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MODERN WOMAN
HER INTENTIONS
BY
FLORENCE FARR
[Illustration: Logo]
LONDON FRANK PALMER 12-14 RED LION COURT
_Another fire has come into the harp,_
_Fire from beyond the world, and wakens it:_
_It has begun to cry out to the eagles!_
W. B. YEATS,
_Second version of “Shadowy Waters.”_
_First published 1910. All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Mr. Galsworthy’s toy dog--Jewish religion--Embryology _page_ 7
I
THE VOTE
Latent period before explosion--Refusal of the vote
has given impetus to revolutionary enthusiasm--Thin
end of the wedge--Ingenuity of women--A
working woman and the hospital official’s
chivalry--Thirty-two million workers, half-million
independent means, two million of idle spinsters
in England and Wales--Our wants 15
II
WOMEN’S INCOMES
Lucrative professions for women--Opera singing--Theatrical,
Literature, Medical, Expert, and
average incomes--Other work--Independent incomes--Marriage
for money--Courtesans, prostitutes,
and riff-raff--Economic independence is a
way of ennobling sex relations--Marriage often
settles down into business partnership--The working
man’s wife--Eugenic advantages of economic
independence--Racial and social ideals are opposed
to each other at present 25
III
THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE
The difficulty of a lasting attachment--Enthusiasm
of youth--English girls apt to mistake interest for
love--The virtuous wife--The flow and ebb of the
tide of love--Permanent relations often founded
on mutual contempt--Jealousy of relations--Mr.
Harold Gorst’s _Philosophy of Love_--The marriage
tie must persist because it suits one half of the
population--Six million bachelors and seven
million spinsters in England and Wales--The
ostracism of the unfaithful is more often the cause
of disease becoming serious than infidelity--The
emotional degradation of a loveless marriage 33
IV
THE SORDID DIVORCE
Marriage laws to be reformed--Binding marriage in
the Catholic Church--Bond of parenthood--The
bond between the unattractive people--Heiresses--The
childless--The extraordinarily attractive--Sordidness
of English divorce--Restitution of conjugal
rights--Suggested reform--Agreement in
wishing for divorce should be the first cause for
it--Questions of fortune or wealth to be fought out
on economic grounds--Boredom the chief reason
that people part, but too insulting to be mentioned
in public--French _dot_--Sale of beauty--Sale of
helpmate--Fixed allowance for “bed” and fixed
allowance for “board”--The birth of child should
automatically make a bond as in remote country
places--The Saturday orgy and prudence--Drugging
and prudence--The police court and the
wife’s housekeeping money--A romance of the
mining world 41
V
THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN
Edmond de Goncourt’s account of courtesans in Tokio--Urgent
danger of delay in reform--Fear of the
spread of contagious disease--A trades union for
prostitutes--The good of Public Health in this
matter the good of future generations--Clean bill
of health gives special susceptibility--_Les
Avariés_--Anti-social rage--The various moral standards
of women--Dangers of promiscuity not so great
as the dangers of a cut finger or chapped lip--The
sale of virginity--Intoxication leads to
promiscuity, but it is not natural to the average
woman--The ardour of a fresh lover her greatest
temptation--Is charm of value as a racial factor?
The attitude of marrying women 53
VI
BEAUTY AND MOTHERHOOD
The terror of motherhood--Women will specialize--Lovers
of men and lovers of children--A woman
has an instinct for the right father for her child;
but often chooses a bad lifelong companion for
herself--Useless old ethical codes--Practical suggestion
for race betterment--Sterilization of the
unfit--Education in the laws of sexual health--Motherly
women with no chance of children--Unmotherly
women attractive to men and very
good helpmates--Surgical aid for the tuberculosis
child-producer--Prejudices--Intellectual education 63
VII
THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Life Consciousness--The Man, the Insect, the Tree
are representatives of Intellect, Instinct, and
Torpid Consciousness--Henri Bergson and William
James--The interplay of the three kinds of
consciousness--Motherhood and the vegetative
consciousness--Choosing the mate and the instinctive
consciousness--The Matriarchal civilization--The
surprises instinct prepares for intellect in dreams
and inventions 70
VIII
THE IMAGINATIVE WOMAN
Physical love, reproduction--Emotional love, a
satisfaction or enjoyment--Scientific curiosity
about love--Philosophic and sympathetic understanding
of all sorts of love--Imaginative love
makes the consciousness elemental--The glory
and danger of imagination--Vicarious imagination
in reading--The middle-aged suppress imagination
in the young--Saintly beauty--Philosophy,
Criticism, Sensuousness, and commonplace life--Madness,
Folly, Drink, Drugging--The imaginative
man is womanly in these respects--Weiningen’s
_Sex and Character_--Forel, Bloch--Mr.
Austen Chamberlain 78
IX
EXPERIMENTS
Solitude and family--The home--The gay societies
of the past--Solemn experiments in love--Civilization
a protection from, or concealment of, the
animal necessities--Eating in public--Privacy--When
truth is goodness--Useful conventions--Saint
Teresa and her men friends--Lead the way
if you want to make an experiment; if you want
to follow anyone, it is a sign you should follow the
herd 84
X
THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED
The Spaniard, the Russian, the Parisian--Intellect,
art, morals, religion, and women--Conspicuousness--The
fight against the patriarchal goat--The
passing love--The necessity of many friends--The
real play of the life to come 91
PREFACE
There is a great difficulty in writing of the women of the first ten
years of the twentieth century. This is to be the Woman’s Century. In
it she is to awake from her long sleep and come into her kingdom; but
when I look about me I find myself surrounded by the most terribly
contradictory facts. We know there is to be a revaluation of all
values--we know that old rubbish is to be burnt up, that the social
world is to be melted down and remoulded “nearer to the heart’s
desire”; but at the same time we have to recognize that in spite of the
enthusiasm of the alchemists and the transmuters of base metal into
gold, the main body of society is as yet hardly aware of the fire that
is to burn it.
In writing of this change I have to explain to one set of women, who
will think me outrageously advanced, my opinions of another set of
women, who will think me absurdly conventional.
I think I had better own up at once that as an artist I am prejudiced
against the exhibition of the necessities of nature. I am like Mr.
Galsworthy’s little toy terrier, who disliked the strong odours of real
life. Yet at the same time I have a passion for the discussion of life;
the salt of wit makes me enjoy the strongest flavours. So I present
myself and my limitations to my readers, hoping that my fervid faith in
the delight of the communion of thoughts, emotions, and sympathies will
make up for my lack of conviction in some other directions.
Before we proceed any further I think I ought to point out that the
degradation of women in the past originated in the region of the
country round Mount Ararat. The lowering of their status occurred
when the white races adopted the Assyrian Semite’s Scriptures. The
Christian religion brought us that curse cowering behind its gospel of
glad tidings; and it is most remarkable to trace the way in which the
Jews’ religion crept into Europe under the cloak of Christianity. In
heaven, the Gospel says, there is love, but neither marriage or giving
in marriage. Are we to wait for heaven or the millennium before the
present system of marrying and selling in marriage shall be abolished?
Everyone who has read a modern encyclopædia is familiar with the
fact that the first chapters of Genesis are made up of two different
narratives. One, called the Priestly narrative, from the beginning to
the first part of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis,
and continued in the first five verses of the fifth chapter. There is
nothing derogatory to women in this narrative. The unpleasant details
about Adam and Eve are in the Prophetic narrative, which is given
from the second part of the fourth verse of the second chapter to the
twenty-sixth verse of the fourth chapter. The Jews have taken advantage
of the confusion of these two contradictory stories to fix the blame
of all social evils on Eve, just as the Hesiod, influenced by Eastern
legend, fixed it on Pandora. These myths come from the same region, a
region in which women were kept entirely for the amusement and service
of men, and were humbled by every kind of insult that the Semite mind
could invent. Women have a very long score to settle with the Jews and
the Mahommedans. Even Hindoo women were comparatively respected and
free until the Mahommedans brought their ideas into Hindostan. And I
am told that in nearly every city of ill-fame in the world the profits
arising from the procuring of girls are collected by the Chosen Nation.
The Semites founded their opinion of women on fabulous legends and
false science. They assert that man gives the spirit and woman the
matter to the child. Embryology has now taught us that the parents
make exactly equal contributions of chromatin, or the active element,
to the original cell from which a child develops. It has taught us
that, originally, cells are capable of self-reproduction; that sex is
not always a vital necessity, but often a device for securing variety.
It has taught us by experiment that boys come from their mother’s
right side, and girls from her left side, and in a healthy mother the
rhythm of sex is regular. The symbolism of the Fall might indeed
apply to the history of the cell which at first contains its own force
of reproduction, but in the case of a female ovum deliberately parts
with some of its original power in order that it may be replaced by
the vital power of a male. The male cell also rends itself apart, and
becomes quite unfit for reproductive purposes until it can find another
cell with which to join. In the simple facts which have been observed
through microscopes there is no place for the overweening pride of the
Semite race in the virtue of maleness; and I can only hope that it was
ignorance and not malice that led the Jews and the Arabs to spread
false doctrine on the subject of sex. It is unfortunate that the first
patriarchs, from whom they proudly count their descent, had much in
common with the primitive goat worshippers, who were responsible for
the one-sided arrangements for sexual contentment common in harems and
the other patriarchal institutions I have mentioned.
In the great mediæval revival, the real age of chivalry and
troubadours, the knights carried their ladies’ colours to victory in
vain. The old lies are in our blood--we still believe in Eve and her
shame. White men have fought in the past, and it remains for white
women to fight now, and at last rid their sex all over the world of the
ignominy of this false doctrine.
Modern Woman:
Her Intentions
I
THE VOTE
It is my conviction that all great changes come from a force that after
many years of silence blazes with emotional, passionate enthusiasm.
That long period of torpid latent life, once it is liberated from
prison, gives driving power. Without silence and darkness no new
creature can be brought forth. Without resistance no great desire can
be felt. It is the same with the woman’s movement.
When the vote was refused, the first artillery for the woman’s army was
forged. That little request for the vote might have been granted three
years ago without making any more difference than the borough council
vote here, or the parliamentary vote in New Zealand, Australia, Norway,
Finland, and so forth, has made already. That little request, that
might have passed almost unnoticed had it been granted, has raised up
a powerful body of feeling on both sides, that will end in one of the
greatest social revolutions of the time.
Whether women are militant or anti-militant, whether they ask for the
vote in order to fight the working man or to join hands with him,
whether they content themselves with words of approval and donations,
or whether they lose their tempers in denunciation of the unfeminine
behaviour of certain brave enthusiasts--yet all the women of many
opinions are alike rousing themselves from their former deadly attitude
of quiescent acceptance.
The most violent anti-suffragette is obliged to try to understand the
questions of social reform in order to protest against them. The most
downtrodden wife is hearing rumours that even now there are laws which
might protect her from domestic tyranny. The county ladies who never
read anything but _The Queen_, _The Spectator_, or _Punch_, protest
against the struggle, but admit that it is time that women of property
had a vote now that their butlers and coachmen have obtained that
privilege. The “too old at thirty” brigade is carrying the campaign
into the ballroom and skating-rink. All this is familiar to everyone
that moves in English society to-day, and one word of terror used by
men who oppose the vote is heard on all sides. They say the vote is
“the thin end of the wedge,” and I reply gladly from my side--not only
as a suffragist, but as an onlooker at the loves and hatreds of the
sexes--I reply that the wedge is being driven every day. Every day of
delay in giving women the vote gives them a power far more deadly, a
hope more dangerous, an accomplishment far more vital. It gives them
the power of standing up for themselves, freed from the belief in the
protection of men. It gives them hope in each other. It teaches them
to speak for themselves, and discover the force of their eloquence and
the ingenuity of their resources. It is impossible to go to a meeting
of the militant party without feeling amazement at the dexterity of all
concerned. With wit, with banter, with beauty, with dignity, awkward
questions are answered, coarse jokes are frustrated, and swift as
light the laugh is turned against the interrupter.
The odd contrast between the scenes we personally witness and the same
scenes served up for breakfast by the daily press, is having some
effect in breaking up the touching faith of our foremothers in the
accuracy of newspaper reports. Women are awake to public affairs for
the first time since the matriarchal period. They are weighing the
evidence of the press, they are considering political facts. They are
said to be losing the chivalrous adoration of men. But in contrast to
the politeness of men to well-dressed, good-looking women, I would call
attention to the attitude of a respectable hospital official towards
a poor woman who, in November, 1909, brought her little boy as an
out-patient.
She arrived very early in order to be able to go to her work with as
little delay as possible, and secured a seat before the men, who came
in later. When the attendant entered, she was made to go back to the
last seat of all and wait for her son to take his turn until all the
elder males had been interviewed. “Men come first, your place is at
the back,” was all the answer she got to her protests. So much for
chivalry when a woman is poor and worn with labour. It is pathetic to
see the working woman, apologetic for her poverty, apologetic for her
womanhood, apologetic for her ill-health or any temporary need of help.
And I say that the working woman’s heroic patience has been attained
by centuries of ill-usage and _lack_ of chivalry. Most women would not
understand the idea of chivalry if it were explained to them, so little
does it come within their range of experience. We have no conception
of the size of the mass we are dealing with. In England and Wales
there are about 17 million females. Of these females, 13 million are
past childhood, roughly speaking 6 million of these are unmarried, 7
million are married or widows. About 9 million married and unmarried
women are unoccupied, or have retired from business; about 4 million
are engaged in occupations, and trying to make their own living. Of
the 16 million males, about 2 million are unoccupied or retired, 10
million are occupied, and the rest are children. Now we find from the
last census that about 7 million women are in charge of a family,
and 3 million of these are occupied in business; 6 million women are
unmarried, about 1 million of these are occupied in business, and
nearly ½ million have independent means. Making allowance for the very
young, we have about 2½ million grown women in a dependent position
without a husband or an occupation in England and Wales alone.
If one spends an afternoon studying the census returns, one sees in
all occupations the well-paid businesses are for men, and the ill-paid
for women. In general and local government, defence of the country,
and professional occupations, 326 thousand women only have subordinate
posts, but there are nearly 2 million in domestic service. Textile
manufactures, 663 thousand; dress, 710 thousand; food and lodging, 300
thousand, but in commerce and finance only 60 thousand.
Men can no longer support their daughters, and daughters cannot
command good positions in lucrative professions. There are only 7
million families, and at least 4 million grown-up women, unmarried
and superfluous as mothers. The working man tells these women to “go
home and do the washing.” “Well,” a virgin replies, “one million of us
are working at laundry and other work, under half a million of us are
amusing ourselves on independent incomes, and the rest of us have to
while away life somehow without money or occupation, so we are making a
revolution.”
The struggle for the vote is putting heart into the superfluous woman,
and it is putting the hope of reorganizing the market value of women’s
labour into her heart. We not only want work, but we want good wages.
If we have children we want to be sure they will be cared for and fed.
If we keep house we want our wages. The 12 million females that have
no independent income cry out to the ½ million that has an independent
income, in their almost hopeless struggle to win fair wages. It is
interesting to think that out of the total population of about 32½
million in England and Wales, a very little over ½ million are living
on independent incomes, and we find that there are less than 100,000
heirs, and more than 400,000 heiresses in this country. The rest, that
is 32 million, have to work or starve so as to save enough for their
old age. Each person that lives at ease is surrounded by sixty-five
people that have to struggle. Each woman that has a husband knows
that a widow or spinster stands portionless beside her. Figures are
abstractions, but behind these figures are facts and problems that are
driving us before them with such resistless cruelty that at last we are
determined to cry halt and make a fight--vote or no vote!
II
WOMEN’S INCOMES
Let us say that certain _prime donne_ can earn £25,000 a year for a few
years, that the most successful London actress may receive a salary of
£5000 a year, that a successful novelist may get a few thousands a year
by her books, that a lady doctor or dressmaker may make £1000 a year,
and you have admitted all that can be said in favour of the present
means women have of making a large income on the same lines as men. I
suppose the average successful singer is delighted with £1000 a year,
the average successful actress with £10 a week or £500 a year, the
average novelist with £300 a year, and the average lady doctor with the
same. In an institution which gives £1000 a year to its male principal,
we find the lady superintendent receiving £200 a year, and the male
secretary £350. Women find it hard to get any professional income out
of the Government offices, the Church, or the law courts. In the Post
Office and in all educational work the disparities between the salaries
of men and women is well known. And I think we may take it for granted
that the average business income of an everyday sort of woman, working
hard, is less than £100 a year. The income of a charwoman in London,
we know, is 2s. 6d. a day, or a possible 15s. a week--that is, 3d. an
hour, exactly half a man’s minimum wage.
These are a few well-known facts. The reason is that women are said to
have “other means” of earning a livelihood. First among these comes the
comfortable possibility of inheriting money from relations. Many great
heiresses and little heiresses are to be found among the conservative
forces of the land, for these women have nothing to gain and everything
to lose by changing the present state of things. They and the insurance
offices alike prosper on the present foundations of English family life.
Next comes the probably miserable alternative of marrying a rich
husband. It is a very curious thing that it is harder for a rich man
to be naturally attractive to women than it is for the camel to pass
through the needle’s eye, and the consequence is that women generally
have a more or less unhappy domestic life when they definitely marry
for a livelihood.
Then we have the adventuress, who succeeds in making a handsome income
by the unscrupulous use of her intelligence and charm. After that come
the various types of women who hire themselves or are hired out for
the relief of excitable gentlemen. And lastly the crowd of desolate
diseased refuse who pick up a living any way they can, in ways too
horrible to think of, by the practice of vulgar indecency.
All these incomes which are earned by women, either by their
tenderness and charm or by their bestiality, are, together with the
family inheritances, the real reasons why women as a sex are not made
economically independent on the same lines as men. The father of a
family longs to save his daughters from the temptations of poverty,
and if they do what he bids them he insures his life in their favour.
The husband prefers to keep his wife dancing to the tune he pays for,
so he makes her allowance dependent on his own mood of the moment. The
infatuated boy considers he is seeing life when he spends his money
recklessly on an adventuress. All these women can undersell other
women in the labour market, because they have incomes which make them
independent of what they may earn there. They are, in a kind of way,
what the strike organizers would call “blacklegs”: they make life more
difficult for the women who must work to live or starve.
Again, the magic of love is destroyed by the thought of money. And love
is very apt to evaporate when such thoughts flame up in the mind.
The hope I see for the ennobling of sex relations is that women should,
by some means never yet thought of, become independent of the caprice
of individual man.
The average middle-class Englishman, I believe, looks upon his married
life as a kind of business partnership, in which he pays money in order
that he may not be worried about the care of his clothes or his food
or his affectional needs. These things once settled and put under the
care of a sensible woman, he can devote his thoughts to business, to
betting, to cards, to golf, or any other amusement he may select to
ensure that he may not become a “dull man.” The average working man, of
course, not only marries a housekeeper, a cook, a maid-of-all-work, but
the mother and nurse of his continuous flow of offspring, and the butt
of his temper when the world has used him ill.
If any hope of eventual economic freedom is to come for the whole sex,
I stand aghast to think of all the antagonistic interests that will
have to be reconciled. It will be worse than the Budget. The wives will
have to stand out for fixed allowances. The mothers will have to make
their bargain either with their husbands or the State, whichever wants
their children most. The housekeepers will have to take their wages
like the other servants.
The women of the adventuress class are a hopeless problem. They are
worth a hundred a week at one moment, and nothing at all a few weeks
later perhaps. Their trade is so dangerous. But we can cheer ourselves
up with the statistics which tell us they are in England and Wales
numbered by thousands only, whereas we are dealing at present with the
problem of seventeen millions of women.
We have, then, four classes of women--the heiresses, the portionless
wives, the courtesans, and the prostitutes--who stand in the way of the
economic independence of women because they appear to be better off
under the present state of disorganization. The labour market for women
is of course permeated by their influence. The rich women who work for
nothing, the wives who “get round” their husbands, the courtesans who
command the “flesh market,” the prostitutes, who are ignored by the
rest of their sex, but revenge themselves on the ignorant by spreading
disease and sorrow among the happy and healthy.
The record of the overwhelming advantages of the economic independence
of women can hardly be compressed into the compass of this chapter. It
would make love marriages possible. It is almost certain that a love
marriage on the woman’s side is one of the most important elements for
good in the production of a fine race. If a girl were free to choose
according to her inclination, there is practically no doubt that she
would choose the right father for her child, however badly she might
choose a lifelong companion for herself.
This is, of course, true about both the sexes to a certain extent,
although average men are much less dainty about these matters than the
average woman. If we could remove the economic considerations from
parenthood it would help towards the invigoration of the race.
The sad part of this question is that according to all the great racial
ideals women ought to be economically independent, but, according to
all little social ideals, it seems inevitable that her independence
will be resisted to the last.
III
THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE
We cannot trust ourselves to make a real love-knot unless money or
custom forces us to “bear and forbear.” There is always the lurking
fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear upon the
Book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every first love
is born free of tradition; indeed, not only is first love innocent and
valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been taught,
and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is so
extraordinary, so unlike anything told by the poets, so absorbing, that
it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out. Sometimes one
feels a great pity for the lovers in England, because young English
girls are very apt to mistake a feeling of gratified vanity and the
emotion of a new sensation for love of some special man who happens
to make love to them at the propitious moment. Many faithful women
go through life enduring the love of a man whom they care for very
moderately, who, on his side, congratulates himself on having found a
virtuous wife. It is lucky for these people that probably the wife, in
her limited circle of acquaintances, will never meet the man who ought
to have been her mate.
I have often talked to the apparently contented mother of a family,
when some little word reveals to me that it is possible to be the
mother of a man’s children merely by putting up with his caresses while
one thinks about some other subject. Is it any wonder that the race
becomes more and more anæmic and bored with existence as generation
follows generation?
Other wives have loved their husbands with passion, and perhaps for two
years their devotion has steadily increased, but the husband meanwhile
has known many ecstasies and wearinesses. His love is like the waves,
which follow each other as periods of dullness follow moments of
rapture. Hers has been like the tide, increasing in devotion and
tenderness; but the tide turns at last, and the dancing of the waves
can do very little to stay its ebbing. I think men are justified who
say that women either love too much for their taste or not at all.
Some women say they could love their husbands better if they did not
see so much of the unromantic side of their lives. The holes in a man’s
socks are not the most endearing remembrances in the world.
The only permanent relations are founded on mutual contempt. Brothers
and sisters have no illusions about each other, and if they feel any
affection at all it is a steadfast one. Alas! the close knowledge
of weaknesses very seldom permits the affection to show through the
contempt. Married lovers have to pass from the state of love, which
is so apt to be a state of delusion, to the state of clear-sighted
affection. The ordeal is one which very few survive.
Another tragedy of love is jealousy. A man or woman is very often
jealous of the partner’s brothers and sisters, or other relations.
Those who love wish to be all in all to each other, those who quarrel
dislike to have others taking sides in their quarrels. This fundamental
jealousy of relations is ever apt to break into a flame, besides
jealousy of the more usual kind.
Mr. Harold Gorst has written a book on _The Philosophy of Love_, in
which he points out that it is unwise of a bridegroom to take instant
possession of his bride. He maintains that the usual programme, in
which a wife shows all her modesty and a husband all his love on the
wedding-night, is an absurd waste of the honeymoon, which ought to be
spent in a gradual approach to the supreme surrender. Again, wives are
too apt to give up the charming resistances which are necessary to the
satisfaction of a man’s emotional nature. Mr. Gorst cannot imagine
that a husband would tire of his wife if she kept her right over her
own body with a firm hand, and required wooing every time she yielded
to the wedding of her husband. So much for the man of the world’s point
of view.
The marriage tie is a way of keeping people together while they undergo
the various disillusions and jealousies that are inevitable, unless one
of them is prepared to give way in everything. Is there any better way?
In most cases, no.
The marriage tie will always exist, because it is the natural impulse
of the majority of young people to wish to love each other alone, and
to remain with each other for ever. The honeymoon having elapsed, they
very likely find they are about to become parents, and they spend
the intervening months in making happy preparations. Then the baby
is born, and has to be brought up until it is old enough to go to
school. If there are three children, they have to be looked after for
about fourteen years. The wife is now thirty-four, and the husband
thirty-eight. The children are placed in various schools away from
home. Is there any alternative to the rather boring life that has to be
lived out until death parts the parents? None. They are not rich enough
to travel and amuse themselves, so the wife goes on housekeeping and
calling on neighbours, and changing her servants, and the husband goes
to the City, plays golf, and reads trashy novels. The marriage tie must
always persist while these people exist.
But what are the six million bachelors and the seven million spinsters
to do? Some of them are very young; thousands of them do not wish to
marry, their sexual nature is hardly developed more than a child’s;
others are invalids, openly or secretly; and a good number are leading
illegally arranged lives because the present marriage laws do not
suit their constitutions. Among the grown-up population about half
the number are married, and the other half unmarried. Many of these
marriages are unhappy, and it is to be presumed that at least six
million of each sex do not wish to marry enough to overcome the terrors
of saying what they want for ever, and getting it.
Now, having regard to the natural variations of love, I must suggest
that the stigma might be removed from those who are not capable of
lifelong fidelity. There seems good proof that a few millions of men
and women are bringing misery upon the rest because they are treated
as unworthy of social consideration. Medical men are saying that the
disease which is undermining the health of the nation is dangerous only
because it is shameful. It could be easily cured in its early stages if
it could be treated openly and without ruining the reputation of those
whom it attacks. Even when health is retained, reputations are lost and
careers are ruined in order to prop up the tottering institution of
marriage by making it the only refuge for the respectable.
But until it is acknowledged that it is not respectable to live
together when the temperaments are incompatible, there will be no
real virtue in the married state. Never to want the same thing at the
same time is a more far-reaching cause of emotional degradation than
one violent outbreak of temper under extreme provocation. It is more
degrading to the finer feelings than a temporary alienation of marital
love. One would imagine that the men who refuse to alter the divorce
laws really do believe in the sacrament of the marriage ceremony,
instead of in the sacrament of the true love, which abides when there
is a real compatibility of temperament.
IV
THE SORDID DIVORCE
I mentioned in passing that marriage was an institution that should
not be ended, but should be mended. In the first place, let us inquire
whether the marriage ceremony is a sacrament, whether parenthood is
a sacrament, and why marriage should be binding. The Catholic Church
refuses divorce altogether on the ground that the blessing of the
Church makes the contract binding till death. Parents with children are
generally prepared to endure each other for the sake of their family.
While women are economically dependent it would be pure folly for
them to advocate marriage for a short term. Very few women succeed in
retaining their attraction for men for any considerable length of time.
Ten years of attractiveness is not to be thought of in the majority of
cases. While a man holds the purse-strings he can always find someone
to marry. A woman can offer nothing but her power of enchantment, and
most of them have to rely on the universal enchantment of innocence
which can only be offered once.
But conditions are very variable even now. Women hold the
purse-strings when they are heiresses. They are as free as men when
they are childless. Ninon de l’Enclos was irresistible until she was
eighty, apparently because she was amusing as well as fascinating.
Under such circumstances as these it is sometimes wise to seek divorce.
In England this cannot be done without outraging every feeling of
dignity and delicacy.
Unless one of the married pair is faithless, impotent, cruel, or rich
enough to leave the neighbourhood, the other cannot get a divorce. This
involves discussing the secrets of the alcove with solicitors, and a
final exposure of your domestic concerns in the law courts, for the
press and the public to take or leave as they are more or less painful
to you and amusing to them.
A very frequent method of obtaining a divorce now is for a wife, who
would not touch her husband with a besom if she could help it, to sue
publicly for restitution of conjugal rights. To a woman of any delicacy
such a demand would be degrading, even if it were made in private.
To be obliged to make it publicly as a matter of form is, to say the
least, unpleasant to such a woman. The next proceeding is taken when a
certain time has elapsed and the husband has not noticed the wife who
has to pretend to be pining for his forced caresses.
I confess it is hard to realize the state of a woman who actually can
desire the society of a man who is weary of her. I have not imagination
for that, I am afraid. The law was made by men, and men are said to
know women better than they know each other; also, we have all heard
of the charms of a captured or unwilling bride, so perhaps it is an
instance in which men have done for women what they would wish to have
done for themselves.
Whatever the reason is, the law is there, and when the husband has been
faithless and refused his wife’s embraces, he has done sufficient to
justify the court in calling him guilty of desertion and adultery, and
a decree _nisi_ is pronounced. Then, if no evidence of collusion is
forthcoming, and the court can make believe that one of the parties at
least does _not_ want to be divorced, the decree is made absolute in
six months. Can anyone realize that the present divorce law is in such
a hopelessly stupid state? There seems no possibility of using common
sense in a law court. To get a divorce you must _not_ agree together
that it is a desirable step. To get a divorce the innocent person must
speak in public of subjects no innocent person would care to mention
in private. To get a divorce from a woman you respect at all, you must
refuse to live with her, and must openly commit adultery, at the same
time making no arrangement with her as to how she is to get rid of
you. The old complaint of the inequality of the divorce laws for the
sexes is perhaps of importance, but to me it seems a small thing in
comparison to the general sordidness of the whole proceeding.
Surely the one cause of causes for a divorce is that both the parties
want it. Some simple form of procedure, such as separation on the first
application, to be followed by divorce in six months if the parties had
not made up their differences in the meantime, should be devised.
The difficulties would arise in cases in which the parties were not
agreed, and I am afraid in those instances the question of money would
nearly always be discovered to be the root of the trouble. Ladies would
be found to be unaccountably attached to their husband’s cheque-books;
and gentlemen unable to separate themselves from a share in their
wives’ dividends. But when the question of fortune or wealth enters
into the marriage bargain, why not let it be fought out on that ground?
Divorce is always brought about because of the weariness and boredom
one human being causes another. Cruelty, adultery, temporary desertion,
every kind of outrage can be borne if excitement and interest
counterbalance suffering. But the devotion of the whipped dog would
soon be exhausted if the dog could find something in the world which
interested him more than his master. Curiosity once fully satisfied,
tenderness balances on the edge of the precipice of boredom, and may
topple over at any moment.
Of course the insult of being considered a bore would be harder to
bear in most instances than the accusation of wickedness, so on the
whole it would seem advisable to keep to the good old formula of
“incompatibility of temper,” and fight out the money questions on their
own merits.
Now the merits of the money question in marriage have never been
properly arranged. In France the wife has her own _dot_, as a matter
of course; but the French have so carefully adjusted their population
to their pockets that we can only bow in silent admiration of their
unparalleled foresight.
In England a girl very often marries without any fortune of her own,
on the understanding either that she is beautiful and that the husband
is prepared to endow her with all his worldly goods, or that she is so
useful that she will really save him a good deal of money. If she is
very beautiful, her relations can generally get a settlement made on
her; if she is only useful, she is lucky if she can induce her husband
to insure his life in her favour. The merely useful wife has very
little hold on ready money. One week she may get a good sum of money,
another week nothing, for her household expenses. If she is clever and
managing, she will probably gain her husband’s confidence, and if he is
honest and has a regular income they may be very comfortable together;
but under other conditions the affairs of the household go from bad to
worse, and the wife is only a very inefficient servant, who may get her
keep, but who will certainly not get her wages.
I can only suggest that the position of wife and mother ought to
legally entitle a woman to a fixed proportion of her husband’s income,
and the position of housekeeper to a further proportion. If, as is
often the case in upper and middle-class modern marriage, the husband
and wife do not live in the connubial state, the legal allowance as
wife and mother would not be made, but the allowance as hostess and
housekeeper could be enforced as long as they remained under the same
roof. In the case of the poorer classes, where the wife does the whole
work of keeping up the home and increasing the family, the proportion
should be very much greater, so great, indeed, as to make both partners
think twice before recklessly bringing children into the world. Among
this class I think that the birth of a child might legalise the union
of the parents. This appears to be an old custom in many parts of the
world.
The working man is the greatest enemy of women’s equal value, I am
afraid. Among the mining population, where his wages are high enough
to make him independent, the woman he has married holds a very
low position--very much what middle-class women held early in the
nineteenth century. The working man of prudence and forethought is of
course limiting his family with as much care as the rest of the world.
But the others, who drive away drab intelligence by a Saturday orgy,
forget prudence, and the result is that their wives are always in the
pangs of childbirth or miscarriage. The usual self-sacrifice of women
comes dangerously near suicide in this matter. To save her husband from
a few moments of self-control she goes through months of drugging,
loses her beauty, undermines her health in the endeavour to exercise
prudence and to avoid bringing children into the world for whom she has
no hope of making provision.
A romance of the mining world, in September, 1909, is instructive
reading. One Friday night, at 10 o’clock, the husband came home with
two former lodgers, two old friends, and one stranger. They brought
plenty of beer with them. The wife was upstairs in bed, but she called
over the banisters to them to make themselves at home, and returned
to her sleep. Later on, when the men were nearly all dead drunk, one
of the former lodgers heard screams upstairs. He found the stranger
undressed and making an assault on the wife of his host. The lodger
flung him downstairs, and to his horror found that he had killed him.
He was terrified, and he and the woman left the house, calling to
the others to fetch a doctor at once. Whatever the woman and he said
to each other it was tragic, for she hurried to a pond and drowned
herself, while he went to his sister’s house and waited arrest. The
husband was severely reprimanded for his “negligence.” A woman counts
for very little in the mining districts, she takes the German position
of a kind of upper servant, in whose emotions, if she has any, none
take any interest. In the manufacturing districts the working man’s
wife is generally a breadwinner herself, and she only needs a little
enterprise to make her position much more favourable than it is at
present.
Nearly all the police court cases turn on the question of the wife’s
housekeeping allowance. It is an endless source of dispute, and if it
could be regulated, irrespective of caprice, most of the miseries of
married poverty would cease. The poor are simple, and in this truth
about them we see the truth about ourselves. We all want a regular
income, and very few of us gain from being dependent on the affection
of our family. Divorce, then, is sordid with regard to sentiment and
with regard to money, and in these ways is greatly in need of change.
V
THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN
This chapter deals with the subject of prostitution from the point of
view of public health, so that the nervous reader had better skip it.
Edmond de Goncourt has written some charming chapters in his book about
Outamaro, the Japanese artist, on the courtesans who live within the
walls of Yoshiwara. He describes the quarter as containing fifty green
houses within the walls and a hundred without the walls. They were
established by the Emperor of Japan in the eighth century for the use
of foreign princes, ambassadors, and wealthy merchants. The present
walls were built in the seventeenth century. The girls, from all parts,
are brought up like princesses, and taught writing, the arts, music,
and the archaic language spoken by the court in the seventh and eighth
centuries, which is now the language of the poets. The formalities of
the suitors are three visits of ceremony, each with its ritual of good
manners. A green house contains twenty first-class beauties and sixty
second-class beauties. They sing, play, and write verses. These are a
few translations which give some idea of their feelings:--
“It is only when both of us are looking at it that the moon is
beautiful; when I am alone it makes me feel too sad.”
“This evening who will share the sweetness of life, this floating
body in the passing world?”
“Oh, that the moonlight might shine brightly in the waters of this
life [the courtesan’s], but the autumn moon on the other side of
the clouds makes me long for it” [wifehood].
“Although I am nothing here, the moon lights up my heart with a
ray of consolation.”
“How often do I part from one whose shadow I shall never see again
under the moon of dawn!”
These little moon-women are not the only members of the sisterhood in
Tokio. There are the geishas who dance and sing, and there are the old
and abandoned; but the horrible sordidness of the red blinds and the
draggled torn lace curtains one sees in the streets Charles Booth has
coloured red in his maps of London, is absent.
This question is not a mere matter of sentiment, it is one in urgent
need of immediate attention. The pitiless contempt of married women for
prostitution is bringing a terrible punishment, which is ruining the
physique of nearly every civilized race. It is now certain that the
diseases called contagious can be cured with the greatest certainty
if they are taken in hand in the earliest stages, but if they are
neglected they bring in their train every scourge that the flesh is
capable of enduring. It cannot be repeated too often that if women
do not wish to contract diseases themselves in the intercourse of
ordinary life, they must bring themselves to protect those who in the
intercourse of passional life are ignorantly or malignantly spreading
the diseases. There might be a trade union for women on the streets.
In the cause of public health, which is, in this matter, the cause of
future generations, family cannot separate itself from family, innocent
from guilty, moral from immoral. We can no longer say: Let those who
practise promiscuity suffer for their incontinence, let them encounter
the dangers they choose to face, “let their sin find them out.” We know
now that from this particular scourge of contagious disease the pure
suffer far more severely than the impure; and the races who have never
known the disease are the first to die when, by accident, they finally
come in contact with it.
So the clean, healthy youth from some remote country place is in
greater danger than the sophisticated townsman. And mothers do not
realize the dangers they and their young children run every day when,
in their ignorance of danger, they entrust their households to the
care of women servants who may be carrying contagion without even
knowing it.
The contempt that is shown towards prostitutes makes it impossible
for them to insist upon proper sanitation in the quarters where they
congregate. They are hunted from street to street, and, as they get
poorer and poorer, their condition becomes more and more of a danger to
the rest of the town.