On the one hand, we are assured by Feminists that women do not differ
from men, and therefore should not be confined to a “sphere.” On the
other hand, we are no less confidently assured by them that politics
and industry are in pressing need of qualities which men do not
possess, and cannot acquire, because they are distinctively feminine.
Olive Schreiner has carefully studied the male and female dog, and
reaches the conclusion that there is no difference between them to
justify different treatment and different occupations. She does not
expect woman suffrage to effect any political changes, except in one
or two matters where she believes women have interests which men have
not, or do not recognize. For example, war. Woman in politics will
put an end to war because she knows how much it costs to produce each
human life. This is mere rhetoric. What are the facts? The Teutonic
women, whose status she would re-establish, went to the wars with
their husbands, and fought by their sides. From the Spartan mother who
charged her son to return with his shield or on it, to Mlle. Juliette
Habay, of Brussels, who wrote: “We are learning to shoot with rifles.
Here in Brussels great numbers of young girls have joined rifle corps,
and a professor of arms is teaching us to shoot,” when has woman ever
failed to gird the sword upon her man? Socially there is assuredly no
discrimination against the red coat in England, or the blue coat in
the United States.
Very recently _Femina_, the woman’s newspaper in Paris, addressed to
its readers the question, “If not a woman, what man would you have
wished to be?” We are told in a news despatch that “Napoleon won
easily.”
But Mrs. Schreiner is substantially correct. Biology may know something
of male and female temperaments, but in their general characters and
habits and adaptability to employments, there is no great difference
between her male and female dog, or the male and female of other
animals. If the path of progress leads downward by all means let us
learn our sociology and domestic economy from the beasts of the field
and the fowls of the air. If human progress has been retrogression,
let us get back by way of primitive man and the missing link, to the
animals and birds whose social economy commends itself strongly to
Feminist and socialist.
The differentiation of men and women is the most valuable product of
ages of gradually developing civilization. The world does not need
twice as many diggers in the earth, and workers in metals, as it has
now, but it does need homes. If the beasts merely have dens from which
they go forth at night for their prey, and in which they produce their
young, which they care for only till the young can catch their own
game, Mrs. Gilman sees no reason why men and women should have homes,
except as places for sleeping, from which they go out every morning to
secure subsistence for themselves and for their young. But the latter,
in her system, would soon be removed to training institutions conducted
by the state, and managed by experts in child-culture; for Mrs. Gilman
does not credit women with ability to rear their own offspring (however
well she thinks they can rear those of other women), though the world
is perishing for lack of their greater participation in industries and
politics.
The prolonged association of parents with children, the protraction of
mother-love beyond the infancy of offspring, the association of men and
women intimately, but not entirely for the perpetuation of the race;
the instinct of exclusiveness in the relations of man and woman, and
their refinement by sentiments of romance; the development of chivalry
and accountability for others in man, and of modesty in woman; the
separation of one part of the race from much that the other part must
often be in close contact with; the creation of a domestic atmosphere
which is not like that of the shop or the field--the essential features
of the home and the family--these are the best results of civilization,
and against them the Feminist storms. Yet they are more important, if
possible, to woman than to man.
Women are different from men as the result of ages of segregation,
and that is above all things else the object of Feminist attack. The
whole purpose of Feminism is to make the conditions of life the same
for men and women. Women are more chaste than men, and the Feminists
may be right when they say that this has been forced upon woman by
man, but they are mistaken when they treat this not as a gain, but
as a grievance. It need not be disputed that men ought to be as pure
as women, but it is at least a great gain to hold one sex to a high
standard of purity. In the course of time something may be achieved
by the other--much has been already, or mixed society would be
impossible--but it will not be effected by the Feminists who complain
of servitude to man-made standards of morals, and demand for women the
freedom practiced surreptitiously by some men.
The common notion of the innate moral superiority of woman is due to
fond recollections of happy childhood, to the warm language of poets,
to the romance of the male when in the springtime of life his fancies
lightly turn to thoughts of love, and to actual differences which are
the result of the segregation of women. Feminism is breaking that down,
and we are already getting some of the results. In _The Vanishing
Lady_, _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1911, Mrs. Comer finds that
the contrast between the people in the novels of Howells and in those
of David Graham Phillips suggests something like a submergence of
Christian civilization under a wave of materialism and paganism. The
interval between these two writers is the period during which Feminism
has been spreading like an epidemic. Women have not saved society from
the change. The advanced women have not tried to. Like their clothes,
they have been entirely up-to-date, and the materialism and paganism of
the day are quite as apparent among women as among men.
This is Mrs. Comer’s description of the type of woman who is being
evolved by Feminism:
One cannot travel far in these days without being filled with wonder
at the vast numbers of these women roaming the continent. They are
usually of a willful fatness, with flesh kept firm by the masseuse;
their brows are lowering, and there is the perpetual hint of hardness
in their faces; their apparel is exceedingly good, but their manners
are ungentle, their voices harsh and discontented; there is no
light in their eyes, no charm or softness in their presence. They
are fitting mates, perhaps, for the able-bodied pagans who are
overrunning the earth, but hardly suitable nurses for a generation
which must redeem us from materialism, if, indeed, we are to be so
redeemed. Facing them, one wonders if race-suicide is not one of
nature’s merciful devices?
In a period of rapidly acquired fortunes women have accepted the dollar
as the unit of individual worth quite as readily as men have, and have
applied it more relentlessly, for men are more democratic than women;
rich and poor wear the same costumes, and in their friendships they do
not draw the financial line so closely as their wives do. During the
spread of Feminism manners have coarsened, modesty is disappearing,
the fiction and drama of the day familiarize the young with vice under
the thin pretext of fortifying virtue. If it be true, as is sometimes
charged, that women are taking to alcohol and tobacco, it is merely
one additional evidence that in breaking down the distinctions between
men and women, the standards of the former are not raised, but those of
the latter are lowered.
Two women have lately suggested the assimilation of the figures of the
male and female of the species. Ellen Key refers to the flattening of
woman’s bosom as the result of the growing use of artificial means of
nourishing infants, and “Lucas Malet” speaks of “large-boned, athletic,
sexless persons, petticoated, yet conspicuously deficient in haunches
and busts.”