must
have known the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated
love, and the clinging devotion of adoring offspring. No break can have
occurred in this long dynasty of love, otherwise they—the women-workers
themselves—would not be there. It is impossible at present to rear a
species of human beings to lovelessness as you can rear a breed of dogs
to retrieving or sheep-minding. Love must always have existed one step
back. And it is this fact, that these unmated women-workers are all so
fatally close to love, all such near blood-relations of love, that makes
lovelessness such an ordeal and a trial to them—an ordeal and a trial no
human being who has not sinned against society should be made to suffer.
Thus the modern world is inclined to be very cruel to the young unmated
woman. For, while everything is done to facilitate her self-support and
usefulness, no provision is made either to ensure the sublimation of her
mating instincts (a problem of almost insuperable difficulty now, though
solved with success in the Middle Ages), or to give her the chance of
expressing them without dishonour and disgrace. On the contrary, the
whole tendency is to ignore, to shelve, and to conceal that aspect of
her life; and thousands of bitter or sub-normal women, whose thwarted or
deficient passions have unsaddled their natural love of man, are now
only too eager to assure her and everybody else that human beings can
well get on and be happy without sexual expression—in fact that a spirit
and a body can quite easily play the life-long rôle of a disembodied
spirit.
All this does not mean that the solution of the unmated woman problem is
an easy and obvious one, which modern people are too blind to see. But
it does mean that the very first step towards its proper solution can
never be taken as long as we persist in arguing and behaving as if a
full life can be lived by merely paying one’s way.
In 1921 the population of England and Wales amounted to 37,885,242
persons, of whom 19,803,022 were females. Of this female population
4,302,568 consisted of children under twelve, and the remainder,
amounting to 15,501,454, were divided up as follows:
9,070,538 were married or widowed or divorced, and 6,403,916 were
single. Of the married 1,106,433, and of the single 4,000,000 (to be
precise, 3,914,127) were occupied in some form of work, thus making a
total of 5,020,560 women-workers, 3,000,000 of whom were employed in
industry alone.
These figures give some idea of the formidable development of women’s
employment within recent years, nor is there any sign whatsoever that
the movement is likely to abate. Those who are aware of the harm that
modern industry and commercial offices have done to the spirit and
bodies of men for generations, by converting them into little more than
machine-minders or adding-machines, exercising few if any of their
highest faculties, may deplore the fact that the sex which hitherto had
still to a large extent escaped these dehumanizing labours should now be
enrolled in such large numbers to accomplish them. The last check on the
complete besotment of our people seems thus to have vanished. But, in
view of the existing atmosphere and tendencies, there seems to be little
hope of a reaction.
The 4,000,000 spinster workers alone represent a formidable army; and,
when it is remembered that this vast legion of single women not only
compete with and directly replace male labour, thus reducing still more
their chances of marriage, but are also drawn away from home and from
the many arts that could be learnt there, we cannot help feeling alarmed
at the possible consequences of the development we are witnessing.
The duties and virtues of the home are almost all connected with the
body and its care—sewing, cooking, and the nurture of the young. All
these arts are gradually being lost; and, when they have to be performed
by inexperienced hands, they are performed badly.
Meanwhile, abetting this movement and rendering it ever more
practicable, there are hundreds and thousands of commercial and
voluntary corporations whose whole energies are directed towards taking
the home-arts out of the hands of women. Science, as usual, following
the hints implicit in values, has come to the assistance of our female
population deficient in domestic skill and knowledge. The art of cooking
is gradually becoming simplified into a mere fool’s game, and in its
place we are being deluged by innumerable patent and proprietary
products, the preparation of which requires no thought and no trouble.
These products are very largely injurious to the bodies of those who
live on them, but, as they leave the housewife ample leisure to gad
about or else to earn money outside the home, no one complains. Quick
gravy-makers, pudding- and cake-powders, tinned foods of every
description all ready for consumption, custards, porridges, and jellies
that require only a few minutes’ cooking, jams and preserves, and a
multitude of other artificial aids to replace, though not to equal, the
dishes of former days, now compose the normal contents of almost every
working-class and middle-class market-bag. Never have the country’s food
and its preparation been in a more deplorable condition than they are
to-day. Nevertheless, so strong is the tradition to neglect bodily
concerns, that all this vast machinery for supplementing traditional
knowledge, skill, labour, and good food, in the home, has grown up in
our midst without a word of protest from anyone.
As regards the lot of infants and children, so completely broken is the
tradition which, once upon a time, was handed down from mother to
daughter, that now child-welfare-workers in every town in England,
equipped with but a smattering of sound knowledge on the subject, have
to teach the women of the masses the arts they have had no opportunity
of acquiring. In the departments of dress-making, millinery, and
lingerie, it is just the same. Together with the loss of skill and
knowledge in the home, the supply of ready-mades from outside increases
with leaps and bounds, and huge drapery-businesses, carried on in
palatial premises, now line all our leading thoroughfares in a
practically unbroken frontage.
Thus, even if the girls and young women of the nation who are or who are
not eligible for marriage were to remain at home, there would now be
little for them to learn, and still less for them to do; and the recent
Girl Guide Movement is the best possible proof that this fact has
already been recognized.
Meanwhile, it may be asked what it is that these 4,000,000 learn away
from their homes. What do they acquire in exchange for their lost arts?
Those who have not actually adopted dress-making, millinery, or lingerie
as an occupation, have, as a rule, acquired only the knowledge necessary
for running a certain machine—a cutter, a folder, a binder, a stamper,
or a typewriter, etc. Or else they have learnt to wait in restaurants,
sell goods across a counter, or keep books. Only about one million of
them are either domestic servants or hospital nurses.
Those engaged in industry or commerce who remain at their work and do
not marry are at least prevented from passing on their acquired
besotment to the next generation; but, meantime, no one inquires about
their bodies, and the general feeling is that a girl withered and broken
by long years of typing is not a tragic figure because in the first
place her career has been morally unimpeachable, and secondly it has
brought neither herself nor anyone else any pleasure.
In the better classes, teaching and the professions obtain the bulk of
the recruits each year,[4] and girls are now trained quite unselectively
from earliest childhood with a view to entering these occupations, as if
it were taken for granted that they would never marry.
Footnote 4:
In 1923 in England and Wales there were 22 women barristers, and 66
law students; 5 women solicitors; 76,117 Government officials, and
2,000 doctors; and, in 1921, 93,987 elementary and secondary
school-teachers.
Not all of the 6,403,916 spinsters—whether workers or not—are doomed to
spinsterhood. As we have seen, the excess of females over males in
England and Wales is only 1,720,902.[5] But unless they attempt to
emigrate, these odd 2,000,000 must certainly remain unmated, and even if
emigration could now be organized on a much bigger scale than hitherto,
they could hardly be satisfactorily disposed of.
Footnote 5:
Although, however, the actual excess of women amount to 1,720,902, the
number of women actually doomed to spinsterhood is much greater, owing
first to the cases of celibacy among the available men and secondly to
the marriage of widows.
The self-governing Dominions cannot absorb more than 432,284[6] in all,
and even if they could, it is doubtful whether such a large number of
girls could be induced to leave their native country. Why should they,
when almost every one of them considers her chance of matrimony at home
as at least equal to her sister’s or neighbour’s?
Footnote 6:
This figure represents the excess of men over women in Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in 1921.
Dame Muriel Talbot, O.B.E., writing on the effect of Dominion life, is
not so very encouraging either. “For the woman,” she says, “it means
only too often an unduly heavy burden of work since there are so few at
hand to help.”[7]
Footnote 7:
See _The Woman’s Year Book_, 1923.
Owing to the degeneracy and unattractiveness of modern man, a certain
noble and estimable proportion of these 6,000,000 will of course refrain
from any attempt at marriage. Still faithful to the lost and antiquated
values that once led people to respect and care for their bodies, they
will feel secretly that their bodies deserve something better than the
mate the twentieth century can offer them; and, although they may be
fully and admirably equipped for happy motherhood, this noble and very
small minority will turn nauseated away from it in order to become
absorbed in interests that will help them to forget. These are the
greatest sufferers among modern women, and their unmated condition
constitutes our greatest national loss.
But the great majority will be too thoroughly unsophisticated, too
completely immersed in the values of their day, to see anything wrong or
odd in degeneration. These, like the 9,000,000 already mated, will
strive after marriage and the home. They will insist on having their
third-rate or fourth-rate bodily ecstasies with the inferior men of the
age, and on rearing their fourth-rate children. And, if their hopes are
disappointed, either through their inability to find a mate or owing to
the rude awakening that too often comes with modern matrimony, they will
become either wretched spinsters or disgruntled wives. We shall consider
their fate as wives, however, in the next chapter.
There are also a large number whose bodies are so conspicuously inferior
in passion and equipment that they will be indifferent to marriage
through sheer physiological apathy. Looking at life through the optics
of their atonic or badly functioning bodies, they will declare love
unnecessary to human well-being, and the natural life a wholly
antiquated desideratum. They will lack the desire even for fourth-rate
bodily experiences, and scorn all such experiences in consequence. They
will boast that they are “above sex.” To them the Feminist reformers
will point triumphantly in refutation of all the arguments of those who,
like ourselves, claim that sound and desirable women cannot be happy
unmated. And the more simple and unsuspecting among mankind, looking
upon these adapted unmated women, will begin to believe that the
Feminists are right. As the number of these women increases every year,
and, in their systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are
joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who
also have become slanderers of love and man, the ranks of those who
scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for
women, swell with imposing rapidity.
With two million spinsters, and—if we reckon the disgruntled married
women—with probably two or three million more women distributed all over
England, who are prepared to malign both man and life and to cause the
effect of their thwarted impulses to be felt in a thousand ways, a good
deal of misery and friction must necessarily arise from modern
conditions which it is extremely difficult to relieve.
But the most serious aspect of the spinster and embittered wife
question, from the standpoint of the nation’s life, is the compensation
which, consciously or unconsciously, these unmated women and revolted
wives, particularly the wealthy and leisured ones, seek for their
thwarted instincts. The mother’s fostering care never having been
experienced, its joys and thrills are sought along other channels. The
lust of exercising power becomes a consuming passion, and its owner is
usually quite indifferent as to the means she uses to express it. Any
movement, any policy, any kind of interference may supply the
opportunity, and the merits of the case will always be subordinate to
the urgent need of alleviating the hunger for compensatory power. Thus
influences and forces are let loose which have about as much wisdom in
them as accident alone can be expected to introduce into any lustful
action; and, all the while, the loftiest motives will be professed for
the activities pursued. The very natural discontent which arises from
thwarted instincts will also tend to express itself in many instances,
particularly among the disillusioned married, as a bitter hatred of man;
and, as I shall show later, in its extreme form as an unconscious
jealousy of healthy young women and happily married women. This will
lead to an attempt to wean the latter from the lure of love and men.
Signs are already visible which show that such a movement is on foot,
and, although these Lysistratas of the modern world have not
Lysistrata’s patriotic motives, this will not make them any the less
anxious to achieve their end.
At all events, from the imperfectly concealed triumph with which such
people, particularly the female working-woman leaders, will tell you
that in 1923 700,000 of the 5,020,560 women-workers were _directly
replacing males_ in industry alone, it is impossible not to read the
signs of hostility to the male in their general outlook; and, to examine
their literature, is to become convinced of it, careful as they are to
cover it up.
Among the organizers of women-movements to-day, there can be no question
that there is this note of hostility to the male; and the reason of it
is that women-movements are largely led either by spinsters or else by
unhappy married women.
Now the attitude of Feminism towards our vast army of spinsters and
disgruntled wives is that of Socialist organizations all over the world
towards discontented labour elements. It is one in which the latent
discontent is turned to every possible advantage for the Cause. Feminism
offers no bodily solution of the problem presented by our unmated women
and our disillusioned wives, and it escapes from the responsibility of
so doing by consistently regarding the whole crowd as nothing more than
disembodied spirits. It does not even recognize that the muddle in which
we now find ourselves is chiefly due to physical degeneration: for that
it is too Puritanical. All it does is to promote and intensify the very
tendencies which have brought us to our present pass, and to use the
power obtained from its supporters to express in every possible way,
legislatively and otherwise, its general hostility to man and its
radical hatred of the bodily side of life.
Meanwhile, it misses no opportunity of appealing to the vanity and
mistaken ambition of its potential victims, in order to lure even the
normal and desirable among modern young women in ever greater numbers
into neutral pursuits and interests only fit for neuters. And it sets to
work with a conscience so clean, with such a profound conviction of its
rectitude, and above all with such a great display of moral indignation,
that the more guileless sections of the modern world, always taken in by
moral indignation, are almost led to believe that Feminism is a natural
and desirable evolutionary development, on which all hope for the future
depends.
Why does Feminism act with a conscience so clean and a conviction so
profound of its rectitude?—Because, behind it, it feels the support of
the body-despising values, which tell it that Puritanism is right, that
sex-equality is at last a fact owing to the marked degeneration of man,
and that man, as the traditional enemy of female “virtue,” is _the_
enemy _par excellence_.
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