SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF THE MALADY IN WOMEN.
"Their hypocrisy is a perpetual marvel to me, and a constant
exercise of cleverness of the finest sort."
THACKERAY, "Mr. Brown's Letters to a Young Man."
"It would take a large volume to contain the authentic accounts of
deception practised by women."
DR. E. J. TILT, "The Change of Life."
Women are particularly susceptible to the disease of Respectability.
Our sisters esteem rank and birth; they bow down to all kinds of idols
with a veneration seldom equalled in men. Form, ceremonies, modes of
dress, points of etiquette, and social observances mean more to them
than to us; and it is difficult to prove to them the hollowness and
inutility of mere seems, because externals satisfy their sense of
decorum and give them pleasure. The average _bourgeois_ woman reads
the court news and aristocratic tittle-tattle with avidity mingled
with envy. Baubles, insignia, uniforms, and the pomps of officialdom
attract and dazzle her, and she would rather know a stupid peer than a
sage, unpretentious philosopher, man of science, or poet.
Notice the large proportion of women in the crowds that gather outside
a West End mansion, or at the door of a church, on the occasions of a
ball or a fashionable wedding. Many women will travel long distances,
and endure severe fatigue and discomfort to gain a transitory glimpse
at titled personages. Lacking the power of analysis, and being
deficient in imagination, they admire the popular and ostentatious, and
contemn the persons and the things of true worth. Besides this, women's
sense of humour is less keen than that of men; they fail to see the
droll side of customs and fetishes, and they get angry with those who
jest and chuckle at grotesque ceremonies and functions. It matters not
to the middle-class woman how good or wise a man or woman may be if
they do not conform to preposterous codes and usages.
The romantic youth who imagines that most women are more sentimental
and romantic than himself, discovers his error when he becomes a lover,
and is received as a suitor in the family of his inamorata. He finds
the Little Muddleton Road folk extremely practical and respectable.
Materfamilias may possibly have been slightly tinged with romance and
poetry in her teens; but at fifty she is a slave to Respectability,
and she teaches her daughters, in season and out, that they must,
before all else, be "Respectable members of society." Is it a matter
for wonder? Naturally, the romantic youth puzzles over this shrewd,
business-like phase of woman's character; but he forgets that "human
beings, cramped under worse than South Sea Isle taboo," develop
astuteness in order to survive. You cannot expect women who have been
fenced around by Respectability and restricted to the back parlour
and the kitchen, to be wild, free, natural creatures, and nymphs of
the woodland. We ought not to have imprisoned them in this way at the
beginning. By this time, alas! the majority of them appear to hug their
fetters.
The black shadow of the plague of Respectability is over love and
the relations of the sexes, and women suffer more than men from this
terrible blight. Respectability isolates the sexes before marriage,
and only allows them to discover each other's idiosyncracies,
caprices, and foibles when they are inseparably united ankle to ankle
and wrist to wrist, to hobble on through life, and pretend that they
are enjoying the penance. I do not say that the shackles _always_
gall. It is almost a sheer question of chance if they do not. For
this fearful uncertainty Respectability is much to blame. Girls are
immured and guarded, like vestal virgins of old; there is no wholesome
widespread social commingling of the sexes. Boys are free; but what is
their liberty worth to them, when girls are watched, chaperoned, and
secluded at the very age when their society is most sought by the youth
of the opposite sex? This nunnery system is practically restricted
to the middle-class Respectables. What is its effect upon the morals
and the weal of the order? Most disastrous. The young man, in a very
large number of instances, gains his knowledge of womankind among the
flashy, flighty, and even more undesirable specimens of the sex. He
meets the Little Muddleton Road girls at parties occasionally, but if
he walks home from chapel with one of them, Paterfamilias or Mamma
intervenes, and cuts short the friendship, or they want to know the
young fellow's "intentions" towards Ethel. His own parents tell him he
is too youthful, or too poor, to think of wooing yet; and I have even
known mothers who excluded all girls from the house for fear that their
sons should fall in love prematurely.
Now, it is quite probable that the young man has no "intentions,"
beyond gaining a friend in one of the Little Muddleton Road girls. He
may simply desire social intercourse with one of the feminine kind,
out of obedience to an eternal and immutable law of attraction. But
no, such intimacies, unless they are distinctly understood to be the
prelude to marriage, are rarely permitted by the Respectables. "It
is not proper for Ethel to be seen about with that young Simpkins.
What will Mrs. Robinson think?" Therefore Ethel is interdicted from
communication with the estimable Simpkins, and injured propriety is
appeased and quieted.
I say without hesitation that such isolation is ruinous to the
morals of the community. Finding how exceedingly difficult it is to
associate with the daughters of the Respectables, young Simpkins finds
companions among the female outcasts of society, women who besmirch his
romance, and degrade his pure passion to the lowest animal lust. The
world is full of love, could he but find it; but Respectability locks
it up in fusty dens, and says: "You mustn't be a close friend of my
daughter. That will never do! If you were engaged to her it would be a
different matter; but you're not, and people would talk." So Simpkins
goes away, and "picks up" very questionable girls in the street, and
buys his first experience of "love." And the saddest thing is that he
forms his opinion about women from these types, which is, of course,
unwise, to say the least. But is he wholly to blame for this? No, he
is one of the victims of Respectability, the grim tyrant who mars and
blasts millions of human lives in England. At thirty-five Simpkins is
a _blasé_, cynical young man-about-town, a sufferer, probably, from
inordinate sexuality, with a profound contempt for all women, founded
on his miserable experiences with female harpies and panders. "A fool
and sinner," cries the moralist. Yes, but there are many like to him
amongst us; and they were once decent, healthy, chivalrous young men.
And what of the isolated young girl? Her case seems to me even more
sorrowful and piteous. Half of life is a sealed book to her. She has
scarcely any ideas that are not delusions about love and the opposite
sex, and the most important offices of her being. Her natural impulses
have been suppressed, stunted, and perverted, and her physical health
is probably feebler than that of the dissipated young man. She marries
late, dazed with joy that her hour has come at last, and frequently
awakes in the first year of marriage to the truth that she knew little
about men in general, and not nearly enough about the man she has
wedded; that she was wofully inexperienced and ignorant, and that
Respectability condemns her to drain the bitter cup of disappointment
to the dregs, to drain it with composure and a smiling face to the
world. She was not allowed to mix freely with men. All her ideas of
male human nature are derived from mawkish novels and story books,
often written by women as ill-informed as herself. Many women have
confessed to me that they did not understand men till they married one,
and many men have said the same concerning women.
How, then, can we lessen the chances of drawing the wrong card in
the great lottery of marriage? Certainly not by the sequestration of
youths and maidens, for that is one of the chief causes of unsuccessful
unions. Grundyism and Respectability must be set at defiance, and boys
and girls in adolescence allowed to form companionships with each
other. The artificial barriers between them must be broken down; the
old stupid inhibitions rescinded, and a wholesome association not only
permitted, but by every means encouraged. Education in life through
the fellowship and the interchange of ideas between the sexes is one
safeguard against wreckage in the perilous journey of matrimony.
Discoursing upon the "eternal feminine," Schopenhauer says: "Individual
and partial exceptions do not alter the fact that women are, and will
always remain, the most thorough and incurable Philistines.... Their
domination and influence ruins modern society.... The essentially
European lady is a being who ought to have no existence at all; there
ought, on the other hand, to be housewives and girls who hope to
become such, and who are, in consequence, brought up to domesticity
by subordination. Just because there are _ladies_ in Europe, women of
a lower grade, who form, therefore, the great majority of the sex, are
much more unhappy than they are in the East."
As to the charge of Philistinism, I am, unfortunately, compelled to
agree with the pessimistic mysogynist. Women are the larger part of
humanity in this country, and, that part being Philistine, it must
exercise a bad influence upon society in the mass. I do not deny
that the spirit of rebellion lurks in every woman's breast, but, for
all that, women are not readily persuaded to rebel against absurd
conventions. Their great desire is to be on the popular side, and in
the ranks of the mightier force, because unpopular causes are generally
accounted discreditable by the majority. Women, therefore, set a high
value on Respectability, and they endure much suffering to maintain
it. Yet here and there we find women as leaders and foremost fighters
in assaults upon irrational institutions and customs, and they are
often wise tacticians and valorous assailers. But such women are not
of the Respectables; they are thinkers and reformers who have cast
aside the cumbrous, tawdry trappings of that order, so that they may be
of service to humanity. The Philistine woman cares little or nothing
for social advance and the welfare of posterity, and in this respect
she is always rather more apathetic or actively hostile to progress
than the Philistine man. She feels that a woman has more to lose than
a man by abandoning conventionalities and orthodox opinions. But this
dread is somewhat ill-founded and exaggerated, because there are many
unconventional men only too ready to warmly welcome the women who
revolt, and not only to bid them cheer, but to pay them high homage for
their bravery and independence. In the long run, a woman gains far more
esteem and friendship in the army of the Unconventionalists than she
wins from the host of the Respectables.
Timidity is one of the prime sources of the disease of Respectability
in both sexes, and women are by nature more timid than men in the
matter of revolt against ignorant Public Opinion. The result is that
women are much less free than men in so-called free countries. "A man
glories in being considered bold, but a woman shrinks from the charge
of boldness, as degrading to her sex."[2] And here I shelter myself
behind a doughty champion of women, because if I wrote the indictment
which he has set down, my ethical-cum-philosophical Gamaliel, and
possibly many of my women readers, would charge me with "cynicism" and
"sex-bias." I quote again from Mr. Gibson, who, in this charge of the
alleged untruthfulness of women, is almost as emphatic as Schopenhauer:
"Owing to the subordinate position of women, _they are less truthful
than men_. They work up to their ends without the exercise of force,
and must therefore use guile. Men lie as readily as women when they
think lies will serve their purpose, but, having more freedom, and
being less afraid of conflict, they have less cause to lie. _Women are
taught to lie from their childhood, in order to hide their desires,
their disappointments, and their sufferings._ Women are driven in upon
themselves, and in sheer self-defence lie as men are not called upon to
lie."[3]
I know several charming women who lie most glibly and as to the manner
born, without a tinge of shame; indeed, it is a difficult matter to
make sure that you have "got them," so to speak, for their speech is
so slippery, and they fib so artistically that no reliance can be
placed upon their admissions of belief or disbelief in this or that.
All that they say must be swallowed with a large grain of salt. But let
me qualify this impugnment somewhat. I think we may fairly say that
the tarradiddles of women are not generally of the more ignoble order
of lies. They are mostly pretty little semi-transparent falsehoods
which do not utterly deceive the hearer who has studied the psychology
of women. It is Respectability that makes cowards and cozeners of
men and women; and those who imagine that they have the most to lose
by frankness will naturally practice the most deception.[4] The
woman-thrall to convention is forced to use the weapons of falsehood
and to don the armour of deceit. In corroboration of this assertion,
I shall again quote the words of another writer, and a woman to boot.
Miss Violet Hunt, a clever satiric novelist, thus describes the unhappy
girl who has been inoculated with the virus of Respectability:--
"How one knows the kind of girl! One meets a specimen in almost
every house-party. She is nicely dressed, but not quite so nicely
as the other girls staying in the house. She has charming manners,
but there is something of the offensive and defensive sharpness
of the street Arab about her. She has had to take care of herself
ever since she was grown up, and make her tongue do the work of
chaperonage. If it rains, she is in mute agony, because she cannot
afford to spoil her clothes. She takes Champagne regularly at
dinner because she does not have it at home. She is at some pains
to propitiate her hostess, because she intends to be asked again.
She holds her tongue when grand functions are mentioned, because
she was not there. In short, she is a kind of innocent whited
sepulchre; a frail, jerry-built edifice, whose prestige may be
destroyed at any moment by untoward revelations as to her social
standing, whose whole endeavour is to give the impression that she
lives in a mentionable part of London, and dresses on more than
thirty pounds a year."[5]
This is a pitiless exposure of the shifts and subterfuges to which
you must stoop in posing as a lady or gentleman, when you are only a
person. What happiness, what profit, come out of such masquerading?
It is better, a hundred times better, to save your soul alive, and
preserve something of self-respect, as one of the unreceived and
unrecognised Non-Respectables. You will find this enchanted garden of
Philistia, fenced with high walls bristling with spikes, and set with
warning boards, is a very shoddy Paradise when you are admitted to it
on sufferance. It is the domain of the "bores and bored," the haunt of
parasites and toadies, incessantly scheming and distrusting each other
in a deadly dull atmosphere of uncongeniality.
My sister, you gain _nothing_ by fostering this malady of
Respectability, by vapouring and wasting your sweetness in the aridity
of the Little Muddleton Road. So long as you slavishly conform to the
barbaric customs and codes of that wretched clan, so long will you be
abject and unhappy. Come out of the fetid air of the Charnel-house of
Convention, rip off those corsets and cramping disguises, cast away
your high-heeled boots, and stand erect and fearless among men and
women who dare to live free uncontaminated lives, beyond the reek and
blight of the infected purlieus.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] "The Emancipation of Women," by J. Gibson.
[3] The italics in this passage are mine.
[4] Heine, in his confessions, says: "We men will sometimes lie
outright: women, like all passive creatures, seldom invent, but can so
distort a fact that they can thereby injure us more surely than by a
downright lie."
[5] "The Way of Marriage."