MEN and women are latecomers to this planet, but they have existed
for a very long time, judged by human standards. One might reasonably
expect the difference between them, if it is an essential difference,
to be now capable of formulation. An essential difference would be a
difference distinctively human, that is, spiritual as well as physical,
and at the same time distinctively sexual.
External differences, such as the presence or absence of beards and
other secondary sexual characteristics, do not satisfy the first
part of this definition, and are to be disregarded. Many so-called
differences in social behaviour are also not essential differences. A
valuable book written by the Vaertings[1] has made this clear. In a
State where men are dominant, as in most of our civilised States for
the past two thousand years, certain attributes are considered to be
characteristic of women which are equally characteristic of men in a
State where women are dominant, as it is said they were for some time
in ancient Egypt. The subordinate sex in each case is excluded from
complete development, and is considered to be less intelligent, less
courageous, and more domesticated than the dominant sex. In fact,
men and women share jointly in what is called human nature, and are
alike capable of courage, fear, cruelty, tenderness, intelligence,
and stupidity. When exhilarated by power and responsibility they
display the more dominating qualities, and in subordinate positions
they manifest a “slave psychology.” Therefore men and women are not to
be differentiated as brave or timid, intelligent or stupid, strong or
weak, because a classification of this kind is too broadly human and
not distinctively sexual.
It is not asserted that secondary physiological differences between
the sexes or social differences in behaviour have no significance.
Possibly sexual differentiation is so fundamental that it modifies
the least reactions of men and women; but to begin an investigation
of these would require exhaustive scientific information outside the
scope of this essay, which is an attempt to discover if the division
of the human race into men and women involves a division of spiritual
as well as of sexual functions, so that the creative work of women is
different in kind from the creative work of men. From this point of
view the differences mentioned are significant as effects rather than
causes, and a consideration of them must be dismissed as unfruitful.
The aim of this essay, then, is to find a conception of womanhood as
something essentially different from manhood. An essential difference
would persist through all the variations of behaviour caused by the
dominance of either sex: consequently the validity of this inquiry is
not impaired by the restriction of its material to the activities of
men and women in our present one-sided civilisation. The knowledge
that it is one-sided, because men have for so long been dominant over
women, is valuable in helping to distinguish what is essential from
what is accidental. The subordination of women makes it difficult but
not impossible to recognise the essential quality of womanhood. In a
masculine civilisation the creative work of women may be belittled,
misinterpreted, or denied: but if it is a reality, its existence will
be proved at least by the emotional colour of the denial.
I
It is therefore legitimate to consider the composite picture of
woman presented to us by the beliefs and opinions recorded by men.
These opinions are curiously contradictory and at the same time
generalised. In spite of the intense interest felt in individual
women, generalisations about women are common, whereas generalisations
about men are made warily, if at all. Men are fellow-creatures of many
different kinds: conclusions are drawn about classes of men, such as
kings, statesmen, or warriors, angry men, foolish men, or strangers;
but nothing less than a universal attribute of humanity is attached
to all men, such as that men are mortal, or subject to Fate, or
inconstant. But it is seriously believed by Moslems that women have no
souls. Thousands of Christians believe that women are not intelligent.
Mystics believe that women are on a lower plane of spiritual
development than men. Women have no sense of justice, no sense of
honour: women cannot be trusted with political power: women are all the
better for a good beating with a stick. These generalisations reflect
man as the dominant sex, conscious of his superiority. But one comes
at once upon contradictions. Every great man has been inspired by some
woman. The hand that rocks the cradle indisputably rules the world. A
woman was the first cause of original sin, but a woman was the Mother
of God. What does this mean? Half of the picture is tinged with vague
contempt, and the other half with vague reverence. Apparently the
average man sees woman alternately as an inferior being and as an angel.
One must conclude that he is looking at her through a distorting
medium. His conception of her as an inferior being is natural, in a
man-made State, and were she really inferior it would stop there.
His vague reverence for her remains to prevent this conclusion: it is
certainly a compensation for something, a distorted recognition of
some half-guessed-at power in women. It looks as if man knows that
the inferiority of woman is a fiction, that his domination of her and
his refusal to admit her to his own level are not justified. In the
background there lurks a fear of reprisals. The distorting medium
contains fear as one of its elements.
In men’s societies of a primitive or arrested type where the etiquette
of conduct betrays its origin, one can see clearly man’s fear of
woman. Woman possesses some mysterious power which must be averted
by elaborate taboos. A woman can ruin a man’s chances of success in
hunting or fishing by touching his gear. A woman’s shadow can blight a
religious ceremony. Women are particularly to be feared when they are
menstruating or in childbed. The most terrible ghost is that of a woman
who dies in childbed. In more developed societies men burn old crones
as witches in possession of the evil eye. And even to-day, especially
in politics, men find it difficult to rid themselves of the uneasy
suspicion that women are dangerous.
This fear proves the artificiality of man’s domination. One can be
sceptical of any claim to superiority which throws such a shadow.
Natural domination, that domination of skill and experience which is
expected of a physician in a sick-room, or of a captain on his ship,
establishes itself without arrogance and fear, and is exercised within
its natural limits in particular directions. The physician does not
interfere with navigation; the captain claims no divine right of
authority over medical prescriptions. But the domination claimed by
men over women has been a kind of magical quality, an absolute and
divine right of authority, a mass domination, and, like all other mass
dominations, rooted in fear.
But men’s fear of women proves only that women are not naturally
inferior and subordinate. It does not prove that they are different
from men. There remains the other side of the picture, however,
with its sentimentalised ideal of women. A reverence for woman as a
mother appears clearly: the mother is elevated to a place in heaven
and worshipped as the Mother of God, or as the Mother of the Gods.
Now motherhood is an undisputed function of women which they do not
share with men. At the lowest estimate of their powers all women are
potential mothers. Men are born of women, and of women only. It must be
an important function, for men have tried to belittle it. The theology
of the masculine world branded Eve as the first cause of evil, and
explained the pains of child-birth as a just punishment from heaven.
Still more significant, however, is the fact that Adam and Eve were
created by a masculine God in a garden, and that the theologians could
not leave them there. It was necessary to bring them from the plane of
abstract art on to the plane of humanity. But only a woman can create
human beings, and therefore it was the woman who had to bring them out
of the mythical garden into reality--a confession of failure for the
theologians, and they wreaked their revenge on Eve. Yet in spite of
themselves they were driven to attribute to a woman the decisive action
which transformed the figments of a male God into men and women.
But motherhood was smirched with original sin. Later on it was still
further belittled. Women were regarded as mere receptacles, passive
receptive bodies which created nothing. Men must have felt that
motherhood was important, or they would not have tried to explain it
away altogether. But the sentimental ideal of woman as the mother
still persisted, especially among men, and could not be explained
away: so, finally, motherhood was allowed by popular opinion to be a
creative function, but of a purely physical nature, and it was further
defined as the sole justifiable function of women. Mr. Rudyard Kipling
expressed this very neatly when he said that blind Nature made man for
several ends and woman for only one. In Oriental countries the still
more logical conclusion is drawn that women justify their existence
only by producing men-children. In a society committed to this point
of view childless women are failures in life, and the unmarried woman
is a ridiculous nuisance. If social remedies such as polygamy, suttee,
infanticide, or euthanasia are not put into practice, the phrase
“superfluous women” comes into existence, and the State is shaken by
the problem of what to do with its superfluous women.