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THE INTELLIGENCE
OF WOMAN
BY
W. L. GEORGE
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1916
_Copyright, 1916_,
BY W. L. GEORGE.
_All rights reserved_
Published, November, 1916
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN 1
II FEMINIST INTENTIONS 61
III UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN 94
IV WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT 119
V THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME 130
VI THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY 165
VII SOME NOTES ON MARRIAGE 204
I
THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN
1
Men have been found to deny woman an intellect; they have credited her
with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and
effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. But intellect in
its broadest sense, the capacity consecutively to plan and steadfastly
to execute, they have often denied her.
The days are not now so dark. Woman has a place in the state, a place
under, but still a place. Man has recognized her value without coming to
understand her much better, and so we are faced with a paradox: while
man accords woman an improved social position, he continues to describe
her as illogical, petty, jealous, vain, untruthful, disloyal to her own
sex; quite as frequently he charges her with being over-loyal to her own
sex: there is no pleasing him. Also he discerns in this unsatisfactory
creature extreme unselfishness, purity, capacity for self-sacrifice. It
seems that the intelligence of man cannot solve the problem of woman,
which is a bad sign in a superior intelligence. The trouble lies in
this: man assumes too readily that woman essentially differs from man.
Hardly a man has lived who did not so exaggerate. Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, agreed to despise women; Napoleon seemed to view them as
engines of pleasure; for Shakespeare they may well have embodied a
romantic ideal, qualified by sportive wantonness. In Walter Scott, women
appear as romance in a cheap edition; Byron in their regard is a beast
of prey, Doctor Johnson a pompous brute and a puritanical sensualist.
Cervantes mixed in his romantic outlook a sort of suspicious hatred,
while Alexandre Dumas thought them born only to lay laurel wreaths and
orange blossoms (together with coronets) on the heads of musketeers.
All, all--from Thackeray, who never laid his hand upon a woman save in
the way of patronage, to Goethe, to Dante, to Montaigne, to
Wellington--all harbored this curious idea: in one way or another woman
differs from man. And to-day, whether we read Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr.
George Moore, M. Paul Bourget, or Mr. Hall Caine, we find that there
still persists a belief in Byron's lines:--
"What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger
Is woman!"
Almost every man, except the professional Lovelace (and he knows
nothing), believes in the mystery of woman. I do not. For men are also
mysterious to women; women are quite as puzzled by our stupidity as by
our subtlety. I do not believe that there is either a male or a female
mystery; there is only the mystery of mankind. There are to-day
differences between the male and the female intellect; we have to ask
ourselves whether they are absolute or only apparent, or whether they
are absolute but removable by education and time, assuming this to be
desirable. I believe that these differences are superficial, temporary,
traceable to hereditary and local influences. I believe that they will
not endure forever, that they will tend to vanish as environment is
modified, as old suggestions cease to be made.
This leads us to consider present idiosyncrasies in woman as a sex, her
apparently low and apparently high impulses, her exaltations, and, in
the light of her achievements, her future. I do not want to generalize
hastily. The subject is too complex and too obscure for me to venture so
to do, and I would ask my readers to remember throughout this chapter
that I am not laying down the law, but trying only to arrive at the
greatest possible frequency of truth. This is a short research of
tendencies. There are human tendencies, such as belief in a divine
spirit, painting pictures, making war, composing songs. Are there any
special female tendencies? Given that we glimpse what distinguishes man
from the beast, is there anything that distinguishes woman from man? In
the small space at my disposal I cannot pretend to deal extensively with
the topic. One reason is the difficulty of securing true evidence.
Questions addressed to women do not always yield the truth; nor do
questions addressed to men; for a desire to please, vanity, modesty,
interfere. But the same question addressed to a woman may, according to
circumstances, be _sincerely_ answered in four ways,--
1. Truthfully, with a defensive touch, if she is alone with another
woman.
2. With intent to cause male rivalry if she is with two men.
3. With false modesty and seductive evasiveness if she is with one
man and one woman.
4. With a clear intention to repel or attract if she is with a man
alone.
And there are variations of these four cases! A man investigating
woman's points of view often finds the response more emotional than
intellectual. Owing to the system under which we live, where man is a
valuable prey, woman has contracted the habit of trying to attract. Even
aggressive insolence on her part may conceal the desire to attract by
exasperating. These notes must, therefore, be taken only as hints, and
the reader may be interested to know that they are based on the
observation of sixty-five women, subdivided as follows: Intimate
acquaintance, five; adequate acquaintance, nineteen; slight
acquaintance, forty-one; married, thirty-nine; status uncertain, eight;
celibate, eighteen. Ages, seventeen to sixty-eight (average age, about
thirty-five).
2
It is most difficult to deduce the quality of woman's intellect from her
conduct, because her impulses are frequently obscured by her policy. The
physical circumstances of her life predispose her to an interest in sex
more dominant than is the case with man. As intellect flies out through
the window when emotion comes in at the door, this is a source of
complications. The intervention of love is a difficulty, for love,
though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for
the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and
the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should
be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect
is the ideal skeleton of a man's mental power. It may be defined as an
aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement,
combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement
or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon,
Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France,
are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can
tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,--a frailty which
probably explains why there has never been a British or American
intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all
alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American
mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since
the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing
life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing
life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena;
seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.
In this sense it can probably be said that no woman has ever been an
intellectual. A few may have pretensions, as, for instance, "Vernon
Lee," Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Wharton, perhaps Mrs. Hetty Green. I do not
know, for these women can be judged only by their works. The greatest
women in history--Catherine of Russia, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Queen
Elizabeth--appear to have been swayed largely by their passions,
physical or religious. I do not suppose that this will always be the
case. For reasons which I shall indicate further on in this chapter, I
believe that woman's intellect will tend toward approximation with that
of man. But meanwhile it would be futile not to recognize that there
exist to-day between man and woman some sharp intellectual divergences.
One of the sharpest lies in woman's logical faculty. This may be due to
her education (which is seldom mathematical or scientific); it may
proceed from a habit of mind; it may be the result of a secular
withdrawal from responsibilities other than domestic. Whatever the
cause, it must be acknowledged that, with certain trained exceptions,
woman has not of logic the same conception as man. I have devoted
particular care to this issue, and have collected a number of cases
where the feminine conception of logic clashes with that of man. Here
are a few transcribed from my notebook:
_Case 33_
My remark: "Most people practice a religion because they are too
cowardly to face the idea of annihilation."
Case 33: "I don't see that they are any more cowardly than you. It
doesn't matter whether you have a faith or not, it will be all the same
in the end."
The reader will observe that Case 33 evades the original proposition; in
her reply she ignores the set question, namely why people practice a
religion.
_Case 17_
_Votes for Women_, of January 22, 1915, prints a parallel, presumably
drawn by a woman, between two police-court cases. In the first a man,
charged with having struck his wife, is discharged because his wife
intercedes for him. In the second a woman, charged with theft, is sent
to prison in spite of her husband's plea. The writer appears to think
that these cases are parallel; the difference of treatment of the two
offenders offends her logic. From a masculine point of view two points
differentiate the cases:
In the first case the person who may be sent to prison is the
bread-winner; in the second case it is the housekeeper, which is
inconvenient but less serious.
In the first case the person who intercedes, the wife, is the one who
has suffered; in the second case the person who intercedes, the husband,
has not suffered injury. The person who has suffered injury is the one
who lost the goods.
_Case 51_
This case is peculiar as it consists in frequent confusion of words. The
woman here instanced referred to a very ugly man as looking Semitic. She
was corrected and asked whether she did not mean simian, that is, like a
monkey. She said, "Yes," but that Semitic meant looking like a monkey.
When confronted with the dictionary, she was compelled to acknowledge
that the two words were not the same, but persisted in calling the man
Semitic, and seriously explained this by asserting that Jews look like
monkeys.
Case 51, in another conversation, referred to a man who had left the
Church of England for the Church of Rome as a "pervert." She was asked
whether she did not mean "convert."
She said, "No, because to become a Roman Catholic is the act of a
pervert."
As I thought that this might come from religious animus, I asked whether
a Roman Catholic who entered a Protestant church was also a pervert.
Case 51 replied, "Yes."
Case 51 therefore assumes that any change from an original state is
abnormal. The application to the charge of bad logic consists in this
further test:
I asked Case 51 whether a man originally brought up in Conservative
views would be a pervert if he became a Liberal.
Case 51 replied, "No."
On another occasion Case 51 referred to exaggerated praise showered upon
a popular hero, and said that the newspapers were "belittling" him.
I pointed out that they were doing the very contrary; that indeed they
were exaggerating his prowess.
Confronted with the dictionary, and the meaning of "belittle", which is
"to cheapen with intent", she insisted that "belittling" was the correct
word because "the result of this exaggerated praise was to make the man
smaller in her own mind."[1]
[1] The notes as to Case 51 have not an absolute bearing upon logic in
general, but the reasons put forth in her defense by Case 51 are
indicative of a certain kind of logic which is not masculine. I must add
that Case 51 is a woman of very good education, with many general
interests.--THE AUTHOR.
_Case 63_
In the course of a discussion on the war in which Case 63 has given vent
to moral and religious views, she remarks, "Thou shalt not kill."
I: "Then do you accept war?"
Case 63: "War ought to be done away with."
I (attempting to get a straight answer): "Do you accept war?"
Case 63: "One must defend one's self."
Upon this follows a long argument in which I attempt to prove to Case 63
that one defends, not one's self but the nation. When in difficulties
she repeats, "One must defend one's self."
She refuses to face the fact that if nobody offered any resistance,
nobody would be killed; she completely confuses the defense of self
against a burglar with that of a nation against an invader. Finally she
assumes that the defense of one's country is legitimate, and yet insists
on maintaining with the Bible that one may not kill!
_Case 33_
Case 33: "Why didn't America interfere with regard to German atrocities
in Belgium?"
I: "Why should she?"
Case 33: "America did protest when her trade was menaced."
I: "Yes. America wanted to protect her interests, but does it follow
that she should protest against atrocities which do not menace her
interests?"
Case 33: "_But her interests are menaced._ Look at the trade
complications; they've all come out of that."
Case 33 has confused trade interests with moral duty; she has confused
two issues: atrocities against neutrals and destruction of American
property. When I tell her this, she states that there is a connection:
that if America had protested against atrocities, the war would have
proceeded on better lines because the Germans would have been
frightened.
I: "How would this have affected the trade question?"
Case 33 does not explain but draws me into a morass of moral indignation
because America protested against trade interference and not against
atrocities. She finally says America had no right to do the one without
the other, which logically is chaos. She also demands to be told what
was the use of America's signing the Geneva Convention and the Hague
Convention. She ignores the fact that these conventions do not bind
anybody to fight in their defense but merely to observe their
provisions. I would add that Case 33 is a well-educated woman,
independent in views, and with a bias toward social questions.
Naturally, where there is a question of love, feminine logic reaches the
zenith of topsy-turvy-dom. Here is a dialogue which took place in my
presence.
_Case 8_
Case 8, who was about to be married, attacked a man who had had a
pronounced flirtation with her because he suddenly announced that he
was engaged.
Case 8: "How can you be so mean?"
The man: "But I don't understand. You're going to be married. What
objection can you have to my getting engaged?"
Case 8: "It's quite different." Nothing could move Case 8 from that
point of view.[2]
[2] Probably owing to woman's having for centuries been taught to regard
the vain aspirations of the male as her perquisites.--THE AUTHOR.
I do not contend that bad logic is the monopoly of woman, for man is
also disposed to believe what he chooses in matters such as politics,
wars, and so forth, and then to try to prove it. Englishmen as well as
Englishwomen find victory in the capture of a German trench,
insignificance in the loss of a British trench; man, as well as woman,
is quite capable of saying that it always rains when the Republicans are
in power, should he happen to be a Democrat; man also is capable of
tracing to a dinner with twelve guests the breaking of a leg, while
forgetting the scores of occasions on which he dined in a restaurant
with twelve other people and suffered no harm. Man is capable of every
unreasonable deduction, but he is more inclined to justify himself by
close reasoning. In matters of argument, man is like the Italian brigand
who robs the friar, then confesses and asks him for absolution; woman is
the burglar unrepentant. This may be due to woman as a rule having few
guiding principles or intellectual criteria. She often holds so many
moral principles that intellectual argument with her irritates the
crisper male mind. But she finds it difficult to retain a grasp upon a
central idea, to clear away the side issues which obscure it. She can
seldom carry an idea to its logical conclusion, passing from term to
term; somewhere there is a solution of continuity. For this reason
arguments with women, which have begun with the latest musical play,
easily pass on, from its alleged artistic merit, to its costumes, their
scantiness, their undesirable scantiness, the need for inspection,
inspectors of theaters, and, little by little, other inspectors, until
one gets to mining inspectors and possibly to mining in general. The
reader will observe that these ideas are fairly well linked. All that
happens is that the woman, tiring of the central argument, has pursued
each side issue as it offered itself. This comes from a lack of
concentration which indisposes a woman to penetrate deeply into a
subject; she is not used to concentration, she does not like it. It
might lead her to disagreeable discoveries.
It is for this reason--because she needs to defend purely emotional
positions against man, who uses intellectual weapons--that woman is so
much more easily than man attracted by new religions and new
philosophies--by Christian Science, by Higher Thought, by Theosophy, by
Eucken, by Bergson. Those religions are no longer spiritual; they have
an intellectual basis; they are not ideal religions like Christianity
and Mohammedanism and the like, which frankly ask you to make an act of
faith; what they do is to attempt to seduce the alleged soul through the
intellect. That is exactly what the aspiring woman demands: emotional
satisfaction and intellectual concession. Particularly in America, one
discovers her intellectual fog in the continual use of such words as
mental, elemental, cosmic, universality, social harmony, essential
cosmos, and other similar ornaments of the modern logomachy.
_Case 16_
Case 16 told me that my mind did not "functionalize" properly. And gave
me as an authority for the statement Aristotle, before whom, of course,
I bow.
A singular and suggestive fact is that woman generally displays pitiless
logic when she is dealing with things that she knows well. An expert
housekeeper is the type, and there are no lapses in her argument with a
tradesman. It is a platitude to mention the business capacity of the
Frenchwoman, and many women are expert in the investment of money, in
the administration of detail, in hospital management, in the rotation of
servants' holidays (which, in large households, is most complex). It
would appear that woman is unconcentrated and inconsequent only where
she has not been properly educated, and this has a profound bearing on
her future development. There is a growing class, of which Mrs. Fawcett,
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, the Countess of Warwick, Miss Jane Addams, are
typical, who have bent their minds upon intellectual problems; women
like Miss Emma Goldman; like Miss Mary McArthur, whose grasp of
industrial questions is as good as any man's. They differ profoundly
from the average feminine literary artist, who is almost invariably
unable to write of anything except love. I can think of only one modern
exception,--Miss Amber Reeves; among her seniors, Mrs. Humphry Ward is
the most notable exception, but not quite notable enough.
This tendency is, I believe, entirely due to woman having always been
divorced from business and politics, to her having been until recently
encouraged to delight in small material possessions, while discouraged
from focusing on anything non-material except religion, and from
considering general ideas. Particularly as regards general ideas woman
has lived in a bad atmosphere. The French king who said to his queen,
"Madam, we have taken you to give us children and not to give us
advice," was blowing a chill breath upon the tender shoot of woman's
intelligence. Neither he nor other men wished women to conceive general
ideas: women became incapable of conceiving or understanding them.
Thence sprang generalization, the tendency in woman to make sweeping
statements, such as "All men are deceivers," or "Men can do what they
like in the world," or "Men cannot feel as women do." It is not that
they dislike general questions, but that they have been thrust back from
general questions, so that they cannot hold them. Here is a case:
_Case 2_
With the object of entertaining an elderly lady, who is an invalid, I
explain, _in response to her own request_, the case that Germany makes
for having declared war. She asks one or two questions, and then
suddenly interrupts me to ask what I have been doing with myself lately
in the evenings.
This is a case of interest in the particular as opposed to the general.
It is an instance of what I want to show,--that woman drifts toward the
particular because she has been driven away from the general. To
concentrate too long upon the general is to her merely fatiguing.
Doubtless because of this, many middle-aged women become exceedingly
dull to men. So long as they are young all is well, for few men care
what folly issues from rosy lips. But once the lips are no longer rosy,
then man fails to find the companion he needs, because companionship, as
differentiated from love, can rest only on mental sympathy. Middle-aged
man is often dull too; while the middle-aged woman may concern herself
overmuch with the indigestion of her pet dog, the middle-aged man is
often unduly moved by his own indigestion. But, broadly speaking, a
greater percentage of middle-aged and elderly men than of such women
are interested in political and philosophical questions.
These men are often dull for another reason: they are more conventional.
The reader may differ from me, but I believe that woman is much less
conventional than man. She does all the conventional things and attacks
other women savagely for breaches of convention. But you will generally
find that where a man may with impunity break a convention he will not
do so, while, if secrecy is guaranteed, a woman will please herself
first and repent only if necessary. It follows that a man is
conventional because he respects convention; woman conventional because
she is afraid of what may happen if she does not obey convention. I
submit that this shows a greater degree of conventionality in man. The
typical Englishman of the world, wrecked on a desert island, would get
into his evening clothes as long as his shirts lasted; I do not think
his wife, alone in such circumstances, would wear a low-cut dress to
take her meal of cocoanuts, even if her frock did up in front.
It is this unconventionality that precipitates woman into the so-called
new movements in art or philosophy. She reacts against what is, seeking
a new freedom; even if she is only seeking a new excitement, a new
color, a new god, unconsciously she seeks a more liberal atmosphere,
while man is nearly always contented with the atmosphere that is. When
he rebels, his tendency is to destroy the old sanctuary, hers to build a
new sanctuary. That is a form of idealism,--not a very high idealism,
for woman seldom strains toward the impossible. In literature I cannot
call to mind that woman has ever conceived a Utopia such as those
imagined by Bellamy, Samuel Butler, William Morris, and H. G. Wells. The
only woman who voiced ideas of this kind was Mary Wollstonecraft, and
her views were hardly utopian. Nothings, such as Utopias, have been
always too airy for woman. The heroes in the novels she has written,
until recently and with one or two exceptions,--such as some of the
heroes of George Eliot,--are either stagey or sweet. Mr. Rochester is
stagey, Grandcourt is stagey, while the hero of "Under Two Flags" is
merely Turkish Delight.
3
A quality which singularly contrasts with woman's vague idealism is the
accuracy she displays in business. This is due to her being
fundamentally inaccurate. It is not the accurate people who are always
accurate; it is the inaccurate people on their guard.[3] Woman's
interest in the particular predisposes her to the exact, for accuracy
may be defined as a continuous interest in the particular. I suspect
that it indicates a probability that by education, and especially
encouragement, woman may develop a far higher degree of concentration
than she has hitherto done. In her way stands a fatal facility, that of
grasping ideas before they are half-expressed. It is a quality of
imagination, natural rather than induced. Any schoolteacher will confirm
the statement that in a mixed class, aged eleven to twelve, the essays
of the girls are better than those of the boys. This is not so in a
mixed university. I suspect that this latter is quite as much due to the
academic judgment, which does not recognize imagination, as to the fact
that in the later years of their lives the energies of girls are
diverted from intellectual concentration (and also expression) toward
the artistic and the social. This untrained concentration produces a
certain superficiality and an impetuousness which harmonize with the
intrusion of side issues,--to which I have referred,--and with the
burgeoning of side issues on the general idea.
[3] I have observed for two years the steady growth in the accuracy of
the work of Case 33, due to her having concentrated upon her instinctive
inaccuracy.--THE AUTHOR.
Nowhere is this better shown than in the postscript habit. Men do not,
as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and
persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than
other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by
postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the
postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before
me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary
letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written
outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality. The writers
have run on, seduced by irrelevance, and have not been able to stop to
consider in all its bearings the subject of the letter. Each postscript
represents a development or qualification, which must indicate the waste
by bad education of what may be a very good mind.
I would say in passing that we should not attach undue importance to
woman's physical disabilities. It is true that woman is more conscious
of her body than is man. So long as he is fed, sufficiently busy, in
good general health, he is normal. But woman is far more often in an
unbalanced physical condition. There is a great deal to be said for the
Hindu philosophical point of view, that the body needs to be just so
satisfied as to become imperceptible to the consciousness, as opposed to
the point of view of the Christian ascetics, who unfortunately carried
their ideas so far that they ended by thinking more of their hair shirt
than of Him for whose sake they wore it. In this sense woman is
intellectually handicapped because her body obtrudes itself upon her. It
is a subject of brooding and agitation. I suspect that this is largely
remediable, for I am not convinced that it is woman's peculiar physical
conditions that occasionally warp her intellect; it is equally possible
that a warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions.
Therefore, if, as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this
intellect, profound changes may with time appear in these physical
conditions.
4
The further qualification of woman's intellect is in her moral attitude.
I would ask the reader to divest himself of the idea that "moral"
refers only to matters of sex. Morality is the rule of conduct of each
human being in his relations with other human beings, and this covers
all relations. Because in some senses the morality of woman is not the
morality of man, we are not entitled to say with Pope that
"Woman's at best a contradiction still."
She is a contradiction. Man is a contradiction, apparently of a
different kind, and that is all. Thence spring misunderstandings and
sometimes dislike, as between people of different nations. I do not want
to labor the point, but I would suggest that in a very minor degree the
apparent difference between man and woman may be paralleled by the
apparent difference between the Italian and the Swede, who, within two
generations, produce very similar American children. But man, who
generalizes quite as wildly as woman when he does not understand, is
determined to emphasize the difference in every relation of life. For
instance, it is commonly said that woman cannot keep her promise. This
seems to me entirely untrue; given that as a rule woman's intellect is
not sufficiently educated to enable her to find a good reason for
breaking her promise, it is much more difficult for her to do so. For we
are all moral creatures, and if a man must steal the crown jewels, he is
happier if he can discover a high motive for so doing. Man has a
definite advantage where a loophole has to be found, and I have known
few women capable of standing up in argument against a trained lawyer
who has acquired the usual dexterity in misrepresentation.
In love and marriage, particularly, woman will keep plighted troth more
closely than man; there is no male equivalent of jilt, but the male does
jilt on peculiar lines; while a woman who knows that her youth, her
beauty are going must bring things to a head by jilting, the male is
never in a hurry, for his attractions wane so very slowly. Why should he
jilt the woman,--make a stir? So he just goes on. In due course she
tires and releases him, when he goes to another woman. That is jilting
by inches, and as regards faithfulness a pledged woman is more difficult
to win away than a pledged man. (To be just, it should be said that
unfaithfulness is in the eyes of most men a small matter, in the eyes of
most women a serious matter.) A pledged woman will remain faithful long
after love has flown; the promise is a mystic bond; none but a tall
flame can hide the ashes of the dead love. And so, when Shakespeare
asserts,--
"Frailty, thy name is woman,"
he is delivering one of the hasty judgments that abound in his solemn
romanticism.
This applies in realms divorced from love,--in questions of money, such
as debts or bets. Women do run up milliners' bills, but men boast of
never paying their tailors. And if sometimes women do not discharge the
lost bet, it is largely because a tradition of protection and patronage
has laid down that women need not pay their bets. Besides, women usually
pay their losses, while several men have not yet discharged their debts
of honor to me. It is a matter of honesty, and I think the criminal
returns for the United States would produce the same evidence as those
for England and Wales. In 1913 there were tried at Assizes for offences
against property 1616 men and 122 women. The records of Quarter Sessions
and of the courts of Summary Jurisdiction yield the same result, an
enormous majority of male offenders,--though there be more women than
men in England and Wales! And yet, in the face of such official figures,
of the evidence of every employer, man cherishes a belief in woman's
dishonesty! One reason, no doubt, is that woman's emotional nature leads
her, when she is criminal, to criminality of an aggravated kind. She
then justifies Pope's misogynist lines:
"O woman, woman! When to ill thy mind
Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend."
Most men, however, have abandoned the case against woman's dishonesty
and confine themselves to describing her as a liar, forgetting that they
generally dislike the truth when it comes from a woman's lips, and
always when it reflects upon their own conduct. For centuries man has
asked that woman should flatter, but also that she should tell the
truth: such a confusion of demands leads the impartial mind to the
conclusion that vanity cannot be a monopoly of the female. But it is
quite true that woman does not always cherish truth so well as man. The
desire for truth is intellectual, not emotional. Truth is a cold
bed-fellow, as might be expected of one who rose from a well. And among
women cases of disinterested lying are not uncommon. Here is Case 16:
An elderly woman talked at length about not having received insurance
papers, and made a great disturbance. It later appeared that she had not
insured. On another occasion she informed the household that her
son-in-law had been cabled to from South Africa to come and visit his
dying mother. It was proved that no cable had been sent.
I have a number of cases of this kind, but this is the most curious. I
suspect that this sort of lying is traceable to a need for romance and
drama in a colorless life. It springs from the wish to create a romantic
atmosphere round one's self and to increase one's personal importance.
Because men hold out hands less greedy toward drama and romance they are
less afflicted, but they do not entirely escape, and we have all
observed the new importance of the man whose brother has been
photographed in a newspaper or, better still, killed in a railway
accident. If he has been burned in a theater, the grief of his male
relatives is subtly tinged with excited delight. Romance, the wage of
lies, is woman's compensation for a dull life.
5
Vanity is as old as the mammoth. Romantic lying, obviously connected
with vanity, is justly alleged to be developed in woman. No doubt
woman's chief desire has been to appear beautiful, and it is quite open
to question whether the leaves that clothed our earliest ancestress were
gathered in a spirit of modesty rather than in response to a desire for
adornment.
But it should not be too readily assumed that vanity is purely a
feminine characteristic. It is a human characteristic, and the favor of
any male savage can be bought at the price of a necklace of beads or of
an admiral's cocked hat. The modern man is modish too, as much as he
dares. At Newport as at Brighton the dandy is supreme. It would be
inaccurate, however, to limit vanity to clothes. Vanity is more subtle,
and I would ask the reader which of the three principal motives that
animate man--love, ambition, and gold lust--is the strongest. The desire
to shine in the eyes of one's fellows has produced much in art and
political service; it has produced much that is foolish and ignoble. It
has led to political competition, to a wild race for ill-remunerated
offices, governorships, memberships of Parliament. Representatives of
the people often wish to serve the people; they also like to be marked
out as the people's men. There are no limits to masculine desire for
honors; seldom in England does a man refuse a peerage; Frenchmen are
martyrs to their love of ribbons, and not a year passes without a
scandal because an official has been bribed to obtain the Legion
d'Honneur for somebody, or, funnier still, because an adventurer has
blacked his face, set up in a small flat, impersonated a negro
potentate, and distributed for value received grand crosses of fantastic
kingdoms. Even democratic Americans have been known to seek titled
husbands for their daughters, and a few have become Papal barons or
counts.
Male vanity differs from female, but both are vanity. The two sexes even
share that curious form of vanity which in man consists in his calling
himself a "plain man", bragging of having come to New York without shoes
and with a dime in his pocket; which, in woman, consists in neglecting
her appearance. Both sexes convey more or less: "I am what I am, a
humble person ... but quite good enough." The arrogance of humility is
simply repulsive.
Ideas such as the foregoing may proceed from a certain simplicity. Woman
is much less complex than the poets believe. For instance, many men hold
that woman's lack of self-consciousness, as exemplified by disturbances
in shops, has its roots in some intricate reasoning process. One must
not be carried away: the truth is that woman, having so long been
dependent upon man, has an exaggerated idea of the importance of small
sums. Man has earned money; woman has been taught only to save it. Thus
she has been poor, and poverty has caused her to shrink from
expenditure; often she has become mean and, paradoxically enough, she
has at the same time become extravagant. Poverty has taught her to
respect the penny, while it has taught her nothing about the pound. If
woman finds it quite easy to spend one tenth of the household income on
dress, and even more,[4] it is because her education makes it as
difficult for her to conceive a thousand dollars as it is for a man to
conceive a million. It is merely a question of familiarity with money.
[4] See "Uniforms for Women," and observe extreme figures and details of
feminine expenditure on clothes.
Besides, foolish economy and reckless expenditure are indications of an
elementary quality. In that sense woman is still something of a savage.
She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been
educated. This may be a very good thing, and it certainly is an
agreeable one from the masculine point of view. Whether we consider
woman's attitude to the law, to social service, or to war, it is the
same thing. In most cases she is lawless; she will obey the law because
she is afraid of it, but she will not respect it. For her it is always
_sic volo, sic jubeo_. I suspect that if she had had a share in making
the law she would not have been like this, for she would have become
aware of the relation between law and life. Roughly she tends to look
upon the law as tyrannous if she does not like it, as protective if she
does like it. Probably there is little relation between her own moral
impulse, which is generous, and the law, which is only just. (That is,
just in intention.) This is qualified by the moral spirit in woman,
which increasingly leads her to the view that certain things should be
done and others not be done. But even then it is likely that at heart
woman does not respect the law; she may respect what it
represents,--strength,--but not what it implies,--equity. She is
infinitely more rebellious than man, and where she has power she
inflames the world in protest. I do not refer to the militant
suffragists, but to woman's general attitude. For instance, when it is
proposed to compel women to insure their servants, to pay employer's
compensation for accident, to restrict married women's control of their
property, to establish laws regulating the social evil, we find female
opposition very violent. I do not mean material opposition, although
that does occur, but mental hostility. Woman surrenders because she
must, man because he ought to.
That is an attitude of barbarism. It is a changing attitude; the ranks
of social service have, during the last half-century, been
disproportionately swollen by woman. Our most active worker in the
causes of factory inspection, child protection, anti-sweating, is to-day
woman. Woman is emerging swiftly from the barbarous state in which she
was long maintained. She will change yet more,--and further on in this
chapter I will attempt to show how,--but to-day it must be granted that
there runs in her veins much vigorous barbarian blood. Her attitude to
war is significant. During the past months I have met many women who
were inflamed by the idea of blood; so long as they were not losing
relatives or friends themselves, they tended to look upon the war as the
most exciting serial they had ever read. Heat and heroism, what could be
more romantic? Every woman to whom I told this said it was untrue, but
in no country have the women's unions struck against war; the
suffragettes have organized, not only hospitals, but kitchens,
recreation rooms, canteens for the use of soldiers; many have clamored
to be allowed to make shells; some, especially in Russia, have carried
rifles. In England, thirteen thousand women volunteered to make war
material; women filled the German factories. Of course, I recognize that
this is partly economic: women must live in wartime even at the price of
men's lives, and I am aware that a great many women have done all they
could to arrest the spread of war. In England many have prevented their
men from volunteering; in America, I am told, women have been solid
against war with Germany. But let the reader not be deceived. A subtle
point arises which is often ignored. If women went to war instead of
men, their attitude might be different. Consider, indeed, these two
paragraphs, fictitious descriptions of a battlefield:--
"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young men, with torn bodies,
their faces pale in the moonlight. The rays lit up the face of one that
lay near, made a glitter upon his little golden moustache."
"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young girls. The moonlight
streamed upon their torn bodies and their fair skins. The rays fell upon
one that lay near, drawing a glow from the masses of her golden hair."
Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do
not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will
hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered--how hateful! That girls
should be slaughtered--it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of
woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her
humanitarian attitude. I will not press the point that as a savage she
may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that
a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a sexual
consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed,
just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male
reader.
Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based
their attitude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the
Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is
absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely
claim no greater nobility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched
suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid
in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price.
To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in
Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a
goddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as
neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.
6
We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a
characteristic of sex; it is merely the exaggeration of a human
characteristic. For instance, it is currently said that women make
trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and
will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to
understand an obvious syllogism, their passion for side issues, their
generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused,
make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male
member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation.
What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of
degree, not of quality.
Where the emotionalism of women grows more pronounced is in matters of
religion and love. There is a vague correspondence between her attitude
to the one and to the other, in outwardly Christian countries, I mean.
She often finds in religion a curious philter, both a sedative and a
stimulant. Religion is often for women an allotrope of romance; blind
as an earthworm she seeks the stars, and it is curious that religion
should make so powerful an appeal to woman, considering how she has been
treated by the faiths. The Moslem faith has made of her a toy and a
reward; the Jewish, a submissive beast of burden; the Christian, a
danger, a vessel of impurity. I mean the actual faiths, not their
original theory; one must take a faith as one finds it, not as it is
supposed to be, and in the case of woman the Christian religion is but
little in accord with the view of Him who forgave the woman taken in
adultery. The Christian religion has done everything it could to heap
ignominy upon woman: head-coverings in church, practical tolerance of
male infidelity, kingly repudiation of queens, compulsory child-bearing,
and a multiplicity of other injustices. The Proverbs and the Bible in
general are filled with strictures on "a brawling woman", "a
contentious woman"; when man is referred to, mankind is really implied.
Yet woman has kissed the religious rods. One might think that indeed she
was seduced and held only by cruelty and contempt. She is now, in a
measure, turning against the faiths, but still she clings to them more
closely than man because she is more capable of making an act of faith,
of believing that which she knows to be impossible.
The appeal of religion to woman is the appeal of self-surrender,--that
is, ostensibly. In the case of love it is the same appeal, ostensibly;
though I suspect that intuition has told many a woman who gave herself
to a lover or to a god that she was absorbing more than she gave: in
love using the man for nature whom she represents, in faith performing a
pantheistic prodigy, the enclosing of Nirvana within her own bosom.
But speculation as to the impulse of sex in relation to religion, in
Greece, in Egypt, in Latin countries, would draw me too far. I can
record only that to all appearances a portion of the religious instinct
of woman is derived from the love instinct, which many believe to be
woman's first and only motive. It is significant that among the
sixty-five cases upon which this article is based there are several
deeply religious single women, while not one of the married women shows
signs of more than conventional devotion. I incline to believe that
woman is firstly animal, secondly, intellectual; while man appears to be
occasionally animal and primarily intellectual.
Observe indeed the varying age at which paternal and maternal instincts
manifest themselves. A woman's passion for her child generally awakes at
birth, and there are many cases where an unfortunate girl, intending to
murder her child, as soon as it is born discovers that she loves it. On
the other hand, a great many men are indifferent to their children in
infancy and are drawn to them only as they develop intellectual quality.
This is just the time when woman drifts from them. Qualified by
civilized custom, the attitude of woman toward her child is very much
that of the cat toward her kitten; as soon as the kitten is a few weeks
old, the mother neglects it. A few months later she will not know it.
Her part is played. So it is not uncommon to find a woman who has been
enthralled by her baby giving it over entirely to hired help: the baby
is growing intellectualized; it needs her no more except as a kindly but
calm critic. And frequently at that time the father begins to
intervene, to control the education, to prepare for the future. Whether
in the mental field this means much more than the difference in
temperament between red hair and black hair (if that means anything), I
do not know; but it is singular that so often the mother should drift
away from her child just at the moment when the father thinks of
teaching it to ride and shoot and tell the truth. Possibly by that time
her critical work is done.