Thousands, and tens of thousands of women who pass through the Eighth
Year, not unscathed, find another way out. They are finding it now
through this new femininist movement which is linked up with the
cause of Women’s Suffrage. The Eighth Year produces many suffragettes,
militant and otherwise. At first, in the first years of their married
life, they scoffed at the idea of Votes for Women. They could not
see the sense of it. They hated the vulgarities of the business, the
shamelessness of it, the ugly squalor of these scuffles with the police,
these fights with the crowds, these raids on the House of Commons.
It was opposed to all their ideals of femininity and to all their
traditions of girlhood. “The hussies ought to be whipped,” is the
verdict of the young wife in the first stage of her romantic affection.
But, later on, when romance has worn very threadbare in the little home,
when reality is beginning to poke its head through the drawing-room
windows, she finds herself taking an interest in this strange
manifestation which seems to be inspired by some kind of madness. She is
silent now when some new phase in the conflict is being discussed in her
presence. She listens and ponders. Presently she goes out of her way
to get introduced to some suffrage woman on the outskirts of her
acquaintance. She is surprised to find her a wonderfully cheerful, and
apparently sane, woman, very keen, very alert, and with a great sense of
humor--utterly unlike her tired, bored and melancholy self. Perhaps she
is quite a young woman, a bachelor girl, earning her own living, down in
Chelsea, or as a typist secretary in the City. But young as she is she
has dived into all sorts of queer studies--the relations between men and
women, the divorce laws, the science of eugenics--and she discusses
them with an amazing frankness, and in a most revolutionary spirit,
startling, and a little appalling, at first to this wife in her Eighth
Year. She has made up her mind conclusively on all the great questions
of life. She pooh-poohs romantic love. “There is too much fuss made
about it,” she says. “It is a mere episode, like influenza. There are
bigger things.” She holds herself perfectly free to choose her mate,
and to remedy any little mistake which she may make in her choice. At
present she prefers her independence and her own job, which she likes,
thank you very much. She is tremendously enthusiastic about the work
which women have got to do in the world, and there is nothing they
cannot do, in her opinion. She claims an absolute equality with men. In
fact, she is inclined to claim a superiority. After all, men are poor
things.... Altogether she is a most remarkable young woman, and she
seems to get tremendous fun out of life--and this wife in her Eighth
Year, without agreeing with her yet envies her!
Or perhaps the wife meets a suffrage woman of middle-age. She, too, is
a cheerful, keen, alert, bustling woman with cut-and-dried opinions on
subjects about which the wife in the Eighth Year is full of doubt
and perplexity. She has a certain hardness of character. She is
intellectually hard, and without an atom of old-fashioned sentiment.
She calls a spade a spade, in a rather embarrassing way, and prefers
her facts to be naked. She is the mother of two children, whom she is
bringing up on strictly eugenic principles, whatever those may be, and
she is the wife of a husband whom she keeps in the background and treats
as a negligible quantity. “We wives, my dear,” she says, “have been too
long kept prisoners in upholstered cages. It is time we broke our prison
windows. I am breaking other people’s windows as well. It lets in a lot
of fresh air.”
She talks a great deal about sweated labor, about the white-slave
traffic, about women’s work and wages. She talks still more about the
treachery of the Government, the lies of politicians, the cowardice of
men. “Oh, we are going to make them sit up. We shall stop at nothing. It
is a revolution.”
She is amazed at the ignorance of the young wife. “Good heavens, your
education _has_ been neglected!” she cries. “You are like all these
stuffy suburban women, who are as ignorant of life as bunny-rabbits.
Haven’t you even read John Stuart Mill’s _Subjection of Women?_ Good
gracious! Well, I will send you round some literature. It will open your
eyes, my dear.”
She sends round a lot of little pamphlets, full of dangerous ideas,
ideas that sting like bees, ideas that are rather frightening to the
wife in her Eighth Year. They refer to other books, which she gets out
of the lending library. She reads Ibsen, and recognizes herself in many
of those forlorn women in the plays. She reads small booklets on the
Rights of Wives, on the Problems of Motherhood, on the Justice of the
Vote. And suddenly, after a period of intellectual apathy, she is set on
fire by all these burning sparks. She is caught up in a great flame of
enthusiasm. It is like strong drink to her. It is like religious mania.
She wakens out of her lethargy. Her feeling of boredom vanishes, gives
way to a great excitement, a great exhilaration. She startles her
husband, who thinks she has gone mad. She argues with him, laughs at his
old-fashioned opinions, scoffs at him, pities him for his blindness. She
goes out to suffrage meetings, starts to her feet one day and falters
out a few excited words. She sits down with burning cheeks, with the
sound of applause in her ears, like the roar of the sea. She learns to
speak, to express herself coherently. She offers herself to “the cause.”
She sells her trinkets and gives the money to the funds. She is out for
any kind of adventure, however perilous. She is one of the Hot Young
Bloods, or if she has not the pluck for that, or the strength, one of
the intellectual firebrands who are really more dangerous.
It is a queer business, this suffrage movement, which sets these women
aflame. There are a few women in it who have the cold intellectual
logic of John Stuart Mill himself. They have thought the thing out on
scientific lines, in its economic, political, and social aspects. They
want the vote honestly, as a weapon to give their sex greater power,
greater independence, better conditions of life in the labor market. But
the rank and file have no such intellectual purpose, though they make
use of the same arguments and believe that these are the mainsprings of
their actions. In reality they are Eighth Year women. That is to say,
they seize upon the movement with a feverish desire to find in it some
new motive in life, some tremendous excitement, some ideals greater
and more thrilling than the little ideals of their home life. In this
movement, in this great battle, they see many things which they
keep secret. They go into it with blind impulses, which they do not
understand, except vaguely. It is a movement of revolt against all the
trammels of sex relationship which have come down through savagery to
civilization; laws evolved out of the inherited experience of tribes and
races for the protection of womanhood and the functions of womanhood,
laws of repression, of restraint, for the sake of the children of the
race; duties exacted by the social code again for the sake of the next
generation. Having revolted against the duties of motherhood, all
these laws, these trammels, these fetters, become to them intolerable,
meaningless, exasperating. The scheme of monogamy breaks down. It has
no deep moral purpose behind it, because the family is not complete. The
scheme has been frustrated by the childlessness of the wife. Again, this
movement is a revolt against the whole structure of modern society as
it affects the woman--against the very architecture of the home; against
all those tiny flats, those small suburban houses, in which women are
cramped and confined, and cut off from the large world. It did not
matter so long as there was a large world within the four walls. Their
space was big enough to hold the big ideals of old-fashioned womanhood,
in which the upbringing of children was foremost and all-absorbing. But
for a woman who has lost these ideals and the duties that result from
them, these little places are too narrow for their restless hearts; they
become like prison cells, in which their spirits go pacing up and down,
up and down, to come up against the walls, to heat their hands against
them. They believe that they may find in this suffrage movement the key
to the riddle of the mysteries in their souls, world-old mysteries,
of yearnings for the Unknown Good, of cravings for the Eternal
Satisfaction, for the perfect fulfilment of their beings. Their poor
husband, a dear good fellow, after all, now that they look at him
without hysteria, has not provided this Eternal Satisfaction. He has
only provided pretty frocks, tickets for matinées, foolish little
luxuries. He does not stand for them as the Unknown Good. After the
first year or two of marriage they know him with all his faults and
flaws, and familiarity breeds contempt. But here, in this struggle for
the Vote, in these window-breakings and house-burnings, in imprisonments
and forcible feedings, in this solidarity of women inspired by a fierce
fanaticism--there is, they think, the answer to all their unsolved
questions, the splendor and the glory of their sex, the possibility of
magnificent promises and gifts, in which the soul of woman may at last
find peace, and her body its liberty. She is to have the supreme mastery
over her own spirit and flesh.
It is a fine promise. But as yet it is unfulfilled. It is not to
be denied that for a time at least some of these women do gain
a cheerfulness, a keenness, a vitality, which seem to be a great
recompense for their struggles and strivings. But they are the younger
women, and especially the young unmarried women, who get a good deal of
fun out of all this excitement, all this adventure, all the dangerous
defiance of law and convention. The older women--many of them--are
already suffering a sad disillusionment. They have not yet found those
splendid things which seemed at last within their grasp. They are
desperate to get them, fierce in their desire for them, but the cup of
wine is withheld from their lips. They find themselves growing old and
still unsatisfied, growing hard, and’ bitter, and revengeful against
those who thwart them. The problems of their sex still remain with them.
They may break all the laws, but get no nearer to liberty. They are
still prisoners of fate, bond-slaves to a nature which they do not
understand. The femininist movement is only a temporary way of escape
for the wife who has reached her crisis in the Eighth Year.