FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE
AND PROGRESS
"A woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of
daily life."
I
In _Woman and Labour_, Miss Schreiner laments as follows, picturesquely
but speciously: "Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge
buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands
(often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world; and we
dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our
peoples!"
A scene is conjured of brute-men with clubs savagely attacking and
destroying hapless women's innocent spinning-wheels, as Mrs. Arkwright
ruthlessly destroyed her husband's cherished models. Yet who, regarding
the subject dispassionately, sees cause for anything but gladness that
modern woman has not still to spin the linen of her household and the
garments of its members--for anything but thankfulness for that
intelligent male-brain which carried the woman-invention of the needle
to its higher adaptations in the weaving and the sewing-machine? Who can
justly regret that the taking over by men, in factories, of wholesale
brewings and bakings, jam-makings, and so forth, has relieved the other
sex of ceaseless drudgeries; and in so relieving it of drudgeries of
house-keeping has left it free to develop the higher and the more
intellectual arts of home-making?
"_Slowly but determinedly, as the old fields of labour close up and are
submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new_," Miss Schreiner
affirms. And to emphasise our determination, the demand is printed in
her book, as I have reproduced it, in Italics.
Losing sight altogether of the inestimable benefits to woman secured by
the intervention of men between her and the hardest and the most
debasing employments, she further protests, "any attempt to divide the
occupations in which male and female intellects and wills should be
employed, must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbitrary
division."
"Our cry is, _We take all labour for our province!_"
Nevertheless, clever and intuitive woman as she is, she confesses (now
the Italics are mine), "_It may be with sexes as with races, the
subtlest physical differences between them may have their fine mental
correlatives_." And yet, oh why, having come upon so promising a vein of
truth, did she not follow it to its logical conclusions, and find in it
all the answers to her extremist demands, and, with these, the
refutations of her Feminist plea and claims?
Men and women are unlike not only in "_the subtlest physical
differences_" which "_may have their fine mental correlatives_." They
are unlike in the most obvious and basic facts of physical constitution
and of biological function. And these must inevitably entail mental and
temperamental correlatives more intrinsic and farther reaching even than
the subtler physical differences she recognises as being possibly
modifying factors in psychical aptitude.
Advocating soldiering even for the sex, Miss Schreiner says: " ...
Undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant-girl of France, who has
carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme
general."
Here is fallacy again. Joan of Arc was, beyond all things, woman. Not
the man in her, but the woman in her, and her Supra-conscious womanly
attributes it was which (inspiring her by way of mystical voices and
visions) impelled her so to transcend her woman-nature that without
knowledge of arts military or of strategic science, as, too, without
experience, she was able, by intuitive prescience, to lead her
compatriots to victory. For the soldiers, perceiving the Light in her
face, followed in awed confidence whithersoever she led.
In earlier days of civilisation, this intuitive and visionary faculty of
woman was recognised and honoured.
II
In _The Human Woman_, Lady Grove presents a wholly contrary view to Miss
Schreiner's.
With her, woman suffers less in being shut out from the labour-market
than in having been driven from the home.
"The woman has been driven from her home into the labour-market.
The fact of 82 per cent. of the women of this country working for
their living is an ugly rebuff to the pretty platitudes about the
home," she says.
" ... The stupendous mistake that has been made up to now is in
supposing that it is men's judgment only that should decide
questions, and hence the hopeless state of unravelled misery
existing in the world, side by side with all the wealth and wonders
of the age.
"If we examine the conditions of the working-classes, after years
and years of male legislation, what a hideous set of conditions we
find. Intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for
existence among the poorer classes. And yet we spend over
L22,000,000 annually on the education of these people. Surely there
is something wrong somewhere. What is it that we, seeing this
condition of things at our very door, have, as women, to be so
grateful for in male legislation?"
The writer fails wholly to perceive that these factors she deplores as
due to defective masculine legislation are effects less of faulty
measures than of faulty Humanity. Measures are the gauge of the men who
frame them. And men are very much the measure of the mothers who bore
them. Those which she properly characterises as the "hideous" conditions
of the working-classes, "intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel
struggle for existence" are circumstances legislation cannot remedy
unless the hearts of legislators are moved to do this, and their hands
are empowered, moreover, to do it, by the collective will of those they
represent.
Except all are content to subordinate their personal interests to the
general welfare, and to improve their personal morale for their own and
for the common good, Acts of Parliament can do but little. Drunkenness
can be penalised by legislation, difficulties put in the way of
obtaining drink. But intemperance can be effectually stamped out only by
individual men and women so rising to higher levels of thought and
self-control as voluntarily to become sober; or by men and women so
improving in brain and constitution that the craving for drink--now
recognised as a disease--no longer obsesses them.
Acts of Parliament may condemn insanitary and defective dwellings, may
compel landlords to repair them to degrees of decency and comfort; may
pull them down and build others in their stead. But none of these
measures will eradicate the bad housing of dirty and comfortless, or of
demoralised and demoralising homes. The best house possible becomes bad
housing for its occupants when the woman at the head of it fails to do
her duty therein, in consequence of industrial labour which leaves her
neither time nor energy to make a clean, well-ordered, cosy and
inspiring home of it; or because her own idleness or ignorance, her
drunkenness or worthlessness, results in her neglect of it. Human
conditions, like human measures, result from the personalities, good or
bad, capable or incapable, of those who create them.
III
The Feminist's faith in the masculine prerogative of Legislation, as
being a possible panacea--had _she_ but part in it--for every ill
beneath the sun, is one of her gravest disqualifications for taking part
therein.
Legislators who are over-confident in the efficacy of The Law express
their over-confidence in terms of premature and unduly-coercive
legislation. Procedure which, more often than not, frustrates the ends
to which it was designed by the methods taken to secure these. Progress
is personal, moreover. It is the sum of the advance of individuals.
Legislation is the statutory _formulation_ of public opinion; it is not
the _source_ of this. It merely crystallises public opinion. But before
crystallisation of thought (as of chemical) sets in, saturation-point
must first have been reached throughout the medium wherein it occurs.
Were any other development required to show the utter inadequacy of
Legislation to attain its ends--when not reinforced by personal
co-operation and initiative--this has been supplied in that latter-day
demoralisation of young girls, the consequences whereof will be vastly
more baneful and farther-reaching in contributing to national decline
than even that other dire factor of the flower of our virile youth
struck down before its prime.
Girls are fully protected by law to the age of sixteen. Yet many of the
demoralised girls seen consorting freely with Tommy or Reggie, according
to their class, are well below that age. Legislation is powerless,
however, failing parental vigilance and co-operation to invoke its aid.
Nevertheless, with its characteristic blind confidence in the male
prerogative of Law, Feminism now advocates raising "the age of consent"
to eighteen. But to do this would no more protect the girl under
eighteen than the existing law protects the girl under sixteen--or, for
that matter, protects the girl of twelve. Law can do little or nothing
unless, as happens so seldom and happens too late, parents requisition
its assistance for menace or for punishment. Mothers themselves should
see to it that their little daughters have neither temptation nor
opportunity to consent to their own ruin.
IV
We saw lately a militant rising of women against men and their laws; the
object being to compel concessions from the male by way of violence. And
so short-sighted were the leaders of this Movement that not only did
they seek to prove their right to make laws, by breaking them, but they
showed themselves ignorant of the first rudiments of combat by electing
to fight the enemy with his own weapon--that weapon of Force which is
man's especial Fitness and Woman's Unfitness. Woman's Unfitnesses have
prevailed, it is true, in the counsels of progress, but, obviously, they
have not prevailed, nor can they ever prevail by being pitted directly
against masculine strengths. Her way of supremacy is one by far more
subtle and sublime.
The leaders of Militancy seem never to have suspected, moreover, that
while they were demanding to be liberated from all womanly privileges,
they were, nevertheless, waging their deplorable skirmishes from behind
a strong wall of such privileges. Men who should have adopted such
tactics would have received but short and scant shrift.
Were the sex to be confronted, indeed, with that "Fair field and no
favour!" for which some members of it are so clamorous, these would find
it a grievously different thing from the privilege they paint it.
Marcel Prevost has said that when men find women competing with them in
fields of Labour, to degrees injurious to masculine interests, they will
turn and strike them in the face. There are indications to the contrary,
however. Among decadent races and savages, the emasculate sons of
deteriorate mothers assert their masculine authority otherwise.
Far from combating their women's right to work, they force them to
work--and to work in support of the males!
More and more every day, civilised men, indeed, released by
working-wives from their natural obligation to maintain the family, are
seen so to have lapsed from their sense of virile responsibility as to
be coming further and further to shelve upon such working-wives the
burden of the family support. Among the labouring and artisan classes,
the wife's contribution to the exchequer leaves the husband more money
to spend on drink or on gambling; or on both. In superior classes, too,
it leaves husbands with more money to spend on amusement--of one sort or
another.
Responsibility and effort are natural spurs to masculine development.
Relieve the male of these and he degenerates. As woman released from
child-bearing and the duties entailed by the family, degenerates
rapidly. We can no more improve on The Plan than we can improve without
each and every appointed factor of it.
V
Another disastrous blunder of Feminism is to make for equal wage for men
and women.
The higher wage of men springs, economically, from the fact that the
industrial output of women is, normally, less than that of men. But
there is a deeper, and a biological significance involved. Which is,
that men's greater output of work results from more of their energy of
brain and body being available to them for work, because far less of
their vital power is locked-up in them for Race-perpetuation and
nurture. There is the implication also that man being the natural
breadwinner of the family, his wage should suffice for its support.
A system of equal wages for the sexes would press as cruelly upon women
as it would be disastrous to the Race. Because it would compel woman,
despite the biological disabilities that handicap her economically, to
force her powers to masculine standards of work and output. It would,
moreover, by qualifying her to support the family, serve as cogent
excuse for her husband to shirk his bounden duty.
The crux of the demand for equal pay for equal work is that, because of
her natural lesser strength and endurance, when a woman is doing work
identical in nature and equal in quantum to that of a man, it means that
_she_ is doing _more_ than a woman's work, and is overtaxing and
injuring her constitution, therefore; or it means that _he_ is doing
_less_ than a man's work, and is "slacking," therefore.
A further important issue is that when rendered too easy by both husband
and wife earning wage, marriage is entered upon far too lightly, and at
too early and irresponsible ages, than happens when the whole burden of
support rests with the man. Moreover, in such case masculine selection
makes only too often for economic rather than for human values in the
wife. A man upon whom is to fall the whole tax of supporting the home
and the family regards marriage more seriously, and delays it until he
is more mature of years and of settled position. Moreover, he chooses
more carefully. And the Race benefits proportionally.
In manufacturing towns, with opportunity for both husband and wife
earning wage, boy-and-girl marriages, feckless, discordant homes, and
sickly degenerate, neglected children are the rule.
That women should be paid for work they do, a salary enabling them to
live honestly and in comfort, goes without saying. Economics should be
adjusted on a far higher basis than that mainly of a competitive
struggle which allows the employer to fix wages less according to the
value of work done, than by the number of persons at his mercy, who, in
their eagerness to live, will undersell their values and thus cheapen
labour. Nevertheless economics have, in a degree, adapted to the
evolutionary trend. Because, in the main, the more skilled and difficult
tasks are more highly remunerated than the less skilled, and are
performed by the more fit. And not only are these better qualified to
expend such higher remuneration intelligently, and with benefit to
themselves and to the community, but they are able to secure thereby
those better conditions which are the due and the need of families
higher in the scale of humanity, and requiring, therefore, higher
conditions of nurture.
The cases of colliers and of other rough-grade humans who earn wage
beyond their mental calibre to expend intelligently, show how an income
too large for its possessor leads to coarse and demoralising
extravagances, rather than to personal happiness or elevation. (The like
is true of many plutocrats.) War has shown us boys' lives wrecked by the
same factor. No greater fallacy exists than that of supposing progress
to lie in freeing persons from all disabilities--poverty, and other
restrictive conditions.
Wives should be legally entitled to a just proportion of their husband's
income, as a _right_, not merely as dole. This, in recognition of their
invaluable work in home-making, and of their invaluable service to the
State in producing and rearing worthy citizens for it.
VI
Masculine legislation, making all the while, in the face of economic
difficulties, for the ever further release of women and children from
the more laborious and debasing tasks, has made compulsory, in their own
and in the interests of their unborn infants, a month of respite for
expectant mothers, and a further month for mothers after delivery.
Extending thus to these poor victims--beasts of the burden of toil, and
beasts of the burden of sex--a mercy and consideration wholly lacking in
the Feminist propaganda. For this latter repudiates indignantly all need
for concession or privilege to wifehood or to motherhood, equally with
womanhood.
To justify the claim for equality in all things, women must be forced,
at all cost, to identical standards of work and production. To ask
privileges and concessions would be to confess, in the sex, weaknesses
and disabilities that must disqualify it from economic identity with the
other.
Far, indeed, from such vain-glorious and disastrous straining for
equality, the leaders of the Woman's Movement should, before all else,
have demanded insistently still further industrial concessions and
privileges for a sex handicapped for industry, by Nature. First and
foremost, they should come into the open and boldly proclaim--what it is
useless to deny, indeed--that in the function of parenthood, at all
events, men and women are wholly dissimilar. They should reject outright
all tinkerings and half-measures for relief of this great human
disability, whereof one sex only bears the stress and burden for the
benefit of both, and for survival of nations and races.
Not only for the pitiful respite of a month before and a month after
the birth of her child, should the mother be prohibited from industrial
labour. By that time all the damage will have been done. The power that
should have been put into the evolution of her infant will have been put
into the revolutions of a lathe. The life-potential that should have
gone to build its living bone and brain and muscle will have gone to
feed the life of a machine. The breath she will have drawn for it will
have been contaminated by the dust and fumes of toil. Its poor nascent
brain and faculties will have been dulled and depleted, stupefied and
vitiated by the stress and turmoil of its mother's labours. Only the
dregs of the maternal powers will have been invested in the Race. The
finest and most valuable will have gone to swell the balance-sheets of
Capital.
The trumpet-cry of The Woman's Movement should be, indeed, _The Absolute
Prohibition of young Wives and Mothers from all Industrial and
Professional employment!_
Such a prohibition, by lessening the competition of the labour-market,
and by thus increasing the value of labour (which the flood of female
industry inevitably cheapens) would automatically so increase the wage
of men as to make of these true living wage, sufficient for the
maintenance of home and family. Such a prohibition would, moreover, so
diminish the competitive pressure among women as to make it possible for
unmarried women, the future wives and mothers, as well as for the older
spinsters and widows, to select in every fitting trade and industry,
work suited to the lesser strength and endurance of the female brain and
body.
VII
Nothing has characterised the Feminist Movement throughout so much as
lack of knowledge of human nature (both masculine and feminine), lack
of prevision to foresee the trend of new developments, lack of intuitive
apprehension to gauge the issues of such trend. Its leaders have never
suspected, accordingly, that, in propaganda and in practice, they have
been tampering with a great biological ordinance; and that, in
obliterating women's Sex-characteristics, they have been destroying that
counterpoise of human powers and faculties whereon progress and
permanence rest, and that morale which is the inspiration of advance.
Regarding their own masculine Rationalism as the ideal and standard for
all women, they have believed it possible to shape all women
successfully thereto. Nature is not to be thwarted, however. And when we
destroy the balance of the Normal, abnormal developments--gravely
mischievous and singularly difficult to deal with--crop up and require
to be dealt with. One may raise the familiar cry that some modern
developments are due to our being in "a transition stage." But from that
remote day when Nature first evolved us as a race of _amoebae_, further
to evolve into the human species, we have been always in "transition
stages." Normal transition upwards is so slow an impulse as to be
well-nigh imperceptible, however. Rapid change invariably betokens
regression--descent being vastly easier and swifter in movement than
ascent is.
Deplorably mistaken has been a doctrine of Emancipation which, by
disparaging the arts domestic, has sent out young girls and women,
indiscriminately, from the sphere domestic, to de-sexing and
demoralising work in factories and businesses; and has engendered the
race of stunted, precocious, bold-eyed, cigarette-smoking, free-living
working-girls who fill our streets; many tricked out like cocottes, eyes
roving after men, impudence upon their tongues, their poor brains
vitiated by vulgar rag-times and cinema-scenes of vice and
suggestiveness.
Some of our working-girls are charming-looking, pretty-mannered, pure
of thought and life, of course. A small minority--alas, how small!--are
normal of development and sound of constitution. But these are not the
average. And it is the average with which a nation has to reckon.
Emphatically, men are not as women. In body and in mind they are by
nature rougher, tougher, and vastly less impressionable. A regime that
_makes_ a boy will wreck a girl. Of more sensitive calibre, she requires
more kindly, protective conditions, moral and industrial, than does he.
Notwithstanding which, little girls now run the streets and take their
chances as they may--in capacities of over-burdened errand-girl,
telegraph-messenger, and otherwise--at ages when their developing
womanhood requires due care of nurture, moral supervision, and freedom
from physical strain. Sedentary occupations are a natural need of their
sex, moreover, as is indicated by the breadth and weight of the female
pelvis and hips, as too by the delicate adjustments of those important
reproductive organs, the future products whereof are of inestimably
higher national values than are the industrial assets of these poor
children's labour. As Girl-guides and so forth, young girls parade our
towns in meretricious (albeit hideous) uniform; developing thereby that
love of publicity and of unwholesome excitement to which the sex is
prone. Small girls just fresh from school are even now employed in
barbers' shops to shave men; destroying thus in them, at the outset of
life, that natural diffidence and reserve toward the other sex which are
the first defences of womanly honour.
In demanding absolute emancipation, industrial and personal, Feminists
had no other thought but that such new liberty would have widened
woman's scope for usefulness, for happiness, for self-development. Yet
what has been the outcome of it all? For one who has used her new
freedom for the ends designed, very many more have used it to their
serious injury; only too many to their moral downfall.
Already everywhere such liberty has fast degenerated into licence. Our
girls were no sooner emancipated by their mothers from the usually
wholesome--if sometimes too severe--control of their fathers, than
straightway they have emancipated themselves from the indispensable
maternal rule. Strict supervision and guidance in a world they are
ignorant of--or if sophisticated are in far worse case--are essential to
the well-being, physical and moral, of the young and immature.
Young girls, on first discovering their attraction for the other sex,
become intoxicated by the sense of their new dangerously-alluring power,
and lose their heads. Beyond all things, they require at this phase a
mother's strict and careful supervision, with sympathy and firm control;
to tide them over their perilous phase, and thus to preserve them from
consequences of their ignorance or folly, or from those of a pernicious
bent. Nevertheless, young girls of every class are granted now
disastrous latitudes of thought and action. The vigilant chaperonage
indispensable to protect them from the biological impulses--which they
mistake for "love"--of the careless or vicious young men to whom
(equally with the chivalrous and honourable) modern mothers abandon
their daughters, has become a dead-letter. The girl only just in her
teens is free to play fast-and-loose with boys and men--as too
with life, before she has learned the merest rudiments of living.
All too soon she learns her lesson. And becoming precociously
sophisticated--only too often precociously vicious--her nature and
future are wrecked at the outset. Because nothing wrecks a woman's
disposition so effectually as sex-precocity does. Sex is the very pivot
of her nature. On this she swings up--or down. And early habit decides
her bent.
That many of these cigarette-smoking, decadent young creatures are no
worse than impudent, feather-brained and misguided, does not save the
licence allowed them from being as harmful to physical as it is perilous
to moral health; nor from the experiences resulting from such licence
wholly unfitting the majority for later wholesome restraint, and for
purer and fairer ideals of womanly conduct and living.
For much of this Feminism is gravely to blame. Not only because it has
led to the absorption of the mothers in outside pursuits, as being of
greater importance than the fulfilment of their maternal duties and
responsibilities to their young daughters, but because, too, the partial
sterilisation of girls, by masculine training and habits, in robbing
them of womanly qualities, robs them of natural reserve and modesty, and
of the other more delicate instincts and aspirations of their sex.
Significant, truly, of latter-day maternal neglect of young daughters
was the disclosure by a doctor, in a recent _British Medical Journal_,
that of a hundred men infected with venereal diseases, more than
_seventy had contracted disease_ from "_amateur flappers_." Yet as with
a child badly burned by playing with fire, we blame the mother or
guardian who exposed it to danger of thus injuring itself for life, so
the mothers of these unfortunate girls were to blame for gross neglect
of their duty to safeguard these young lives.
Nature avenges her betrayed girls, however. For medical authority shows
that these youthful unfortunates transmit disease in its most virulent
and destructive forms. It is as though all the vital potential of their
developing womanhood is perverted to a malign poison, charged with the
forces of their blasted youth.
* * * * *
The Victorian, who brought up her daughters to marry in ignorance of
biological fact, went to the other extreme. But it was a far less
harmful one than that in vogue to-day.
Like that of the child, the immature, susceptible mind of a girl,
incapable of apprehending the sex-factor in its true perspective with
the other factors of life, becomes unduly dominated by consideration
thereof when too early instructed. She is far better left, for so long
as is practicable, ignorant or hazy concerning this vital phenomenon, in
place of being fully informed, as girls are now-a-days. So that they
know all that there is to be known about sex--except its seriousness and
sacredness. And divorced from the seriousness and sacredness of Love and
Birth--which mere knowledge of biological fact is wholly inadequate to
impart--such knowledge of fact presents a crude and bald distortion of
the truth; only too often imparting an ugly and demoralising warp to
mind and conduct. Ignorance is not Innocence, 'tis true, but it serves
the same purpose in safeguarding innocence that clothes do in
safeguarding modesty. And for one girl who falls in consequence of
innocence, twenty fall from sophistication.
Unless masculine traits have been over-developed in her by abnormal
training, in which case (as occurs sometimes in the quasi-masculine
woman of middle-age) sex-instinct may acquire an unnatural and
quasi-masculine insistence, this instinct is, in the normal girl,
_responsive_ rather than _initiative_. (Wherein she differs
diametrically from the male.) And such natural dormancy may be
advantageously preserved by haziness of knowledge, and by the careful
surveillance required for protection of immature minds and powers. The
bald, matter-of-course view-point of many modern girls with regard to
sex, their knowledge of vice, and their cynical acceptance and
discussion thereof, as too of the vulgar intrigues of notorious dancers
and peeresses, to say nothing of the ugly and debasing personal
experiences only too many of them have incurred, are among the evils of
the injurious licence at present accorded to young persons.
Feminism, having thrust such disastrous liberty on creatures as eager to
grasp as they are unfitted to cope with the dangers thereof, is striving
now, by way of women-patrols and police-women, to stem the evil with one
hand--while with the other, it continues to open the flood-gates still
wider. The only way to stem the evil is to stem it at its source. The
home, with the vigilant supervision and guidance of a mother whose duty
is publicly recognised and her authority strengthened thereby, whose
time and faculties are devoted mainly to the making of home and to the
safeguarding and disciplining of the young creatures she has brought
into existence, is environment and shelter as indispensable to the
impressionable youth of both sexes--but more particularly to the
impressionable youth of one--as it is for the rearing of infancy and
childhood. Such home-influences, reinforced by the strong hand of a
father who likewise recognises his parental responsibilities, are the
first of all the rights that matter for young womanhood.
Later, should come a term of domestic service. Mistresses of households
should realise not only their human but likewise their national
responsibility to these young humbler members thereof. No other public
service possible to them would equally conduce to national progress.
As fathers are legally responsible for debts of sons under age, mothers
should be responsible to the State for the virtue of daughters under
sixteen.
In the _personal_, vastly more than in any other field of operation,
woman's chiefest value lies. When she exchanges it for public functions,
and seeks to further progress by officialdom and politics, by
institution of women-patrols, police-women, Mayoresses, and so forth,
the supreme importance of the personal factor becomes impressed by the
discovery of the utter inadequacy of any substitute to take its place.
"If mothers did their duty, there would be no need for us," a
woman-patrol stated recently.
By the time young women have reached such phases of demoralisation that
their conduct in public demands the intervention of police-women, it is
too late to reform them, moreover. They will have lost the best promise
and hope of their womanhood.
And so it is and must be ever all along the line. The home and the
family are the nursery of civic as they are of racial progress. We
regard it as proof of civilisation that Law-Courts for Children have
been instituted. Yet what a blot it is, in truth, upon both parentage
and parenthood that, in our day of enlightenment, such should have
become necessary.
So have mother influences and maternal sense of responsibility declined,
however, that mothers on all sides openly confess their utter lack of
power to control boys and girls just in their 'teens.
VIII
The fashion is to pity and deride the "poor" early Victorian because she
lacked the manifold and nerve-wracking outlets for that restlessness and
boredom from which modern women suffer.
The "poor" Victorian was a more harmonious, better-balanced and more
tranquil being, however. And she was far less cursed with "nerves," with
feverish unrest and carking discontent, than women are to-day.
Mrs. Craigie observed that the Victorian, with her backboard and gentle
accomplishments, produced (without the pusillanimous expedient of
"Twilight Sleep") notably stronger, finer, and more clever children than
do present-day over-educated or athletic women--athletic women, whose
muscles of arms and of legs have so sapped the powers of important
internal muscles that most of them are incapable of bringing their
infants into life without instrumental aid.
One does not, for a moment, counsel reversion to the type or to the
methods of an earlier generation. Evolution and development must
advance, and are, of course, advancing satisfactorily in some stock. But
the Victorian served her generation nobly, producing splendid specimens
of men and women, and handing on a generous racial constitution--now
being squandered recklessly, alas! by her descendants. The tide of
greater freedom, of broader outlook, and fuller effectiveness for woman
has set in, however. Albeit, owing to Feminist misapprehensions, it is
not only moving too rapidly but it is moving in a wrong direction;
because in direct opposition to biological law.
_By their fruits ye shall know them._ And the Victorian so preserved her
woman-powers and attributes that she was an excellent and a contented
wife, and could bring into existence--without instrumental aid--a family
of comely, clever boys and girls; nurse them all from eldest to
youngest; rear and discipline and put such stuff of health and sanity
and enterprise into them as shames some flimsy, feeble-minded,
characterless modern stock. We have far to look to-day, indeed, for
statesmen and soldiers, poets and artists, business and craftsmen, and
other such virile and talented personages as those early and
pre-Victorian mothers endowed their epoch with.
And were further evidence needed that our great-grandmothers equalled
our own women in the qualities we pride ourselves upon as triumphs of
Feminism, the strength and courage, the resource and fortitude those
others showed throughout the stress and horrors of the Indian Mutiny are
proof sufficient that, beneath their gentler virtues, lay the sterner
fibre of nobility.
IX
To prove to what a third-grade power Woman, once so potent an
inspiration of life, has lapsed, we need but go to The Drama--reflex
ever of its period. Consider Shakespeare's women--subtly wise,
profoundly clever, beautiful and gracious, true and charming, strong and
tender, chaste and gay; warm with temperament, crystal-sparkling with
wit and parry!
And comparing these adorable beings with the posturing, tricky,
intriguing, slangy, spotty creatures--neurotic unfaithful wives and
erratic "bachelor"-daughters--of the modern stage, the deplorable
deterioration of our womanly ideals becomes patent.
Women have sinned in every age, but they have sinned in some ages
picturesquely and pathetically, because Nature led them. While the
morbids and neurotics of our modern Plays are for ever noisily turning
out the dusty corners of their warped psychologies, in order to discover
some loose end of Nature in them to condone their erotic eccentricities.
Strange, that Twentieth-Century woman tolerates the mirror held to her
in these abnormal and distasteful creatures!
The modern dramatist is handicapped in his art, it is true, by lack, in
our latter-day actresses, of that personal charm and magnetism, and the
vital power to render the higher and subtler emotions and passions,
whereby the actresses of earlier days held audiences spell-bound.
Politics and Sports destroy alike the Muses and the Graces. One who
attempts to combine them with the delicate psychological arts and
artistries of The Drama is bound to failure--in her art, at all events.
Time was when the best men reverenced women as beings of more delicate
calibre, to be shielded from the rougher and grosser contacts of life.
Chivalry forbade that they should have taken these to coarse
exhibitions, prize-fights and the like. And to such restriction woman's
purer instinct and her finer taste assented.
The male being practical and rational, however, since women themselves
are changing all that, he too is coming to believe that any and every
thing is good enough for a sex which more and more repudiates its
subtler quality.
That native delicacy which preserved her once from masculine habits of
thought and indulgence, taught man to realise woman as belonging, by
nature, to a purer and daintier order. (Howsoever inferior to himself in
some other respects he may have held her.)
It won his reverence and worship that these frailer and more
exquisitely-constituted creatures should possess, despite their
exquisiteness, such fine mettle of resistance in their softness as
withstood the fire and urgence of the masculine siege; that within their
(possibly) ignorant little brains was light that flashed straight to
intrinsic truths and right courses of action; such intuitive
apprehension of The Good and The Beautiful, without experience of the
base and ugly, as taught them to distinguish clearly, to select, and to
hold fast to the fairer in thought and in conduct.
To encounter in woman his own traits touched to higher, subtler issues,
and transformed to novel and alluring quality by the charm and graces of
another sex, has made always an enchanting, an inspiring, and a baffling
enigma of her--to endue woman for man with eternal values and
impenetrable mystery. For he has visioned in her--without
formulating--the mystery of the Human Duality.
Trembling in the delicate poise of her twofold being, between the soft
impressionable, variable woman in her and the man of steel aesthetically
sheathed within the velvet of her womanhood, the play of her swift
supple transitions, the kaleidoscopic changes of her perpetual new
combinations--giving ever fresh bewildering effects of colour, light and
mode--have made her infinite variety for him. While her soft, immediate
adjustments to his own moods and needs have been his wonder and delight;
presenting to him all that there is in himself, yet in modes impossible
to himself. All that he knows by acquaintance she knows by
intuition--and in a fresh and fairer way. All that he sees, her eyes
make him see again in new and more exquisite lights. All that he thinks
had been already in her woman-heart ere ever man began to think. All
that he loves she shows him a reason for loving--yet not by way of
reason. All that he craves with his soul, her soul can confer. All that
his body and sense have desired, her body and sense can bestow--But with
all the immeasurable differences and enhancements of her unlike sex.
"_Away, away!_" cried Jean Paul Richter, apostrophising Music, "_thou
speakest to me of things that in all my endless life I have not found,
and shall not find!_"
Wagner said, "Music is a Woman."
Dr. Havelock Ellis, himself a zealous Feminist, has said, that, in their
ardour for emancipation, women sometimes seem anxious to be emancipated
from their sex. While Ellen Key, most impartial of critics, observes:
"But full of insight as they are into the _ars amandi_, have modern
women, indeed, learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and
all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers--on a much lower
plane of woman's erotic idealism--knew of only one object; that of
making their husbands happy.... But what watchful tenderness, what
dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of
these spiritually-ignored women develop! The new man lives in a dream of
the new woman, and she in a dream of the new man. But when they actually
find one another, it frequently results that two highly-developed
brains together analyse love; or that two worn-out nervous systems fight
out a disintegrating battle over love.... Of love's double
heart-beat--the finding one's self, and the forgetting one's self in
another--the first is now considerably more advanced than the second."
The reason why the New man and the New woman, having found one another,
find no more inspiration or sweetness each in the other than to "fight
out a disintegrating battle" is because both are male of brain and
bent--one normally so, the other abnormally.
And when two males meet, their nature is--to fight!
* * * * *
Into every clause of this book must be read the many inspiring
exceptions to be found among those modern men and women and children who
are advancing normally along evolutionary lines. Such are so fine of
type, in body and in mind, that they blind not a few to facts of racial
deterioration. We point to these and say: One cannot speak with truth of
the degeneracy of nations which produce such noble specimens!
These exceptions prove the principle I am endeavouring to impress,
however. That were we to apply ourselves to correction of our biological
and social errors, we have with us stock of the noblest Race
conceivable, and the noblest possible future for that Race.