But it may also be said, “Granting fully that you are right, that, as
woman’s old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or
must become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other
elements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested through
lack of exercise: and, granting that her evolution being arrested,
the evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person:
granting all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human
labour tends to become more and more intellectual and less and less
purely mechanical, as perfected machinery takes the place of crude human
exertion; and that therefore if woman is to be saved from degeneration
and parasitism, and the body of humanity from arrest, she must receive a
training which will cultivate all the intellectual and all the physical
faculties with which she is endowed, and be allowed freely to employ
them; nevertheless, would it not be possible, and perhaps be well, that
a dividing line of some kind should be drawn between the occupations
of men and of women? Would it not, for example, be possible that
woman should retain agriculture, textile manufacture, trade, domestic
management, the education of youth, and medicine, in addition to
child-bearing, as her exclusive fields of toil; while, to the male,
should be left the study of abstract science, law and war, and
statecraft; as of old, man took war and the chase, and woman absorbed
the further labours of life? Why should there not be again a fair and
even division in the field of social labour?”
Superficially, this suggestion appears rational, having at least this
to recommend it, that it appears to harmonise with the course of human
evolution in the past; but closely examined, it will, we think, be found
to have no practical or scientific basis, and to be out of harmony with
the conditions of modern life. In ancient and primitive societies, the
mere larger size and muscular strength of man, and woman’s incessant
physical activity in child-bearing and suckling and rearing the young,
made almost inevitable a certain sexual division of labour in almost
all countries, save perhaps in ancient Egypt. (The division of labour
between the sexes in Ancient Egypt and other exceptional countries, is
a matter of much interest, which cannot here be entered on.) Woman
naturally took the heavy agricultural and domestic labours, which were
yet more consistent with the continual dependence of infant life on
her own, than those of man in war and the chase. There was nothing
artificial in such a division; it threw the heaviest burden of the most
wearying and unexciting forms of social labour on woman, but under it
both sexes laboured in a manner essential to the existence of society,
and each transmitted to the other, through inheritance, the fruit of its
slowly expanding and always exerted powers; and the race progressed.
Individual women might sometimes, and even often, become the warrior
chief of a tribe; the King of Ashantee might train his terrible regiment
of females; and men might now and again plant and weave for their
children: but in the main, and in most societies, the division of
labour was just, natural, beneficial; and it was inevitable that such a
division should take place. Were today a band of civilised men, women,
and infants thrown down absolutely naked and defenceless in some desert,
and cut off hopelessly from all external civilised life, undoubtedly
very much the old division of labour would, at least for a time,
reassert itself; men would look about for stones and sticks with which
to make weapons to repel wild beasts and enemies, and would go a-hunting
meat and fighting savage enemies and tend the beasts when tamed: (The
young captured animals would probably be tamed and reared by the women.)
women would suckle their children, cook the meat men brought, build
shelters, look for roots and if possible cultivate them; there certainly
would be no parasite in the society; the woman who refused to labour for
her offspring, and the man who refused to hunt or defend society, would
not be supported by their fellows, would soon be extinguished by want.
As wild beasts were extinguished and others tamed and the materials for
war improved, fewer men would be needed for hunting and war; then they
would remain at home and aid in building and planting; many women would
retire into the house to perfect domestic toil and handicrafts, and on
a small scale the common ancient evolution of society would probably
practically repeat itself. But for the present, we see no such natural
and spontaneous division of labour based on natural sexual distinctions
in the new fields of intellectual or delicately skilled manual labour,
which are taking the place of the old.
It is possible, though at present there is nothing to give indication of
such a fact, and it seems highly improbable, that, in some subtle
manner now incomprehensible, there might tend to be a subtle correlation
between that condition of the brain and nervous system which accompanies
ability in the direction of certain modern forms of mental, social
labour, and the particular form of reproductive function possessed by
an individual. It may be that, inexplicable as it seems, there may
ultimately be found to be some connection between that condition of the
brain and nervous system which fits the individual for the study of the
higher mathematics, let us say, and the nature of their sex attributes.
The mere fact that, of the handful of women who, up to the present,
have received training and been allowed to devote themselves to abstract
study, several have excelled in the higher mathematics, proves of
necessity no pre-eminent tendency on the part of the female sex in
the direction of mathematics, as compared to labour in the fields of
statesmanship, administration, or law; as into these fields there has
been practically no admittance for women. It is sometimes stated,
that as several women of genius in modern times have sought to find
expression for their creative powers in the art of fiction, there must
be some inherent connection in the human brain between the ovarian sex
function and the art of fiction. The fact is, that modern fiction being
merely a description of human life in any of its phases, and being
the only art that can be exercised without special training or special
appliances, and produced in the moments stolen from the multifarious,
brain-destroying occupations which fill the average woman’s life, they
have been driven to find this outlet for their powers as the only one
presenting itself. How far otherwise might have been the directions in
which their genius would naturally have expressed itself can be known
only partially even to the women themselves; what the world has lost by
that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been
its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one
can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber
the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that
beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried
a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific
investigator, or a good judge. Scientifically speaking, it is as
unproven that there is any organic relation between the brain of the
female and the production of art in the form of fiction, as that there
is an organic relation between the hand of woman and a typewriting
machine. Both the creative writer and the typist, in their respective
spheres, are merely finding outlets for their powers in the direction of
least resistance. The tendency of women at the present day to undertake
certain forms of labour, proves only that in the crabbed, walled-in,
and bound conditions surrounding woman at the present day, these are the
lines along which action is most possible to her.
It may possibly be that in future ages, when the male and female forms
have been placed in like intellectual conditions, with like stimuli,
like training, and like rewards, that some aptitudes may be found
running parallel with the line of sex function when humanity is viewed
as a whole. It may possibly be that, when the historian of the future
looks back over the history of the intellectually freed and active
sexes for countless generations, that a decided preference of the female
intellect for mathematics, engineering, or statecraft may be made clear;
and that a like marked inclination in the male to excel in acting,
music, or astronomy may by careful and large comparison be shown. But,
for the present, we have no adequate scientific data from which to draw
any conclusion, and any attempt to divide the occupations in which male
and female intellects and wills should be employed, must be to attempt
a purely artificial and arbitrary division: a division not more rational
and scientific than an attempt to determine by the colour of his eyes
and the shape and strength of his legs, whether a lad should be an
astronomer or an engraver. Those physical differences among mankind
which divide races and nations--not merely those differences, enormously
greater as they are generally, than any physical differences between
male and female of the same race, which divide the Jew and the Swede,
the Japanese and the Englishman, but even those subtle physical
differences which divide closely allied races such as the English and
German--often appear to be allied with certain subtle differences in
intellectual aptitudes. Yet even with regard to these differences, it
is almost impossible to determine scientifically in how far they are the
result of national traditions, environment, and education, and in how
far the result of real differences in organic conformation. (In thinking
of physical sex differences, the civilised man of modern times has
always to guard himself against being unconsciously misled by the very
exaggerated external sex differences which our unnatural method of sex
clothing and dressing the hair produces. The unclothed and natural human
male and female bodies are not more divided from each other than those
of the lion and lioness. Our remote Saxon ancestors, with their great,
almost naked, white bodies and flowing hair worn long by both sexes,
were but little distinguished from each other; while among their modern
descendants the short hair, darkly clothed, manifestly two-legged male
differs absolutely from the usually long-haired, colour bedizened,
much beskirted female. Were the structural differences between male and
female really one half as marked as the artificial visual differences,
they would be greater than those dividing, not merely any species of man
from another, but as great as those which divide orders in the animal
world. Only a mind exceedingly alert and analytical can fail ultimately
to be misled by habitual visual misrepresentation. There is not,
probably, one man or woman in twenty thousand who is not powerfully
influenced in modern life in their conception of the differences,
physical and intellectual, dividing the human male and female, by the
grotesque exaggerations of modern attire and artificial manners.)
No study of the mere physical differences between individuals of
different races would have enabled us to arrive at any knowledge of
their mental aptitude; nor does the fact that certain individuals of a
given human variety have certain aptitudes form a rational ground for
compelling all individuals of that variety to undertake a certain form
of labour.
No analysis, however subtle, of the physical conformation of the Jew
could have suggested a priori, and still less could have proved, apart
from ages of practical experience, that, running parallel with any
physical characteristics which may distinguish him from his fellows, was
an innate and unique intellectual gift in the direction of religion. The
fact that, during three thousand years, from Moses to Isaiah, through
Jesus and Paul on to Spinoza, the Jewish race has produced men who
have given half the world its religious faith and impetus, proves that,
somewhere and somehow, whether connected organically with that physical
organisation that marks the Jew, or as the result of his traditions and
training, there does go this gift in the matter of religion. Yet, on
the other hand, we find millions of Jews who are totally and markedly
deficient in it, and to base any practical legislation for the
individual even on this proven intellectual aptitude of the race as a
whole would be manifestly as ridiculous as abortive. Yet more markedly,
with the German--no consideration of his physical peculiarities, though
it proceeded to the subtlest analysis of nerve, bone, and muscle, could
in the present stage of our knowledge have proved to us what generations
of experience appear to have proved, that, with that organisation which
constitutes the German, goes an unique aptitude for music. There is
always the possibility of mistaking the result of training and external
circumstance for inherent tendency, but when we consider the passion for
music which the German has shown, and when we consider that the greatest
musicians the world has seen, from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to
Wagner, have been of that race, it appears highly probable that such a
correlation between the German organisation and the intellectual gift of
music does exist. Similar intellectual peculiarities seem to be connoted
by the external differences which mark off other races from each other.
Nevertheless, were persons of all of these nationalities gathered in one
colony, any attempt to legislate for their restriction to certain forms
of intellectual labour on the ground of their apparently proved national
aptitudes or disabilities, would be regarded as insane. To insist that
all Jews, and none but Jews, should lead and instruct in religious
matters; that all Englishmen, and none but Englishmen, should engage in
trade; that each German should make his living by music, and none but
a German allowed to practise it, would drive to despair the unfortunate
individual Englishman, whose most marked deficiency might be in the
direction of finance and bartering trade power; the Jew, whose religious
instincts might be entirely rudimentary; or the German, who could not
distinguish one note from another; and the society as a whole would be
an irremediable loser, in one of the heaviest of all forms of social
loss--the loss of the full use of the highest capacities of all its
members.
It may be that with sexes as with races, the subtlest physical
difference between them may have their fine mental correlatives; but no
abstract consideration of the human body in relation to its functions
of sex can, in the present state of our knowledge, show us what
intellectual capacities tend to vary with sexual structure, and nothing
in the present or past condition of male and female give us more
than the very faintest possible indication of the relation of their
intellectual aptitudes and their sexual functions. And even were it
proved by centuries of experiment that with the possession of the
uterine function of sex tends to go exceptional intellectual capacity
in the direction of mathematics rather than natural history, or an
inclination for statecraft rather than for mechanical invention; were it
proved that, generally speaking and as a whole, out of twenty thousand
women devoting themselves to law and twenty thousand to medicine, they
tended to achieve relatively more in the field of law than of
medicine, there would yet be no possible healthy or rational ground
for restricting the activities of the individual female to that line
in which the average female appeared rather more frequently to excel.
(Minds not keenly analytical are always apt to mistake mere correlation
of appearance with causative sequence. We have heard it gravely asserted
that between potatoes, pigs, mud cabins and Irishmen there was an
organic connection: but we who have lived in Colonies, know that within
two generations the pure-bred descendant of the mud cabiner becomes
often the successful politician, wealthy financier, or great judge; and
shows no more predilection for potatoes, pigs, and mud cabins than men
of any other race.)
That even one individual in a society should be debarred from
undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes
an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets. That one male
Froebel should be prohibited or hampered in his labour as an educator of
infancy, on the ground that infantile instruction was the field of
the female; that one female with gifts in the direction of state
administration, should be compelled to instruct an infants’ school,
perhaps without the slightest gift for so doing, is a running to waste
of social life-blood.
Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical,
is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be
determined. And our demand today is that natural conditions, inexorably,
but beneficently, may determine the labours of each individual, and not
artificial restrictions.
As there is no need to legislate that Hindus, being generally supposed
to have a natural incapacity for field sports, shall not betake
themselves to them--for, if they have no capacity, they will fail; and,
as in spite of the Hindus’ supposed general incapacity for sport, it is
possible for an individual Hindu to become the noted batsman of his age;
so, also, there is no need to legislate that women should be restricted
in her choice of fields of labour; for the organic incapacity of the
individual, if it exist, will legislate far more powerfully than any
artificial, legal, or social obstruction can do; and it may be that the
one individual in ten thousand who selects a field not generally sought
by his fellows will enrich humanity by the result of an especial genius.
Allowing all to start from the one point in the world of intellectual
culture and labour, with our ancient Mother Nature sitting as umpire,
distributing the prizes and scratching from the lists the incompetent,
is all we demand, but we demand it determinedly. Throw the puppy into
the water: if it swims, well; if it sinks, well; but do not tie a
rope round its throat and weight it with a brick, and then assert its
incapacity to keep afloat.
For the present our cry is, “We take all labour for our province!”
From the judge’s seat to the legislator’s chair; from the statesman’s
closet to the merchant’s office; from the chemist’s laboratory to the
astronomer’s tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is not
our intention to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no closed door
we do not intend to force open; and there is no fruit in the garden of
knowledge it is not our determination to eat. Acting in us, and through
us, nature we know will mercilessly expose to us our deficiencies in
the field of human toil, and reveal to us our powers. And, for today, we
take all labour for our province!
But, it may then be said: “What of war, that struggle of the human
creature to attain its ends by physical force and at the price of the
life of others: will you take part in that also?” We reply: Yes; more
particularly in that field we intend to play our part. We have always
borne part of the weight of war, and the major part. It is not merely
that in primitive times we suffered from the destruction of the fields
we tilled and the houses we built; or that in later times as domestic
labourers and producers, though unwaged, we, in taxes and material loss
and additional labour, paid as much as our males towards the cost of
war; nor is it that in a comparatively insignificant manner, as
nurses of the wounded in modern times, or now and again as warrior
chieftainesses and leaders in primitive and other societies, we have
borne our part; nor is it even because the spirit of resolution in its
women, and their willingness to endure, has in all ages again and again
largely determined the fate of a race that goes to war, that we demand
our controlling right where war is concerned. Our relation to war is
far more intimate, personal, and indissoluble than this. Men have made
boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we
have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all ages
produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which
no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has
been, howsoever covered with slain, which is has not cost the women of
the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, then it has
cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life.
In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not
merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish
and weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of
childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in
the long months and years of rearing that follow, the women of the race
go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier
on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the
matter of death, in all civilised societies, the probability that the
average woman will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than the
probability that the average male will die in battle.
There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or
be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a
battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, “So
many mothers’ sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there!
So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped
within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so
many baby mouths drawing life at woman’s breasts;--all this, that men
might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue,
unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this, that an acre of ground
might be manured with human flesh, that next year’s grass or poppies or
karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or
that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!” And we cry,
“Without an inexorable cause, this should not be!” No woman who is a
woman says of a human body, “It is nothing!”
On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in the
governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also
be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human
differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce
women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the
wilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether
it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one. And this will be,
not because with the sexual function of maternity necessarily goes in
the human creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of social
instinct than that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all ages
led as nobly as women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward the
higher social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widely
cultured, they have led further and better. The fact that woman has
no inherent all-round moral superiority over her male companion, or
naturally on all points any higher social instinct, is perhaps most
clearly exemplified by one curious very small fact: the two terms
signifying intimate human relationships which in almost all human
languages bear the most sinister and antisocial significance are both
terms which have as their root the term “mother,” and denote feminine
relationships--the words “mother-in-law” and “step-mother.”
In general humanity, in the sense of social solidarity, and in
magnanimity, the male has continually proved himself at least the equal
of the female.
Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth’s women
of every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity
that no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few have
equalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom,
unparasitised and labouring women have in all ages known how to bear an
active part, and die.
Nor will woman’s influence militate against war because in the future
woman will not be able physically to bear her part in it. The smaller
size of her muscle, which would severely have disadvantaged her when
war was conducted with a battle-axe or sword and hand to hand, would now
little or at all affect her. If intent on training for war, she might
acquire the skill for guiding a Maxim or shooting down a foe with a
Lee-Metford at four thousand yards as ably as any male; and undoubtedly,
it has not been only the peasant girl of France, who has carried latent
and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general. If
our European nations should continue in their present semi-civilised
condition, which makes war possible, for a few generations longer, it
is highly probable that as financiers, as managers of the commissariat
department, as inspectors of provisions and clothing for the army, women
will play a very leading part; and that the nation which is the first to
employ its women so may be placed at a vast advantage over its fellows
in time of war. It is not because of woman’s cowardice, incapacity, nor,
above all, because of her general superior virtue, that she will end war
when her voice is fully, finally, and clearly heard in the governance
of states--it is because, on this one point, and on this point almost
alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of
man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he
does not. (It is noteworthy that even Catharine of Russia, a ruler and
statesman of a virile and uncompromising type, and not usually troubled
with moral scruples, yet refused with indignation the offer of Frederick
of Prussia to pay her heavily for a small number of Russian recruits in
an age when the hiring out of soldiers was common among the sovereigns
of Europe.)
In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streets
might seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings and
galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts
by the enemy, unconsideringly and merely because they came first to
hand, not valuing them more than had they been paving-stones. But one
man could not do this--the sculptor! He, who, though there might be no
work of his own chisel among them, yet knew what each of these works of
art had cost, knew by experience the long years of struggle and study
and the infinitude of toil which had gone to the shaping of even one
limb, to the carving of even one perfected outline, he could never so
use them without thought or care. Instinctively he would seek to throw
in household goods, even gold and silver, all the city held, before he
sacrificed its works of art!
Men’s bodies are our woman’s works of art. Given to us power of control,
we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human
relationships made by international ambitions and greeds. The thought
would never come to us as woman, “Cast in men’s bodies; settle the thing
so!” Arbitration and compensation would as naturally occur to her
as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national
relationships, as to the sculptor it would occur to throw in anything
rather than statuary, though he might be driven to that at last!
This is one of those phases of human life, not very numerous, but very
important, towards which the man as man, and the woman as woman, on
the mere ground of their different sexual function with regard to
reproduction, stand, and must stand, at a somewhat differing angle.
The physical creation of human life, which, in as far as the male is
concerned, consists in a few moments of physical pleasure; to the female
must always signify months of pressure and physical endurance, crowned
with danger to life. To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the
female, blood, anguish, and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the
few yet important differences between man and woman as such.
The twenty thousand men prematurely slain on a field of battle, mean,
to the women of their race, twenty thousand human creatures to be
borne within them for months, given birth to in anguish, fed from
their breasts and reared with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and the
strength of the nation are to be maintained. In nations continually at
war, incessant and unbroken child-bearing is by war imposed on all women
if the state is to survive; and whenever war occurs, if numbers are to
be maintained, there must be an increased child-bearing and rearing.
This throws upon woman as woman a war tax, compared with which all that
the male expends in military preparations is comparatively light.
The relations of the female towards the production of human life
influences undoubtedly even her relation towards animal and all life.
“It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something!” cries the typical
male of certain races, instinctively. “There is a living thing, it will
die if it is not cared for,” says the average woman, almost equally
instinctively. It is true, that the woman will sacrifice as mercilessly,
as cruelly, the life of a hated rival or an enemy, as any male; but she
always knows what she is doing, and the value of the life she takes!
There is no light-hearted, careless enjoyment in the sacrifice of life
to the normal woman; her instinct, instructed by practical experience,
steps in to prevent it. She always knows what life costs; and that it is
more easy to destroy than create it.
It is also true, that, from the loftiest standpoint, the condemnation
of war which has arisen in the advancing human spirit, is in no sense
related to any particular form of sex function. The man and the woman
alike, who with Isaiah on the hills of Palestine, or the Indian Buddha
under his bo-tree, have seen the essential unity of all sentient
life; and who therefore see in war but a symptom of that crude
disco-ordination of life on earth, not yet at one with itself, which
affects humanity in these early stages of its growth: and who are
compelled to regard as the ultimate goal of the race, though yet perhaps
far distant across the ridges of innumerable coming ages, that harmony
between all forms of conscious life, metaphorically prefigured by the
ancient Hebrew, when he cried, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb; and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion
and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them!”--to that
individual, whether man or woman, who has reached this standpoint, there
is no need for enlightenment from the instincts of the child-bearers of
society as such; their condemnation of war, rising not so much from the
fact that it is a wasteful destruction of human flesh, as that it is an
indication of the non-existence of that co-ordination, the harmony which
is summed up in the cry, “My little children, love one another.”
But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably for generations to come, the
instinctive antagonism of the human child-bearer to reckless destruction
of that which she has at so much cost produced, will be necessary to
educate the race to any clear conception of the bestiality and insanity
of war.
War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible
to the female an equal share in the control and governance of modern
national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its
extinction will not be delayed much longer.
It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men’s
bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamour
and ardour of battle, but singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-morning
courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may have
its food, a food more precious to us than our heart’s blood; it is we
especially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no
man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of
war and to labour there till in the course of generations we have
extinguished it.
If today we claim all labour for our province, yet more especially do we
claim those fields in which the difference in the reproductive function
between man and woman may place male and female at a slightly different
angle with regard to certain phases of human life.