This raises the question of public life for women. There is certainly
room for creative womanhood in the public life of the State. The
modern State is a highly organised system of government resting upon
other systems, such as those of finance, law, and industry; but these
complicated organisations ramify downwards until they touch the lives
of all the individuals who compose the nation. The point at which
they do so is a fitting point for the public activities of women.
Women have already begun to mediate between the system of law and
the individuals upon whom punishment by imprisonment is imposed; they
have called attention to the impossibility of reforming offenders
in a prison which ignores individuality and the psychology of the
individual. It is true that such mediation is at present usually
subject to the veto of the controlling system, and is therefore
limited; a disability which is likely to hamper women until the value
of women’s work is recognised as equal to that of men. But the obscure
dissatisfactions of our time, caused by the discrepancy between
institutional and human values are, on the one hand, compelling women
to penetrate into public life, and, on the other hand, threatening the
stability of all institutions. If women are true to themselves their
full co-operation with men is inevitable.
This means that women must carry their womanhood with them into all
occupations, otherwise the advantage of their entry into public affairs
will be entirely lost. Besides, a woman who tries to do a man’s work
in a man’s way pays too high a price for the effort. A man can be
formal and abstract without losing his human qualities or ceasing to be
creative, since his energies are distributed in that way, but a woman
cannot. She must expend more energy than he does to achieve the same
formal outlook; she must abandon the creative love for the individual
which is essential for womanhood; and, because she has killed herself
spiritually, a formal woman is twice as formal as any man, and her
work is necessarily barren. Most women are instinctively aware of this
danger and protect themselves from the hardening of traditional routine
by simple indifference to their work and an escape into marriage
as soon as possible. But this is merely an evasion of the problem
which women must solve in the next generation or two, the problem
of leavening the organised systems of society with human values so
that mechanical routine is reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile, women are
obviously in their proper place in any occupation which deals directly
with human beings.