know what we mean by Victorian conventions and hypocrisies, but the
perpetual intrusion of blinding truths disturbs our point of view. The
new Reform bill and the extension of the suffrage were hardy denials
of convention. “The Origin of Species” and “Zoölogical Evidences as
to Man’s Place in Nature” were not published in the interests of
hypocrisy. There was nothing oppressively respectable about “The
Ring and the Book”; and Swinburne can hardly be said to have needed
correction at Zola’s hands. These mid-Victorian products have a savour
of freedom about them, and so has “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.”
Even the Homeric eloquence of Ruskin was essentially the eloquence of
the free. The two lessons he sought to drive home to his reluctant
readers were, first, that Englishmen were not living on an illuminated
earth spot, under the especial patronage of the Almighty; and, second,
that no one was called by Providence to the enjoyment of wealth and
security. If such unpleasant and reiterated truths--as applicable
to the United States to-day as they were to Victoria’s England--are
“smug,” then Jeremiah is sugar-coated, and the Baptist an apostle of
ease.
The English have at all times lacked the courage of their emotions, but
not the emotions themselves. Their reticence has stood for strength
as well as for stiffness. The pre-Raphaelites, indeed, surrendered
their souls with docility to every wavelet of feeling, and produced
something iridescent, like the shining of wet sand. Love, according to
their canon, was expressed with transparent ease. It was “a great but
rather sloppy passion,” says Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, “which you swooned
about on broad general lines.” A pre-Raphaelite corsair languished
as visibly as a pre-Raphaelite seraph. He could be bowled over by a
worsted ball; but he was at least more vigorous and more ruddy than a
cubist nude. One doubted his seared conscience and his thousand crimes;
but not his ability to walk unassisted downstairs.
The Victorian giants were of mighty girth. They trod the earth with
proud and heavy steps, and with a strength of conviction which was as
vast and tranquil as the plains. We have parted with their convictions
and with their tranquillity. We have parted also with their binding
prejudices and with their standards of taste. Freedom has come to us,
not broadening down
“from precedent to precedent,”
but swiftly and comprehensively. There are no more taboos, no more
silent or sentimental hypocrisies. We should now know a great many
interesting details concerning the Marquis of Steyne and the Duke of
Omnium, if these two imposing figures had not passed forever from our
ken. We should have searchlights thrown upon Becky Sharp, if Becky
had not escaped into the gloom. Her successors sin exhaustively, and
with a lamentable lack of _esprit_. We are bidden to scrutinize their
transgressions, but Becky’s least peccadillo is more engaging than all
their broken commandments. The possibility of profound tediousness
accompanying perfect candour dawns slowly on the truth-tellers of
fiction. It takes a great artist, like Edith Wharton, to recognize
and deplore “the freedom of speech which never arrives at wit, and the
freedom of act which never makes for romance.”
Woman Enthroned
The Michigan magistrate who gave orders that a stalwart male angel
presiding over the gateway of a cemetery should be recast in feminine
mould may have been an erring theologian and a doubtful art-critic;
but that he was a sound-hearted American no one can deny. He was not
thinking of Azrael the mighty who had garnered that little harvest of
death; or of Michael, great leader of the “fighting seraphim,” whose
blade
“smote and felled
Squadrons at once”;
or of Gabriel the messenger. Holy Writ was as remote from his mental
vision as was Paradise Lost. He was thinking very properly of the
“angel in the house,” and this feminine ideal was affronted by the
robust outlines, no less than by the robust virtues, associated with
the heavenly host. Cowley’s soothing compromise, which was designed as
a compliment to a lady, and which, instead of unsexing angels, endowed
them with a double line of potencies,--
“They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet,”--
is not easily expressed in art. The very gallant Michigan gentleman
simplified the situation by eliminating the masculine element. He
registered his profession of faith in the perfectibility of women.
It is awkward to be relegated to the angelic class, and to feel
that one does not fit. Intelligent feminists sometimes say that
chivalry--that inextinguishable point of view which has for centuries
survived its own death-notices--is more disheartening than contempt.
Chivalry is essentially protective. It is rooted in the consciousness
of superior strength. It is expansively generous and scrimpingly
just. It will not assure to women a fair field and no favours, which
is the salvation of all humanity; but it will protect them from the
consequences of their own deeds, and that way lies perdition.
Down through the ages we see the working of this will. Rome denied to
women all civic rights, but allowed them many privileges. They were
not permitted to make any legal contract. They were not permitted to
bequeath their own fortunes, or--ordinarily--to give testimony in
court. But they might plead ignorance of the law, “as a ground for
dissolving an obligation,” which, if often convenient, was always
demoralizing. Being somewhat contemptuously absolved from the oath
of allegiance in the Middle Ages, they were as a consequence immune
from outlawry. On the other hand, the severity with which they were
punished for certain crimes which were presumed to come easy to
them--poisoning, husband-murder, witchcraft (King Jamie was not the
only wiseacre who marvelled that there should be twenty witches to one
warlock)--is evidence of fear on the legislators’ part. The oldest
laws, the oldest axioms which antedate all laws, betray this uneasy
sense of insecurity. “Day and night must women be held by their
protectors in a state of dependence,” says Manu, the Hindu Noah, who
took no female with him in his miraculously preserved boat, but was
content with his own safety, and trusted the continuance of the race to
the care and ingenuity of the gods.
In our day, and in our country, women gained their rights (I use the
word “rights” advisedly, because, though its definition be disputed,
every one knows what it implies) after a prolonged, but not embittered
struggle. Certain States moved so slowly that they were over-taken by
a Federal Amendment. Even with the franchise to back them, American
women have a hard time making their way in the professions, though a
great deal of courtesy is shown them by professional men. They have
a hard time making their way in trades, where the unions block their
progress. They have a very small share of political patronage, and
few good positions on the civil lists. Whether the best interests of
the country will be advanced or retarded by a complete recognition of
their claims--which implies giving them an even chance with men--is a
point on which no one can speak with authority. The absence of data
leaves room only for surmise. Women are striving to gain this “even
chance” for their own sakes, which is lawful and reasonable. Their
public utterances, it is true, dwell pointedly on the regeneration of
the world. This also is lawful and reasonable. Public utterances have
_always_ dwelt on the regeneration of the world, since the apple was
eaten and Paradise closed its gates.
Meanwhile American chivalry, a strong article and equal to anything
Europe ever produced, clings passionately and persistently to its
inward vision. Ellen Key speaks casually of “the vices which men
call woman’s nature.” If Swedish gentlemen permit themselves this
form of speech, it finds no echo in our loyal land. Two things an
American hates to do,--hold a woman accountable for her misdeeds, and
punish her accordingly. When Governor Craig of North Carolina set
aside the death-sentence which had been passed upon a murderess, and
committed her to prison for life, he gave to the public this plain
and comprehensive statement: “There is no escape from the conclusion
that Ida Bell Warren is guilty of murder, deliberate and premeditated.
Germany executed the woman spy; England did not. The action of the
military Governor of Belgium was condemned by the conscience of the
world. The killing of this woman would send a shiver through North
Carolina.”
Apart from the fact that Edith Cavell was not a spy, and that her
offence was one which has seldom in the world’s history been so cruelly
punished, Governor Craig’s words deserve attention. He explicitly
exempted a woman, because she was a woman, from the penalty which would
have been incurred by a man. Incidentally he was compelled to commute
the death-sentence of her confederate, as it was hardly possible to
send the murderous wife to prison, and her murderous accomplice to the
chair. That the execution of Mrs. Warren would have sent a “shiver”
through North Carolina is doubtless true. The Governor had received
countless letters and telegrams protesting against the infliction of
the death-penalty on a woman.
One of the reasons which has been urged for the total abolition of
this penalty is the reluctance of juries to convict women of crimes
punishable by death. The number of wives who murder their husbands,
and of girls who murder their lovers, is a menace to society. Our
sympathetic tolerance of these _crimes passionnés_, the sensational
scenes in court, and the prompt acquittals which follow, are a menace
to law and justice. Better that their perpetrators should be sent
to prison, and suffer a few years of corrective discipline, until
soft-hearted sentimentalists circulate petitions, and secure their
pardon and release.
The right to be judged as men are judged is perhaps the only form of
equality which feminists fail to demand. Their attitude to their own
_errata_ is well expressed in the solemn warning addressed by Mr.
Louis Untermeyer’s Eve to the Almighty,
“Pause, God, and ponder, ere Thou judgest me!”
The right to be punished is not, and has never been, a popular
prerogative with either sex. There was, indeed, a London baker who
was sentenced in the year 1816 to be whipped and imprisoned for
vagabondage. He served his term; but, whether from clemency or from
oversight, the whipping was never administered. When released, he
promptly brought action against the prison authorities because he had
not been whipped, “according to the statute,” and he won his case.
Whether or not the whipping went with the verdict is not stated; but it
was a curious joke to play with the grim realities of British law.
American women are no such sticklers for a code. They acquiesce in
their frequent immunity from punishment, and are correspondingly, and
very naturally, indignant when they find themselves no longer immune.
There was a pathetic ring in the explanation offered some years ago by
Mayor Harrison of Chicago, whose policemen were accused of brutality to
female strikers and pickets. “When the women do anything in violation
of the law,” said the Mayor to a delegation of citizens, “the police
arrest them. And then, instead of going along quietly as men prisoners
would, the women sit down on the sidewalks. What else can the policemen
do but lift them up?”
If men “go along quietly,” it is because custom, not choice, has bowed
their necks to the yoke of order and equity. They break the law without
being prepared to defy it. The lawlessness of women may be due as much
to their long exclusion from citizenship,
“Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,”
as to the lenity shown them by men,--a lenity which they stand ever
ready to abuse. We have only to imagine what would have happened to a
group of men who had chosen to air a grievance by picketing the White
House, the speed with which they would have been arrested, fined,
dispersed, and forgotten, to realize the nature of the tolerance
granted to women. For months these female pickets were unmolested.
Money was subscribed to purchase for them umbrellas and overshoes. The
President, whom they were affronting, sent them out coffee on cold
mornings. It was only when their utterances became treasonable, when
they undertook to assure our Russian visitors that Mr. Wilson and Mr.
Root were deceiving Russia, and to entreat these puzzled foreigners to
help them free our nation, that their sport was suppressed, and they
became liable to arrest and imprisonment.
Much censure was passed upon the unreasonable violence of these women.
The great body of American suffragists repudiated their action, and the
anti-suffragists used them to point stern morals and adorn vivacious
tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the beginning a liberty
which would not have been accorded to men, and which led inevitably to
licence? Were they not treated as parents sometimes treat children,
allowing them to use bad language because, “if you pay no attention
to them, they will stop it of their own accord”; and then, when they
do not stop it, punishing them for misbehaving before company? When
a sympathetic gentleman wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say
that the second Liberty Loan would be more popular if Washington would
“call off the dogs of war on women,” he turned a flashlight upon the
fathomless gulf with which sentimentalism has divided the sexes. No
one dreams of calling policemen and magistrates “dogs of war” because
they arrest and punish men for disturbing the peace. If men claim the
privileges of citizenship, they are permitted to suffer its penalties.
A few years before the war, a rage for compiling useless statistics
swept over Europe and the United States. When it was at its height,
some active minds bethought them that children might be made to bear
their part in the guidance of the human race. Accordingly a series of
questions--some sensible and some foolish--were put to English, German,
and American school-children, and their enlightening answers were given
to the world. One of these questions read: “Would you rather be a man
or a woman, and why?” Naturally this query was of concern only to
little girls. No sane educator would ask it of a boy. German pedagogues
struck it off the list. They said that to ask a child, “Would you
rather be something you must be, or something you cannot possibly be?”
was both foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice were of
value only when the will was a determining factor.
No such logical inference chilled the examiners’ zeal in this
inquisitive land. The question was asked and was answered. We
discovered, as a result, that a great many little American girls (a
minority, to be sure, but a respectable minority) were well content
with their sex; not because it had its duties and dignities, its
pleasures and exemptions; but because they plainly considered that they
were superior to little American boys, and were destined, when grown
up, to be superior to American men. One small New England maiden wrote
that she would rather be a woman because “Women are always better than
men in morals.” Another, because “Women are of more use in the world.”
A third, because “Women learn things quicker than men, and have more
intelligence.” And so on through varying degrees of self-sufficiency.
These little girls, who had no need to echo the Scotchman’s prayer,
“Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’ ourselves!” were old maids in the
making. They had stamped upon them in their tender childhood the
hall-mark of the American spinster. “The most ordinary cause of
a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty, especially in certain
self-pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is reserved for the American
woman to remain unmarried because she feels herself too valuable to be
entrusted to a husband’s keeping. Would it be possible in any country
save our own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining “Why I
am an Old Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the explanation?
Would it be possible in any other country to hear such a question
as “Should the Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked, and seriously
answered? Would it be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who
was not an American to consider even the remote possibility of our
spinsters becoming a detached class, who shall form “the intellectual
and economic _élite_ of the sex, leaving marriage and maternity to
the less developed woman”? What has become of the belief, as old as
civilization, that marriage and maternity are developing processes,
forcing into flower a woman’s latent faculties; and that the
less-developed woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen
and powerful stimulus? “Never,” said Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin,
young or old, produced a work of art.” One makes allowance for the
Latin point of view. And it is possible that M. de Goncourt never read
“Emma.”
There is a formidable lack of humour in the somewhat contemptuous
attitude of women, whose capabilities have not yet been tested, toward
men who stand responsible for the failures of the world. It denotes,
at home and abroad, a density not far removed from dulness. In Mr. St.
John Ervine’s depressing little drama, “Mixed Marriage,” which the
Dublin actors played in New York some years ago, an old woman, presumed
to be witty and wise, said to her son’s betrothed: “Sure, I believe the
Lord made Eve when He saw that Adam could not take care of himself”;
and the remark reflected painfully upon the absence of that humorous
sense which we used to think was the birthright of Irishmen. The too
obvious retort, which nobody uttered, but which must have occurred to
everybody’s mind, was that if Eve had been designed as a care-taker,
she had made a shining failure of her job.
That astute Oriental, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, manifested a wisdom
beyond all praise in his recognition of American standards, when
addressing American audiences. As the hour for his departure drew
nigh, he was asked to write, and did write, a “Parting Wish for the
Women of America,” giving graceful expression to the sentiments he
knew he was expected to feel. The skill with which he modified and
popularized an alien point of view revealed the seasoned lecturer. He
told his readers that “God has sent woman to love the world,” and to
build up a “spiritual civilization.” He condoled with them because
they were “passing through great sufferings in this callous age.” His
heart bled for them, seeing that their hearts “are broken every day,
and victims are snatched from their arms to be thrown under the car of
material progress.” The Occidental sentiment which regards man simply
as an offspring, and a fatherless offspring at that (no woman, says
Olive Schreiner, could look upon a battle-field without thinking,
“So many mothers’ sons!”), came as naturally to Sir Rabindranath as
if he had been to the manner born. He was content to see the passion
and pain, the sorrow and heroism of men, as reflections mirrored in a
woman’s soul. The ingenious gentlemen who dramatize Biblical narratives
for the American stage, and who are hampered at every step by the
obtrusive masculinity of the East, might find a sympathetic supporter
in this accomplished and accommodating Hindu.
The story of Joseph and his Brethren, for example, is perhaps the best
tale ever told the world,--a tale of adventure on a heroic scale, with
conflicting human emotions to give it poignancy and power. It deals
with pastoral simplicities, with the splendours of court, and with the
“high finance” which turned a free landholding people into tenantry
of the crown. It is a story of men, the only lady introduced being a
disedifying _dea ex machina_, whose popularity in Italian art has
perhaps blinded us to the brevity of her Biblical rôle. But when this
most dramatic narrative was cast into dramatic form, Joseph’s splendid
loyalty to his master, his cold and vigorous chastity, were nullified
by giving him an Egyptian sweetheart. Lawful marriage with this young
lady being his sole solicitude, the advances of Potiphar’s wife were
less of a temptation than an intrusion. The keynote of the noble old
tale was destroyed, to assure to woman her proper place as the guardian
of man’s integrity.
Still more radical was the treatment accorded to the parable of the
“Prodigal Son,” which was expanded into a pageant play, and acted with
a hardy realism permitted only to the strictly ethical drama. The
scriptural setting of the story was preserved, but its patriarchal
character was sacrificed to modern sentiment which refuses to be
interested in the relation of father and son. Therefore we beheld the
prodigal equipped with a mother and a trusting female cousin, who,
between them, put the poor old gentleman out of commission, reducing
him to his proper level of purveyor-in-ordinary to the household. It
was the prodigal’s mother who bade her reluctant husband give their
wilful son his portion. It was the prodigal’s mother who watched for
him from the house-top, and silenced the voice of censure. It was the
prodigal’s mother who welcomed his return, and persuaded father and
brother to receive him into favour. The whole duty of man in that
Syrian household was to obey the impelling word of woman, and bestow
blessings and bags of gold according to her will.
The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or seeks to
embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as opposed to the
intellectual, feminist. “The Mother State of which we dream” offers
no attraction to many plain and practical workers, and is a veritable
nightmare to others. “Woman,” writes an enthusiast in the “Forum,”
“means to be, not simply the mother of the individual, but of society,
of the State with its man-made institutions, of art and science, of
religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and
social, needs to be mothered.”
“Needs to be mothered”! When men proffer this welter of sentiment in
the name of women, how is it possible to say convincingly that the girl
student standing at the gates of knowledge is as humble-hearted as
the boy; that she does not mean to mother medicine, or architecture,
or biology, any more than the girl in the banker’s office means to
mother finance? Her hopes for the future are founded on the belief that
fresh opportunities will meet a sure response; but she does not, if
she be sane, measure her untried powers by any presumptive scale of
valuation. She does not consider the advantages which will accrue to
medicine, biology, or architecture by her entrance--as a woman--into
any one of these fields. Their need for her maternal ministration
concerns her less than her need for the magnificent heritage they
present.
It has been said many times that the craving for material profit is not
instinctive in women. If it is not instinctive, it will be acquired,
because every legitimate incentive has its place in the progress of
the world. The demand that women shall be paid men’s wages for men’s
work may represent a desire for justice rather than a desire for gain;
but money fairly earned is sweet in the hand, and to the heart. An
open field, an even start, no handicap, no favours, and the same goal
for all. This is the worker’s dream of paradise. Women have long known
that lack of citizenship was an obstacle in their path. Self-love has
prompted them to overrate their imposed, and underrate their inherent,
disabilities. “Whenever you see a woman getting a high salary, make
up your mind that she is giving twice the value received,” writes an
irritable correspondent to the “Survey”; and this pretension paralyzes
effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is to be at the end of our
usefulness.
M. Émile Faguet, that most radical and least sentimental of French
feminists, would have opened wide to women every door of which man
holds the key. He would have given them every legal right and burden
which they are physically fitted to enjoy and to bear. He was as
unvexed by doubts as he was uncheered by illusions. He had no more
fear of the downfall of existing institutions than he had hope for the
regeneration of the world. The equality of men and women, as he saw
it, lay, not in their strength, but in their weakness; not in their
intelligence, but in their stupidity; not in their virtues, but in
their perversity. Yet there was no taint of pessimism in his rational
refusal to be deceived. No man saw more clearly, or recognized more
justly, the art with which his countrywomen have cemented and upheld a
social state at once flexible and orderly, enjoyable and inspiriting.
That they have been the allies, and not the rulers, of men in building
this fine fabric of civilization was also plain to his mind. Allies
and equals he held them, but nothing more. “_La femme est parfaitement
l’égale de l’homme, mais elle n’est que son égale._”