am almost reluctant to answer. Yet though the fault is woman's, the
responsibility is man's. Down to only a few years ago woman was no
more than man's toy. She existed for his pleasure and convenience. If
he covered her with pretty dresses and radiant jewels it was because
she was his chattel. It seems only yesterday that a married woman's
property became her husband's when he married her; that she could not
bring an action at law. It needed the celebrated Jackson case, familiar
to students of the feminist movement, to decide that a man might not
lock his wife up in his house.
I believe that the law enabling a man to administer "moderate
chastisement" to his wife has never been repealed. A woman cannot
divorce her drunken, dissolute husband unless he ill-uses her
physically; the law, unable to deny that woman has a body, will not
grant her the possession of a soul. Trashy novels, trivial amusement,
unending decoration, freedom from the development of mentality and
personality--these are the things that have been held to suffice women,
and though there have always been a few great women in the world, the
vast majority has been compelled to accept the conditions offered.
I cannot help thinking that if there had not been a surplus of women
over men in countries where monogamy rules, change would have been
longer still in coming; but there have always been tens of thousands
of women for whom there is neither mate, domestic inactivity nor
child-bearing, and the educational progress, though leaden footed, has
moved.
From the Garden of Eden to Ibsen's "Dolls' House" is a far cry, but it
was left to the great Scandinavian dramatist to open woman's eyes.
That is, I think, why he was greeted by male critics with such howls
of execration--they saw the foundation of the old order being sapped.
Man had appealed to woman's vanity, and had consequently developed it
enormously; but the motive was little higher than that which inspires
the male baboon when he goes courting. Ibsen showed woman the result of
her submission.
Only the historian, looking at our social history when the youngest
of us "has lain for a century dead," will realise the strength and
progress of the feminist movement in the last decade or two; the
barriers it has surmounted or swept away; the barbed wire entanglements
of prejudice and convention against which it has flung itself. Yet
I am bold enough to declare that had universal war been mooted in
1934 instead of 1914 woman throughout all the countries of potential
combatants would have combined instantly to prevent it.
At present the ranks of the thinkers are too thin; woman is divided
against herself. The worst foes of feminism are women; it is the
anti-feminists who parade the streets in khaki, who band themselves
into wholly unnecessary and sometimes disreputable anti-German leagues,
who labour as though war were a glory rather than a curse. You will
not find militarists or anti-feminists among the glorious sisterhood
of the hospitals, for they almost alone among women know what war
really is. If the propaganda of feminism could have spread, if it could
have invaded Germany, where the Church, the nursery and the kitchen
are expected to fill every woman's life, what a very different answer
would have been given to the ambitions of rulers and the blundering of
politicians! In how many million homes, where sadness reigns supreme,
would there have been the simple, harmless happiness that is the
birthright of us all?
Is it the irony of fate that man must pay the terrible price for
having made woman what she is; for having stifled or sought to stifle
her common sense; for robbing her of the rights that she possesses
by reason of being a human being; for distracting her with gawds and
frivolities, and seeking to keep her merely as a minister to his
pleasures and a mother to his children? He has paid for the supreme
folly of generations with the price of the lives of millions of his
best and bravest, with the ruin of flourishing cities and fair country,
with the poverty of the generation to come, and with many another
bitter offering of which he is not yet fully aware.
Doubtless there are still in our midst countless women who accept all
that is happening as inevitable; who look upon it without realising
that had the sex responded to the ideals of feminism and become
one sisterhood without boundaries and without a limited patriotism
conditioned by the accident of birth, these things could not have been.
I say, without hesitation, that the future of the world demands the
elimination of some existing types of women, the education of others,
and, in the end, the union of all.
Man was not born merely for glorious death, he was born for glorious
life, and in the systematic and universally condoned slaughter of
man by man there is neither honour nor glory. The world, properly
administered, can produce enough food and clothing for all; it has work
and a measure of happiness for all. Our enemies are not Englishmen or
Germans, Frenchmen or Turks; they are ignorance and poverty, disease
and vice. Woman recognises the truth--that is to say, thinking and
emancipated woman recognises it--and she knows that all the strife that
tears the older world asunder is fratricidal, that a million times
Cain strikes down a million times Abel, and in so doing deliberately
obscures the Divine Event toward which all creation moves.
Woman falters, she is young in mental growth and still very weak,
though growing stronger hour by hour. She sees nothing of war, but she
hears of moving incidents by flood and field and hairbreadth 'scapes
in the imminent deadly breach, and her sense of romance so largely
fostered by pernicious or trivial literature is stirred to its depths.
She wants for her son or her husband or her lover some of the dust of
praise, some of the ribbons and medals, some of the glory in which she
will discern some pale reflection of herself.
She falls in love with war because she has not the least inkling of
its realities; her mourning garments are edged with pride. It has been
left to this terrible struggle to tear some of the bandages from her
eyes and to rob her of an unworthy ideal. What a supreme misfortune
that world tragedy has supervened while she is growing up, before she
has learned to grasp the power that lies to hand! In instances beyond
numbering she has passed the feminist movement by, quite content to hug
her chains as long as they are heavily gilded. She does not realise and
does not believe in her own powers, and in Central Europe, at least,
she has been kept under surveillance all the time.
England, France, and America are the great Powers that have given
feminism a chance. Russia was beginning to follow suit, but the oak
that will in years to come defy so many storms and shelter so many
lives is as yet a sapling. We must face the bitter truth that had all
our sisters accepted feminism we would have saved man from his worst
enemy, we could have saved him from himself.
We could have said--
"_We brought you into the world, we fed you at the breast, we guarded
your tender years. When you grew older we gave you inspiration and
the love that is the romance of life. We bore you children through
agonies of which you know nothing; we loved you with the love that
is woman's whole existence. You shall not destroy yourself, for you
are ours and we are yours, and we are placed on this earth to lift it
nearer to heaven, not to drag it down into hell. Your bits of shining
metal or ribbons, your uniforms, your personal bravery are as nothing
to us, if to earn the one or prove the other you are to kill and maim
our husbands and sons, our fathers and brothers. There are greater
fights to be fought, nobler victories to be won, and in the only war
worth waging we can move by your side. Love and not hate must rule the
world._"
The time will come when woman will speak to man in this wise, and he
will listen because he must, even though in listening he remove the
strange, obscene gods of strife from his Pantheon. That the truth is
known already to noble-minded women throughout the world is to me the
most vitalising comfort that these days can yield. That so many women
still pass it by, that they praise war and magnify personal courage
and "martial glory," that they still foster and encourage the meanest
hatreds born of war, is I think worse than many a disaster. But the
lesson it enforces is plain. The time is not ripe; before she can
handle the power to which she lays claim woman must abjure her idols,
she must follow the path of pain and suffering a little longer, she
must learn for herself through bitter experience how great a curse war
is. I believe she is learning her lesson; I believe that the hosts of
the unthinking are melting, and that as the real meaning of glory,
heroism and the rest is brought home to her she will understand.
Even men in the lands of death and desolation have been vouchsafed a
glimpse of the truth. There is nothing quite so pathetic in modern
history as that mingling of foes on Christmas Day, 1914, in a brief
truce of God. Truly the light was brief and soon withdrawn, not to be
rekindled a year later, but it was strong enough to testify to the
brotherhood of man obscured so long by kings and statesmen.
Women can rekindle the light so that it will not be suddenly put out;
they have no nobler purpose under heaven. And in the days when they are
come to their full stature the memory of those who applauded strife
and were dazzled by some of its exterior aspects will be utterly and
happily forgotten.
XV
RACE SUICIDE
I was visiting the north of England in connection with an Industrial
Congress, and I called upon a woman whose husband worked in a mine.
Her small house was scrupulously clean, she was young, vigorous, swift
in thought and movement, and gave me the impression that nothing came
into her life in the form of obstacle and surprise without finding
her ready to deal with it effectively. She showed me with a certain
pride the small collection of books on social subjects bought in
second-hand shops by her and her husband. I remember seeing John
Stuart Mill, Ruskin, William Morris, Rowntree, Henry George, and many
another familiar name. "We have read them together," she told me,
"we have educated one another since the time we first met at evening
classes." I remarked that her married life seemed to lack one thing
only, and that was a family, and I quoted the Eastern aphorism that
a house without children is a garden without flowers. She smiled a
little sadly, and then I noted how some faint lines about her mouth
tightened and hardened, robbing her of a certain charm. "Lady Warwick,"
she said, "we earn between us by hard work from day to day between four
and five pounds a week. It has taken many years to reach that figure,
and there is no chance of passing beyond it. What we have endured on
the road to this comparative comfort we alone know, and we don't talk
about it. But we both believe that the game is not worth the candle.
The conditions of life in England are not worth perpetuating, and
neither of us would willingly bring children into the world to take
their chance and run their horrible risks as we did." She stopped for
a moment in order to be sure of her self-control, and then she told me
that in her view, though all her heart cried out for little children,
sterility was the only protest that could be made against the cruel
conditions of modern life under capitalism. "I know that my husband and
I are desirables from the employer's standpoint. We earn far more than
we receive, we are temperate, hard-working, punctual, reliable. But
when we have settled our rent and rates, clubs, and insurances, dressed
ourselves, paid tram fares and bought a few books, there is nothing
left but a slender margin that a few months' illness would sweep away.
For a week or ten days a year we may learn that England is not all as
hideous as this corner of it, but we shall die without a glimpse of
the world beyond and of its treasures that our books tell us about. If
we stop to think, our life is full of unsatisfied longings, and though
we don't give them free play we can't ignore them altogether. So we
will not produce any more slaves for the capitalist, _and I can tell
you that there is not one decently educated, young married woman of my
acquaintance who is not of the same mind_. You could go into a score of
houses known to me in this town alone and find strong, vigorous women
whose childlessness is their one possible protest against the existing
wage slavery."
Years have passed since, in that gloomy little northern town with its
congeries of mean streets looking meaner than ever under the rain,
I met the speaker whose name has passed from me. She may well be
approaching the time when Nature will confirm her resolve irrevocably,
but the memory of that conversation has haunted me with the vision of
thousands of lost souls and unhappy lives.
I know now, if I did not know it then, that the music of little
voices and the patter of little feet would have brought into that
poor worker's life many of the joys for which she sighed in vain. She
did not know, nor at that time did I, that obedience to natural law
ensures a happiness that is independent of external circumstances,
while disobedience brings in its train an ever-growing mental discord
and sows the seeds of disease and decay. Statistics can be fascinating
friends even though they be formidable acquaintances; they have a rough
eloquence of their own that is more effective than honeyed speech.
The birth-rate of England, France, and the United States, associated
as it is in all these countries with the death-rate of the newly born,
is to me one of the most depressing signs of the times. I cannot help
realising that in many cases sterility is not the deliberate protest
of the wage slave, it is the selfish protest of the pleasure seeker,
and in a small minority of cases the genuine, yet narrow, fear of the
eugenist and his following whose enthusiasms have outrun both knowledge
and faith. Tolstoy went so far as to say that the man who enjoys
association with his wife for any purpose save procreation is guilty of
a crime. While many childless women live celibate lives, particularly
in America, the great majority do not. In Milton's stately words they
"of love and love's delight take freely," as though the power that
rules and guides the world could in the long run be outwitted by what
it has created.
To-day the civilised world is at the parting of the ways. War has riven
asunder the ranks of the best and bravest, and has left in the hearts
of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a
man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their
place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance
to be among the dwellers in a conquered city. All classes have been
gathered to battle, one and all will feel the responsibility attending
the failure of our civilisation. While many will believe they are
responding to a high instinct when they elect to follow the line of
least resistance and leave the world a little poorer, the cumulative
effect of such a decision is positively terrible to contemplate.
There are some lines in _Coriolanus_ that might have been addressed not
to those who banished him from Rome, but to the women of the world's
most highly civilised countries:--
"Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows."
If these lines are really as appropriate as they seem to me, it is
because the women of the civilised world and the more leisured section
of it are on their trial. There is going to be an unimagined shortage
among the best elements of the most highly civilised population, a
shortage due in part to the fashion in which responsible women have
neglected their duties hitherto. If the pleasure lovers decline their
share of child-bearing on the ground that it robs them of long periods
of amusement, and if the finest type of women workers refuse on the
other grounds raised earlier in this paper, what will be the result?
There will be a sharp social cleavage, the few clever exploiters will
enchain the unfit who are produced so rapidly, we shall develop a small
class that governs and a large class that is ruled, all progress will
come to an end, while the conditions obtaining when the industrial
era was opened by steam power will be revived with all the attendant
horrors in some new and unsuspected guise.
It is well to remember how, following the first trumpet call of war,
our hard-won liberties were stripped from us. Some of my American
friends say it is because our free institutions were not very deeply
rooted, but I am well convinced that if the United States were
involved, the results would be much the same. War always dethrones
Liberty, and the nation that can set her up again when peace is
restored may be congratulated. As a rule the struggle has to begin
all over again, for the State advances claims that are incompatible
with any kind of freedom that is worth having. Only the will of the
people can gain liberty, and to make that will sufficiently strong and
effective it must be expressed by the best human material, the children
of the best types. So it seems to me that race suicide, evil at all
times, becomes in seasons like this an act of treason, not only to the
nation but to civilisation and all those ideals upon which civilisation
waits.
In the town to which I referred on the first page of this paper, the
women who deliberately discarded motherhood might between them have
raised a strong company to fight for the rights of the next generation.
They were shocked to consider the travail that brought them beyond the
reach of want, had they lost sympathy with those who succumbed by the
way? Is not the fate of these last the more tragic?
The faults and failures of life are not a divine dispensation.
Providence has placed us in a marvellous world, capable of raising far
more than is needed to supply the reasonable wants of one and all. That
there are misery, injustice, want and inequality must not be charged to
the account of Providence, but to the foolishness and immortal greed
of man, who cannot deal equitably with the resources of which he is
the trustee. The world waxes richer year by year, for we are gathering
the power to increase production and to distribute the surplus of
one region to supply the deficiency of another. It is a very fair and
beautiful world, and we need no more than that all should be permitted
to share what is produced. To enforce this distribution, to see that
it is enjoyed in peace and tranquillity is the appointed task of a
strong and vigorous democracy. The primal duty of women is to give this
democracy to the world and keep its strength renewed.
Some may fear that women "condemned to fertility" as one phrased it in
my hearing recently, may be unable to take their part in the struggle
for emancipation. But surely motherhood enforces the qualifications of
women, justifies their claims and provides them with the material to
train for future triumphs. Olive Schreiner, in her magnificent book
"Woman and Labour," in which, however, she wrote of the birth-rate and
its incidents without visualising the possibilities of world war, says
that some birds have raised the union of the sexes to a far higher
level than humanity has reached. The male and the female share the
nest building, the incubation and the feeding of the young, and it was
impossible for that fine observer to note any difference in the task of
the sexes. So it should be with us and will be when we have developed
to that standard. The labours and responsibilities of the home, and
the daily work will be a part of the common contract and bond of men
and women, and no woman will be disqualified by the fulfilment of her
duties in the home more than the man is disqualified by reason of his
labours beyond it. We are all conscious of evils that throng the world,
we all strive to better them in a degree, few of the most careless
fail altogether to be kind in some fashion, however haphazard, but if
the women who take life seriously will not only fulfil the commandment
to be fruitful and multiply, but will do their best to urge their
reluctant sisters, a single generation may avail to restore the balance
of sanity, equity and progress throughout civilisation.
This social disease of race suicide has not been long established. It
came into France, I believe, as a result of the law that divides the
inheritance of the parents among the children equally, it has crept
into England and America chiefly as a product of overmuch luxury and
wealth. Apart from such a reason as calculated protest against social
inequalities, it is due to the methods of life that soften women and
make child-bearing a terror. I have been told by my travelled friends,
the men and women who have been to the far ends of the earth, that
in the lands where women are hardy, healthy, and vigorous, there is
no trouble for the mother at these critical times. She recovers her
full strength in a few days. At Easton, in Essex, where I was born
and brought up, and at Warwick, where I have lived so much since my
marriage, I have seen that the workers' wives who live frugally and
actively are able to rear large families and retain not only their
health, but their good looks. Casting my memory back I can recall the
time when great families were the rule, and not the exception, among
the leisured classes. The women who entertained in great houses that
they administered in every detail, brought their six, eight, or ten
children into the world and lived long, healthy, happy lives. The
modern fashion is of recent date, and now that the war has stirred the
heights and depths of human consciousness the old bad custom should
pass, for the sake of a world that the madmen of mankind have made
desolate. At no period in the history of Western civilisation, has
it been more necessary for the women who count as factors in world
progress to consider their duty and fulfil it to the extreme limit of
their power.
I think that the need of the United States is not less than our own,
for it sees the influx day by day of the most diverse elements, and
knows well enough that the genius of rule belongs to the Anglo-Saxon.
The negroid element does not forget its duty, and the honest class
of immigrant that seeks to share the benefit of an enlightened
civilisation is hardly less prolific. Against all the problems that my
American friends, and they are many, have set out, there is no surer
safeguard than an ever increasing birth-rate of the best elements.
I have never felt disposed to join in the cry of the Yellow Peril, nor
to think well of those who raise it wantonly, but certain facts stand
out in a very bright light shed upon them by the war. In the first
place the Allied powers of the Entente have sought the services of both
yellow and black races, and have by so doing proclaimed the dawn of
a new era in which all questions of equality must come to the front.
Japan is very wide awake, and China is still a slumbering giant. Given
sanitary science and a great gift of organisation, she might rule all
Asia. The Berbers, Arabs, and negroid races of Africa have lined our
trenches and taken part in our attacks; one and all, to say nothing of
the Indian soldiers, have learned more of war in the past year or so
than they had ever known before. They have seen the weakness as well as
the strength of the white man.