We have seen that, in the past, no such thing as the parasitism of the
entire body or large majority of the females inhabiting any territory
was possible. Beneath that body of women of the dominant class or race,
who did not labour either mentally or physically, there has always been
of necessity a far more vast body of females who not only performed the
crude physical toil essential to the existence of society before the
introduction of mechanical methods of production, but who were compelled
to labour the more intensely because there was a parasite class above
them to be maintained by their physical toil. The more the female
parasite flourished of old, in one class or race, the more certainly
all women of other classes or races were compelled to labour only too
excessively; and ultimately these females and their descendants were
apt to supplant the more enervated class or race. In the absence of
machinery and of a vast employment of the motor-forces of nature,
parasitism could only threaten a comparatively small section of any
community, and a minute section of the human race as a whole. Female
parasitism in the past resembled gout--a disease dangerous only to the
over-fed, pampered, and few, never to the population of any society as a
whole.
At the present day, so enormous has been the advance made in the
substitution of mechanical force for crude, physical, human exertion
(mechanical force being employed today even in the shaping of
feeding-bottles and the creation of artificial foods as substitutes
for mother’s milk!), that it is now possible not only for a small and
wealthy section of women in each civilised community to be maintained
without performing any of the ancient, crude, physical labours of their
sex, and without depending on the slavery of, or any vast increase in
the labour of, other classes of females; but this condition has already
been reached, or is tending to be reached, by that large mass of women
in civilised societies, who form the intermediate class between poor
and rich. During the next fifty years, so rapid will undoubtedly be the
spread of the material conditions of civilisation, both in the societies
at present civilised and in the societies at present unpermeated by
our material civilisation, that the ancient forms of female, domestic,
physical labour of even the women of the poorest classes will be little
required, their place being taken, not by other females, but by always
increasingly perfected labour-saving machinery.
Thus, female parasitism, which in the past threatened only a minute
section of earth’s women, under existing conditions threatens vast
masses, and may, under future conditions, threaten the entire body.
If woman is content to leave to the male all labour in the new and
all-important fields which are rapidly opening before the human race;
if, as the old forms of domestic labour slip from her for ever
and evitably, she does not grasp the new, it is inevitable, that,
ultimately, not merely a class, but the whole bodies of females in
civilised societies, must sink into a state of more or less absolute
dependence on their sexual functions alone. (How real is this apparently
very remote danger is interestingly illustrated by a proposition gravely
made a few years ago by a man of note in England. He proposed that a
compulsory provision should be made for at least the women of the upper
and middle classes, by which they might be maintained through life
entirely without regard to any productive labour they might perform,
not even the passive labour of sexual reproduction being of necessity
required of them. That this proposal was received by the women striving
to reconstruct the relation of the modern woman to life without
acclamation and with scorn, may have surprised its maker; but with no
more reason than that man would have for feeling surprise who, seeing
a number of persons anxious to escape the infection of some contagious
disease, should propose as a cure to inoculate them all with it in its
most virulent form!)
As new forms of natural force are mastered and mechanical appliances
perfected, it will be quite possible for the male half of all civilised
races (and therefore ultimately of all) to absorb the entire fields of
intellectual and highly trained manual labour; and it would be entirely
possible for the female half of the race, whether as prostitutes, as
kept mistresses, or as kept wives, to cease from all forms of active
toil, and, as the passive tools of sexual reproduction, or, more
decadently still, as the mere instruments of sexual indulgence, to sink
into a condition of complete and helpless sex-parasitism.
Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has never
before worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance of
which was not equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancient
civilisation. As we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by,
the difficulties of our position, so also will be the future, not merely
of our own class, or even of our own race alone, but also of those
vast masses who are following on in the wake of our civilisation. The
decision we are called on to make is a decision for the race; behind us
comes on the tread of incalculable millions of feet.
There is thus no truth in the assertion so often made, even by
thoughtful persons, that the male labour question and the woman’s
question of our day are completely one, and that, would the women of
the European race of today but wait peacefully till the males alone had
solved their problem, they would find that their own had been solved at
the same time.
Were the entire male labour problem of this age satisfactorily settled
tomorrow; were all the unemployed or uselessly employed males at both
ends of societies, whom the changes of modern civilisation have robbed
of their ancient forms of labour, so educated and trained that they were
perfectly fitted for the new conditions of life; and were the material
benefit and intellectual possibilities, which the substitution of
mechanical for human labour now makes possible to humanity, no longer
absorbed by the few but dispersed among the whole mass of males in
return for their trained labour, yet the woman’s problem might be
further from satisfactory solution than it is today; and, if it were
affected at all, might be affected for the worse. It is wholly untrue
that fifty pounds, or two thousand, earned by the male as the result of
his physical or mental toil, if part of it be spent by him in supporting
non-labouring females, whether as prostitutes, wives, or mistresses, is
the same thing to the female or to the race as though that sum had been
earned by her own exertion, either directly as wages or indirectly by
toiling for the man whose wages supported her. For the moment, truly,
the woman so tended lies softer and warmer than had she been compelled
to exert herself; ultimately, intellectually, morally, and even
physically, the difference in the effect upon her as an individual and
on the race is the difference between advance and degradation, between
life and death. The increased wealth of the male no more of necessity
benefits and raises the female upon whom he expends it, than the
increased wealth of his mistress necessarily benefits mentally or
physically a poodle because she can give him a down cushion in place of
one of feathers, and chicken in place of beef. The wealthier the males
of a society become, the greater the temptation, both to themselves and
to the females connected with them, to drift toward female parasitism.
The readjustment of the position of the male worker, if it led to a
more equitable distribution of wealth among males, might indeed diminish
slightly the accompanying tendency to parasitism in the very wealthiest
female class; but it would, on the other hand, open up exactly those
conditions which make parasitism possible to millions of women today
leading healthy and active lives. (The fact cannot be too often dwelt
upon that parasitism is not connected with any definite amount of
wealth. Any sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy
him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely
parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally
tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any
enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the
different points at which enervation is reached by different females
came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire
was visited by a woman, the daughter and also the widow of small
professional men. She stated that she was in need of both food and
clothing. The millionaire’s wife gave her a leg of mutton and two
valuable dresses. The woman proceeded to whine, though in vigorous
health, that she had no one to carry them home for her, and could
not think of carrying them herself. The American, the descendant of
generations of able, labouring, New England, Puritan women, tucked the
leg of mutton under one arm and the bundle of clothes under the other
and walked off down the city street towards the woman’s dwelling,
followed by the astonished pauper parasite.
The most helpless case of female degeneration we ever came into contact
with was that of a daughter of a poor English officer on half-pay and
who had to exist on a few hundreds a year. This woman could neither
cook her own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any
social, political, or intellectual or artistic labour. Though able to
dance for a night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly
able to do her own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely to
have lost all power of compelling herself to do anything which was at
the moment fatiguing or displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however
great its ultimate reward. In a life of twenty-eight years this
woman had probably not contributed one hour’s earnest toil, mental or
physical, to the increase of the sum total of productive human labour.
Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she would possibly have
preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than have cultivated half
an acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the ultimate effect of
parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel
oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and
exhaustive.
That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidence
were needed, by the fact that those males most actively employed in
attempting to readjust the relations of the mass of labouring males to
the new conditions of life, are sometimes precisely those males who
are most bitterly opposed to woman in her attempt to readjust her
own position. Not even by the members of those professions, generally
regarded as the strongholds of obstructionism and prejudice, has a more
short-sighted opposition often been made to the attempts of woman to
enter new fields of labour, than have again and again been made by male
hand-workers, whether as isolated individuals or in their corporate
capacity as trade unions. They have, at least in some certain instances,
endeavoured to exclude women, not merely from new fields of intellectual
and social labour, but even from those ancient fields of textile
manufacture and handicraft, which have through all generations of the
past been woman’s. The patent and undeniable fact, that where the male
labour movement flourishes the woman movement also flourishes, rises
not from the fact that they are identical, but that the same healthy and
virile condition in a race or society gives rise to both.
As two streams rising from one fountain-head and running a parallel
course through long reaches may yet remain wholly distinct, one finding
its way satisfactorily to the sea, while the other loses itself in sand
or becomes a stagnant marsh, so our modern male and female movements,
taking their rise from the same material conditions in modern
civilisation, and presenting endless and close analogies with one
another in their cause of development, yet remain fundamentally
distinct. By both movements the future of the race must be profoundly
modified for good or evil; both touch the race in a manner absolutely
vital; but both will have to be fought out on their own ground,
and independently: and it can be only by determined, conscious, and
persistent action on the part of woman that the solution of her own
labour problems will proceed co-extensively with that of the other.
How distinct, though similar, is the underlying motive of the two
movements, is manifested most clearly by this fact, that, while the male
labour movement takes its rise mainly among the poor and hand-labouring
classes, where the material pressure of the modern conditions of life
fall heaviest, and where the danger of physical suffering and even
extinction under that pressure is most felt; the Woman Labour Movement
has taken its rise almost as exclusively among the wealthy, cultured,
and brain-labouring classes, where alone, at the present day, the
danger of enervation through non-employment, and of degeneration through
dependence on the sex function exists. The female labour movement of our
day is, in its ultimate essence, an endeavour on the part of a section
of the race to save itself from inactivity and degeneration, and this,
even at the immediate cost of most heavy loss in material comfort and
ease to the individuals composing it. The male labour movement
is, directly and in the first place, material; and, or at least
superficially, more or less self-seeking, though its ultimate reaction
on society by saving the poorer members from degradation and dependency
and want is undoubtedly wholly social and absolutely essential for
the health and continued development of the human race. In the Woman’s
Labour Movement of our day, which has essentially taken its rise among
women of the more cultured and wealthy classes, and which consists
mainly in a demand to have the doors leading to professional, political,
and highly skilled labour thrown open to them, the ultimate end can only
be attained at the cost of more or less intense, immediate, personal
suffering and renunciation, though eventually, if brought to a
satisfactory conclusion, it will undoubtedly tend to the material and
physical well-being of woman herself, as well as to that of her male
companions and descendants.
The coming half-century will be a time of peculiar strain, as mankind
seeks rapidly to adjust moral ideals and social relationships and the
general ordering of life to the new and continually unfolding material
conditions. If these two great movements of our age, having this as
their object, can be brought into close harmony and co-operation, the
readjustment will be the sooner and more painlessly accomplished; but,
for the moment, the two movements alike in their origin and alike in
many of their methods of procedure, remain distinct.
It is this fact, the consciousness on the part of the women taking their
share in the Woman’s Movement of our age, that their efforts are not,
and cannot be, of immediate advantage to themselves, but that they
almost of necessity and immediately lead to loss and renunciation, which
gives to this movement its very peculiar tone; setting it apart from the
large mass of economic movements, placing it rather in a line with those
vast religious developments which at the interval of ages have swept
across humanity, irresistibly modifying and reorganising it.
It is the perception of this fact, that, not for herself, nor even for
fellow-women alone, but for the benefit of humanity at large, it is
necessary she should seek to readjust herself to life, which lends to
the modern woman’s most superficial and seemingly trivial attempts at
readjustment, a certain dignity and importance.
It is this profound hidden conviction which removes from the sphere of
the ridiculous the attitude of even the feeblest woman who waves her
poor little “Woman’s rights” flag on the edge of a platform, and which
causes us to forgive even the passionate denunciations, not always
wisely thought out, in which she would represent the suffering and evils
of woman’s condition, as wrongs intentionally inflicted upon her, where
they are merely the inevitable results of ages of social movement.
It is this over-shadowing consciousness of a large impersonal
obligation, which removes from the sphere of the contemptible and
insignificant even the action of the individual young girl, who leaves
a home of comfort or luxury for a city garret, where in solitude, and
under that stern pressure which is felt by all individuals in arms
against the trend of their environment, she seeks to acquire the
knowledge necessary for entering on a new form of labour. It is this
profound consciousness which makes not less than heroic the figure of
the little half-starved student, battling against gigantic odds to take
her place beside man in the fields of modern intellectual toil, and
which, whether she succeed or fail, makes her a landmark in the course
of our human evolution. It is this consciousness of large impersonal
ends to be attained, and to the attainment of which each individual is
bound to play her part, however small, which removes from the domain of
the unnecessary, and raises to importance, the action of each woman
who resists the tyranny of fashions in dress or bearing or custom which
impedes her in her strife towards the new adjustment.
It is this consciousness which renders almost of solemn import the
efforts of the individual female after physical or mental self-culture
and expansion; this, which fills with a lofty enthusiasm the heart of
the young girl, who, it may be, in some solitary farm-house, in some
distant wild of Africa or America, deep into the night bends over her
books with the passion and fervour with which an early Christian may
have bent over the pages of his Scriptures; feeling that, it may be, she
fits herself by each increase of knowledge for she knows not what duties
towards the world, in the years to come. It is this consciousness of
great impersonal ends, to be brought, even if slowly and imperceptibly,
a little nearer by her action, which gives to many a woman strength
for renunciation, when she puts from her the lower type of sexual
relationship, even if bound up with all the external honour a legal bond
can confer, if it offers her only enervation and parasitism; and which
enables her often to accept poverty, toil, and sexual isolation (an
isolation even more terrible to the woman than to any male), and the
renunciation of motherhood, that crowning beatitude of the woman’s
existence, which, and which alone, fully compensates her for the organic
sufferings of womanhood--in the conviction that, by so doing, she makes
more possible a fuller and higher attainment of motherhood and wifehood
to the women who will follow her. It is this consciousness which makes
of solemn importance the knock of the humblest woman at the closed
door which shuts off a new field of labour, physical or mental: is she
convinced that, not for herself, but in the service of the whole race,
she knocks.
It is this abiding consciousness of an end to be attained, reaching
beyond her personal life and individual interests, which constitutes the
religious element of the Woman’s Movement of our day, and binds with the
common bond of an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body the women
of whatsoever race, class, and nation who are struggling after the
readjustment of woman to life.
This it is also, which in spite of defects and failures on the part of
individuals, yet makes the body who these women compose, as a whole, one
of the most impressive and irresistible of modern forces. The private
soldier of the great victorious army is not always an imposing object as
he walks down the village street, cap on side of head and sword dangling
between his legs, nor is he always impressive even when he burnishes up
his accoutrements or cleans his pannikins; but it is of individuals
such as these that the great army is made, which tomorrow, when it is
gathered together, may shake the world with its tread.
Possibly not one woman in ten, or even one woman in twenty thousand
among those taking part in this struggle, could draw up a clear and
succinct account of the causes which have led to the disco-ordination in
woman’s present position, or give a full account of the benefits to flow
from readjustment; as probably not one private soldier in an army of ten
or even of twenty thousand, though he is willing to give his life for
his land, would yet be able to draw up a clear and succinct account of
his land’s history in the past and of the conditions which have made
war inevitable; and almost as little can he often paint an exact and
detailed picture of the benefits to flow from his efts. He knows his
land has need of him; he knows his own small place and work.
It is possible that not one woman in ten thousand has grasped with
scientific exactitude, and still less could express with verbal
sharpness, the great central conditions which yet compel and animate her
into action.
Even the great, central fact, that with each generation the entire race
passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing
with the indelible marks of that mould upon it, that as the os cervix of
woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms
a ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head, a
size which could only increase if in the course of ages the os cervix of
woman should itself slowly expand; and that so exactly the intellectual
capacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms
also an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive
generation the limits of the expansion of the human race;--even this
fact she may not so clearly have grasped intellectually as to be able to
throw it into the form of a logical statement. The profound truth, that
the continued development of the human race on earth (a development
which, as the old myths and dreams of a narrow personal heaven fade
from our view, becomes increasingly for many of us the spiritual hope by
light of which we continue to live), a development which we hope shall
make the humanity of a distant future as much higher in intellectual
power and wider in social sympathy than the highest human units of
our day, as that is higher than the first primeval ancestor who
with quivering limb strove to walk upright and shape his lips to the
expression of a word, is possible only if the male and female halves of
humanity progress together, expanding side by side in the future as they
have done in the past--even this truth it is possible few women have
exactly and logically grasped as the basis of their action. The truth
that, as the first primitive human males and females, unable to count
farther than their fingers, or grasp an abstract idea, or feel the
controlling power of social emotion, could only develop into the
Sapphos, Aristotles, and Shelleys of a more expanded civilisation, if
side by side, and line by line, male and female forms have expanded
together; if, as the convolutions of his brain increased in complexity,
so increased the convolutions in hers; if, as her forehead grew higher,
so developed his; and that, if the long upward march of the future is
ever to be accomplished by the race, male and female must march side by
side, acting and reacting on each other through inheritance; or progress
is impossible. The truth that, as the existence of even the male Bushman
would be impossible without the existence of the analogous Bushwoman
with the same gifts; and that as races which can produce among their
males a William Kingdon Clifford, a Tolstoy, or a Robert Browning, would
be inconceivable and impossible, unless among its females it could also
produce a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, or a Louise Michel; so,
also, in the future, that higher and more socialised human race we dream
of can only come into existence, because in both the sex forms have
evolved together, now this sex and then that, so to speak, catching
up the ball of life and throwing it back to the other, slightly if
imperceptibly enlarging and beautifying it as it passes through their
hands. The fact that without the reaction of interevolution between the
sexes, there can be no real and permanent human advance; without the
enlarged deep-thinking Eve to bear him, no enlarged Adam; without the
enlarged widely sympathising Adam to beget her, no enlarged widely
comprehending Eve; without an enlarged Adam and an enlarged Eve, no
enlarged and beautified generation of mankind on earth; that an arrest
in one form is an arrest in both; and in the upward march of the entire
human family. The truth that, if at the present day, woman, after her
long upward march side by side with man, developing with him through
the countless ages, by means of the endless exercise of the faculties of
mind and body, has now, at last, reached her ultimate limit of growth,
and can progress no farther; that, then, here also, today, the growth
of the human spirit is to be stayed; that here, on the spot of woman’s
arrest, is the standard of the race to be finally planted, to move
forward no more, for ever:--that, if the parasite woman on her couch,
loaded with gewgaws, the plaything and amusement of man, be the
permanent and final manifestation of female human life on the globe,
then that couch is also the death-bed of human evolution. These profound
underlying truths, perhaps, not one woman in twenty thousand of those
actively engaged in the struggle for readjustment has so closely and
keenly grasped that she can readily throw them into the form of exact
language; and yet, probably, not the feeblest woman taking share in our
endeavour toward readjustment and expansion fails to be animated by a
vague but profound consciousness of their existence. Beyond the small
evils, which she seeks by her immediate, personal action to remedy, lie,
she feels; large ills of which they form but an off-shoot; beyond the
small good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great and
universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of today,
lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she alone
nor her sex alone are concerned, but all mankind.
That such should be the mental attitude of the average woman taking part
in the readjustive sexual movement of today; that so often on the public
platform and in literature adduces merely secondary arguments, and
is wholly unable logically to give an account of the great propelling
conditions behind it, is sometimes taken as an indication of the
inefficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of the movement in
which she takes part. But in truth, that is not so. It is rather
an indication which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in the
substance of human life, are the roots of this movement; and it places
it in a line with all those vast controlling movements which have in the
course of the ages reorganised human life.
For those great movements which have permanently modified the condition
of humanity have never taken their rise amid the chopped logic of
schools; they have never drawn their vitality from a series of purely
intellectual and abstract inductions. They have arisen always through
the action of widely spread material and spiritual conditions, creating
widespread human needs; which, pressing upon the isolated individuals,
awakens at last continuous, if often vague and uncertain, social
movement in a given direction. Mere intellectual comprehension may
guide, retard, or accelerate the great human movements; it has never
created them. It may even be questioned whether those very leaders, who
have superficially appeared to create and organise great and successful
social movements, have themselves, in most cases, perhaps in any, fully
understood in all their complexity the movements they themselves have
appeared to rule. They have been, rather, themselves permeated by the
great common need; and being possessed of more will, passion, intensity,
or intellect, they have been able to give voice to that which in
others was dumb, and conscious direction to that which in others was
unconscious desire: they have been but the foremost crest of a great
wave of human necessity: they have not themselves created the wave which
bears themselves, and humanity, onwards. The artificial social movements
which have had their origin in the arbitrary will of individuals, guided
with however much determination and reason, have of necessity proved
ephemeral and abortive. An Alexander might will to weld a Greece and
an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversified
Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determination
they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which they
desired; but the constraining individual will being withdrawn, the
object of their toil has melted away, as the little heap of damp sand
gathered under the palm of a child’s hand on the sea-shore, melts away,
scattered by the wind and washed out by the waves, the moment the hand
that shaped it is withdrawn; while the small, soft, indefinite, watery
fragment of jelly-fish lying beside it, though tossed hither and
thither by water and wind, yet retains its shape and grows, because its
particles are bound by an internal and organic force.
Our woman’s movement resembles strongly, in this matter, the gigantic
religious and intellectual movement which for centuries convulsed the
life of Europe; and had, as its ultimate outcome, the final emancipation
of the human intellect and the freedom of the human spirit. Looked
back upon from the vantage-point of the present, this past presents the
appearance of one vast, steady, persistent movement proceeding always
in one ultimate direction, as though guided by some controlling human
intellect. But, to the mass of human individuals taking part in it, it
presented an appearance far otherwise. It was fought out, now here,
now there, by isolated individuals and small groups, and often for
what appeared small and almost personal ends, having sometimes,
superficially, little in common. Now it was a Giordano Bruno, burnt
in Rome in defence of abstract theory with regard to the nature of the
First Cause; then an Albigense hurled from his rocks because he refused
to part with the leaves of his old Bible; now a Dutch peasant woman,
walking serenely to the stake because she refused to bow her head before
two crossed rods; then a Servetus burnt by Protestant Calvin at Geneva;
or a Spinoza cut off from his tribe and people because he could
see nothing but God anywhere; and then it was an exiled Rousseau or
Voltaire, or a persecuted Bradlaugh; till, in our own day the last
sounds of the long fight are dying about us, as fading echoes, in the
guise of a few puerile attempts to enforce trivial disabilities on the
ground of abstract convictions. The vanguard of humanity has won its
battle for freedom of thought.
But, to the men and women taking part in that mighty movement during
the long centuries of the past, probably nothing was quite clear, in the
majority of cases, but their own immediate move. Not the leaders--most
certainly not good old Martin Luther, even when he gave utterance to
his immortal “I can no otherwise” (the eternal justification of all
reformers and social innovators!), understood the whole breadth of the
battlefield on which they were engaged, or grasped with precision the
issues which were involved. The valiant Englishman, who, as the flames
shot up about him, cried to his companion in death, “Play the man,
Master Ridley; we shall by God’s grace this day light such a candle
in England, as shall never be put out!” undoubtedly believed that
the candle lighted was the mere tallow rushlight of a small sectarian
freedom for England alone; nor perceived that what he lighted was but
one ray of the vast, universal aurora of intellectual and spiritual
liberty, whose light was ultimately to stream, not only across England,
but across the earth. Nevertheless, undoubtedly, behind all these
limited efforts, for what appeared, superficially, limited causes,
lay, in the hearts of the men and women concerned, through the ages, a
profound if vague consciousness of ends larger than they clearly knew,
to be subserved by their action; of a universal social duty and a great
necessity.
That the Woman’s Movement of our day has not taken its origin from any
mere process of theoretic argument; that it breaks out, now here and
now there, in forms divergent and at times superficially almost
irreconcilable; that the majority of those taking part in it are driven
into action as the result of the immediate pressure of the conditions
of life, and are not always able logically to state the nature of all
causes which propel them, or to paint clearly all results of their
action; so far from removing it from the category of the vast
reorganising movements of humanity, places it in a line with them,
showing how vital, spontaneous, and wholly organic and unartificial is
its nature.
The fact that, at one point, it manifests itself in a passionate, and
at times almost incoherent, cry for an accredited share in public and
social duties; while at another it makes itself felt as a determined
endeavour after self-culture; that in one land it embodies itself mainly
in a resolute endeavour to enlarge the sphere of remunerative labour
for women; while in another it manifests itself chiefly as an effort to
recoordinate the personal relation of the sexes; that in one individual
it manifests itself as a passionate and sometimes noisy struggle for
liberty of personal action; while in another it is being fought out
silently in the depth of the individual consciousness--that primal
battle-ground, in which all questions of reform and human advance must
ultimately be fought and decided;--all this diversity, and the fact
that the average woman is entirely concerned in labour in her own little
field, shows, not the weakness, but the strength of the movement; which,
taken as a whole, is a movement steady and persistent in one direction,
the direction of increased activity and culture, and towards the
negation of all possibility of parasitism in the human female. Slowly,
and unconsciously, as the child is shaped in the womb, this movement
shapes itself in the bosom of our time, taking its place beside those
vast human developments, of which men, noting their spontaneity and the
co-ordination of their parts, have said, in the phraseology of old days,
“This thing is not of man, but of God.”
He who today looks at some great Gothic cathedral in its final form,
seems to be looking at that which might have been the incarnation of the
dream of some single soul of genius. But in truth, its origin was far
otherwise. Ages elapsed from the time the first rough stone was laid as
a foundation till the last spire and pinnacle were shaped, and the hand
which laid the foundation-stone was never the same as that which set
the last stone upon the coping. Generations often succeeded one another,
labouring at gargoyle, rose-window, and shaft, and died, leaving the
work to others; the master-builder who drew up the first rough outline
passed away, and was succeeded by others, and the details of the work as
completed bore sometimes but faint resemblance to the work as he devised
it; no man fully understood all that others had done or were doing,
but each laboured in his place; and the work as completed had unity;
it expressed not the desire and necessity of one mind, but of the human
spirit of that age; and not less essential to the existence of the
building was the labour of the workman who passed a life of devotion
in carving gargoyles or shaping rose-windows, than that of the greatest
master who drew general outlines: perhaps it was yet more heroic; for,
for the master-builder, who, even if it were but vaguely, had an image
of what the work would be when the last stone was laid and the last
spire raised, it was easy to labour with devotion and zeal, though well
he might know that the placing of that last stone and the raising of
that last spire would not be his, and that the building in its full
beauty and strength he should never see; but for the journeyman labourer
who carried on his duties and month by month toiled at carving his own
little gargoyle or shaping the traceries in his own little oriel window,
without any complete vision, it was not so easy; nevertheless, it was
through the conscientious labours of such alone, through their heaps of
chipped and spoiled stones, which may have lain thick about them, that
at the last the pile was reared in its strength and beauty.
For a Moses who could climb Pisgah, and, though it were through a
mist of bitter tears, could see stretching before him the land of the
inheritance, a land which his feet should never tread and whose fruit
his hand should never touch, it was yet, perhaps, not so hard to turn
round and die; for, as in a dream, he had seen the land: but for the
thousands who could climb no Pisgah, who were to leave their bones
whitening in the desert, having even from afar never seen the true
outline of the land; those who, on that long march, had not even borne
the Ark nor struck the timbrel, but carried only their small household
vessels and possessions, for these it was perhaps not so easy to lie
down and perish in the desert, knowing only that far ahead somewhere,
lay a Land of Promise. Nevertheless, it was by the slow and sometimes
wavering march of such as these, that the land was reached by the people
at last.
For her, whose insight enables her to see, through the distance, those
large beatitudes towards which the struggles and suffering of the women
of today may tend; who sees beyond the present, though in a future which
she knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood
bearing forward with it a strengthened and expanded race, it is not so
hard to renounce and labour with unshaken purpose: but for those
who have not that view, and struggle on, animated at most by a vague
consciousness that somewhere ahead lies a large end, towards which their
efforts tend; who labour year after year at some poor little gargoyle of
a Franchise Bill, or the shaping of some rough little foundation-stone
of reform in education, or dress a stone (which perhaps never quite fits
the spot it was intended for, and has to be thrown aside!); or who
carve away all their lives to produce a corbel of some reform in sexual
relations, in the end to find it break under the chisel; who, out of
many failures attain, perhaps, to no success, or but to one, and that
so small and set so much in the shade that no eye will ever see it;
for such as these, it is perhaps not so easy to labour without growing
weary. Nevertheless, it is through the labours of these myriad toilers,
each working in her own minute sphere, with her own small outlook, and
out of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last the enwidened
and beautified relations of woman to life must rise, if they are ever to
come.
When a starfish lies on the ground at the bottom of a sloping rock it
has to climb, it seems to the onlooker as though there were nothing
which could stir the inert mass and no means for taking it to the top.
Yet watch it. Beneath its lower side, hidden from sight, are a million
fine tentacles; impulses of will from the central nerve radiate
throughout the whole body, and each tiny fibre, fine as a hair, slowly
extends itself, and seizes on the minute particle of rough rock nearest
to it; now a small tentacle slips its hold, and then it holds firmly,
and then slowly and slowly the whole inert mass rises to the top.
It is often said of those who lead in this attempt at the readaption
of woman’s relation to life, that they are “New Women”; and they are
at times spoken of as though they were a something portentous and
unheard-of in the order of human life.
But, the truth is, we are not new. We who lead in this movement today
are of that old, old Teutonic womanhood, which twenty centuries ago
ploughed its march through European forests and morasses beside its male
companion; which marched with the Cimbri to Italy, and with the Franks
across the Rhine, with the Varagians into Russia, and the Alamani into
Switzerland; which peopled Scandinavia, and penetrated to Britain; whose
priestesses had their shrines in German forests, and gave out the oracle
for peace or war. We have in us the blood of a womanhood that was never
bought and never sold; that wore no veil, and had no foot bound; whose
realised ideal of marriage was sexual companionship and an equality in
duty and labour; who stood side by side with the males they loved in
peace or war, and whose children, when they had borne them, sucked
manhood from their breasts, and even through their foetal existence
heard a brave heart beat above them. We are women of a breed whose
racial ideal was no Helen of Troy, passed passively from male hand
to male hand, as men pass gold or lead; but that Brynhild whom Segurd
found, clad in helm and byrne, the warrior maid, who gave him counsel
“the deepest that ever yet was given to living man,” and “wrought on him
to the performing of great deeds;” who, when he died, raised high the
funeral pyre and lay down on it beside him, crying, “Nor shall the door
swing to at the heel of him as I go in beside him!” We are of a race
of women that of old knew no fear, and feared no death, and lived great
lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil
and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.
If it be today on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men,
and on no march through no external forest or morass that we have to
lead; it is yet the old spirit which, undimmed by two thousand years,
stirs within us in deeper and subtler ways; it is yet the cry of
the old, free Northern woman which makes the world today. Though the
battlefield be now for us all, in the laboratory or the workshop, in the
forum or the study, in the assembly and in the mart and the political
arena, with the pen and not the sword, of the head and not the arm, we
still stand side by side with the men we love, “to dare with them in
war and to suffer with them in peace,” as the Roman wrote of our old
Northern womanhood.
Those women, of whom the old writers tell us, who, barefooted and
white robed, led their Northern hosts on that long march to Italy, were
animated by the thought that they led their people to a land of warmer
sunshine and richer fruitage; we, today, believe we have caught sight
of a land bathed in a nobler than any material sunlight, with a fruitage
richer than any which the senses only can grasp: and behind us, we
believe there follows a longer train than any composed of our own race
and people; the sound of the tread we hear behind us is that of all
earth’s women, bearing within them the entire race. The footpath, yet
hardly perceptible, which we tread down today, will, we believe, be
life’s broadest and straightest road, along which the children of men
will pass to a higher co-ordination and harmony. The banner which
we unfurl today is not new: it is the standard of the old, free,
monogamous, labouring woman, which, twenty hundred years ago, floated
over the forests of Europe. We shall bear it on, each generation as it
falls passing it into the hand of that which follows, till we plant it
so high that all nations of the world shall see it; till the women of
the humblest human races shall be gathered beneath its folds, and no
child enter life that was not born within its shade.
We are not new! If you would understand us, go back two thousand
years, and study our descent; our breed is our explanation. We are the
daughters of our fathers as well as of our mothers. In our dreams we
still hear the clash of the shields of our forefathers as they struck
them together before battle and raised the shout of “Freedom!” In our
dreams it is with us still, and when we wake it breaks from our own
lips! We are the daughters of those men.
But, it may be said, “Are there not women among you who would use the
shibboleth, of freedom and labour, merely as a means for opening a
door to a greater and more highly flavoured self-indulgence, to a more
lucrative and enjoyable parasitism? Are there not women who, under the
guise of ‘work,’ are seeking only increased means of sensuous pleasure
and self-indulgence; to whom intellectual training and the opening to
new fields of labour side by side with man, mean merely new means of
self-advertisement and parasitic success?” We answer: There may be
such, truly; among us--but not of us! This at least is true, that we,
ourselves, are seldom deceived by them; the sheep generally recognise
the wolf however carefully fitted the sheepskin under which he hides,
though the onlookers may not; and though not always be able to drive him
from the flock! The outer world may be misled; we, who stand shoulder to
shoulder with them, know them; they are not many; neither are they
new. They are one of the oldest survivals, and among the most primitive
relics in the race. They are as old as Loki among the gods, as Lucifer
among the Sons of the Morning, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as
pain and dislocation in the web of human life.
Such women are as old as that first primitive woman who, when she went
with her fellows to gather wood for the common household, put grass in
the centre of the bundle that she might appear to carry as much as they,
yet carry nothing; she is as old as the first man who threw away his
shield in battle, and yet, when it was over, gathered with the victors
to share the spoils, as old as cowardice and lust in the human and
animal world; only to cease from being when, perhaps, an enlarged and
expanded humanity shall have cast the last slough of its primitive skin.
Every army has its camp-followers, not among its accredited soldiers,
but who follow in its train, ready to attack and rifle the fallen on
either side. To lookers on, they may appear soldiers; but the soldier
knows who they are. At the Judean supper there was one Master, and to
the onlooker there may have seemed twelve apostles; in truth only twelve
were of the company, and one was not of it. There has always been this
thirteenth figure at every sacramental gathering, since the world began,
wherever the upholders of a great cause have broken spiritual bread; but
it may be questioned whether in any instance this thirteenth figure
has been able to destroy, or even vitally to retard, any great human
movement. Judas could hang his Master by a kiss; but he could not
silence the voice which for a thousand years rang out of that Judean
grave. Again and again, in social, political, and intellectual
movements, the betrayer betrays;--and the cause marches on over the body
of the man.
There are women, as there are men, whose political, social,
intellectual, or philanthropic labours are put on, as the harlot puts
on paint, and for the same purpose: but they can no more retard the
progress of the great bulk of vital and sincere womanhood, than the
driftwood on the surface of a mighty river can ultimately prevent its
waters from reaching the sea.