It has been stated sometimes, though more often implicitly than in any
direct or logical form, (this statement being one it is not easy to make
definitely without its reducing itself to nullity!) that woman should
seek no fields of labour in the new world of social conditions that
is arising about us, as she has still her function as child-bearer: a
labour which, by her own showing, is arduous and dangerous, though she
may love it as a soldier loves his battlefield; and that woman should
perform her sex functions only, allowing man or the state to support
her, even when she is only potentially a child-bearer and bears no
children. (Such a scheme, as has before been stated, was actually put
forward by a literary man in England some years ago: but he had the
sense to state that it should apply only to women of the upper classes,
the mass of labouring women, who form the vast bulk of the English women
of the present day, being left to their ill-paid drudgery and their
child-bearing as well!)
There is some difficulty in replying to a theorist so wholly delusive.
Not only is he to be met by all the arguments against parasitism of
class or race; but, at the present day, when probably much more than
half the world’s most laborious and ill-paid labour is still performed
by women, from tea pickers and cocoa tenders in India and the islands,
to the washerwomen, cooks, and drudging labouring men’s wives, who
in addition to the sternest and most unending toil, throw in their
child-bearing as a little addition; and when, in some civilised
countries women exceed the males in numbers by one million, so
that there would still be one million females for whom there was no
legitimate sexual outlet, though each male in the nation supported a
female, it is somewhat difficult to reply with gravity to the assertion,
“Let Woman be content to be the ‘Divine Child-bearer,’ and ask no more.”
Were it worth replying gravely to so idle a theorist, we might
answer:--Through all the ages of the past, when, with heavy womb and
hard labour-worn hands, we physically toiled beside man, bearing up by
the labour of our bodies the world about us, it was never suggested to
us, “You, the child-bearers of the race, have in that one function a
labour that equals all others combined; therefore, toil no more in other
directions, we pray of you; neither plant, nor build, nor bend over
the grindstone; nor far into the night, while we sleep, sit weaving the
clothing we and our children are to wear! Leave it to us, to plant, to
reap, to weave, to work, to toil for you, O sacred child-bearer! Work no
more; every man of the race will work for you!” This cry in all the grim
ages of our past toil we never heard.
And today, when the lofty theorist, who tonight stands before the
drawing-room fire in spotless shirtfront and perfectly fitting clothes,
and declaims upon the amplitude of woman’s work in life as child-bearer,
and the mighty value of that labour which exceeds all other, making
it unnecessary for her to share man’s grosser and lower toils: is it
certain he always in practical life remembers his theory? When waking
tomorrow morning, he finds that the elderly house drudge, who rises
at dawn while he yet sleeps to make his tea and clean his boots, has
brought his tea late, and polished his boots ill; may he not even
sharply condemn her, and assure her she will have to leave unless
she works harder and rises earlier? Does he exclaim to her, “Divine
child-bearer! Potential mother of the race! Why should you clean my
boots or bring up my tea, while I lie warm in bed? Is it not enough you
should have the holy and mysterious power of bringing the race to life?
Let that content you. Henceforth I shall get up at dawn and make my own
tea and clean my own boots, and pay you just the same!” Or, should his
landlady, now about to give birth to her ninth child, send him up a
poorly-cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scuttle of coals, does he
send for her and thus apostrophise the astonished matron: “Child-bearer
of the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so noble and
lofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry up heavy
coal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out nerve
and brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We, we,
the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding
toil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life,
not to support it by labour. The Mother, the Mother! How wonderful it
sounds! Toil no more! Rest is for you; labour and drudgery for
us!” Would he not rather assure her that, unless she laboured more
assiduously and sternly, she would lose his custom and so be unable to
pay her month’s rent; and perhaps so, with children and an invalid or
drunken husband whom she supports, be turned out into the streets? For,
it is remarkable, that, with theorists of this class, it is not toil, or
the amount of toil, crushing alike to brain and body, which the female
undertakes that is objected to; it is the form and the amount of the
reward. It is not the hand-labouring woman, even in his own society,
worn out and prematurely aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that
has no beginning and knows no end--
“Man’s work is from sun to sun,
But the woman’s work is never done”--
it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his
shirts, or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in
the sweater’s den where she sews the garments in which he appears so
radiantly in the drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thought
of the woman-doctor with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives
round in her carriage to see her patients, or receives them in her
consulting-rooms, and who spends the evening smoking and reading before
her study fire or receiving her guests; it is the thought of the woman
who, as legislator, may loll for perhaps six hours of the day on the
padded seat of legislative bench, relieving the tedium now and then by
a turn in the billiard- or refreshment-room, when she is not needed to
vote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, with
three or four hundred a year, who gives half a dozen lectures a week,
and has leisure to enjoy the society of her husband and children, and
to devote to her own study and life of thought; it is she who wrings his
heart. It is not the woman, who, on hands and knees, at tenpence a day,
scrubs the floors of the public buildings, or private dwellings, that
fills him with anguish for womanhood: that somewhat quadrupedal posture
is for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of the
mother and child-bearer; and that, in some other man’s house, or perhaps
his own, while he and the wife he keeps for his pleasures are visiting
concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces till far into the night
bearing with aching back and tired head the fretful, teething child
he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty or thirty pounds
a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by work in an
office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have a
comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure,
distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour,
so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the
eternal womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of the
race should labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, or
toilers for the children he brings into the world, provided the reward
they receive is not large, nor in such fields as he might himself at any
time desire to enter.
When master and ass, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbed
a steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and across
sliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when they
were come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad,
green lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse of
trees waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, the
master should say to his ass, “Good beast of mine, lie down! I can push
the whole burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; you
have toiled enough; I will go on alone!” then it might be even the beast
would whisper (with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the green
fields beyond)--“Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountain
together, and the stones have cut my hoofs as they cut your feet.
Perhaps, if when we were at the foot you had found out that the burden
was two heavy for me, and had then said to me, ‘Lie down, my beastie;
I will carry on the burden alone; lie down and rest!’ I might then have
listened. But now, just here, where I see the gates swinging open, a
smooth road, and green fields before us, I think I shall go on a little
farther. We two have climbed together; maybe we shall go on yet, side by
side.”
For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man who
would suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearing
is enough for her share in life’s labour, “Do you dare say to us
now, that we are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that is
performed our powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the ages
of the past, when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regarded
it hardly as a toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our right
hand lost its cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when human
labour is easier and humanity’s work grows fairer, you say to us, ‘You
can do nothing now but child-bear’? Do you dare to say this, to us, when
the upward path of the race has been watered by the sweat of our brow,
and the sides of the road by which humanity has climbed are whitened on
either hand by the bones of the womanhood that has fallen there, toiling
beside man? Do you dare say this, to us, when even today the food you
eat, the clothes you wear, the comfort you enjoy, is largely given you
by the unending muscular toil of woman?”
As the women of old planted and reaped and ground the grain that the
children they bore might eat; as the maidens of old spun that they might
make linen for their households and obtain the right to bear men; so,
though we bend no more over grindstones, or labour in the fields,
or weave by hand, it is our intention to enter all the new fields of
labour, that we also may have the power and right to bring men into the
world. It is our faith that the day comes in which not only shall no man
dare to say, “It is enough portion for a woman in life that she bear
a child,” but when it will rather be said, “What noble labour has that
woman performed, that she should have the privilege of bringing a man or
woman child into the world?”
But, it has also been objected, “What, and if the female half of
humanity, though able, in addition to the exercise of its reproductive
functions, to bear its share in the new fields of social labour as it
did in the old, be yet in certain directions a less productive labourer
than the male? What if, in the main, the result of the labour of the two
halves of humanity should not be found to be exactly equal?”
To this it may be answered, that it is within the range of possibility
that, mysteriously co-ordinated with the male reproductive function in
the human, there may also be in some directions a tendency to possess
gifts for labour useful and beneficial to the race in the stage of
growth it has now reached, in excess of those possessed by the female.
We see no reason why this should be so, and, in the present state of our
knowledge, this is a point on which no sane person would dogmatise; but
it is possible! It may, on the other hand be, that, taken in the bulk,
when all the branches of productive labour be considered, as the ages
pass, the value of the labour of the two halves of humanity will be
found so identical and so closely to balance, that no superiority can
possibly be asserted of either, as the result of the closest analysis.
This also is possible.
But, it may also be, that, when the bulk and sum-total of human
activities is surveyed in future ages, it will be found that the value
of the labour of the female in the world that is rising about us, has
exceeded in quality or in quantity that of the male. We see no reason
either, why this should be; there is nothing in the nature of the
reproductive function in the female human which of necessity implies
such superiority.
Yet it may be, that, with the smaller general bulk and the muscular
fineness, and the preponderance of brain and nervous system in net bulk
over the fleshy and osseous parts of the organism, which generally,
though by no means always, characterises the female as distinguished
from the male of the human species, there do go mental qualities which
will peculiarly fit her for the labours of the future. It may be, that
her lesser possession of the mere muscular and osseous strength, which
were the elements of primary importance and which gave dominance in one
stage of human growth, and which placed woman at a social disadvantage
as compared with her companion, will, under new conditions of life, in
which the value of crude mechanical strength as distinguished from high
vitality and strong nervous activity is passing away, prove as largely
to her advantage, as his muscular bulk and strength in the past proved
to the male. It is quite possible, in the new world which is arising
about us, that the type of human most useful to society and best fitted
for its future conditions, and who will excel in the most numerous forms
of activity, will be, not merely the muscularly powerful and bulky, but
the highly versatile, active, vital, adaptive, sensitive, physically
fine-drawn type; and, as that type, though, like the muscularly heavy
and powerful, by no means peculiar to and confined to one sex, is yet
rather more commonly found in conjunction with a female organism, it is
quite possible that, taken in the bulk and on the whole, the female half
of humanity may, by virtue of its structural adaptions, be found most
fitted for the bulk of human labours in the future!
As with individuals and races, so also with sexes, changed social
conditions may render exactly those subtile qualities, which in one
social state were a disadvantage, of the highest social advantage in
another.
The skilled diplomatist or politician, so powerful in his own element,
on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or
consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a
wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature,
a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have
before remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on
a desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages,
and to combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values would
at once reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, the
learned judge, or great poet and scholar who would be sought after, but
the thickest-headed navvy who could throw a stone so exactly that he
brought down a bird, and who could in a day raise a wall which would
shelter the group; and the man so powerful that he could surely strike
an enemy or wild beast dead with his club, would at once be objects of
social regard and attain individual eminence, and perhaps dominance. It
would not be the skilled dancer, who in one night in a civilised state
earns her hundreds, nor yet the fragile clinging beauty, but the girl
of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry
water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in
such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion
in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while
ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his
untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey
to destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with the
new condition brought by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurably
his inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed, survives and multiplies,
exactly because he has been driven by his smaller structure and lesser
physical force to develop those social instincts and those forms of
intelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of life and
valuable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities may be
traced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has been
one long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physically
powerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks under
the lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile among
the willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen hundred years, has been
trampled, tortured, and despised beneath the feet of the more physically
powerful and pugilistic, but not more vital, keen, intelligent, or
persistent races of Europe; has, today, by the slow turning of the
wheel of life, come uppermost. The Egyptian task-master and warrior
have passed; what the Babylonian was we know no more, save for a few mud
tablets and rock inscriptions recording the martial victories; but the
once captive Jew we see today in every city and every street; until at
last, the descendants of those men who spat when they spoke his
name, and forcibly drew his teeth to extract his money from him, wait
patiently behind each other for admission to his offices and palaces;
while nobles solicit his daughters in marriage and kings are proud to be
summoned to his table in hope of golden crumbs, and great questions
of peace and war are often held balanced in the hand of one little
asthmatic Jew. After long ages of disgrace and pariahism, the time has
come, whether for good or for evil, when just those qualities which the
Jew possesses and which subtilely distinguish him from others, are in
demand; while those he has not are sinking into disuse; exactly that
domination of the reflective faculties over the combative, which once
made him slave, also saved him from becoming extinct in wars; and the
intellectual quickness, the far-sighted keenness, the persistent mental
activity and self-control, which could not in those ages save him from
degradation or compensate for his lack of bone and muscle and combative
instinct, are the very qualities the modern world demands and crowns.
The day of Goliath with his club and his oaths is fast passing, and the
day of David with his harp and skilfully constructed sling is coming
near and yet nearer.
The qualities which give an animal, a race, or an individual, a higher
utility or social dominance must always be influenced by any change in
the environment. As the wheel of life slowly revolves, that which was
lowest comes continually uppermost, and that which was dominant becomes
subservient.
It is possible, that women, after countless ages, during which that
smaller relative development in weight and muscularity which is incident
to almost all females which suckle their young, and that lesser desire
for pugilism inherent in almost all females who bear their young alive,
rendered her lacking in the two qualities which made for individual
dominance in her societies, may yet, in the future, discover that those
changes in human conditions, which have done away with the primary
necessity for muscular force and pugilistic arts, have also inverted her
place in the scale of social values.
It is possible, that the human female, like the Jew, the male of that
type farthest removed from the dominant male type of the past, may in
the future find, that, so far from those qualities which, in an earlier
condition, lessened her social value and power of labour, continuing to
do so, they will increase it. That the delicacy of hand, lightness of
structure which were fatal when the dominant labour of life was to
wield a battle-axe or move a weight, may be no restraint but even an
assistance in the intellectual and more delicate mechanical fields of
labour; that the preponderance of nervous and cerebral over muscular
material, and the tendency towards preservative and creative activity
over pugilistic and destructive, so far from shutting her off from the
most important fields of human toil, may increase her fitness for them!
We have no certain proof that it is so at present; but, if woman’s
long years of servitude and physical subjection, and her experience as
child-bearer and protector of infancy, should, in any way, be found
in the future to have endowed her, as a kind of secondary sexual
characteristic, with any additional strength of social instinct,
with any exceptional width of human sympathy and any instinctive
comprehension; then, it is not merely possible, but certain, that, in
the ages that are coming, in which the labour of the human race will be
not mainly destructive but conservative, in which the building up and
developing of humanity, and not continually the inter-destruction of
part by part, will be the dominant activity of the race, that woman as
woman, and by right of that wherein she differs from the male, will have
an all-important part to play in the activity of the race.
The matter is one of curious and subtle interest, but what practically
concerns the human race is, not which of the two sexual halves which
must always coexist is best fitted to excel in certain human labours in
this or that direction, at this or that time, nor even which has most
to contribute to the sum-total of human activities; but it is this, that
every individual unit humanity contains, irrespective of race, sex, or
type, should find exactly that field of labour which may most contribute
to its development, happiness, and health, and in which its peculiar
faculties and gifts shall be most effectively and beneficially exerted
for its fellows.
It matters nothing, and less than nothing, to us as women, whether, of
those children we bring into the world, our sons should excel in virtue,
intelligence, and activity, our daughters, or our daughters our sons;
so that, in each child we bring to life, not one potentiality shall be
lost, nor squandered on a lesser when it might have been expended on a
higher and more beneficent task. So that not one desirable faculty
of the marvellous creatures we suffer to bring into existence be left
uncultivated, to us, as women, it matters nothing and less than nothing,
which sex type excels in action, in knowledge, or in virtue, so both
attain their best. There is one thing only on earth, as precious to
woman as the daughter who springs from her body--it is the son. There
is one thing only dearer to the woman than herself--it is the man. As no
sane human concerns himself as to whether the right or left ventricle
of his heart works most satisfactorily, or is most essential to his
well-being, so both be perfect in health and activity; as no sane woman
distresses herself lest her right breast should not excel the left in
beauty and use; so no sane man or woman questions anxiously over the
relative perfections of male and female. In love there is no first nor
last. What we request of life is that the tools should be given to his
hand or hers who can best handle them; that the least efficient
should not be forced into the place of the more efficient, and that
an artificially drawn line should never repress the activities of the
individual creature, which we as women bring into the world.
But it may also be said to us, “What, and if, all your dreams and hopes
for woman and the future of the race be based on air? What, and if,
desirable as it is that woman should not become practically dependent on
her sexual function alone, and should play at least as great a part in
the productive labour of the race in the future as she played in that of
the past--what, if woman cannot take the same vast share in the complex
and largely mental labour fields of the future, as in the largely
physical fields of the past? What, and if, in spite of all her effort
and sacrifice to attain this end, exactly now and when the labour of
civilised societies becomes mental rather than mechanical, woman be
found wanting?”
In Swiss valleys today the traveller comes sometimes on the figure of
a solitary woman climbing the mountain-side, on her broad shoulders a
mighty burden of fodder or manure she is bearing up for the cattle, or
to some patch of cultivated land. Steady, unshrinking eyes look out
at you from beneath the deeply seamed forehead, and a strand of hair,
perhaps almost as white as the mountain snows on the peaks above,
escapes from under the edge of the binding handkerchief. The face is
seamed and seared with the stern marks of toil and endurance, as the
mountain-side is with marks of storm and avalanche. It is the face of
one who has brought men into the world in labour and sorrow, and toiled
mightily to sustain them; and dead must be the mind to the phases of
human existence, who does not see in that toilworn figure one of the
mighty pillars, which have in the long ages of the past sustained the
life of humanity on earth, and made possible its later development; and
much must the tinsel of life have dazzled him, who fails to mark it with
reverence and, metaphorically, to bow his head before it--the type of
the mighty labouring woman who has built up life.
But, it may be said, what if, in the ages to come, it should never again
be possible for any man to stand bowed with the same respect in the
presence of any other of earth’s mighty toilers, who should also be
mother and woman? What, if she, who could combine motherhood with the
most unending muscular toil, will fall flaccid and helpless where the
labour becomes mental? What if, struggle as she will, she can become
nothing in the future but the pet pug-dog of the race, lying on its
sofa, or the Italian greyhound, shivering in its silken coat? What
if woman, in spite of her most earnest aspirations and determined
struggles, be destined to failure in the new world that is rising
because of inherent mental incapacity?
There are many replies which may be made to such a suggestion. It is
often said with truth, that the ordinary occupations of woman in the
past and present, and in all classes of society in which she is not
parasitic, do demand, and have always demanded, a very high versatility
and mental activity, as well as physical: that the mediaeval baron’s
wife who guided her large household probably had to expend far more pure
intellect in doing so than the baron in his hunting and fighting; that
the wife of the city accountant probably expends today more reason,
imagination, forethought, and memory on the management of her small
household, than he in his far simpler, monotonous arithmetical toil;
that, as there is no cause for supposing that the tailor or shoemaker
needs less intellect in his calling than the soldier or prize-fighter,
so there is nothing to suggest that, in the past, woman has not expended
as much pure intellect in the mass of her callings as the man in his;
while in those highly specialised intellectual occupations, in which
long and uninterrupted training tending to one point is necessary,
such as the liberal professions and arts, that, although woman has
practically been excluded from the requisite training, and the freedom
to place herself in the positions in which they can be pursued, that
yet, by force of innate genius and gifts in such directions, she has
continually broken through the seemingly insuperable obstacles, and
again and again taken her place beside man in those fields of labour;
showing thereby not merely aptitude but passionate and determined
inclination in those directions. With equal truth, it is often remarked
that, when as an independent hereditary sovereign, woman has been placed
in the only position in which she has ever been able freely and fully
to express her own individuality, and though selected at random by fate
from the mass of women, by the mere accident of birth or marriage, she
has shown in a large percentage of cases that the female has the power
to command, organise, and succeed in one of the most exacting and
complex of human employments, the government of nations; that from the
days of Amalasontha to Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth of England, and
Catharine of Russia, women have not failed to grasp the large impersonal
aspects of life, and successfully and powerfully to control them, when
placed in the supreme position in which it was demanded. It may also
be stated, and is sometimes, with so much iteration as to become almost
wearisome, that women’s adequacy in the modern fields of intellectual or
skilled manual labour is no more today an open matter for debate, than
the number of modern women who, as senior wranglers, doctors, &c.,
have already successfully entered the new fields, and the high standard
attained by women in all university examinations to which they are
admitted, and their universal success in the administration of parochial
matters, wherever they have been allowed to share it, proves their
intellectual and moral fitness for the new forms of labour.
All these statements are certainly interesting, and may be unanswerable.
And yet--if the truth be told, it is not ultimately on these grounds
that many of us base our hope and our certitude with regard to the
future of woman. Our conviction as to the plenitude of her powers for
the adequate performance of lofty labours in these new fields, springs
not at all from a categorical enumeration of the attainments or
performances of individual women or bodies of women in the past or
present; it has another source.
There was a bird’s egg once, picked up by chance upon the ground, and
those who found it bore it home and placed it under a barn-door fowl.
And in time the chick bred out, and those who had found it chained it by
the leg to a log, lest it should stray and be lost. And by and by they
gathered round it, and speculated as to what the bird might be. One
said, “It is surely a waterfowl, a duck, or it may be a goose; if we
took it to the water it would swim and gabble.” But another said, “It
has no webs to its feet; it is a barn-door fowl; should you let it loose
it will scratch and cackle with the others on the dung-heap.” But a
third speculated, “Look now at its curved beak; no doubt it is a parrot,
and can crack nuts!” But a fourth said, “No, but look at its wings;
perhaps it is a bird of great flight.” But several cried, “Nonsense!
No one has ever seen it fly! Why should it fly? Can you suppose that
a thing can do a thing which no one has ever seen it do?” And the
bird--the bird--with its leg chained close to the log, preened its wing.
So they sat about it, speculating, and discussing it: and one said
this, and another that. And all the while as they talked the bird sat
motionless, with its gaze fixed on the clear, blue sky above it. And one
said, “Suppose we let the creature loose to see what it will do?”--and
the bird shivered. But the others cried, “It is too valuable; it might
get lost. If it were to try to fly it might fall down and break its
neck.” And the bird, with its foot chained to the log, sat looking
upward into the clear blue sky; the sky, in which it had never been--for
the bird--the bird, knew what it would do--because it was an eaglet!
There is one woman known to many of us, as each human creature knows but
one on earth; and it is upon our knowledge of that woman that we base
our certitude.
For those who do not know her, and have not this ground, it is probably
profitable and necessary that they painfully collect isolated facts and
then speculate upon them, and base whatever views they should form upon
these collections. It might even be profitable that they should form no
definite opinions at all, but wait till the ages of practical experience
have put doubt to rest. For those of us who have a ground of knowledge
which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to
act fearlessly than to argue.
Finally, it may be objected to the entrance of woman to the new fields
of labour, and in effect it is often said--“What, and if, all you have
sought be granted you--if it be fully agreed that woman’s ancient fields
of toil are slipping from her, and that, if she do not find new,
she must fall into a state of sexual parasitism, dependent on her
reproductive functions alone; and granted, that, doing this, she must
degenerate, and that from her degeneration must arise the degeneration
and arrest of development of the males as well as of the females of her
race; and granting also, fully, that in the past woman has borne one
full half, and often more than one half, of the weight of the productive
labours of her societies, in addition to child-bearing; and allowing
more fully that she may be as well able to sustain her share in the
intellectual labours of the future as in the more mechanical labours of
the past; granting all this, may there not be one aspect of the question
left out of consideration which may reverse all conclusions as to the
desirability, and the human good to be attained by woman’s enlarged
freedom and her entering into the new fields of toil? What if, the
increased culture and mental activity of woman necessary for her
entrance into the new fields, however desirable in other ways for
herself and the race, should result in a diminution, or in an absolute
abolition of the sexual attraction and affection, which in all ages of
the past has bound the two halves of humanity together? What if, though
the stern and unlovely manual labours of the past have never affected
her attractiveness for the male of her own society, nor his for her;
yet the performance by woman of intellectual labours, or complex and
interesting manual labour, and her increased intelligence and width,
should render the male objectionable to her, and the woman undesirable
to the male; so that the very race itself might become extinct through
the dearth of sexual affection? What, and if, the woman ceases to value
the son she bears, and to feel desire for and tenderness to the man who
begets him; and the man to value and desire the woman and her offspring?
Would not such a result exceed, or at least equal, in its evil to
humanity, anything which could result from the degeneration and
parasitism of woman? Would it not be well, if there exist any
possibility of this danger, that woman, however conscious that she can
perform social labour as nobly and successfully under the new conditions
of life as the old, should yet consciously, and deliberately, with her
eyes open, sink into a state of pure intellectual torpor, with all its
attendant evils, rather than face the more irreparable loss which her
development and the exercise of her gifts might entail? Would it not be
well she should deliberately determine, as the lesser of two evils,
to dwarf herself and limit her activities and the expansion of her
faculties, rather than that any risk should be run of the bond of desire
and emotion between the two sexual halves of humanity being severed? If
the race is to decay and become extinct on earth, might it not as well
be through the parasitism and decay of woman, as through the decay of
the sexual instinct?”
It is not easy to reply with rationality, or even gravity, to a
supposition, which appears to be based on the conception that a sudden
and entire subversion of the deepest of those elements on which human,
and even animal, life on the globe is based, is possible from so
inadequate a cause: and it might well be passed silently, were it not
that, under some form or other, this argument frequently recurs, now
in a more rational and then in a more irrational form; constituting
sometimes an objection in even moderately intelligent minds, to the
entrance of woman into the new fields of labour.
It must be at once frankly admitted that, were there the smallest
possible danger in this direction, the sooner woman laid aside all
endeavour in the direction of increased knowledge and the attainment of
new fields of activity, the better for herself and for the race.
When one considers the part which sexual attraction plays in the order
of sentient life on the globe, from the almost unconscious attractions
which draw amoeboid globule to amoeboid globule, on through the endless
progressive forms of life; till in monogamous birds it expresses itself
in song and complex courtship and sometimes in the life-long conjugal
affection of mates; and which in the human race itself, passing through
various forms, from the imperative but almost purely physical attraction
of savage male and female for each other, till in the highly developed
male and female it assumes its aesthetic and intellectual but not less
imperative form, couching itself in the songs of poet, and the sometimes
deathless fidelity of richly developed man and woman to each other, we
find it not only everywhere, but forming the very groundwork on which is
based sentient existence; never eradicable, though infinitely varied
in its external forms of expression. When we consider that in the human
world, from the battles and dances of savages to the intrigues and
entertainments of modern Courts and palaces, the attraction of man and
woman for each other has played an unending part; and, that the most
fierce ascetic religious enthusiasm through the ages, the flagellations
and starvations in endless nunneries and monasteries, have never been
able to extirpate nor seriously to weaken for one moment the master
dominance of this emotion; that the lowest and most brutal ignorance,
and the highest intellectual culture leave mankind, equally, though in
different forms, amenable to its mastery; that, whether in the brutal
guffaw of sex laughter which rings across the drinking bars of our
modern cities, and rises from the comfortable armchairs in fashionable
clubs; or in the poet’s dreams, and the noblest conjugal relations of
men and women linked together for life, it plays still today on earth
the vast part it played when hoary monsters ploughed after each other
through Silurian slime, and that still it forms as ever the warp on
which in the loom of human life the web is woven, and runs as a thread
never absent through every design and pattern which constitutes the
individual existence on earth, it appears not merely as ineradicable;
but it is inconceivable to suppose that that attraction of sex towards
sex, which, with hunger and thirst, lie, as the triune instincts, at
the base of animal life on earth, should ever be exterminable by the
comparatively superficial changes resulting from the performance of this
or that form of labour, or the little more or less of knowledge in one
direction or another.
That the female who drives steam-driven looms, producing scores of yards
of linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of her
corresponding male than had she toiled at a spinning-wheel with hand
and foot to produce one yard; that the male should desire less of the
companionship of the woman who spends the morning in doctoring babies in
her consulting-room, according to the formularies of the pharmacopoeia,
than she who of old spent it on the hillside collecting simples for
remedies; that the woman who paints a modern picture or designs a modern
vase should be less lovable by man, than her ancestor who shaped the
first primitive pot and ornamented it with zigzag patterns was to the
man of her day and age; that the woman who contributes to the support
of her family by giving legal opinions will less desire motherhood and
wifehood than she who in the past contributed to the support of
her household by bending on hands and knees over her grindstone, or
scrubbing floors, and that the former should be less valued by man than
the latter--these are suppositions which it is difficult to regard as
consonant with any knowledge of human nature and the laws by which it is
dominated.
On the other hand, if it be supposed that the possession of wealth or
the means of earning it makes the human female objectionable to the
male, all history and all daily experience negates it. The eager hunt
for heiresses in all ages and social conditions, make it obvious
that the human male has a strong tendency to value the female who can
contribute to the family expenditure; and the case is yet, we believe,
unrecorded of a male who, attracted to a female, becomes averse to her
on finding she has material good. The female doctor or lawyer earning a
thousand a year will always, and today certainly does, find more suitors
than had she remained a governess or cook, labouring as hard, earning
thirty pounds.
While, if the statement that the female entering on new fields of labour
will cease to be lovable to the male be based on the fact that she will
then be free, all history and all human experience yet more negates its
truth. The study of all races in all ages, proves that the greater the
freedom of woman in any society, the higher the sexual value put upon
her by the males of that society. The three squaws who walk behind the
Indian, and whom he has captured in battle or bought for a few axes or
lengths of tobacco, and over whom he exercises the despotic right of
life and death, are probably all three of infinitesimal value in his
eyes, compared with the value of his single, free wife to one of our
ancient, monogamous German ancestors; while the hundred wives and
concubines purchased by a Turkish pasha have probably not even an
approximate value in his eyes, when compared with the value which
thousands of modern European males set upon the one comparatively free
woman, whom they may have won, often only after a long and tedious
courtship.
So axiomatic is the statement that the value of the female to the male
varies as her freedom, that, given an account of any human society in
which the individual female is highly valued, it will be perfectly safe
to infer the comparative social freedom of woman; and, given a statement
as to the high degree of freedom of woman in a society, it will be safe
to infer the great sexual value of the individual woman to man.
Finally, if the suggestion, that men and women will cease to be
attractive to one another if women enter modern fields of labour, be
based on the fact that her doing so may increase her intelligence and
enlarge her intellectual horizon, it must be replied that the whole
trend of human history absolutely negates the supposition. There is
absolutely no ground for the assumption that increased intelligence and
intellectual power diminishes sexual emotion in the human creature of
either sex. The ignorant savage, whether in ancient or modern societies,
who violates and then clubs a female into submission, may be dominated,
and is, by sex emotions of a certain class; but not less dominated
have been the most cultured, powerful, and highly differentiated male
intelligences that the race has produced. A Mill, a Shelley, a Goethe,
a Schiller, a Pericles, have not been more noted for vast intellectual
powers, than for the depth and intensity of their sexual emotions. And,
if possible, with the human female, the relation between intensity of
sexual emotion and high intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The life
of a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, an Elizabeth Browning have not
been more marked by a rare development of the intellect than by deep
passionate sexual emotions. Nor throughout the history of the race has
high intelligence and intellectual power ever tended to make either male
or female unattractive to those of the opposite sex.
The merely brilliantly attired and unintelligent woman, probably never
awakened the same intensity of profound sex emotion even among the men
of her own type, which followed a George Sand; who attracted to herself
with deathless force some of the most noted men of her generation, even
when, nearing middle age, stout, and attired in rusty and inartistic
black, she was to be found rolling her cigarettes in a dingy office,
scorning all the external adornments with which less attractive females
seek to supply a hidden deficiency. Probably no more hopeless mistake
could be made by an ascetic seeking to extirpate sex emotion and the
attraction of the sexes for one another, than were he to imagine that
in increasing virility, intelligence, and knowledge this end could be
attained. He might thereby differentiate and greatly concentrate the
emotions, but they would be intensified; as a widely spread, shallow,
sluggish stream would not be annihilated but increased in force and
activity by being turned into a sharply defined, clear-cut course.
And if, further, we turn to those secondary manifestations of sexual
emotion, which express themselves in the relations of human progenitors
to their offspring, we shall find, if possible more markedly, that
increase of intelligence and virility does not diminish but increases
the strength of the affections. As the primitive, ignorant male, often
willingly selling his offspring or exposing his female infants to death,
often develops, with the increase of culture and intelligence, into
the extremely devoted and self-sacrificing male progenitor of civilised
societies; so, yet even more markedly, does the female relation with her
offspring, become intensified and permanent, as culture and intelligence
and virility increase. The Bushwoman, like the lowest female barbarians
in our own societies, will often readily dispose of her infant son for
a bottle of spirits or a little coin; and even among somewhat more
mentally developed females, strong as is the affection of the average
female for her new born offspring, the closeness of the relation between
mother and child tends rapidly to shrink as time passes, so that by
the time of adolescence is reached the relation between mother and son
becomes little more than a remembrance of a close inter-union which
once existed. It is, perhaps, seldom, till the very highest point of
intellectual growth and mental virility has been reached by the human
female, that her relation with her male offspring becomes a permanent
and active and dominant factor in the lives of both. The concentrated
and all-absorbing affection and fellowship which existed between the
greatest female intellect France has produced and the son she bore,
dominating both lives to the end, the fellowship of the English
historian with his mother, who remained his chosen companion and the
sharer of all his labours through life, the relation of St. Augustine
to his mother, and those of countless others, are relations almost
inconceivable where the woman is not of commanding and active
intelligence, and where the passion of mere physical instinct is
completed by the passion of the intellect and spirit.
There appears, then, from the study of human nature in the past, no
ground for supposing that if, as a result of woman’s adopting new forms
of labour, she should become more free, more wealthy, or more actively
intelligent, that this could in any way diminish her need of the
physical and mental comradeship of man, nor his need of her; nor that
it would affect their secondary sexual relations as progenitors, save
by deepening, concentrating, and extending throughout life the parental
emotions. The conception that man’s and woman’s need of each other could
be touched, or the emotions binding the sexes obliterated, by any mere
change in the form of labour performed by the woman of the race, is as
grotesque in its impossibility, as the suggestion that the placing of a
shell on the seashore this way or that might destroy the action of the
earth’s great tidal wave.
But, it may be objected, “If there be absolutely no ground for the
formation of such an opinion, how comes it that, in one form or another,
it is so often expressed by persons who object to the entrance of woman
into new or intellectual fields of labour? Where there is smoke must
there not also be fire?” To which it must be replied, “Without fire, no
smoke; but very often the appearance of smoke where neither smoke nor
fire exist!”
The fact that a statement is frequently made or a view held forms no
presumptive ground of its truth; but it is undoubtedly a ground for
supposing that there is an appearance or semblance which makes it appear
truth, and which suggests it. The universally entertained conception
that the sun moved round the world was not merely false, but the reverse
of the truth; all that was required for its inception was a fallacious
appearance suggesting it.
When we examine narrowly the statement, that the entrance of woman into
the new fields of labour, with its probably resulting greater freedom
of action, economic independence and wider culture, may result in a
severance between the sexes, it becomes clear what that fallacious
appearance is, which suggests this.
The entrance of a woman into new fields of labour, though bringing her
increased freedom and economic independence, and necessitating increased
mental training and wider knowledge, could not extinguish the primordial
physical instinct which draws sex to sex throughout all the orders of
sentient life; and still less could it annihilate that subtler mental
need, which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex for emotional
fellowship and close intercourse; but, it might, and undoubtedly would,
powerfully react and readjust the relations of certain men with certain
women!
While the attraction, physical and intellectual, which binds sex to sex
would remain the same in volume and intensity, the forms in which it
would express itself, and, above all, the relative power of individuals
to command the gratification of their instincts and desires, would be
fundamentally altered, and in many cases inverted.
In the barbarian state of societies, where physical force dominates,
it is the most muscular and pugilistically and brutally and animally
successful male who captures and possesses the largest number of
females; and no doubt he would be justified in regarding any social
change which gave to woman a larger freedom of choice, and which would
so perhaps give to the less brutal but perhaps more intelligent male,
whom the woman might select, an equal opportunity for the gratification
of his sexual wishes and for the producing of offspring, as a serious
loss. And, from the purely personal standpoint, he would undoubtedly
be right in dreading anything which tended to free woman. But he would
manifestly not have been justified in asserting, that woman’s increased
freedom of choice, or the fact that the other men would share his
advantage in the matter of obtaining female companionship, would in any
way lessen the amount of sexual emotion or the tenderness of relation
between the two halves of humanity. He would not by brute force possess
himself of so many females, nor have so large a circle of choice,
under the new conditions; but what he lost, others would gain; and
the intensity of the sex emotions and the nearness and passion of the
relation between the sexes be in no way touched.
In our more civilised societies, as they exist today, woman possesses
(more often perhaps in appearance than reality!) a somewhat greater
freedom of sexual selection; she is no longer captured by muscular
force, but there are still conditions entirely unconnected with
sex attractions and affections, which yet largely dominate the sex
relations.
It is not the man of the strong arm, but the man of the long purse,
who unduly and artificially dominates in the sexual world today.
Practically, wherever in the modern world woman is wholly or partially
dependent for her means of support on the exercise of her sexual
functions, she is dependent more or less on the male’s power to support
her in their exercise, and her freedom of choice is practically so far
absolutely limited. Probably three-fourths of the sexual unions in our
modern European societies, whether in the illegal or recognised legal
forms, are dominated by or largely influenced by the sex purchasing
power of the male. With regard to the large and savage institution of
prostitution, which still lies as the cancer embedded in the heart of
all our modern civilised societies, this is obviously and nakedly the
case; the wealth of the male as compared to the female being, with
hideous obtrusiveness, its foundation and source of life. But the
purchasing power of the male as compared with the poverty of the female
is not less painfully, if a little less obtrusively, displayed in those
layers of society lying nearer the surface. From the fair, effete young
girl of the wealthier classes in her city boudoir, who weeps copiously
as she tells you she cannot marry the man she loves, because he says he
has only two hundred a year and cannot afford to keep her; to the father
who demands frankly of his daughter’s suitor how much he can settle on
her before consenting to his acceptance, the fact remains, that, under
existing conditions, not the amount of sex affection, passion, and
attraction, but the extraneous question of the material possessions of
the male, determines to a large extent the relation of the sexes. The
parasitic, helpless youth who has failed in his studies, who possesses
neither virility, nor charm of person, nor strength of mind, but who
possesses wealth, has a far greater chance of securing unlimited sexual
indulgence and the life companionship of the fairest maid, than her
brother’s tutor, who may be possessed of every manly and physical grace
and mental gift; and the ancient libertine, possessed of nothing but
material good, has, especially among the so-called upper classes of our
societies, a far greater chance of securing the sex companionship of
any woman he desires as wife, mistress, or prostitute, than the most
physically attractive and mentally developed male, who may have nothing
to offer to the dependent female but affection and sexual companionship.
To the male, whenever and wherever he exists in our societies, who
depends mainly for his power for procuring the sex relation he desires,
not on his power of winning and retaining personal affection, but, on
the purchasing power of his possessions as compared to the poverty of
the females of his society, the personal loss would be seriously and
at once felt, of any social change which gave to the woman a larger
economic independence and therefore greater freedom of sexual choice. It
is not an imaginary danger which the young dude, of a certain type which
sits often in the front row of the stalls in a theatre, with sloping
forehead and feeble jaw, watching the unhappy women who dance for
gold--sees looming before him, as he lisps out his deep disapproval
of increased knowledge and the freedom of obtaining the means of
subsistence in intellectual fields by woman, and expresses his vast
preference for the uncultured ballet-girl over all types of cultured and
productive labouring womenhood in the universe. A subtle and profound
instinct warns him, that with the increased intelligence and economic
freedom of woman, he, and such as he, might ultimately be left sexually
companionless; the undesirable, the residuary, male old-maids of the
human race.
On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a certain body of females who
would lose, or imagine they would lose, heavily by the advance of woman
as a whole to a condition of free labour and economic independence. That
female, wilfully or organically belonging to the parasite class, having
neither the vigour of intellect nor the vitality of body to undertake
any form of productive labour, and desiring to be dependent only upon
the passive performance of sex function merely, would, whether as
prostitute or wife, undoubtedly lose heavily by any social change which
demanded of woman increased knowledge and activity. (She would lose
in two directions: by the social disapprobation which, as the new
conditions became general, would rest on her; and yet more by the
competition of the more developed forms. She would practically become
non-existent.)
It is exactly by these two classes of persons that the objection is
raised that the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour and her
increased freedom and intelligence will dislocate the relations of
the sexes; and, while from the purely personal standpoint, they
are undoubtedly right, viewing human society as a whole they are
fundamentally wrong. The loss of a small and unhealthy section will be
the gain of human society as a whole.
In the male voluptuary of feeble intellect and unattractive
individuality, who depends for the gratification of his sexual
instincts, not on his power of winning and retaining the personal
affection and admiration of woman, but on her purchaseable condition,
either in the blatantly barbarous field of sex traffic that lies beyond
the pale of legal marriage, or the not less barbarous though more veiled
traffic within that pale, the entrance of woman into the new fields of
labour, with an increased intellectual culture and economic freedom,
means little less than social extinction. But, to those males who, even
at the present day, constitute the majority in our societies, and who
desire the affection and fellowship of woman rather than a mere material
possession; for the male who has the attributes and gifts of mind or
body, which, apart from any weight of material advantage, would fit him
to hold the affection of woman, however great her freedom of choice,
the gain will be correspondingly great. Given a society in which the
majority of women should be so far self-supporting, that, having their
free share open to them in the modern fields of labour, and reaping the
full economic rewards of their labour, marriage or some form of sexual
sale was no more a matter of necessity to them; so far from this
condition causing a diminution in the number of permanent sex unions,
one of the heaviest bars to them would be removed. It is universally
allowed that one of the disease spots in our modern social condition is
the increasing difficulty which bars conscientious men from entering
on marriage and rearing families, if limited means would in the case of
their death or disablement throw the woman and their common offspring
comparatively helpless into the fierce stream of our modern economic
life. If the woman could justifiably be looked to, in case of the man’s
disablement or death, to take his place as an earner, thousands of
valuable marriages which cannot now be contracted could be entered on;
and the serious social evil, which arises from the fact that while the
self-indulgent and selfish freely marry and produce large families,
the restrained and conscientious are often unable to do so, would
be removed. For the first time in the history of the modern world,
prostitution, using that term in its broadest sense to cover all forced
sexual relationships based, not on the spontaneous affection of the
woman for the man, but on the necessitous acceptance by woman of
material good in exchange for the exercise of her sexual functions,
would be extinct; and the relation between men and women become a
co-partnership between freemen.
So far from the economic freedom and social independence of the woman
exterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the first
time fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capture
which dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degrading
element of seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material good
offered to woman in our modern societies, would then give place to the
untrammelled action of attraction and affection alone between the sexes,
and sexual love, after its long pilgrimage in the deserts, would be
enabled to return at last, a king crowned.
But, apart from the two classes of persons whose objection to the
entrance of woman to new fields of labour is based more or less
instinctively on the fear of personal loss, there is undoubtedly a
small, if a very small, number of sincere persons whose fear as to
severance between the sexes to result from woman’s entrance into the new
field, is based upon a more abstract and impersonal ground.
It is not easy to do full justice in an exact statement to views held
generally rather nebulously and vaguely, but we believe we should not
mistake this view, by saying that there are a certain class of perfectly
sincere and even moderately intelligent folk who hold a view which,
expressed exactly, would come to something like this--that the entrance
of woman into new fields would necessitate so large a mental culture and
such a development of activity, mental and physical, in the woman, that
she might ultimately develop into a being so superior to the male and
so widely different from the man, that the bond of sympathy between the
sexes might ultimately be broken and the man cease to be an object of
affection and attraction to the woman, and the woman to the man through
mere dissimilarity. The future these persons seem to see, more or less
vaguely, is of a social condition, in which, the males of the race
remaining precisely as they are today, the corresponding females shall
have advanced to undreamed of heights of culture and intelligence; a
condition in which the hand-worker, and the ordinary official, and
small farmer, shall be confronted with the female astronomer or Greek
professor of astonishing learning and gifts as his only possible
complementary sex companion; and the vision naturally awakens in these
good folk certain misgivings as to sympathy between and suitability for
each other, of these two widely dissimilar parts of humanity.
It must of course at once be admitted, that, were the two sexual halves
of humanity distinct species, which, having once entered on a course
of evolution and differentiation, might continue to develop along those
distinct lines for countless ages or even for a number of generations,
without reacting through inheritance on each other, the consequences of
such development might ultimately almost completely sever them.
The development of distinct branches of humanity has already brought
about such a severance between races and classes which are in totally
distinct stages of evolution. So wide is the hiatus between them often,
that the lowest form of sex attraction can hardly cross it; and the more
highly developed mental and emotional sex passion cannot possibly bridge
it. In the world of sex, kind seeks kind, and too wide a dissimilarity
completely bars the existence of the highest forms of sex emotion, and
often even the lower and more purely animal.
Were it possible to place a company of the most highly evolved human
females--George Sands, Sophia Kovalevskys, or even the average cultured
females of a highly evolved race--on an island where the only males
were savages of the Fugean type, who should meet them on the shores
with matted hair and prognathous jaws, and with wild shouts, brandishing
their implements of death, to greet and welcome them, it is an undoubted
fact that, so great would be the horror felt by the females towards
them, that not only would the race become extinct, but if it depended
for its continuance on any approach to sex affection on the part of the
women, that death would certainly be accepted by all, as the lesser of
two evils. Hardly less marked would be the sexual division if, in place
of cultured and developed females, we imagine males of the same highly
evolved class thrown into contact with the lowest form of primitive
females. A Darwin, a Schiller, a Keats, though all men capable of the
strongest sex emotion and of the most durable sex affections, would
probably be untouched by any emotion but horror, cast into the company
of a circle of Bushmen females with greased bodies and twinkling eyes,
devouring the raw entrails of slaughtered beasts.
But leaving out even such extreme instances of diversity, the mere
division in culture and mental habits, dividing individuals of the same
race but of different classes, tends largely to exclude the possibility
of at least the nobler and more enduring forms of sex emotion. The
highly cultured denizen of a modern society, though he may enter into
passing and temporary and animal relations with the uncultured peasant
or woman of the street, seldom finds awakened within him in such cases
the depth of emotion and sympathy which is necessary for the enjoyment
of the closer tie of conjugal life; and it may be doubted whether the
highest, most permanent, and intimate forms of sexual affection ever
exist except among humans very largely identical in tastes, habits
of thought, and moral and physical education. (In Greece at a certain
period (as we have before noted) there does appear to have been a
temporary advance of the male, so far in advance of the female as to
make the difference between them almost immeasurable; but he quickly
fell back to the level of the woman.) Were it possible that the entrance
of woman into the new fields of labour should produce any increased
divergence between man and woman in ideals, culture, or tastes, there
would undoubtedly be a dangerous responsibility incurred by any who
fostered such a movement.
But the most superficial study of human life and the relation of the
sexes negates such a conception.
The two sexes are not distinct species but the two halves of one whole,
always acting and interacting on each other through inheritance, and
reproducing and blending with each other in each generation. The human
female is bound organically in two ways to the males of her society:
collaterally they are her companions and the co-progenitors with her
of the race; but she is also the mother of the males of each succeeding
generation, bearing, shaping, and impressing her personality upon them.
The males and females of each human society resemble two oxen tethered
to one yoke: for a moment one may move slightly forward and the other
remain stationary; but they can never move farther from each other than
the length of the yoke that binds them; and they must ultimately
remain stationary or move forward together. That which the women of one
generation are mentally or physically, that by inheritance and education
the males of the next tend to be: there can be no movement or change in
one sex which will not instantly have its co-ordinating effect upon the
other; the males of tomorrow are being cast in the mould of the women of
today. If new ideals, new moral conceptions, new methods of action are
found permeating the minds of the women of one generation, they will
reappear in the ideals, moral conceptions, methods of action of the men
of thirty years hence; and the idea that the males of a society can ever
become permanently farther removed from its females than the individual
man is from the mother who bore and reared him, is at variance with
every law of human inheritance.
If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition,
and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist
today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident.
Not merely is the Woman’s Movement of our age not a sporadic and
abnormal growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to the
development of the rest of the social organism, but it is essentially
but one important phase of a general modification which the whole of
modern life is undergoing. Further, careful study of the movement will
show that, not only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading to
severance and separation between the woman and the man, but that it
is essentially a movement of the woman towards the man, of the sexes
towards closer union.
Much is said at the present day on the subject of the “New Woman” (who,
as we have seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic woman of the
remote past, preparing to draw on her new twentieth-century garb):
and it cannot truly be said that her attitude finds a lack of social
attention. On every hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for
her counterfeit, ridiculed, or deified--but nowhere can it be said, that
the phenomenon of her existence is overlooked.
But there exists at the present day another body of social phenomena,
quite as important, as radical, and if possible more far-reaching in its
effects on the present and future, which yet attracts little conscious
attention or animadversion, though it makes itself everywhere felt; as
the shade of a growing tree may be sat under year after year by persons
who never remark its silent growth.
Side by side with the “New Woman,” corresponding to her, as the two
sides of a coin cast in one mould, though differing from each other in
superficial detail, are yet of one metal, one size, and one value; old
in the sense in which she is old, being merely the reincarnation under
the pressure of new conditions of the ancient forms of his race; new in
the sense in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation to material
and social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; more
diverse from his immediate progenitors than even the woman is from hers,
side by side with her today in every society and in every class in which
she is found, stands--the New Man!
If it be asked, How comes it to pass, if, under the pressure of social
conditions, man shows an analogous change of attitude toward life,
that the change in woman should attract universal attention, while
the corresponding change in the man of her society passes almost
unnoticed?--it would seem that the explanation lies in the fact that,
owing to woman’s less independence of action in the past, any attempt
at change or readaptation on her part has had to overcome greater
resistance, and it is the noise and friction of resistance, more than
the amount of actual change which has taken place, which attracts
attention; as when an Alpine stream, after a long winter frost, breaks
the ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away the obstructions which
have gathered in its bed, all men’s attention is attracted to it, though
when later a much larger body of water silently forces its way down, no
man observes it. (An interesting practical illustration of this fact
is found in the vast attention and uproar created when the first three
women in England, some thirty odd years ago, sought to enter the medical
profession. At the present day scores of women prepare to enter it
yearly without attracting any general attention; not that the change
which is going on is not far more in volume and social importance, but
that, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless.)
Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and the
most typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably not
so great a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire
Westerns of that day and the most typical of entirely modern men.
The sexual and social ideals which dominated the fox-hunting,
hard-drinking, high-playing, recklessly loose-living country squire,
clergyman, lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of the
past, are at least as distinct from the ideals which dominate thousands
of their male descendants holding corresponding positions in the
societies of today, as are the ideals of her great-great-grand mother’s
remote from those dominating the most modern of New Women.
That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personal
study of those sections of modern European societies in which change
and adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidly
progressing, is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and women
are being rapidly modified as to their sexual and social ideals and as
to their mode of life, but that this change is strictly complementary.
If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistent
with the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexual
attributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasingly
a fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner and
the bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modern
man departs quite as strongly from that of his forefathers in the
direction of finding in woman active companionship and co-operation
rather than passive submission. If the New Woman’s conception of
parenthood differs from the old in the greater sense of the gravity and
obligation resting on those who are responsible for the production of
the individual life, making her attitude toward the production of her
race widely unlike the reckless, unreasoning, maternal reproduction of
the woman of the past, the most typical male tends to feel in at least
the same degree the moral and social obligation entailed by awakening
lifehood: if the ideal which the New Woman shapes for herself of a male
companion excludes the crudely animal hard-drinking, hard-swearing,
licentious, even if materially wealthy gallant of the past; the most
typically modern male’s ideal for himself excludes at least equally
this type. The brothel, the race-course, the gaming-table, and habits
of physical excess among men are still with us; but the most superficial
study of our societies will show that these have fallen into a new place
in the scale of social institutions and manners. The politician, the
clergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or public standing
by violent addictions in these directions; to drink his companions
under the table, to be known to have the largest number of illicit sex
relations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the gambling
saloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance his
reputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to all
success. If the New Woman’s conception of love between the sexes is one
more largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical,
and wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man’s conception
as expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced by
typically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed
to the same new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelong
companionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable
than death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the most
typical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment
to the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrified
Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch.
If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern
woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong,
fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of
the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations;
and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of
that which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in
the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.
Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena
of our modern world, who see in the Woman’s Movement of our day any
emotional movement of the female against the male, of the woman away
from the man.
We have called the Woman’s Movement of our age an endeavour on the part
of women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as
the old slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an
inactive dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another
side, the Woman’s Movement might not less justly be called a part of
a great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards
common occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards an
emotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and more
indestructible than any the world has yet seen.
But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth
underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity
between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and
females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies,
and often among the very classes forming our typically advanced
sections, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the
present day?
The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination,
struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist when
we regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern
societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the
sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict
between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch
the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining
element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the
individual has reached.
It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome
reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid
evolution and change. The continually changing material conditions of
life, with their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral
aspects of human affairs, render our societies the most complex and
probably the most mobile and unsettled which the world has ever seen.
As the result of this rapidity of change and complexity, there must
continually exist a large amount of disco-ordination, and consequently,
of suffering.
In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation for
hundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no change
in the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moral
principles of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexual
institutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with these
conditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity,
pervades the society.
In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societies
find themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almost
day brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is the
amount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive,
and sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the new
conditions, acting at different angles of intensity on the different
individual members composing the society, according to their positions
and varying intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellous
complexity and dissimilarity in the different individual parts, that
the intensest rupture and disco-ordination between individuals is
inevitable; and sexual ideals and relationships must share in the
universal condition.
In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix illustration may be
allowed) where for countless generations the conditions of life had
remained absolutely unchanged; where for ages it had been necessary that
all males should employ themselves in subduing wild beasts and meeting
dangerous foes, polygamy might universally have been a necessity, if the
race were to exist and its numbers be kept up; and society, recognising
this, polygamy would be an institution universally approved and
submitted to, however much suffering it entailed. If food were scarce,
the destruction of superfluous infants and of the aged might also always
have been necessary for the good of the individuals themselves as well
as of society, and the whole society would acquiesce in it without any
moral doubt. If an eclipse of the sun had once occurred in connection
with the appearance of a certain new insect, they mighty universally
regard that insect as a god causing it; and ages might pass without
anything arising to disprove their belief. There would be no social or
religious problem; and the view of one man would be the view of all
men; and all would be more or less in harmony with the established
institution and customs.
But, supposing the sudden arrival of strangers armed with superior
weapons and knowledge, who should exterminate all wild beasts and render
war and the consequent loss of male life a thing of the past; not only
would the male be driven to encroach on the female’s domain of domestic
agriculture and labour generally, but the males, not being so largely
destroyed, they would soon equal and surpass in numbers the females; and
not only would it then become a moot matter, “a problem,” which labours
were or were not to be performed by man and which by woman, but very
soon, not the woman alone nor the man alone, but both, would be driven
to speculate as to the desirability or necessity of polygamy, which,
were men as numerous as women, would leave many males without sex
companions. The more intelligent and progressive individuals in the
community would almost at once arrive at the conclusion that polygamy
was objectionable; the most fearless would seek to carry their theory
into action; the most ignorant and unprogressive would determinately
stick to the old institutions as inherited from the past, without reason
or question; differences of ideal would cause conflict and dissension
in all parts of the body social, and suffering would ensue, where all
before was fixed and determinate. So also if the strangers introduced
new and improved methods of agriculture, and food became abundant, it
would then at once strike the most far-seeing and readily adaptable
members of the community, both male and female, that there was no
necessity for the destruction of their offspring; old men and women
would begin seriously to object to being hastened to death when they
realised that starvation did not necessarily stare them in the face
if they survived to an extreme old age; the most stupid and hide-bound
members of the community would still continue to sacrifice parents and
offspring long after the necessity had ceased, under the influence of
traditional bias; many persons would be in a state of much moral doubt
as to which course of action to pursue, the old or the new; and bitter
conflict might rage in the community on all these points. Were the
strangers to bring with them telescopes, looking through which it might
at once clearly be seen that an eclipse of the sun was caused merely by
the moon’s passing over its face, the more intelligent members of the
community would at once come to the conclusion that the insect was not
the cause of eclipses, would cease to regard it as a god, and might even
kill it; the more stupid and immobile section of the community might
refuse to look through the telescope, or looking might refuse to see
that it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and their deep-seated
reverence for the insect, which was the growth of ages, would lead them
to regard as impious those individuals who denied its godhead, and might
even lead to the physical destruction of the first unbelievers. The
society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would
become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless
suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the
ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions!
There might be immense gain in many directions; lives otherwise
sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage of
existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle
would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual,
and religious ideals and institutions.
An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the
present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in
every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no
resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our
civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social
conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of
our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the
wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap
printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into
vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are
collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which
invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means
of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and
lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening
and changing in every direction the human horizon--all these produce a
society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination
between all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strife
of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering is
inevitable.
If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers
taught us to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the
samplers our mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are become
superfluous through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their
social institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and
increasingly unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable,
especially for the most advanced and modified individuals in our
societies. This suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three
causes.
Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change
tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already
hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree
ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.
Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human
society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions,
or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost
unparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the different
individuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men and
women who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt
themselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions of
life, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated
societies, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be
found men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would not
constitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the
remote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classes
lies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development.
This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in the
interactions of the members of our societies; more especially, as the
individuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes and
families, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in our
societies. (One of the women holding the most advanced and modern view
of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of a
Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by the
sewing of the uppers of men’s boots.) Persons bound by the closest ties
of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse,
are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptation
to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction and
consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and
almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray
it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium
of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting
on each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of
chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens
together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard
into a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where
all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral,
and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed
traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering
had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might
be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but
not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and
undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been
thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such
as that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with
Europeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty
years ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social
problems and social friction such a society can be. It is in studying
such societies that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key to
half, and more than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition,
can be found only in our rapidly changing conditions necessitating
equally rapid change in our conceptions, ideals, and institutions.)
Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to our age is caused by
conflict going on within the individual himself. So intensely rapid is
the change which is taking place in our environment and knowledge that
in the course of a single life a man may pass through half a dozen
phases of growth. Born and reared in possession of certain ideas and
manners of action, he or she may, before middle life is reached, have
had occasion repeatedly to modify, enlarge, and alter, or completely
throw aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of such
persons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict,
and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between its
different members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, when
the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action,
or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yet
be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman
who attempts to adapt their life to the new material conditions and to
harmony with the new knowledge, is almost bound at some time to rupture
the continuity of their own psychological existence.
It is these conditions which give rise to the fact so often noticed,
that the art of our age tends persistently to deal with subtle social
problems, religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the past
holds no parallel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist who would
obey the artistic instinct to portray faithfully the world about him,
must portray that which lies at the core of its life. The “problem”
play, novel, and poem are as inevitable in this age, as it was
inevitable that the artist of the eleventh century should portray
tournaments, physical battles, and chivalry, because they were the
dominant element in the life about him.
It is also inevitable that this suffering and conflict must make itself
felt in its acutest form in the person of the most advanced individual
of our societies. It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen
stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it
broken, and the last find it gone. It is the man or woman who first
treads down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow,
who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is
deadly. The fact that any course of human action leading to adjustment,
leads also to immediate suffering, by dividing the individual from
the bulk of his fellows; is no argument against it; that solitude and
suffering is the crown of thorns which marks the kingship of earth’s
Messiahs: it is the mark of the leader.
Thus, social disco-ordination, and subjective conflict and suffering,
pervade the life of our age, making themselves felt in every division
of human life, religious, political, and domestic; and, if they are more
noticeable, and make themselves more keenly felt in the region of sex
than in any other, even the religious, it is because when we enter the
region of sex we touch, as it were, the spinal cord of human existence,
its great nerve centre, where sensation is most acute, and pain and
pleasure most keenly felt. It is not sex disco-ordination that is at the
root of our social unrest; it is the universal disco-ordination which
affects even the world of sex phenomena.
Also it is necessary to note that the line which divides the progressive
sections of our communities, seeking to co-ordinate themselves to the
new conditions of life, from the retrogressive, is not a line running
coincidentally with the line of sex. A George Sand and a Henrik Ibsen
belong more essentially to the same class in the order of modern
development, than either belongs to any class composed entirely of their
own sex. If we divide humanity into classes according to type, in each
division will be found the male with his complementary female. Side by
side with the old harlot at the street corner anxious to sell herself,
stands the old aboriginal male, whether covered or not with a veneer of
civilisation, eager and desiring to buy. Side by side with the parasitic
woman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relations
with man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence from
his relations with her. Side by side with the New Woman, anxious for
labour and seeking from man only such love and fellowship as she gives,
stands the New Man, anxious to possess her only on the terms she offers.
If the social movement, through which the most advanced women of our
day are attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the new
conditions of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of the
primitive male; the same movement equally removes the new male from the
old female. The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact that
woman as such is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; but
that, in the unassorted confusion of our modern life, it is continually
the modified type of man or woman who is thrown into the closest
personal relations with the antiquated type of the opposite sex; that
between father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, husband
and wife, may sometimes be found to intervene not merely years, but even
centuries of social evolution.
It is not man as man who opposes the attempt of woman to readjust
herself to the new conditions of life: that opposition arises, perhaps
more often, from the retrogressive members of her own sex. And it is a
fact which will surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modern
life; that among the works of literature in all European languages,
which most powerfully advocate the entrance of woman into the new fields
of labour, and which most uncompromisingly demand for her the widest
training and freedom of action, and which most passionately seek for
the breaking down of all artificial lines which sever the woman from the
man, many of the ablest and most uncompromising are the works of males.
The New Man and Woman do not resemble two people, who, standing on a
level plain, set out on two roads, which diverging at different angles
and continued in straight lines, must continue to take them farther and
farther from each other the longer they proceed in them; rather, they
resemble two persons who start to climb a spur of the same mountain from
opposite sides; where, the higher they climb the nearer they come to
each other, being bound ultimately to meet at the top.
Even that opposition often made by males to the entrance of woman into
the new fields of labour, of which they at present hold the monopoly,
is not fundamentally sexual in its nature. The male who opposes the
entrance of woman into the trade or profession in which he holds more
or less a monopoly, would oppose with equal, and perhaps even greater
bitterness, the opening of its doors to numbers of his own sex who
had before been excluded, and who would limit his gains and share his
privileges. It is the primitive brute instinct to retain as much
as possible for the ego, irrespective of justice or humanity, which
dominates all the lower moral types of humanity, both male and female,
which acts here. The lawyer or physician who objects to the entrance of
women to his highly fenced professional enclosure, would probably object
yet more strenuously if it were proposed to throw down the barriers of
restraint and monetary charges, which would result in the flooding
of his profession by other males: while the mechanic, who resists the
entrance of woman into his especial field, is invariably found even
more persistently to oppose any attempt at entrance on the part of other
males, when he finds it possible to do so.
This opposition of the smaller type of male, to the entrance of woman
into the callings hitherto apportioned to himself, is sometimes taken as
implying the impossibility of fellowship and affection existing between
the men and women employed in common labour, that the professional
jealousy of the man must necessitate his feeling a hatred and antagonism
towards any one who shares his fields of toil. But the most superficial
study of human life negates such a supposition. Among men, in spite
of the occasional existence of the petty professional jealousies and
antagonism, we find, viewing society as a whole, that common interests,
and above all common labours, are the most potent means of bringing them
into close and friendly relations; and, in fact, they seem generally
essential for the formation of the closest and most permanent human
friendships. In every walk of human life, whether trade, or profession,
we find men associating by choice mainly with, and entertaining often
the profoundest and most permanent friendships for, men engaged in
their own callings. The inner circle of a barrister’s friendships almost
always consists of his fellow-barristers; the city man, who is free to
select his society where he will, will be oftenest found in company with
his fellow-man of business; the medical man’s closest friendship is, in
a large number of cases, for some man who was once his fellow-student
and has passed through the different stages of his professional life
with him; the friends and chosen companions of the actor are commonly
actors; of the savant, savants; of the farmer, farmers; of the sailor,
sailors. So generally is this the case that it would almost attract
attention and cause amusement were the boon companion of the sea captain
a leading politician, and the intimate friend of the clergyman an actor,
or the dearest friend of the farmer an astronomer. Kind seeks kind.
The majority of men by choice frequent clubs where those of their own
calling are found, and especially as life advances and men sink deeper
into their professional grooves, they are found to seek fellowship
mainly among their fellow-workers. That this should be so is inevitable;
common amusements may create a certain bond between the young, but
the performance of common labours, necessitating identical knowledge,
identical habits, and modes of thought, forms a far stronger bond,
drawing men far more powerfully towards social intercourse and personal
friendship and affection than the centrifugal force of professional
jealousies can divide them.
That the same condition would prevail where women became fellow-workers
with men might be inferred on abstract grounds: but practical experience
confirms this. The actor oftenest marries the actress, the male musician
the female; the reception-room of the literary woman or female
painter is found continually frequented by men of her own calling; the
woman-doctor associates continually with and often marries one of her
own confreres; and as women in increasing numbers share the fields of
labour with men, which have hitherto been apportioned to them alone, the
nature and strength of the sympathy arising from common labours will be
increasingly clear.
The sharing by men and women of the same labours, necessitating a common
culture and therefore common habits of thought and interests, would
tend to fill that painful hiatus which arises so continually in modern
conjugal life, dividing the man and woman as soon as the first sheen of
physical sexual attraction which glints only over the unknown begins to
fade, and from which springs so large a part of the tragedy of modern
conjugal relations. The primitive male might discuss with her his
success in hunting and her success in finding roots; as the primitive
peasant may discuss today with his wife the crops and cows in which both
are equally interested and which both understand; there is nothing in
their order of life to produce always increasingly divergent habits of
thought and interest.
In modern civilised life, in many sections, the lack of any common
labour and interests and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by the
man and the woman, tend continually to produce increasing divergence; so
that, long before middle life is reached, they are left without any
bond of co-cohesion but that of habit. The comradeship and continual
stimulation, rising from intercourse with those sharing our closest
interests and regarding life from the same standpoint, the man tends to
seek in his club and among his male companions, and the woman accepts
solitude, or seeks dissipations which tend yet farther to disrupt the
common conjugal life. A certain mental camaraderie and community of
impersonal interests is imperative in conjugal life in addition to a
purely sexual relation, if the union is to remain a living and always
growing reality. It is more especially because the sharing by woman of
the labours of man will tend to promote camaraderie and the existence of
common, impersonal interests and like habits of thought and life, that
the entrance of women into the very fields shared by men, and not into
others peculiarly reserved for her, is so desirable. (The reply once
given by the wife of a leading barrister, when reference was made to the
fact that she and her husband were seldom found in each other’s society,
throws a painful but true light on certain aspects of modern life,
against which the entire woman’s movement of our age is a rebellion.
“My husband,” she said, “is always increasingly absorbed in his legal
duties, of which I understand nothing, and which so do not interest me.
My children are all growing up and at school. I have servants enough to
attend to my house. When he comes home in the evening, if I try to amuse
him by telling him of the things I have been doing during the day, of
the bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the visits I
have paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study, his
books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were not
for the society of women and other men with whom I have more in common,
I could not bear my life. When we first met as boy and girl, and fell
in love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything in
common; now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me,
but that is all!” It is, perhaps, only in close confidences between
man and man and woman and woman that this open sore, rising from the
divergence in training, habits of life, and occupation between men
and women is spoken of; but it lies as a tragic element at the core of
millions of modern conjugal relations, beneath the smooth superficial
surface of our modern life; breaking out to the surface only
occasionally in the revelations of our divorce courts.)
It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or
accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men
will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of
science, or the organised professions, that the hands which have been
most eagerly stretched our to welcome her have been those of men; that
the voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been
those of male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered.
There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission
into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the
hands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before
she knocks.
To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shaded
eyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of the
shadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems of
so gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a condition
of human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall
exist between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our old
Northern ancestors shall find its realisation in a concrete reality,
and the Walkurie and her hero feast together at one board, in a brave
fellowship.
Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close the
door of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for the
body and soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that encloses
artificially the activity of woman and divides her from man; always we
picture the love of the sexes, as, once a dull, slow, creeping worm;
then a torpid, earthy chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect,
glorious in the sunshine of the future.
Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it only a blindness
in our eyes, which have been too long strained, which makes us see, far
up the river where it fades into the distance, through all the mists
that rise from the river-banks, a clear, a golden light? Is it only a
delusion of the eyes which makes us grasp our oars more lightly and bend
our backs lower; though we know well that long before the boat reaches
those stretches, other hands than ours will man the oars and guide its
helm? Is it all a dream?
The ancient Chaldean seer had a vision of a Garden of Eden which lay in
a remote past. It was dreamed that man and woman once lived in joy and
fellowship, till woman ate of the tree of knowledge and gave to man to
eat; and that both were driven forth to wander, to toil in bitterness;
because they had eaten of the fruit.
We also have our dream of a Garden: but it lies in a distant future. We
dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man,
and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil
and labour, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any
the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labour and made
beautiful by their own fellowship.
In his apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth;
we see a new earth; but therein dwells love--the love of comrades and
co-workers.
It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the
future; so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive
acquiescence in the present, that today we are found everywhere raising
our strange new cry--“Labour and the training that fits us for labour!”