In woman—modern science has shown—the more fundamental and primitive
nervous centers, and the great sympathetic and vaso-motor system of
nerves generally, are developed to a greater extent than in man; in
woman the whole structure and life rallies more closely and obviously
round the sexual function than in man; and, as a general rule, in the
evolution of the human race, as well as of the lower races, the female
is less subject to variation and is more constant to and conservative of
the type of the race than the male.[6] With these physiological
differences are naturally allied the facts that, of the two, Woman is
the more primitive, the more intuitive, the more emotional. If not so
large and cosmic in her scope, the great unconscious processes of Nature
lie somehow nearer to her; to her, sex is a deep and sacred instinct,
carrying with it a sense of natural purity; nor does she often
experience that divorce between the sentiment of Love and the physical
passion which is so common with men, and which causes them to be aware
of a grossness and a conflict in their own natures; she is, or should
be, the interpreter of Love to man, and in some degree his guide in
sexual matters. More, since she keeps to the great lines of evolution
and is less biased and influenced by the momentary currents of the day;
since her life is bound up with the life of the child; since in a way
she is nearer the child herself, and nearer to the savage; it is to her
that Man, after his excursions and wanderings, mental and physical,
continually tends to return as to his primitive home and resting-place,
to restore his balance, to find his center of life, and to draw stores
of energy and inspiration for fresh conquests of the outer world. “In
women men find beings who have not wandered so far as they have from the
typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human
embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature. To every man, as
Michelet has put it, the woman whom he loves is as the Earth was to her
legendary son; he has but to fall down and kiss her breast and he is
strong again.”[7]
If it be true that by natural and physiological right Woman stands in
some such primitive relationship to Man, then we may expect this
relationship to emerge again into clear and reasonable light in course
of time; though it does not of course follow that a relationship founded
on physiological distinctions is absolutely permanent—since these latter
may themselves vary to some degree. That a more natural and sensible
relation of some kind between the sexes is actually coming to birth, few
who care to read the signs of the times can well doubt. For the moment,
however, and by way of parenthesis before looking to the future, we have
to consider a little more in detail the present position of women under
civilization. Not that the consideration will be altogether gracious and
satisfactory, but that it may—we are fain to hope—afford us some hints
for the future.
It was perhaps not altogether unnatural that Man’s craze for property
and individual ownership should have culminated in the enslavement of
woman—his most precious and beloved object. But the consequence of this
absurdity was a whole series of other absurdities. What between
insincere flattery and rosewater adorations on the one hand, and serfdom
and neglect on the other, woman was, as Havelock Ellis says, treated as
“a cross between an angel and an idiot.” And after a time, adapting
herself to the treatment, she really became something between an angel
and an idiot—a bundle of weak and flabby sentiments, combined with a
wholly undeveloped brain. Moreover by being continually specialized and
specialized in the sexual and domestic direction, she lost touch with
the actual world, and grew, one may say, into a separate species from
man—so that in the later civilizations the males and females, except
when the sex-attraction has compelled them as it were to come together,
have been wont to congregate in separate herds, and talk languages each
unintelligible to the other. Says the author of the Woman’s Question: “I
admit there is no room for pharisaical self-laudation here. The bawling
mass of mankind on a racecourse or the stock-exchange is degrading
enough in all conscience. Yet this even is hardly so painful as the
sight which meets our eyes between three and four in the afternoon in
any fashionable London street. Hundreds of women—mere dolls—gazing
intently into shop-windows at various bits of colored ribbon. * * *
Perhaps nothing is more disheartening than this, except the mob of women
in these very same streets between twelve and one at night.”
The “lady,” the household drudge, and the prostitute, are the three main
types of women resulting in our modern civilization from the process of
the past—and it is hard to know which is the most wretched, which is the
most wronged, and which is the most unlike that which in her own heart
every true woman would desire to be.
In some sense the “lady” of the period which is just beginning to pass
away is the most characteristic product of Commercialism. The sense of
Private Property, arising and joining with the “angel and idiot” theory,
turned Woman more and more—especially of course among the possessing
classes—into an emblem of possession—a mere doll, an empty idol, a brag
of the man’s exclusive right in the sex—till at last, as her vain
splendors increased and her real usefulness diminished, she ultimated
into the “perfect lady.” But let every woman who piques and preens
herself to the fulfilment of this ideal in her own person, remember what
is the cost and what is the meaning of her quest: the covert enslavement
to, and the covert contempt of Man.
The instinct of helpful personal service is so strong in women, and such
a deep-rooted part of their natures, that to be treated as a mere target
for other people’s worship and services—especially when this is tainted
with insincerity—must be most obnoxious to them. To think that women
still exist by hundreds and hundreds of thousands, women with hearts and
hands formed for love and helpfulness, who are brought up as “ladies”
and have to spend their lives listening to the idiotic platitudes of the
Middle-class Man, and “waited upon” by wage-bought domestics, is enough
to make one shudder. The modern “gentleman” is bad enough, but the
“lady” of bourgeois-dom, literally “crucified twixt a smile and
whimper,” prostituted to a life which in her heart she hates—with its
petty ideals, its narrow horizon, and its empty honors—is indeed a
pitiful spectacle.
In Baronial times the household centered round the Hall, where the baron
sat supreme; to-day it centers round the room where the lady reigns. The
“with” is withdrawn from the withdrawing-room, and that apartment has
become the most important of all. Yet there is an effect of mockery in
the homage paid—a doubt whether she is really qualified yet for the
position. The contrast between the two societies, the Feudal and the
Commercial, is not inaptly represented by this domestic change. The
former society was rude and rough, but generous and straightforward; the
latter is polished and nice, but full of littleness and finesse. The
Drawing-room, with its feeble manners and effects of curtains and
embroidery, gives its tone to the new sovereign; and, as far as her rule
is actual, to our lives now-a-days. But we look forward to a time when
this room also will cease to be the center of the house, and
another—perhaps the Common-room—will take its place.
Below a certain level in society—the distinctively commercial—there are
no drawing-rooms. Among the working masses, where the woman is of
indispensable importance in daily life, and is not sequestered as an
idol, there is no room specially set apart for her worship—a curious
change takes place in her nominal position, and whereas in the supernal
sphere she sits in state and has her tea and bread and butter brought to
her by obsequious males, in the cottage the men take their ease and are
served by the women. The customs of the cottage, however, are rooted in
a natural division of labor by which the man undertakes the outdoor, and
the woman the indoor work; and there is, I think, quite as much real
respect shown to her here as in the drawing-room.
In the cottage, nevertheless, the unfortunate one falls into the second
pit that is prepared for her—that of the household drudge; and here she
leads a life which, if it has more honesty and reality in it than that
of the “lady,” is one of abject slavery. Few men again realize, or
trouble themselves to realize, what a life this of the working housewife
is. They are accustomed to look upon their own employment, whatever it
may be, as “work” (perhaps because it brings with it “wages”); the
woman’s they regard as a kind of pastime. They forget what monotonous
drudgery it really means, and yet what incessant forethought and care;
they forget that the woman has no eight hours day, that her work is
always staring her in the face, and waiting for her, even on into the
night; that the body is wearied, and the mind narrowed down, “scratched
to death by rats and mice” in a perpetual round of petty cares. For not
only does civilization and multifarious invention (including smoke) make
the burden of domestic life immensely complex, but the point is that
each housewife has to sustain this burden to herself in lonely effort.
What a sight, in any of our great towns, to enter into the cottages or
tenements which form the endless rows of suburban streets, and to find
in each one a working wife struggling alone in semi-darkness and
seclusion with the toils of an entire separate household—with meals to
be planned and provided, with bread to be baked, clothes to be washed
and mended, children to be kept in order, a husband to be humored, and a
house to be swept and dusted; herself wearied and worried, debilitated
with confinement and want of fresh air, and low-spirited for want of
change and society! How futile! and how dreary!
There remains the third alternative for women; nor can it be wondered at
that some deliberately choose a life of prostitution as their only
escape from the existence of the lady or the drudge. Yet what a choice
it is! On the one hand is the caged Woman, and on the other hand is the
free: and which to choose? “How can there be a doubt,” says one, “surely
freedom is always best.” Then there falls a hush. “Ah!” says society,
pointing with its finger, “but a free Woman!”
And yet is it possible for Woman ever to be worthy her name, unless she
is free?
To-day, or up to to-day, just as the wage-worker has had no means of
livelihood except by the sale of his bodily labor, so woman has had no
means of livelihood except by the surrender of her bodily sex. She could
dispose of it to one man for life, and have in return the respect of
society and the caged existence of the lady or the drudge, or she could
sell it night by night and be a “free woman,” scorned of the world and
portioned to die in the gutter. In either case (if she really thinks
about the matter at all) she must lose her self-respect. What a choice,
what a frightful choice!—and this has been the fate of Woman for how
long?
If, as a consequence of all this, woman has gone down hill, there is no
doubt that man has gravitated too. (Or was it really that Jack fell down
first, and “Jill came tumbling after?”) Anyhow I think that nothing can
be more clear—and this I believe should be taken as the basis of any
discussion on the relation of the sexes—than that whatever injures the
one sex injures the other; and that whatever defects or partialities may
be found in the one must from the nature of the case be tallied by
corresponding defects and partialities in the other. The two halves of
the human race are complementary, and it is useless for one to attempt
to glorify itself at the expense of the other. As in Olive Schreiner’s
allegory of Woman (“Three Dreams in a Desert”), man and woman are bound
together by a vital band, and the one cannot move a step in advance of
the other.
If we were called upon to characterize these mutual defects (inbred
partly by the false property relation) we should be inclined to say they
were brutality and conceit on the one hand, and finesse and subtlety on
the other. Man, as owner, has tended to become arrogant and callous and
egotistic; woman, as the owned, slavish and crafty and unreal.
As a matter of fact, and allowing that sweeping generalizations of this
kind are open to a good many exceptions, we do find (at any rate in the
British Isles) a most wonderful and celestial indifference to anything
but their own affairs amongst the “lords of creation,” an indifference
so ingrained and constitutional that it is rarely conscious of itself,
and which assumes quite easily and naturally that the weaker sex exists
for the purpose of playing the foil, so to speak, to the chief actor in
life’s drama. Nor does the fact that this indifference is tempered, from
time to time, by a little gallantry afford much consolation—as may be
imagined—to the woman who perceives that the gallantry is inspired by
nothing more than a passing sex-desire.
On the other hand Jill has come tumbling after pretty quickly, and has
tumbled to the conclusion that though she cannot sway her lord by force,
she may easily make use of him by craft. Finesse, developed through
scores of generations, combined with the skillful use of the glamor
belonging to her sex, have given her an extraordinary faculty of
carrying out her own purposes, often through the most difficult passes,
without ever exposing her hand. Possibly the knowledge of this forms one
reason why women distrust each other so much more than men distrust each
other. Certainly one of the rarest of God’s creatures is a truly
undesigning female, but—when dowered with intellect such as might seem
to justify it in being designing—one of the most admirable and
beautiful!
Looking a little deeper, and below the superficial contract which an
unsatisfactory relation between the sexes has doubtless created, one
seems to discern some of those more vital and deep-rooted
differentiations spoken of on an earlier page. It is a commonly
conceived opinion that woman tends more to intuition and man to
logic;[8] and certainly the male mind seems better able to deal with
abstractions and generalizations, and the female mind with the personal
and the detailed and the concrete. And while this difference may be in
part attributable to the artificial confinement of women to the domestic
sphere, there is probably something more organic in it than that. At any
rate it gives to Woman some of her best qualities—a quick and immediate
perception, appreciation of character, tact, and a kind of artistic
sense in the ordering of her own life, so that you do not see the tags
and unraveled ends which appear in man’s conduct. While the man is
blundering about, fighting with himself, hesitating, doubting, weighing,
trying vainly to co-ordinate all the elements of his nature, the woman
(often no doubt in a smaller sphere) moves serene and prompt to her
ends. Her actions are characterized by grace and finality; she is more
at unity with herself; and she has the inestimable advantage of living
in the world of persons—which may well seem so much more important and
full of interest than that of things.
On the other hand, this want of the power of generalization has made it
difficult for woman (at any rate up to to-day) to emerge from a small
circle of interests, and to look at things from the point of view of
public advantage and good. While her sympathies for individuals are keen
and quick, abstract and general ideas such as those of Justice, Truth,
and the like have been difficult of appreciation to her; and her
deficiency in logic has made it almost impossible to act upon her
through the brain. A man, if he is on the wrong track, can be argued
with; but with a woman of this type, if her motives are nefarious, there
is no means of changing them by appeal to her reason, or to the general
sense of Justice and Right—and unless controlled by the stronger sway of
a determined personal will (of a man) her career is liable to be pretty
bad.
Generally it will be admitted, as we are dealing with points of mental
and moral difference between the sexes, Man has developed the more
active, and Woman the more passive qualities; and it is pretty obvious,
here too, that this difference is not only due to centuries of social
inequality and of property-marriage, but roots back in some degree to
the very nature of their respective sexual functions. That there are
permanent complementary distinctions between the male and female, dating
first perhaps from sex, and thence spreading over the whole natures,
physical, mental and moral, of each, no one can reasonably doubt. These
distinctions have, however, we contend, been strangely accentuated and
exaggerated during the historic period—till at last a point of maximum
divergence and absolute misunderstanding has been reached. But that
point is behind us now.
WOMAN
IN FREEDOM
It is clear enough, from what has been said, that what Woman most needs
to-day, and is mostly seeking for, is a basis of independence for her
life. Nor is her position likely to be improved until she is able to
face man on an equality; to find, self-balanced, her natural relation to
him; and to dispose of herself and of her sex perfectly freely, and not
as a thrall must do.
Doubtless if man were an ideal creature his mate might be secure of
equal and considerate treatment from him without having to insist upon
an absolute economic independence; but as that is only too obviously not
the case there is nothing left for her to-day but to unfold the war-flag
of her “rights,” and (dull and tiresome as it may be) to go through a
whole weary round of battles till peace is concluded again upon a better
understanding.
Yet it must never be forgotten that nothing short of large social
changes, stretching beyond the sphere of women only, can bring about the
complete emancipation of the latter. Not till our whole commercial
system, with its barter and sale of human labor and human love for gain,
is done away, and not till a whole new code of ideals and customs of
life has come in, will women really be free. They must remember that
their cause is also the cause of the oppressed laborer over the whole
earth, and the laborer has to remember that his cause is theirs.[9]
And since Motherhood is, after all, woman’s great and incomparable work,
people will come to see that a sane maternity is one of the very first
things to be considered—and that really, though not the only
consideration, it is a work which if properly fulfilled does involve the
broadest and largest culture. Perhaps this might seem to some only too
obvious; yet when for a moment we glance around at the current ideals,
when we see what Whitman calls “the incredible holds and webs of
silliness, millinery and every kind of dyspeptic depletion” in which
women themselves live, when we see the absolute want of training for
motherhood and the increasing physical incapacity for it, and even the
feminine censure of those who pass through the ordeal too easily, we
begin to realize how little the present notion of what woman should be
is associated with the healthy fulfilment of her most perfect work. A
woman capable at all points to bear children, to guard them, to teach
them, to turn them out strong and healthy citizens of the great world,
stands at the farthest remove from the finnikin doll or the meek drudge
whom man by a kind of false sexual selection has through many centuries
evolved as his ideal.
The nervous and sexual systems of women to-day, ruined among the rich by
a life and occupations which stimulate the emotional sensibilities
without ever giving the strength and hardiness which flow from healthy
and regular industry, and often ruined among the poor by excessive labor
carried on under most unhealthy conditions, make real wifehood and
motherhood things almost unknown. “Injudicious training,” says Bebel,
“miserable social conditions (food, dwelling, occupation) produce weak,
bloodless, nervous beings, incapable of fulfilling the duties of
matrimony. The consequences are menstrual troubles[10] and disturbances
in the various organs connected with sexual functions, rendering
maternity dangerous or impossible. Instead of a healthy, cheerful
companion, a capable mother, a helpmate equal to the calls made upon her
activity, the husband has a nervous excitable wife, permanently under
the doctor’s hands, and too fragile to bear the slightest draught or
noise.”
The Modern Woman sees plainly enough that no decent advance for her sex
is possible until this whole question is fairly faced—involving, as of
course it will do, a life very different from her present one, far more
in the open air, with real bodily exercise and development, some amount
of regular manual work, a knowledge of the laws of health and
physiology, an altogether wider mental outlook, and greater
self-reliance and nature-hardihood. But when once these things are
granted, she sees that she will no longer be the serf, but the equal,
the mate, and the comrade of Man.
Before any such new conception it is obvious enough that the poor little
pinched ideal of the “lady,” which has ruled society so long, will fade
away into distance and obscurity. People may rail at the new
developments, but what, it may be asked, can any decently sensible woman
think of her present position—of the mock salutations and heroic
politeness of the conventional male—with their suggestion of an empty
homage to weakness and incapacity; of the unwritten law which condemns
her, if occupying any place in society, to bridle in her chin and use an
affected speech in order that it may be patent to everybody that she is
not free; which forbids natural and spontaneous gesture as unbecoming
and suspicious—and indeed in any public place as liable to the attention
of the policeman; what can she think of the perpetual lies under which
she has to live—too numerous to be recorded; except that all these
things are intolerable? Rather than remain in such a coil the modern
woman is sensible enough to see that she must face the stigma of doing
things “unlady-like;” and that only by facing it can she win her true
place in the world, and a real comradeship with the only class of man
who is capable of such a thing—namely, the man who is willing not to be
“a gentleman.”
That a new code of manners between the sexes, founded not on covert lust
but on open and mutual helpfulness, has got to come in, is obvious
enough. The cry of equality need not like a red rag infuriate the
Philistine bull. That woman is in general muscularly weaker than man,
and that there are certain kinds of effort, even mental, for which she
is less fitted—as there are other kinds of effort for which she is more
fitted—may easily be granted; but this only means, in the language of
all good manners, that there are special ways in which men can assist
women, as there are special ways in which women can assist men. Anything
which goes beyond this, and the friendly exchange of equal services, and
which assumes, in the conventionalities of the private household or the
public place, that the female claims a general indulgence (because of
her general incapacity) is an offence—against the encouragement of which
women themselves will no doubt be on their guard.