intensification of love in moments of crisis, such as war, revolution,
or accident. Men do not escape this any more than women: the German
atrocities, for instance, largely proceed from extreme excitement. But
men have but slender bonds to break, being nearly all ready to take
their pleasure where they can, while women are more fastidious. Woman
needs a more highly charged atmosphere, the whips of fear or grief, the
intoxication of glory. When these are given her, her emotions more
readily break down her reserves; and it is not remarkable that in times
of war there should be an increase in illegitimate births as well as an
increase in marriages. Woman's intellect under those pressures gives
way. A number of the marriages contracted by British soldiers about to
leave for the front are simple manifestations of hysteria.
As for caprice, it has long been regarded as woman's privilege, part of
her charm. Man was the hunter, and his prey must run. Only he is annoyed
when it runs too fast. He is ever asking woman to charm him by
elusiveness and then complaining because she eludes him. There is hardly
a man who would not to-day echo Sir Walter Scott's familiar lines,--
"O Woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made."
It is not woman's fault. The poetry of the world is filled with the
words "to win" and "to woo"; one cannot win or woo one who does not
baffle; one can only take her, and men are not satisfied to do only
that. Man loves sincerity until he finds it; he can live neither with it
nor without it; this is true most notably in the lists of love. He is
for falsehood, for affectation, lest the prize should too easily be won.
Both sexes are equally guilty, if guilt there be.
More true is it that many women lie and curvet as a policy because they
believe thus best to manage men. They generally believe that they can
manage men. They look upon them as "poor dears." They honestly believe
that the "poor dears" cannot cook, or run houses, or trim hats, ignoring
the fact that the "poor dears" do these things better than anybody, in
kitchens, in hotels, and in hat shops. Especially they believe that they
can outwit them in the game of love. This curious idea is due to woman's
consciousness of having been sought after in the past and told that she
did not seek man but was sought by him. Centuries of thraldom and
centuries of flattery have caused her to believe this--the poor dear!
In ordinary times, when no world-movements stimulate, the chief
exasperation of woman resides in jealousy. It differs from male
jealousy, for the male is generally possessive, the female competitive.
I suspect that Euripides was generalizing rashly when he said that woman
is woman's natural ally. She is too sex-conscious for that, and many of
us have observed the annoyance of a mother when her son weds.
Competition is always violent, so much so that woman is generally
mocking or angry if a man praises ever so slightly another woman. If
she is young and able to make a claim on all men, she tends to be still
more virulent because her claim is on _all_ men. This is partly due to
the marriage market and its restrictions, but it is also partly natural.
No doubt because it is natural, woman attempts to conceal that jealousy,
nature being generally considered ignoble by the civilized world. In
this respect we must accept that an assumption of coldness is considered
a means of enticing man. It may well be that, where woman does not
exhibit jealousy, she is with masterly skill suggesting to the man a
problem: why is she not jealous? On which follows the desire to make her
jealous, and entanglement.
Because of these powerful preoccupations, when woman adopts a career she
has hitherto frequently allowed herself to be diverted therefrom by
love. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was very common for a
woman to abandon the stage, the concert platform, and so forth, when she
married. A change has come about, and there is a growing tendency in
women, whether or not at the expense of love I do not know, to retain
their occupations when they marry. But the tendency of woman still is to
revert to the instinctive function. In days to come, when we have
developed the individual and broken up the socialized society in which
we live, when the home has been swept away and the family destroyed, I
do not believe that this factor will operate so powerfully. In the way
of change stand the remnants of woman's slavish habit. No longer a
slave, she tends to follow, to submit, to adjust her conduct to the wish
of man, and it is significant that a powerful man is seldom henpecked.
The henpecked deserve to be henpecked, and I would point out that there
is no intention in these notes to attempt to substitute henpecked
husbands for cockpecked wives. The tendency is all the other way, for
woman tends to mould herself to man.
A number of cases lie before me:
Case 61 married a barrister. Before her marriage she lived in a
commercial atmosphere; after marriage she grew violently legal in her
conversation. Her husband developed a passion for motoring; so did Case
61. Observe that during a previous attachment to a doctor, Case 61 had
manifested a growing interest in medicine.
Case 18 comes from a hunting family, married a literary man, and within
a few years has ceased to take any exercise and mixes exclusively with
literary people.
Case 38, on becoming engaged to a member of the Indian Civil Service,
became a sedulous student of Indian literature and religion. On her
husband's appointment to a European post, her interest did not diminish.
She has paid a lengthy visit to India.
There are compensating cases among men: I have two. In one case a
soldier who married a literary woman has turned into a scholar. In the
other a commercial man, who married a popular actress, has been
completely absorbed by the theater, and is now writing successful plays.
It would appear from these rather disjointed notes that the emotional
quality in woman is more or less at war with her intellectual aims.
Indeed it is sometimes suggested that where woman appears, narrowness
follows; that books by women are mostly confined to love, are not cosmic
in feeling. This is generally true, for reasons which I hope to indicate
a little farther on; but it is not true that books where women are the
chief characters are narrow. Such novels as _Anna Karenina_, _Madame
Bovary_, _Une Vie_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ make that point
obvious. As a rule, books about men, touching as they do, not only upon
love, but upon art, politics, business, are more powerful than books
about women. But one should not forget that books written round women
are mostly written by women. As women are far less powerful in
literature than men, we must not conclude that books about women are
naturally lesser than books about men. The greatest books about women
have been written by men. But few men are sufficiently unprejudiced to
grasp women; only a genius can do so, and that is why few books about
women exist that deserve the epithet great. It remains to be seen
whether an increased understanding of the affairs of the world will
develop among women a literary power which, together with the world,
will embrace herself.
7
In the attempt to indicate what the future may reserve for woman, it is
important to consider what she has done, because she has achieved much
in the face of conservatism, of male egotism, of male jealousy, of
poverty, of ignorance, and of prejudice. These chains are weaker to-day,
and the goodwill that shall not die will break them yet; but many
women, a few of whose names follow, gave while enslaved an idea of
woman's quality. Examine indeed this short list:[5]
[5] I associate the arts with intellectual quality. (See "Woman and the
Paintpot.") Broadly, I believe that all achievements, artistic or
otherwise, proceed from intellect.
_Painting:_ Angelica Kauffmann, Madame Vigee le Brun, Rosa Bonheur.
_Music and drama:_ Rachel, Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Teresa
Carreno, Sadayacco.
_Literature:_ George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Madame de Stael,
Madame de Sevigne, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning. More recent,
Mrs. Alice Meynell, Miss May Sinclair, "Lucas Malet," Mrs. Edith
Wharton, "Vernon Lee."
_Social service and politics:_ Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Jane
Addams, Madame Montessori, Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Ennis Richmond, Mrs.
Beecher Stowe, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Mrs. Sidney
Webb, Miss Clementina Black, Josephine Butler, Mrs. Pankhurst, Elizabeth
Fry. Observe the curious case of Mrs. Hetty Green, financier.
This list could be enormously increased, and, as it is, it is a random
list, omitting women of distinction and including women of lesser
distinction. But still it contains no unknown names, and, though I do
not pretend that it compares with a similar list of men, it is an
indication. I am anxious that the reader should not think that I want to
compare Angelica Kauffmann with Leonardo, or Jane Austen with
Shakespeare. In every walk of life since history began there have been a
score of men of talent for every woman of talent, and there has never
been a female genius. That should not impress us: genius is an accident;
it may be a disease. It may be that mankind has produced only two or
three geniuses, and that one or two women in days to come may redress
the balance, and it may be that several women have been mute inglorious
Miltons. We do not know. But in the matter of talent, notably in the
arts, I submit that woman can be hopeful, particularly because most of
the names I give are those of women of the nineteenth century. The
nineteenth century was better for woman than the eighteenth, the
eighteenth better than the seventeenth: what could be more significant?
In the arts I feel that woman has never had her opportunity. She has
been hailed as an executive artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a
creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly
discounted,--told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew
unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an
atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. She has
persistently been told that certain subjects were "not fit for nice
young ladies"; she has been shut away from the expression of life.
Here is a typical masculine attitude, that of Mr. George Moore, in _A
Modern Lover_. Mr. George Moore, who seems to know a great deal about
females but less about women, causes in this book Harding, the novelist,
who generally expresses him, to criticize George Sand, George Eliot, and
Rosa Bonheur: "If they have created anything new, how is it that their
art is exactly like our own? I defy any one to say that George Eliot's
novels are a woman's writing, or that The Horse Fair was not painted by
a man. I defy you to show me a trace of feminality in anything they ever
did; that is the point I raise. I say that women as yet have not been
able to transfuse into art a trace of their sex; in other words, unable
to assume a point of view of their own, they have adopted ours."
This is cool! I have read a great deal of Mr. George Moore's art
criticism: when it deals with the work of a man he never seeks the
_masculine_ touch. He judges a man's work as art; he will not judge a
woman's work as art. He starts from the assumption that man's art is
art, while woman's art is--well, woman's art. That is the sort of thing
which has discouraged woman; that is the atmosphere of tolerance and
good-conduct prizes which she has breathed, and that is the stifling
stupidity through which she is breaking. She will break through, for I
believe that she loves the arts better than does man. She is better
ground for the development of a great artist, for she approaches art
with sympathy, while the great bulk of men approach it with fear and
dislike, shrinking from the idea that it may disturb their
self-complacency. The prejudice goes so far that, while women are
attracted to artists as lovers, men are generally afraid of women who
practice the arts, or they dislike them. It is not a question of sex; it
is a question of art. All that is part of sexual heredity, of which I
must say a few words.
But, before doing so, let me waste a few lines on the male conception of
love, which has influenced woman because love is still her chief
business. To this day, though it dies slowly, the male attitude is still
the attitude to a toy. It is the attitude of Nietzsche when saying, "Man
is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior." This idea is so
prevalent that Great Britain, in its alleged struggle against
Nietzschean ideas, is making abundant use of the Nietzschean point of
view. No wonder, for the idea runs not only through men but through
Englishmen: "woman is the reward of war,"--that is a prevalent idea,
notably among men who make war in the neighborhood of waste-paper
baskets. It has been exemplified by the British war propaganda in every
newspaper and in every music hall, begging women to refuse to be seen
with a man unless he is in khaki. It has had government recognition in
the shape of recruiting posters, asking women "whether their best boy is
in khaki." It has been popularly formulated on picture postcards
touchingly inscribed, "No gun, no girl."
All that--woman as the prize (a theory repudiated in the case of Belgian
atrocities)--is an idea deeply rooted in man. In the eighteen-sixties
the customary proposal was, "Will you be mine?" Very faintly signs are
showing that men will yet say, "May I be yours?" It will take time, for
the possessive, the dominating instinct in man, is still strong; and
long may it live, for that is the vigor of the race. Only we do not want
that instinct to carry man away, any more than we want a well-bred horse
to clench its teeth upon the bit and bolt.
We want to do everything we can to get rid of what may be called the
creed of the man of the world, which is suggested as repulsively as
anywhere in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's _Departmental Ditties_:
"My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward--get out! She has been there
before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking
in lore.
"Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of
Marriage.
Blister we not for _bursati_? So when the heart is vext,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next."
There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Moliere, in Thackeray, in
Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized
if she has "been there before", while man may brag of having "been there
before" as often as possible; of man lovelacing for his credit's sake
and woman adventuring at her peril.
8
I submit that each man and woman has two heredities: one the ordinary
heredity from two parents and their forbears, the other more complex and
purely mental--the tradition of sex. Heredity through sex may be defined
as the resultant of consecutive environments. I mean that a woman, for
instance, is considerably influenced by the ideas and attitudes of her
mother, grandmothers, and all female ascendants. They had a tradition,
and it is the basis of her outlook. Any boy born in a slum can, as he
grows educated, realize that the world lies before him; literature and
history soon show him that many as lowly as he have risen to fame, as
artists, scientists, statesmen; he may even dream of becoming a king,
like Bonaparte. To the boy nothing is impossible; if he is brave, there
is nothing he may not tear from the world. He knows it, and it
strengthens him; it gives him confidence. What his fathers did, he may
do; the male sexual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a
man said to me, "Thank God, I am a man." Contrast with this the
corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave
tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything
because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do
nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing
they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because
uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of
the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to
believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the
comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence,
instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little
is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most
cases she hardly has energy to struggle.
A little while ago, when Britain was floating a large war loan, one
woman told me that she could not understand its terms. We went into them
together, and she found that she understood perfectly. _She was
surprised._ She had always assumed that she did not understand finance,
and the assumption had kept her down, prevented her from understanding
it. Likewise, and until they try, many women think they cannot read maps
and time-tables.
With that heredity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will
deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority
must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily
snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found
out one's elders, it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and
woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the
old slavery that was in her forbears' blood. To me this seems foolish,
and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to
think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of
colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient
because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I
think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of
training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic
in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to
counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of
to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with
the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I
think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent
in sex. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I
suspect that they are mainly due to sexual heredity, to environment, to
suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human
creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men,
there are no women, but only sexual majorities.
The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though
particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the
Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had
no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was
later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among
the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir
Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled
the mediaeval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had
any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up
babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had
become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such
as _The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore_. She was growing significant
in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about
1850 she turned into the "perfect lady" who kept an album bound in
morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had
a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already
the Brontes and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon
was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty
years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to
the House of Commons.
To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which
she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman
governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service.
She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition
of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women
are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists
have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in
their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does
matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical
disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately
intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do
not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless,
more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions
and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is
to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman
than by man, simply because that as a sex he is in power, and the people
who are in power never want to alter anything.
Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings,
her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She
is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her
clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it
must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and
woman in her emancipation campaign is still too busy to think of the art
of charming. I suspect that as time passes and she suffers less
intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old
graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late
years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown
much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there
were so many things woman might not do. Almost any movement would bring
her up against a barrier; that is why it seems that she does nothing in
the world except break barriers. How genuine woman's rebellion is, no man
can say. It may be that woman's impulse toward male occupations and
rights is only a reaction against the growing difficulty of gaining a
mate, children, and a home. But I very much more believe that woman is
straining toward a new order, that the swift evolution of her mind is
leading her to contest more and more violently the assumption that there
are ineradicable differences between the male and the female mind. As
she grows more capable of grasping at education, she will become more
worthy of it; her intellect will harden, tend to resemble that of man;
and so, having escaped from the emptiness of the past into the special
fields which have been conceded her, she will make for broader fields,
fields so vast that they will embrace the world.
II
FEMINIST INTENTIONS
1
The Feminist propaganda--which should not be confounded with the
Suffrage agitation--rests upon a revolutionary biological principle.
Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there
are no women; there are only sexual majorities. To put the matter less
obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory,
according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the
female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or
feminine "_spheres_", and that they propose to identify absolutely the
conditions of the sexes.
Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards
the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend
to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize
the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary
results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious
Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I
have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name
I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with
having "let the cat out of the bag" in my little book, _Woman and
To-morrow_. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in
the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of
a sex war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little
sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter
everything while leaving everything unaltered.