The facts of human life tend to confirm this theory. Starting again
from the fundamental relationship of a mother to her child, we can see
that owing to the peculiar position of the human race, the physical act
of motherhood is only the merest beginning of motherhood as a function.
Man, because he is destined for a more complex life than the other
animals, is born more helpless than any of them, and takes a longer
time to come to maturity. His conscious life constructs itself slowly
out of the perceptions of every day, establishing at every point in
its development a working relationship with his unconscious life, a
relationship which is permanently biassed by the experiences of his
first years. He is terribly at the mercy of his mother. She can ruin or
strengthen that harmony between the conscious and the unconscious which
is a necessary condition of full human development. In short, she must
create not only a human body, but a human being, if she is to fulfil
her function as a mother. But if it is her business to foster growth
in her children, it must be equally her business to foster growth in
all the people with whom she is intimate. If she is a specialist in the
needs of the growing human spirit, her peculiar knowledge must be of
service to men and women of all ages who are still capable of growth.
And what is true in this respect of mothers must be true for all women:
a special equipment for motherhood does not descend suddenly by the
grace of Heaven upon the individual. All girls are potential mothers,
and whatever gifts of intuition are necessary for the creative work
of motherhood must be accessible to all women. If the full content of
motherhood is thus recognised, it must inevitably be recognised as
a special application of the creative power of women. Therefore the
concept “superfluous women” can only arise in a society which denies
the real functions of motherhood, and which consequently prevents
women from free expression and ignores the creative power of womanhood.
Creative power of any kind is, of course, the obverse of an equal power
for destruction. No one can put an engine out of action so deftly as
the man who designs engines. Woman’s power of fostering growth in
human life implies, therefore, an equal power of hindering it. We must
accept both sides of the hypothesis, and in doing so we find fresh
proof that it is true. If the average man sees woman alternately as an
angel and a devil, it is because she exercises both a creative and a
destructive influence upon his inner life. He would neither fear nor
reverence her so intensely if she were merely an inferior counterpart
of himself. Nor would he lay upon her such peculiar disabilities.
These disabilities are not only of the kind that would suffice to keep
an inferior class in subjection. Inferior classes, whether actually
enslaved or not, are kept in their place by being excluded from the
sources of external power, such as the possession of wealth, the
command of armies, the exercise of political rights. Certain moral and
religious sanctions always rise to reinforce the law on these points,
for the springs of human conduct lie in the unconscious, and morality
and religion deal directly with the emotions of unconscious life.
The ruling class seeks therefore to impose a morality consonant with
its own interests, and fears a new religion more than a revolution.
But it is always conscious of the expediency of the conventional
morality it imposes on inferiors, and attaches no ultimate value to
it. The model subordinate, obedient and loyal, is not reverenced or
idealised: he is not regarded by his superiors as a type of perfect
manhood, but only as a perfect subordinate. He may be a bad man
provided that he is a good servant. The position of women in a men’s
State does not correspond exactly to this. True, if we substitute the
function of motherhood in its narrow interpretation for the function
of servitude, the correspondence is exact up to a point. The wife and
mother is excluded from independent access to the sources of external
power: and she is expected to be obedient and loyal to her marriage
contract. Moral and religious sanctions are called in to transform her
marriage contract into a vow. The stock moral virtue required of her is
chastity; she must have sexual relationships only within the pale of
marriage. All women, because they are potential wives, must copy her
virtues and avoid what is forbidden to her. So far this is only another
aspect of the fact that men restrict the function of women to physical
motherhood, and define their own responsibilities by the institution
of marriage. Women are treated exactly as an inferior class with a
definite function, that of child-bearing. But the correspondence stops
here. The disabilities imposed upon women by conventional morality
cut deeper still. The sexually good woman must be not only good but
ignorant: whole tracts of human experience are withheld from her
knowledge. Moreover, her chastity and her ignorance are translated by
men themselves into an abstraction of artificial purity and reverenced
as their ideal of womanhood. An ideal of womanhood cherished in men’s
States, which has for its essential elements ignorance of life and
a debased conception of sex, can be regarded with scepticism. It is
noteworthy that intellectual ignorance does not have the same prestige,
and therefore cannot be so important. Even an “educated” woman is
conventionally more acceptable than a woman who is shocked at nothing.
The conventionally pure good woman is shocked at a great many things:
that is to say, she does not merely condemn certain phases of conduct,
which would be at least a forthright attitude, she is uncomfortable
and timid when they are brought to her notice. Now if man’s reverence
for women is an acknowledgment of her vaguely realised power, at the
same time in that very reverence, conventionalised into an ideal, he
obviously safeguards himself against her power. Apparently, women can
be kept in a subordinate position if ignorance of human conduct is
imposed upon them as a necessary condition of social approval. It can
be inferred that a fearless attitude towards human life is the first
essential quality of a free woman, and that conventional morality is
imposed with such emphasis upon women because the creation of moral
values is their own peculiar vocation. Men are more concerned to
prevent women from having untrammelled judgment and action in affairs
of morality than from having access to the possession of wealth. In
other words, women are hindered not only from external power, but from
the inward power of creating independent moral and religious values. It
is precisely this power which is exercised by creative women in their
treatment of others, and the conventionalised ideal of the ignorant
good woman is the deepest disability laid upon women in a men’s State.
The conventionally good woman helps to perpetuate the formal traditions
created by man, traditions which harden into empty shells unless they
are continuously vitalised by the independent judgments of women. She
accepts the masculine standpoint that human conduct is to be judged
entirely by the values of consciously organised life, which are devised
for the preservation of existing systems, and are not necessarily
humane. She acquiesces in repression and punishment instead of seeking
to understand and cherish. Men praise her for this subserviency and
unconsciously despise her.
But in preventing her from aggression upon their forms and traditions
men lose more than they gain. She is humbugged out of her womanhood,
but she is still a woman, and does not cease to influence their inner
life. The systems of society--such as marriage--are preserved, but
the individual man suffers. He meets hardness where he looks for
tolerance, and condemnation where he needs help. Worse still, for her
conventionality is borrowed and therefore unintelligent, he finds
himself imprisoned in traditions which he himself would destroy and
create anew were it not for the timidity of the conventional women.
Thus in a typical men’s State where the creative work of women is
ignored, where women are prevented by legal and economic barriers
from access to external sources of power and hampered by conventional
ignorance of life, they have an insidious influence which evades all
the means by which men try to keep it in check. The fabric of the
State, the organised systems, remain apparently intact, but the private
life of men becomes sour and stale. The more men deny the rights of
women in public, the more they are delivered over to the obscure
dissatisfactions of their women in private. The conventional women
whom men evoke for their own protection have in the end a more fatal,
because a thwarted, influence on human life than the fearless women.
Among the Hindus, for example, where the social systems of men have
hardened into cast-iron (perhaps because the women have been prevented
from free expression), the negative power of women is very great. Women
are not merely inferior imitations of men: they create men or destroy
them.
The question may be put, If the whole of human experience is the
natural concern of women, and if women are indeed endowed with the
capacity to understand and foster the growth of the human spirit, how
is it possible for women to accept a narrow conventional morality? It
is possible because unconscious life is remarkably suggestible, and in
a society where womanly traditions are mainly negative the continuous
pressure of conventional values is applied to girls almost from
childhood. Only rare women with a genius for womanhood can resist the
potency of such suggestions.
That it is a woman’s destiny to create human beings, whether she
fulfils it or not, is amply confirmed by the natural bias of her
interests. In spite of convention her interest in human beings is
stronger and more spontaneous than her interest in anything else.
Almost from the cradle a girl studies the people around her more
attentively than a boy does, and is quicker in imitating their tricks
of speech and behaviour. A little later she turns naturally to dolls,
not because of an absurdly precocious maternal instinct, but because
dolls are substitutes for human beings, and her creative fancy can
play upon them without restriction. A doll is not necessarily a son
or daughter: it is by turns a confidant, a scapegoat, and a talisman.
Later still her interest in other people becomes practically a ruling
passion: and since she is not merely a potential wife and mother but
a potential woman, she is interested not only in possible sweethearts
but in everybody. She is inquisitive about human relationships of every
kind. She is indifferent to things which have no human interest: she
values things for their associations, or the power they give her over
other people. The intimacy between an adolescent girl and her bosom
friend for the time being is based on a mutual interest in human nature
and a common standard of critical values which they apply to each other
as well as to the world. They analyse motives, provoke moods, love and
hate with such intensity that emotional explosions are inevitable.
Their interest is not that of mere spectators at the human comedy: they
are ready to play important parts in it; and they test at every point
their influence over others.
When fifteen-year-old girls write essays on “What I should like to
be,” the aspirations disclosed are rarely intellectual or material.
Nearly every girl wants to be popular, to be an influence for good,
to establish a reputation for cheerfulness and kindness, in short,
to be successful in handling human beings. When she leaves school
the same bias continues. The average girl is more interested in
the people around her than in her work, especially if her work has
little direct human interest. If her daily work does not consist of
personal relations to other people, her efficiency in it depends upon
the approval of her employers rather than upon her pride in the work
itself. She sees herself as the sunbeam in the office, or as the
comforter of her employer’s broken life, or as a moral influence--in
other words, where no human interest exists in her surroundings she
takes pains to invent it. It is this entirely womanly impulse which
generates most of the sentiment and scandal among women.
In married life women display the same passionate interest in other
people, even though husbands and families absorb a certain amount of
it. Neighbours, servants, and children are their dearest topics. No
woman is bored when she is discussing other people; and this is true of
both educated and uneducated women. The things which primarily concern
women as women are human affairs and experiences, material which helps
them more capably to scrutinise, to interpret, and to meddle with the
people they meet. The result is that they often meddle tediously with
other people’s lives. Like Hedda Gabler, they must have their fingers
in somebody’s destiny, destructively if not creatively. Destruction of
this kind instead of creation is tragic, but it arises at least from a
pre-occupation with humanity, and so, unlike war, it is womanly.
Thus the current of women’s interests sets definitely towards actual
human beings and concrete situations rather than abstract theories.
There are other aspects of womanhood which confirm the hypothesis that
women’s strength lies in unconscious rather than in conscious life, and
which can be briefly enumerated.
The first of these is too obvious to require comment. By general
consent of men, women are more irrational and impulsive than men are.
Secondly, women have a strong, if inarticulate, affinity with what is
called Nature; a fact which is symbolised by the personification of
Nature as a woman. Nature in this sense is the sum of that growing
life which has not reached the conscious level of humanity. To this
growing life, vegetable or animal, women are never indifferent:
their reactions to it are strongly emotional, whether sympathetic
or antipathetic. When because of some timidity they cannot exercise
their creative power on human beings, they readily foster plants or
animals instead, and there are women who can do so with the sureness
of intuitive knowledge. They are more obviously affected by natural
phenomena than men; their sexual life, for example, is governed by the
phases of the moon, and it is claimed that their fertility varies with
the rainfall and the earth’s magnetic currents. Thirdly, they have an
immediate sense of the significance of life: they have the same vivid
interest in even trivial affairs that one finds in dreams. Women have
none of the detachment which is equally prepared to prove that life
is significant or that it is meaningless. They assume without proof
that life, especially human life, is significant; they are so deeply
immersed in life that it is not possible for them to question its value
as men do. For this reason they are more tenacious of life than men.
Fourthly, they come to maturity earlier than men do, although they
live longer on the average. This does not mean that women remain in
a state of arrested development as compared with men: the advent of
puberty does not put a stop to mental and spiritual development. But
it may be interpreted as a sign that the creative work of womanhood
requires a less elaborate conscious equipment than that of men. The
wisdom of conscious life is a structure slowly built by the individual,
and needs a long apprenticeship; it is possible that the wisdom of
unconscious life exists independently of the individual and waits only
for admission. Incidentally, the fact that women have a reasonable
expectation of living for twenty-five years after they have ceased to
bear children is another proof--if proof be needed--that maternity is
not merely a physical function: women go on living as long as their
children need them. Lastly, although their creative work consists
in the handling of individuals, and although they are finely aware
of their own individual reactions, women rarely achieve a conscious
individuality. They are so largely unconscious of themselves that
they need emotional support for their personalities: it is their
danger that they tend to live in a state of perpetual reference to
other people; and when they express themselves as individuals, they
do so spontaneously and not deliberately. Thus women as a body show
a timidity which easily relapses into conservatism, and can only be
overcome by urgent necessity. Conservatism becomes the spiritual
death of women, as of men: but in women it springs from a timidity of
intellect, from a weakness in conscious life; in men from a timidity
of emotion, from a fear of the unconscious. This difference between
men and women is illustrated in dress, for example. As the consciously
organised life of men develops, their clothing expresses less of the
emotion, the temperament, the spontaneity of unconscious life: it
becomes a uniform, symbolic of their status as rational members of an
organised society. They are sure of themselves and of their traditions,
consequently fashion is a convention which sits as easily upon them
as other conventions, and changes as slowly. It is a reasonable law,
deliberately accepted for the sake of convenience and orderliness.
Women, on the other hand, are not afraid of temperament and colour
in dress; they express in their clothing the spontaneous, vivid, and
irrational qualities of unconscious life. But because they are unsure
of themselves as members of a public body, they need the assurance
of “being in the fashion” to give them the necessary confidence for
wearing even the most daring creations. Fashion among women is thus not
a law accepted for convenience; it is a kind of emotional support, and
it fluctuates as often and as widely as emotions.
V
In this weakness of women’s conscious life we have the key to men’s
domination over them. It is the domination of the more articulate over
the less articulate consciousness. Man is the intellectual organiser of
life. He arranges life in patterns, or, as has been already suggested,
translates it into conscious forms, and he is therefore more interested
in the nature of his patterns than in the material out of which he
composes them. He begins, where woman ends, with the individual human
being and individual experiences; his aim is to lift these into a
world of enduring and proved forms. The Platonic idea, for example,
is a purely masculine conception. It is possible that man’s world of
ultimate abstractions is another aspect of the world from which woman
works towards the individual, and that his consciously constructed
philosophy, if it were perfected, would coincide with the content
of her intuitive wisdom. Thus a circle would be completed in which
woman seeks to express the infinite in terms of the individual life,
while man seeks to express the individual in terms of the infinite.
The difference between them remains, however, not merely a difference
in aim but a difference in equipment. Woman is the gateway through
which the wisdom of the unconscious comes to be translated by man into
conscious form. Her wisdom, derived from unfathomable sources, must be
expended upon life incarnate and narrowed into the practical details of
everyday circumstance. Her intelligence is fettered, as it were, to
actual life, and is best stimulated by concrete situations. Man, on the
other hand, moves away from human life: his intelligence ranges freely
in a world of speculation and can create perfectly abstract universes
of knowledge. His work consequently takes visible shape beneath his
hand: it can be tested; it can be destroyed and shaped again; it can
achieve completion. The work of woman has none of these attributes: she
has no objective proof of success; in the last resort she must depend
upon her subjective valuations. Thus the more organised and objective
certainties of men impose themselves easily upon women. Men can prove
their theories even when they are wrong; women cannot prove their
intuitions even when they are right. In his world, that of organised
form, man dominates woman naturally.
But woman should dominate man in her own field, the creation of free
and harmonious individuals; for the potential progress of humanity may
be determined by man, but its actual progress is determined by woman.
In a society which recognises the domination of men and denies that of
women, the creative work of both is hampered. The danger for men lies
in that very quality of detachment which gives their work its value.
Left to themselves they become more and more detached, substituting
for the fluctuations of life a stable and systematic perfection of
theory which is rigidly imposed upon individual members of society.
Religion becomes a creed, morality a code of law, government a party
machine: even art, which is of all their activities the most accessible
to the vitality of unconscious life, is intellectualised and engenders
theories of æsthetics instead of works of art. Human beings become
mere pegs on which to hang the theories, economic units, and man,
the heir of all the ages, is in danger of being crushed under the
weight of his own machines. The financial machine in our own day is an
excellent example of masculine activity pushed to extremes: it has
been successfully detached from human values so that it exists for the
production of money and not for the production of goods and services
to humanity. The mere individual has ceased to be of any importance,
and even the inventions or discoveries of his intelligence are valued
only in terms of money. It is a curious paradox that men who, as
individuals, are surer of themselves than women, and who command their
conscious energies more freely, should inevitably create systems to
which the individual is subordinated. A system of this kind is not
necessarily an evil, but when it makes no allowance for women’s values,
for their sense of the significance of human life and the individual
human being, it moves to its extreme logical conclusion and becomes
inhuman.
This over-emphasis of masculine activities was conceivably necessary at
a point in history when civilisation was in its infancy and the need
for organisation was greater than the need for individual freedom.
Perhaps at such a point the domination of men over women began. But
the discrepancy between human and institutional values is now so great
that even men feel it acutely; it has disquieted women for some time
and is forcing them into the open. It looks as if during the next few
generations the really creative New Woman will emerge, for conventional
morality is no longer so powerful among women, and they are gradually
deserting the blind alleys into which they rushed in their first
efforts at self-assertion.
It does not follow that women by themselves can save humanity. Men
must face their own problems, and women are naturally ill-equipped
to create new forms of society. But it is the business of women to
create the creators of social forms, and they cannot escape a certain
responsibility for the present tension in our organised life. Absolute
domination by either sex is no longer necessary; the modern world
needs the creative work of both. Woman by herself loses a sense of
proportion, just as man by himself loses touch with reality. Man’s
intellectual conclusions must be checked by woman’s intuitive knowledge
of the human spirit, and woman’s spontaneous wisdom must be helped by
man’s intellectual vision. Both are creative although they depend upon
each other: there is no room on either side for false pride or humility.