CONCLUSION.
To guard against misconception on so obscure and so complex a subject
as that of the present inquiry is a somewhat hopeless endeavour. But it
may, perhaps, be worth while to say once more, what has so often been
said already, that those who ask for a fuller and freer life for women
have no desire to interfere with distinctions of sex. The question
under debate is not whether, as a matter of fact, there is such a thing
as distinctive manhood and womanhood; for that no one denies. The
dispute is rather as to the degree in which certain qualities, commonly
regarded as respectively masculine and feminine characteristics, are
such intrinsically, or only conventionally; and further, as to the
degree of prominence which it is desirable to give to the specific
differences in determining social arrangements. It is not against the
recognition of real distinctions, but against arbitrary judgments, not
based upon reason, that the protest is raised. If, in the exigencies of
controversy, expressions may sometimes be used which seem to involve
a denial of differences in the respective natures of women and of
men, it must be regarded as a misfortune for which the advocates of
restriction and suppression are responsible. When broad assertions are
made as to natural fitness and unfitness, and a course of action is
founded upon them, it becomes necessary, at least, to ask for proof.
When proof is wanting, it is not unnatural to fall back upon feeling;
and prejudices, dignified by the name of instincts, are appealed to as
decisive when rational argument fails. The whole question is clouded
over by this confusing procedure. The instincts, to which so much
importance is attached, differ in the most bewildering manner. What
one person’s instinct pronounces lawful and becoming, another finds
revolting. Assumptions are made, and a fabric of argument is built up
upon data which are unverified, and which it is at present impossible
either to verify or absolutely to contradict. For, until artificial
appliances are removed, we cannot know anything certainly about the
native distinctions. As to the future, who can say? It may be that,
‘In the long years liker must they grow,
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
More as the double-natured poet each:’
or it may be that, when ‘full-summed in all their powers,’ new shades
of unlikeness--refinements of diversity hitherto unimagined--may
appear. It is neither necessary nor expedient to prejudge the question;
and those whose faith in the reality and permanence of the native
distinctions is the strongest are the least tempted to make rash
assertions on either side. The excessive apprehensiveness shown by
some people on this point seems to indicate a deeprooted distrust in
the strength of their position. The fear betrays a doubt. No one urges
that girls should be denied the use of cold water, or fresh air, or
light, or animal food, lest they should grow into boys. Yet that these
conditions tend to produce masculine vigour cannot be denied. Those
who are afraid that a free range of thought and action would injure
the delicacy of the female mind, ought, in consistency, to carry their
precautions a little farther. The atmosphere of a hothouse, judiciously
darkened, abstinence from exercise, and a vegetarian diet would have an
evident tendency to produce a sickly delicacy of complexion, to give
languor to the limbs, and feebleness to the voice, and in every way to
make girls much more unlike their brothers than they were by nature.
And if this is the object of education, the appropriate means ought to
be used.
In the meantime, a great part of the difficulties which beset every
question concerning women would be at once removed by a frank
recognition of the fact, that there is between the sexes a deep
and broad basis of likeness. The hypothesis that men and women are
essentially and radically different, embarrasses every discussion.
When facts are proved and admitted, scarcely any progress has been
made, because it is assumed that their action is modified by their
application to the feminine nature. Conditions which would certainly
make a man happy or miserable, as the case might be, are supposed to
have a different, if not an exactly opposite, effect upon a woman.
The theory has been asserted and reasserted so incessantly, that
even women themselves have been partly persuaded to believe it.
And it is, no doubt, so far true, that while the education and the
circumstances of women are widely different from those of men, every
agency brought to bear upon either must act somewhat differently.
But to create facts, and then to argue from them as if they were the
result of an unalterable destiny, is a method which convinces only so
long as it is enforced by prejudice. ‘Chacun selon sa capacité’--‘à
chaque producteur l’ouvrage auquel il est propre’--these are maxims of
unquestioned validity. But who shall say for another--much more, who
shall say for half the human race--this, or this, is the measure of
your capacity; this, and no other, is the work you are qualified to
perform? ‘Women’s work,’ it is said, ‘is helping work.’ Certainly it
is. And is it men’s work to hinder? The vague information that women
are to be ministering angels is no answer to the practical questions,
Whom are they to help, and how? The easy solution, that it is their
nature to do what men cannot do, or cannot do so well, has never been
adopted in practice, inasmuch as everything in the world that there is
to do, the care of infants alone excepted, men are doing; and there is
nothing that a trained man cannot do better than an untrained woman.
Literature and art, teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing--these are the
recognised feminine occupations, and they are all shared by men. The
pursuit of them does not turn men into women, or women into men. Miss
Yonge and Mrs Oliphant ‘help’ Mr Trollope in supplying the world with
novels; and it is not thought necessary to guard either party from
writing masculine or feminine novels respectively. Schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses do not come into unseemly rivalry, although women
teach boys and men teach girls. By and by it will be found equally
superfluous to prescribe limitations in any department of thought or
industry.
It can scarcely be necessary to discuss at length the difficulty
expressed in the frequent question,--if women take to doing men’s work,
what are men to do? Will not the intrusion of women into professions
and trades already overcrowded, lower the current rate of wages, and
by thus making men less able to support their families--in the long
run, do more harm than good? As to the manner and degree in which the
labour-market might be affected by such a readjustment as is proposed,
it is difficult to predict anything with certainty. It is impossible to
tell beforehand how many women would take to what is called (by a very
conspicuous _petitio principii_) men’s work, and how large a portion
of their lives they would devote to it. If women, already destined to
work for their bread, chose to earn it in some hitherto unaccustomed
way, it is obvious that in the exact measure in which their entrance
into a new profession reduced the rate of wages in that particular
calling, it would tend to raise it in some other which they would have
otherwise pursued, and the balance would thus be redressed. If, on
the other hand, women are not supporting themselves, they are being
supported by somebody else, consuming either present earnings or
accumulated savings. To keep them from earning money does not prevent
their spending it. Let us suppose the event, not a very probable one,
that the introduction of women into the medical profession would
lower the average rate of remuneration by one-third, in which case
the professional income of an ordinary medical man would be lessened
in the same proportion. Let us suppose, also--a not at all improbable
case--that the doctor’s wife, or sister, or daughter, would earn, in
the practice of _her_ profession, a sum equivalent to the one-third
he has lost. Evidently, the doctor and his family would be where they
were, neither better nor worse off than before. In the meantime, the
public would be so much the richer by getting its medical attendance
one-third cheaper. Whatever might be the temporary effect of opening
any particular profession to women, one thing is certain, it can never
be for the interest of society, in a purely economical aspect, to keep
any class of its members in idleness. A man who should carry one of his
arms in a sling, in order to secure greater efficiency and importance
to the other, would be regarded as a lunatic. The one free member might
very probably gain a little extra dexterity, of an abnormal sort, but
that the man would be on the whole a loser, is obvious. The case of the
body politic is precisely analogous. The economical argument is all in
favour of setting everybody to work. Such difficulties as exist are
of a moral or æsthetic nature, and require for their disentanglement
considerations of a different sort from those which govern the
comparatively easy economical question.
Much misapprehension has probably arisen from a confusion between
a standard or law of life and the persons to whom it is applied. A
standard or law says nothing about the character of the persons who
are expected to conform to it. It pronounces no opinion upon their
nature beyond what is implied in assuming it to be not impossible for
them to live by it. The command, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself,’ implies that such love
is possible to men; but it may be manifested in countless ways--in
heroic conflict or in patient endurance, in passionate ardour or meek
submission. If it be true that certain gifts and graces are specially
congenial to the masculine or feminine nature, the presentation of a
common standard will draw them out according to their kind, without
the risk of seeming to dispense with the less easy virtues. Just as
when you plant two rose-trees in the same ground, you imply the belief
that certain general conditions of soil and atmosphere are good for
both, but you make no attempt to influence variations of colour or of
perfume; so the Christian theory of education implies an essential
resemblance between the sexes, without interfering in any way with
native differences. If, indeed, you adopt the analogy, not without a
certain fanciful charm, according to which men are trees and women
flowers, the separate system is right. You do wisely to plant the oak
in the forest, and to shelter the delicate geranium in the hothouse.
But this view implies that men and women are of a different genus,
which no one in his senses would maintain. The popular simile of the
oak and the ivy is equally untenable. Advocates on both sides are apt
to talk as if men and women were distinct races, handing down their
respective characteristics from generation to generation. The fact is,
as every one knows, that hereditary qualities are transmitted from
father to daughter, and from mother to son, with much impartiality. The
influences tending to create dissimilarity, which, in our day at least,
are at work, without a moment’s intermission, from the cradle to the
grave, are incessantly neutralised in each successive generation. If
it were not so, it is difficult to imagine what the human race would
become. One thing is certain, it would very soon cease to be human.
Writers on this subject commonly adopt somewhat of a threatening tone
in reference to any proposed change. They warn women that if the oak
and ivy theory is given up, what is called the old chivalry will die
out, and they must no longer expect to be protected. And it is further
urged that men would suffer, no less than women, from the absence of
any demand upon their protective instincts. We are indebted to Mr
Kingsley for a very clear and moderate statement of this view in a
chapter of ‘The Roman and the Teuton’ on the Lombard Laws.
‘It is to be remarked,’ he says, ‘that no free woman can live in
Lombardy, or, I believe, in any Teutonic state, save under the
“mundium” of some one. You should understand this word “mund.” Among
most of the Teutonic races, women, slaves and youths, at least not
of age to carry arms, were under the mund of some one. Of course,
primarily the father, head of the family, and if he died, an uncle,
elder brother, &c. The married woman was, of course, under the mund of
her husband. He was answerable for the good conduct of all under his
mund; he had to pay their fines if they offended; and he was bound, on
the other hand, to protect them by all lawful means.
‘This system still lingers in the legal status of women in England, for
good and evil; the husband is more or less answerable for the wife’s
debts; the wife, till lately, was unable to gain property apart from
her husband’s control; the wife is supposed, in certain cases of law,
to act under the husband’s compulsion. All these, and many others, are
relics of the old system of mund for women; and that system has, I
verily believe, succeeded. It has called out, as no other system could
have done, chivalry in the man. It has made him feel it a duty and an
honour to protect the physically weaker sex. It has made the woman feel
that her influence, whether in the state or in the family, is to be
not physical and legal, but moral and spiritual; and that it therefore
rests on a ground really nobler and deeper than that of the man. The
modern experiments for emancipating women from all mund, and placing
them on a physical and legal equality with the man, may be right, and
may be ultimately successful. We must not hastily prejudge them. But of
this we may be almost certain, that, if they succeed, they will cause
a wide-spread revolution in society, of which the patent danger will
be, the destruction of the feeling of chivalry, and the consequent
brutalisation of the male sex.’
These are terrible warnings, and may well make any one hesitate in
lifting a finger to aid in a revolution charged with such disastrous
possibilities. But is it really true that the male sex is likely
to be brutalised by learning that a man must no longer rely upon
physical and legal influence, but must rest his claims to allegiance
on a moral and spiritual basis? Is it good for a man to feel that his
influence rests on a ground less noble and deep than that of women,
and to satisfy himself with a lower moral position? The mund system
may have succeeded,--in other words, it may have been the best thing
possible, in a rude and barbarous age, when serfdom also was in full
force and ‘succeeded’ in its way--a time when force was met by force,
and individual protection was a surer resource than that of law. But
even as applying to those days, the success of the system seems to
have been somewhat incomplete. How it worked--or failed to work--Mr
Kingsley shows in a few graphic lines, in his recent tale, ‘Hereward.’
Describing the fate of the little Torfrida, his hero’s daughter, he
tells us, that ‘she was married to Hugh of Evermue, who is not said
to have kicked her; and was, according to them of Crowland, a good
friend to their monastery, and therefore, doubtless, a good man. Once,
says wicked report, he offered to strike her, as was the fashion in
those chivalrous days. Whereon she turned upon him like a tigress,
and bidding him remember that she was the daughter of Hereward and
Torfrida, gave him such a beating, that he, not wishing to draw sword
upon her, surrendered at discretion; and they lived all their lives
afterwards as happily as most other people in those times.’
Mr Gladstone lays down, that ‘as the law of force is the law of the
brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law
does man approximate to the brute; and in proportion, on the other
hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the
higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the
emancipation and due ascendancy of women are not a mere fact: they
are the emphatic assertion of a principle; and that principle is the
dethronement of the law of force, and the enthronement of other and
higher laws in its place, and in its despite.’ The advocates of the
protective theory seem scarcely to have realised that the idea of
protection implies the corresponding idea of attack. It assumes, as
part of its essence, that somebody is attacking, or what occasion would
there be for defence? Might it not be well for everybody to abandon
the attitude of attack? To assert that in a civilised country women
want such protection as any human arm can give, is a contradiction in
terms. It is supposing, either that the law permits outrages upon the
defenceless, or that it can be broken with impunity. That we in England
are as yet only partially emerged from barbarism is indeed true. The
time-honoured customs handed down from the days of Hugh of Evermue have
not yet disappeared, and cases of assault, almost invariably committed
by the natural protector, are not uncommon in English households. But
the law undertakes to interfere--and does interfere, though as yet
in a somewhat impotent manner--for the defence of hapless wives and
children. It can scarcely be the true policy of an age which professes
to be enlightened and humane, to suffer general licence to prevail, in
order that a few rare souls, able to be a law to themselves and other
people, may have the occasion for displaying exceptional heroism. If
the scheme of Divine Providence requires that there should be outlets
for the protective energies, they are likely to be found for a long
time yet, in the infirmities of age, of infancy, and of poverty,
without encouraging morbid or affected weakness in human beings
intended by nature to be healthy and strong. There is still plenty of
fighting to do, though the progress of civilisation has removed the
warfare into new fields, and demands new weapons. Evil now appears in a
subtle, intangible shape, against which physical strength is of little
avail. But the generosity and the courage which constituted the true
beauty and worth of chivalry can never become obsolete. The chivalrous
spirit now shows itself in the abandonment of unjust privileges, in
the enactment of equal laws, and in facing ridicule, opposition, and
discouragement in behalf of unpopular ideas. The great battle between
good and evil is for ever going on. The form is renewed from age to
age, but the spirit is the same. Let us take care lest, in clinging
to forms from which the spirit has departed, in shutting our eyes to
keep out the dawning day, we may be blindly fighting the battle of the
Philistines, all unwittingly ranged among the enemies of the cause we
desire to serve.
BALLANTYNE, ROBERTS, AND COMPANY, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.