WOMAN’S STATUS, PAST AND PRESENT
I
Woman tends to assume a position of equality with man only where the
idea of property in human beings has not yet arisen or where it has
disappeared: that is to say, only in extremely primitive or highly
civilized communities. In all the intermediate stages of civilization,
woman is in some degree regarded as a purchasable commodity. Her status
varies widely among different peoples: there are primitive tribes
where she holds a position of comparative independence; and there are
civilized peoples, on the other hand, among whom she is virtually a
slave. But always there is present the idea of subordination to a male
owner, husband, father or brother, even though it may survive only in
ceremonial observances, _e.g._, in the ritual practice of “giving in
marriage,” or in certain legal disabilities, such, for instance, as the
law entitling a man to his wife’s services without remuneration.
The subjection of women, then, bears a close intrinsic resemblance
to both chattel slavery and industrial slavery, in that its basis
is economic. As soon as civilization advances to the point of a
rudimentary organization of agriculture and industry, woman becomes
valuable as a labour-motor and a potential producer of children
who will become labour-motors and fighters. Her economic value, or
chattel-value, then, is a commodity for which her family may demand
payment; and hence, apparently, arises the custom of exacting a
bride-price from the man who wishes to marry her. Once established,
this custom of barter in marriage strikes root so deeply that the
woman who has brought no bride-price is often regarded with scorn and
her children considered illegitimate; and the idea of male ownership
that accompanies it becomes so pronounced that it persists even where,
owing to an excess of women coupled with monogamy, the custom has been
practically reversed, and the father buys a husband for his daughter.
An instance of this survival is the system of dowry which exists in
France. Unless it is otherwise stipulated by pre-nuptial agreement, the
dowry is at the disposal of the husband, and the wife, under the law,
owes him obedience.
When the bargain has been made and the bride delivered to her husband’s
family, her services generally become, save in tribes where residence
is matrilocal, the property of her purchasers, and she is subject to
her husband, or, where the patriarchal system is highly developed, to
the head of his tribe. It must be remarked, however, that although this
is the usual arrangement, it is not invariable. Among some peoples,
the husband’s rights are purely sexual, the services of the wife, and
often even her children, belonging to her own tribe; and among others,
the husband must pay for his bride in services which render him for a
long period the virtual slave of his wife’s relatives. The point to be
remarked in all this is that any conception of woman as an individual
entity, as in any sense belonging to herself, and not to her own
relatives or to her husband and his family, seems to be practically
non-existent among primitive peoples, as it was until recently among
civilized peoples. But it must be remarked, too, that in this respect
her position is only less desirable than that of the man; for in
primitive society the group so dominates the individual that in almost
every phase of life he is hedged about with restrictions and taboos
which leave little room for the play of personality and the pursuit of
individual desires. All social advancement has been in the direction of
the individual’s escape from this group-tyranny.
So important is the part that the labour of women plays in the
primitive world, that the wife or wives are often the sole support
of husband and family; and a man’s wealth and social prestige may
actually depend upon the number of his wives. “Manual labour among
savages,” says Westermarck, “is undertaken chiefly by the women; and
as there are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire, it
becomes necessary for any one who requires many servants to have many
wives.” _There are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire._
Women, then, are the first victims of that deep-rooted and instinctive
preference for living by the labour of other people, which has played
so momentous and sinister a rôle in the world’s history. Among tribes
whose mode of life has made them exploitable by stronger and more
highly organized hordes--as, for example, an agricultural people which
is conquered by a more mobile and disciplined tribe of herders--there,
among the expropriated class, are day-labourers and people who will
work for hire, for these have no choice or alternative; but among
peoples where militant exploitation is impossible--as among the
hunting-tribes--no man can be forced to work for another man, for the
simple reason that there is no way of compelling him to share the
product of his labour. But even here we see the economic phenomenon of
the labour of women being exploited as the labour of man is exploited
after conquest and the foundation of the exploiting State; and this
is the case chiefly because certain natural disadvantages render them
easily exploitable, as I shall show later.
It may be remarked in this connexion, that sexual division of labour
appears to be quite arbitrary among primitive peoples; and that it
often bears little resemblance to the division which has existed
for so long among Europeans that it has apologists who regard it as
being divinely ordained.[3] This suggests at least that the European
division is arbitrary too. Indeed, it has undergone considerable
change. Brewing, for example, was regarded as woman’s work in mediaeval
England. It is even supposed that the monasteries, which excluded
women from other service within their walls, employed women brewers. In
general, it appears a fair conclusion that the occupations which are
considered least desirable are given over to the subordinate sex. Thus
men, according to the Vaertings, during the period when women dominated
in Egypt, were forced to care for children and perform the drudgery of
the household. Where military enterprise plays a part in tribal life,
the division of labour appears to give validity to the contention of
Spencer and others that man is militant and woman industrial; yet
the exclusion of women from military activity is no doubt primarily
due quite as much to the taboos against them as to their own lack of
warlike spirit. Indeed, there are tribes where women take active part
in fighting; and there are folk-tales in plenty which tell of their
prowess--as, for example, in the epic lore of Greece and Russia. But
because of a primitive awe of the function of menstruation, women are
often considered unclean, and excluded on this account from many tribal
activities, particularly from religious rites. Among such peoples, it
would not be surprising to find that the same superstition excluded
women from participation in any enterprise in which the tribal gods
are so active and their aid so important as in war. In certain tribes
of South Africa there is, according to Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, a
direct connexion between militancy and a taboo against woman. “A man
sleeping with his wife must be careful not to touch her with his right
hand. Otherwise his strength as a warrior goes from him and he will
surely be killed.”
Whatever be the basis of sexual division of labour among different
tribes, and whatever minor differences there be in the relative
position of the sexes, one thing is certain, and it is all we are
at present concerned with, namely: in what Dr. Lowie has called
“that planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches called
civilization,” woman almost invariably occupies a more or less inferior
position. Dr. Lowie himself is careful to warn his readers against
the popular assumption that the position of primitive woman is always
abject, and that the status of woman offers a sure index of cultural
advancement; nevertheless he says that “It is true that in by far the
majority of both primitive and more complex cultures woman enjoys, if
we apply our most advanced ethical standards, a less desirable position
than man.”
The obvious question is, Why? The answer is equally obvious, and has
been so often stated and discussed that I need do no more than mention
it here. Woman, however nearly her physical strength in the natural
state may approximate that of man, is under a peculiar disadvantage in
being the childbearing sex. During pregnancy, at least in its later
stages, and during childbirth, she is powerless to defend herself
against aggression. She is also at considerable disadvantage during
the early infancy of her child. Man in the savage state, having
none of that consideration which proceeds in a rough ratio with
cultural development, takes advantage of her periodic weakness and
her consequent need of protection, to force her into a subordinate
position. Superstition, masculine jealousy and desire for domination,
have of course been joined with the economic motive in bringing about
this subjection to the male; but these motives could not have operated
if her subjection had not been physically possible. If woman had had
the natural advantage over man, she would have used it to subject him,
precisely as he used his advantage to subject her; for the human being
in the ruder stages exploits other human beings, when possible, as a
matter of course, without any of those pretexts and indirections that
characterize communities where the sense of human rights has become
sufficiently general to gain the doubtful tribute of disingenuousness.
It is among these more enlightened communities that the subjection of
woman--or of any class--becomes reprehensible: a society that exploits
human beings through ignorant brutality is not open to the same
criticism as a society which continues to exploit them when clearly
aware that in doing so it is violating a natural right.
II
So much for the cause of woman’s subjection and exploitation. It has
had powerful abetment in superstitious notions concerning sex, such as
the primitive horror of menstruation. “Even educated Indians,” says Dr.
Lowie, “have been known to remain under the sway of this sentiment, and
its influence in moulding savage conceptions of the female sex as a
whole should not be underrated. The monthly seclusion of women has been
accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but
it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and
that her exclusion from certain spheres of activity and consequently
lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena
of periodicity.”
It is evident that this superstition has operated powerfully to
segregate women into a special class, excluded from full and equal
participation in the life of the community. It is also reasonable to
assume that it has stimulated the growth of many other superstitions
that have hedged them about from time immemorial. It is probably, for
example, closely connected with the Chinese association of evil with
the female principle of the Universe, and with the Hebrew notion that
sorrow entered the world through the sin of a woman. No doubt it may be
connected with the mediaeval tendency to regard woman as a mysterious
and supernatural being, either angelic or demoniac. The conception
of sibyls and witches is derived from it; and likewise the notion
which shows an interesting persistence even now, that a good woman is
somewhat nearer the angels than a good man, and a bad woman much more
satanic than a bad man.[4] Once the idea is established that woman is
a being extra-human, minds prepossessed by this superstition may see
her as either subhuman or superhuman; or these two notions may coexist,
as in Christian society.
The notion that there is always a savour of sin in the indulgence of
sexual appetite, even when exercised under due and formal regulation,
has also had a profound effect on the status of women. This notion is
to be found in both primitive and civilized communities; and since
to each sex the other sex represents the means of gratifying sexual
desire, the other sex naturally comes, where such a notion obtains,
to represent temptation and sin. But where one sex is dominant and
tends to regard itself as the sum of humanity, the other sex is forced
to bear alone the burden of responsibility for the evil that sex
represents; and it is therefore hedged about by the dominant sex with
all sorts of restrictions intended to reduce its opportunities to be
tempting, and thus to minimize its harmfulness.
It seems a fair assumption that the association of sin with sex-desire
may have arisen from the antagonism between individual inclination
and the domination of the group. Among peoples where the clan or the
family is the final category, marriage is far from being exclusively a
matter of individual interest and preference; indeed the individuals
concerned may have little or nothing to say about it. The marriage
is arranged by their elders, and the principals may not even see one
another before their wedding day. Marriage under these conditions is a
contract between families, an arrangement for founding a new economic
unit and for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are purely
dynastic arrangements in behalf of a political order. Sexual preference
can have little place in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more
inimical to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threatening the
purely utilitarian basis upon which sex has been placed; and as such it
must be discountenanced, and young men and women carefully segregated
in order that this inconvenient sentiment may have no chance to spring
up unauthorized between them.
In the Christian world this association of sin with the sexual
appetite has prevailed since the days of St. Paul.[5] Sexual desire
has been regarded as a base instinct, and its gratification under
any circumstances as a kind of moral concession; therefore woman, as
the instrument of sexual satisfaction in the dominant male, must be
repressed and regulated accordingly, and to this end she was always to
be under obedience to some man, either her husband or a male relative.
“Nothing disgraceful,” says Clement of Alexandria, “is proper for
man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it
brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.” Repression has
combined with the proprietary idea to make chastity a woman’s principal
if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to be punished with a
severity that, in another view, seems irrational and disproportionate,
by permanent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern
communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Europe, by violent death. An
extraordinary inconsistency appears in the fact that since Christian
thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, woman came to be
regarded as the repository of morality, and as such to be considered
on a higher moral plane than man. But it was really her economic and
social inferiority that made her the repository of morality. She must
embody the ideal of sexual restraint that her husband often found it
inconvenient or onerous to attain for himself; and any unfaithfulness
to this ideal on her part inflicted upon him a mysterious injury
called “dishonour.” He might indulge his own polygamous leanings with
impunity, but his failure to make effective his sexual monopoly of his
wife made him liable to contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this
notion persist that one may find anthropologists, usually the most
objective among our men of science, gauging the morality of a primitive
people by the chastity of its women.
Of course the effect of the attempt to make the chastity of women
a matter of morality and law, has been the precise opposite of the
one aimed at. Society can never be made virtuous through arbitrary
regulation; it can only be made unhappy and unamiable. The attempt
to suppress all unauthorized expression of the sex-impulse in women
tended to make them not only miserable and abject, but hypocritical
and deceitful; and it tended also to make men predatory. This was its
inevitable result in a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty
for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all; a result which has made
the relations between the sexes in the Christian world about as bad
as any that could be imagined. Theoretically, to be sure, Christianity
exacted of men the same degree of chastity as of women; practically
it did no such thing, as may be amply proved even now by a study of
the marriage and divorce laws of Christian nations, not excepting
our own.[6] The sexual license of the dominant male was limited only
by the practicable correspondence between his own desires and his
opportunities; and thanks to that convenient being, the prostitute,
his opportunities were plentiful. Hence for him, women were divided
into two classes: the chaste and respectable from whom he chose the
wife who kept his home, bore his children, and embodied his virtue;
and those outcasts from society who promoted the chastity of the first
class by offering themselves, for a price, as sacrifices to illicit
sexual desire. Neither class was he bound to respect; for the only
thing that compels respect is independence, and in neither the first
nor the second class were women independent. From the man’s point of
view, such a social arrangement was superficially satisfactory. It
provided for what might be called the utilitarian ends of sex; that
is to say, the man’s name was perpetuated and his natural appetites
gratified. But beyond this it left a good deal to be desired. Its worst
effect was by way of a complete evaporation of the spiritual quality of
union between man and woman and the very considerable dehumanization
that in consequence set in. Both the wife and the prostitute were man’s
creatures _quoad hoc_, to be used for different purposes but equally
to be used. It is hardly to be wondered at that man came to regard
women as “the sex,” and through his own management of their degradation
came to feel and to express toward them a degree of contempt that
cast considerable doubt on his own humanity. It is invariable that
the person who is able to regard any class of human beings as _per
se_ his natural inferiors, will by so doing sacrifice something of
his own spiritual integrity. In his relation to woman, man occupied a
position of privilege analogous to that occupied by the aristocracy
in the State; and he paid the same penalty for his exercise of a
usurped and irresponsible power: a coarsening of his spiritual fibre.
One of the oddest of the many odd superstitions that have grown out
of male domination is the notion that men suffer less spiritual harm
from sexual promiscuity than women; and this in spite of the biblical
injunction, applied exclusively to their sex: “None who go unto her
return again.” This superstition is accountable for abundant and
incurable misery; and so slow is it to disappear that one is inclined
to advocate a movement for the emancipation of men, a movement to free
them from the prejudices and prepossessions concerning women that are
inculcated by the traditional point of view.
We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked upon woman as man’s
creature and his chief temptation, and that Christian society took
good care to keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her the
enemy of man’s better self in a way that apparently was not foreseen
by St. Paul, whose concern with the temptations of the flesh seems
to have been a matter of more passionate conviction than his concern
with those of the spirit. Woman’s subordinate position; her enforced
ignorance; the narrowness of the interests that were allowed her; the
exaggerated regard for the opinion of other people that was bound
to be developed in a creature whose whole life depended on her
reputation--these conditions were calculated to evolve the sort of
being which is hardly able to give clear recognition either to her own
spiritual interest or to that of other people. Such a being would be
the enemy of man’s spiritual interest primarily through sheer inability
to understand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own destiny;
how could she be expected to conceive of any other or higher for man?
Her whole life must be lived for appearances; how could she help man
to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of appearances
that such an ideal might entail? The only renunciation of the world
that figured in her life was that which led to the convent; of that
renunciation which involves being in the world but not of it--that
steady repudiation of its standards which clears the way to spiritual
freedom--of such a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable
even to dream. The inevitable result of this enforced narrowness was
well stated by John Stuart Mill in the essay which remains the classic
of feminist literature; he pointed out that in a world where women
are almost exclusively occupied with material interests, where their
standard of appraisal is the opinion of other people, their ambition
will naturally connect itself with material things, with wealth
and prestige, no matter how inimical such an ambition may be to the
spiritual interests of the men upon whom they depend. That there have
been distinguished exceptions to this rule does credit to the strength
of character which has enabled an individual now and then to attain
something like spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and retarding
environment.
III
The effects of repression and seclusion on the character of woman
have given rise, and an appearance of reason, to a host of other
superstitions about her nature; notions which have been expressed in
terms by many writers and have coloured the thought of many others. To
offer a petty but interesting example, one of the most widely prevalent
and most easily disproved of these is the belief that women are by
nature more given to self-decoration than men. Certainly the practice
in civilized society at present seems to bear out this notion. But when
we turn to primitive communities we find, on the contrary, that the men
are likely to be vainer of finery and more given to it than the women.
The reason is simple: decoration of the person arises from the desire
to enhance sex-attraction; and it is most industriously practised by
that sex among whose members there is the keener competition for favour
with members of the opposite sex. In European civilization marriage
has been practically the only economic occupation open to women;
but monogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of females and an
increasing proportion of celibacy among males, has made it impossible
for every woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry among them
has been keen, and their interest in self-decoration has been largely
professional. “If in countries with European civilization,” says
Westermarck, “women nevertheless are more particular about their
appearance and more addicted to self-decoration than the other sex, the
reason for it may be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in
getting married. But there is seldom any such difficulty in the savage
world. Here it is, on the contrary, the man who runs the risk of being
obliged to lead a single life.”
M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that “the inclination to
bright and ornamental clothing is dependent not upon sex, but upon
the power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or
female, seeks ornament.” But it would seem, in view of the accepted
theory that self-decoration originates in the desire to enhance
sex-attraction, that Westermarck’s is the more reasonable explanation;
moreover it covers certain cases in primitive life where the women,
although their position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while
the men are given to elaborate decoration of their persons.
In spite of all the evidence which anthropology arrays against it,
however, the notion persists that woman is by nature more addicted
to self-decoration than man; and there are not wanting advocates of
her subjection, among them many women, who maintain that it shows the
essential immaturity of her mind!
The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is
primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them
appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning
women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened
by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed,
it has stood in the way of dispassionate scientific study of the
relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his “Man and
Woman,” says that “the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual
difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of
prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The
unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science
seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study
of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm
and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common;
and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual
differences may be easily summed up.” He then proceeds to show that
those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual
differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they
now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example,
depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of
woman’s brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural
seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous
physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the
female figure. An interesting indication of this is a recent dispatch
from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that
country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger
than the woman of a century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to enlarge
with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.
Even Plato, who advocated the education of woman, held that while her
capacities did not differ in kind from those of man, they differed
in degree because of her inferiority in physical strength. It was a
broad-minded view; for the most part women have simply been held to be
by nature relatively weak-minded and therefore relatively ineducable.
They have already passed one general test of educability, by entering
schools on the same footing with men and showing themselves equally
able to achieve a high scholastic standing; yet the Platonic notion
persists that they are physically incapable of going as far as men
can go in intellectual pursuits. This question can probably not be
settled a priori to any one’s satisfaction. It must be conceded,
after the fact, however, that considering the short time that women
have been tolerated in the schools and in the practical prosecution
of intellectual pursuits, the showing they have made has really been
quite as good as might reasonably be expected, and that it certainly
has not been such as to warrant any arbitrary fixing of limits
beyond which they can not or shall not go. Moreover, the physical
weakness which is supposed to disable woman intellectually may be
itself a result of her adaptation to her environment. There is no
way that I know of to forecast with any kind of accuracy what a few
generations of freedom will accomplish specifically in the way of
spiritual development. Considering that human beings are “creatures
of a large discourse,” the matter is probably determinable only by
experiment--_solvitur ambulando_.
Nor will there be any reason to agree with the numerous adherents of
the idea that women are naturally incapable of great creative work in
any field until they shall have failed, after generations and even
centuries of complete freedom, to produce great creative work. This
notion represents the last stand of a priori judgment concerning female
intelligence. It is based on the theory, at present much in fashion,
that men are more variable than women, and that both idiocy and genius
are thus much more frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence of
women tends to keep to the safe ground of mediocrity. The implications
of this theory manifestly are that genius of the highest order can
not be expected to appear in a woman. Since all cats are grey in the
dark, according to the proverb, nothing worth saying can be said
against this theory or for it. The data which underly it are simply
incompetent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way or the other.
They represent only a projection of men and women as they now are,
and therefore can not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning
men and women as they may become. To say, for instance, that because
there has never been, to our knowledge, any woman, with the possible
exception of Sappho, who showed the highest order of genius in the
arts it is probable that there never can or will be, is much the same
as to say that because there has never been a woman President of the
United States no woman ever can or will be President. Let it be freely
admitted that women have had opportunities in the creative field, and
have fallen short of supremacy. What of it? One must yet perceive
that the woman who has had those opportunities has been the product
of a civilization constitutionally inimical to her use of them, and
one may not assume that she has entirely escaped the effects of the
continuous repression and discouragement exercised upon her by her
social, domestic and political environment. When the power and purchase
of this influence are fully taken into account, one would say it is
not half so remarkable that women have missed supreme greatness in the
arts as that they have been able to achieve anything at all. For in the
arts, more than anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great
achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great deal more than the
mere absence of formal restraint upon the processes of writing books
or painting pictures. It is this important distinction that writers
like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have overlooked or ignored.
They have simply failed to take into account the effect of a generally
debilitating environment on the activities of the human spirit.
The environment of women has long been such as tends to make them,
much more than men, the slaves of “_was uns alle bändigt, das
Gemeine_,” and therefore to win release from the commonplace was,
and still is, proportionately harder for a woman than for a man.
The prevailing notion that a woman must at all costs cultivate
the approval of the world lest she fail, through lack of it, to
manœuvre herself successfully into the only occupation that society
showed any cordiality about opening to her--this put a heavy premium
on dissimulation and artifice. Women have not dared freely to be
themselves, even to themselves. It was the effect of this constraint
that Stendhal noted when he remarked that “the reason why women, when
they become authors, rarely attain the sublime, ... is that they never
dare to be more than half candid.”
It can not be gainsaid that the east wind of indifference which has
chilled the fire of many a masculine artist who found himself part of
an age indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown its coldest
upon the woman who essayed creative work. The woman who undertakes to
achieve artistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated by
men, finds herself opposed by many disabling influences. In an earlier
day she had to endure being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked
because she dared venture outside the limited sphere of sexuality that
had been assigned to her. Now her presence in the field of spiritual
endeavour is taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with the
tacit assumption, which finds expression in a thousand subtle ways,
that her work must be inferior on account of her sex.[7] Again, the
idea that marriage and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling
and are really the natural and proper calling for every woman, still
has general currency; and the very fact that a vast majority of women
tacitly acquiesce in this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the
individual towards the orthodox and expected. Human beings are always
powerfully drawn to be like their fellows; to be different requires
a somewhat uncommon independence of spirit and toughness of fibre,
and the fewer the individuals who attempt it, the more independence
and tenacity it requires. “The fewer there be who follow the way to
heaven,” says the author of the Imitation, “the harder that way is to
find.”
The position of woman in creative work the world over is analogous
to that of the man in America who ventures into the arts: he will be
tolerated; he may even be respected; but he will not find in his
environment the interest and encouragement that will help to develop
his talents and spur him to his best efforts. He may get sympathy and
encouragement from individuals; but his environment as a whole will
not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well termed the “tolerant expectancy”
which nourishes and develops genius. In American civilization the
prevailing ideal for men is business--material success; and our people
retain, as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and
disregard which the pioneer community displays towards the individual
whose governing ideals take a different line of development from those
of his fellows. The artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as
a queer being who loses something of his manhood by taking up purely
cultural pursuits, unless and until, indeed, he happens to make money
by it. Yet one never hears the intimation that because no Shakespeare
or Raphael has ever yet appeared in this country, none ever will. Very
well--imagine instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and you
perceive at once the invidious position of the woman artist in an
exclusively or dominantly masculine civilization.
But what if the emergence of genius does not depend so much on
variability as upon the degree of spiritual freedom that the
environment allows, and the amount and kind of culture that is current
in it? “The number of geniuses produced in a nation,” says Stendhal,
“is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture,
and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul
to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop
his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.” The
fact that prominent men of science accept the theory that genius is
explained by variability, along with a number of conclusions which
they have seen fit to draw from it, is no reason why their view should
be considered final. Whole schools of scientists have before now gone
wrong in the ticklish business of making speculative generalizations;
they may go wrong again, for men of science are human, and may not be
supposed to live wholly above the miasma arising from the stagnant mass
of current prepossessions. So long as the apparent dearth of female
genius may be satisfactorily accounted for on other grounds, one is
under no compulsion to accept the theory that it is due to a natural
and inescapable tendency toward mediocrity. When regarded fairly,
indeed, this theory has something of an _ad captandum_ character; it
is not in itself disingenuous, perhaps, but it lends itself with great
ease to an interested use. It offers strong support, for example, to
an advocacy of an actual qualitative difference in the education of
men and women. Women, being assumed to be fixed by nature at or below
the line of mediocrity, shall be educated exclusively for marriage,
motherhood, and the occupations which require no more than an average
of reflective intelligence. This assumption underlies the educational
plans of even such great libertarians as Thomas Jefferson and Theodore
Hertzka; it represents a reversion, conscious or unconscious, to the
primitive ideology which subordinates the individual to the group,
taking for granted that the individual is to be educated not primarily
for his or her own sake, but for an impersonal “good of society.”
Thus, whether they are aware of it or not, those who subscribe to this
theory would not only keep in woman’s way the discouraging postulate
of inferiority that at present stands against her, but they would
reinforce upon her those arbitrary limitations of opportunity to
which her position of inferiority in the past may not unreasonably be
ascribed.
IV
I have mentioned the repression of natural impulse inculcated upon
women by their upbringing. This will probably not disappear entirely
until the prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help them
to become fully human beings, rather than to make them marriageable;
for humanity and market-value have really little in common. For
centuries the minds and bodies of women have been moulded to suit the
more or less casual taste of men. This was the condition of their
profession, which was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her living
by her sex; her artificially-induced deformities and imbecilities
had an economic value: they helped to get her married. It would be
impossible to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence than the
dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that has been held up before
womankind. “We train them up,” says Montaigne, “from their infancy
to the traffic of love.” Yet men would have them, he says, “in full
health, vigorous, in good keeping, high-fed and chaste together;[8]
that is to say, both hot and cold.” The utter levity of this
traditional attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man’s worst
failure. I know of no stronger argument for the social philosophy of
the anarchist; for there is no more striking proof of the incapacity of
human beings to be their brothers’ keepers than man’s failure, through
sheer levity, over thousands of years to govern woman either for his
good or her own.
With the growing disposition of women to take their interests into
their own hands, this state of things is changing; but the curious
superstitions to which its effect on the female character has given
rise will long survive it. The world’s literature, from the Sanscrit
proverbs to the comic magazine of the twentieth century, is full of
disparaging references to the character of women; to their frailty,
their cunning, their deceitfulness, their irresponsibility, their
treachery--qualities, all of them, which in a fair view they seem bound
to have extemporized as their only defence in a social order which
was proof against more honourable weapons. “A woman,” says Amiel,
“is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and
contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a
good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring
about innumerable evils without knowing it.” This is no doubt true,
and the purposes of the moralist perhaps demand no more than a mere
statement of the fact. But the critic’s purposes demand that the fact
should give an account of itself. Why does woman so regularly bear this
character? Well, certainly the only life that European civilization
offered to women in Amiel’s day--the only views of life that it
accorded them, the only demands on life that it allowed them--was a
specific for producing the kind of creature he describes; and there is
no doubt that it must have produced them by the million. The inference
is inescapable that an equivalent incidence of the same educational and
environmental influences upon men would have produced the same kind
of men. The matter, in short, is not one of the primary or even the
secondary character of women _qua_ women or of men _qua_ men; it is
one of the effect of education and environment upon human beings _qua_
human beings.
The effort to escape this inference gives rise to extraordinary
inconsistencies in the current estimate of female character, and
even the estimate put upon it by men of scientific habit. Women
are supposed, for instance, to be tenderer and gentler than
men--“Tenderness,” says Ellen Key, “distinguishes her whole way of
thinking and feeling, of wishing and working”--yet they are also
supposed to be more vengeful--“Hell hath no fury....” They are supposed
to be creatures of impulse and sentiment “_la femme, dont l’impulsion
sentimentale est le seul guide écouté_”[9]--yet they are at the same
time supposed to be calculating, particularly in their relations with
men. Diluvial irruptions of sentimentalism are continually spewed
over their nobility and self-sacrifice in the rôle of motherhood; yet
men have taken care in the past to deny them guardianship of their
own children. Schopenhauer, far on the right wing, again, appears to
represent the legalistic point of view on this relation: he does not
trust them in it beyond the first purely instinctive love for the child
while it is physically helpless; he thinks they should “never be given
free control of their children, wherever it can be avoided.” Man, now,
is more likely, he thinks, to love his child with a lasting love,
because “in the child he recognizes his own inner self; that is to
say his love for it is metaphysical [or egotistical?] in its origin.”
Occasionally, again, the world is treated to the diverting spectacle
of some woman writer, like Dr. Gina Lombroso, trotting out all the
poor old spavined superstitions and putting them through their paces
in order to prove the strange contention that women are incapable of
making the progress they have already made. Dr. Lombroso’s ideal woman,
as I have already remarked elsewhere in a review of her recent book,
is something of a cross between an imbecile and a saint; that is to
say, she conforms closely to the ideal which has been held up before
the women of the Christian world; an ideal towards which millions of
them have striven with a faithfulness which does more credit to their
devotion than to their intelligence.
Since any discussion of woman’s place in society must necessarily be
to some extent a study in superstition, one can not really have done
with superstition until one is done with the subject. It has seemed
to warrant some special attention at the outset of this work not only
because the past and present status of womankind can not be explained
without reference to it, but because the future of womankind will in
large measure depend upon the expeditiousness with which it and those
prepossessions which spring from it, are laid aside. The sum of these
superstitions and prepossessions may be expressed in the generalization
that woman is primarily a function; and wherever any remote approach
to this generalization may be discerned in a discussion of her status
or her rights--as it may at once be discerned, for instance, in the
sentimental side of the work of feminists as staunch as Ellen Key and
Olive Schreiner--at just that point the abdication of the scientific
spirit in favour of superstition may be suspected.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Among the Chinese, for example, the woman never goes near the
kitchen.
[4] According to news-reports on the day that this is written, Judge
McIntyre of New York, sentencing a young woman in a criminal case,
said: “When a woman is bad she is vicious and worse than a man, many,
many times over.”
[5] It finds grotesque expression now and then. I remember seeing in
a San Francisco newspaper a few years ago this headline: “Accused of
having immoral relations with a woman other than his wife.”
[6] In the State of Maryland, if the wife be found to have been
unchaste before marriage, the husband is entitled to a divorce; but
premarital unchastity on the part of the husband gives the wife no
corresponding ground.
[7] As the only woman member of an editorial staff during a period of
four years, I had ample opportunity for experience of this attitude. It
was openly expressed only twice, both times, oddly enough, by women;
but so universal was the unconscious assumption of inferiority that I
may say without great exaggeration that it was only among my colleagues
that I did not meet with it.
[8] This was written, needless to say, before the casual taste of men
set the fashion for women to be mincing and sickly.
[9] Elie Faure.