DANGEROUS SEPARATION OF WOMEN INTO TWO ORDERS: FEMINISTS AND FEMININISTS
"_Every child comes with the message that God is not yet
discouraged of Man._"
I
Since women possess native gifts of highly-differentiated faculties and
aptitudes, not only their greatest effectiveness, but, too, their
well-being and happiness lie in finding highly-specialised and selective
application for these, in Life, in Art, in Science, and in Industry.
Their role in every field of operation should be recognised as being
wholly different from that of man, however; and their own natural
view-points and special abilities should be fostered, accordingly, by
suitable training; in order to fit them for the special departments for
which they are essentially suited.
The charming artistry and fancies, spontaneous and full of delicate
insight, feeling, and sense of line, which a woman puts into her
illustrations of a child's Fairy-story, are art as true, for example,
and if less great of achievement, are nevertheless as intrinsically
valuable in The Scheme of Things as are the virile masterpieces of a
Michael Angelo or Turner.
Few men attain the exquisite artistry in colour that even indifferent
women-painters show. It is an expression, in mentality, of the
biological fact that the colour-sense is naturally so highly developed
in woman that Colour-blindness--comparatively common among men--is rare
indeed in her.
On the other hand, woman is inherently weak in drawing. When she is
trained, however, to draw with masculine strength and precision, she
loses her natural freedom and delicacy of touch, her sensitive feeling
for line, her exquisite colour-sense, her fertile fancy. Rosa Bonheur's
horses are as strong in drawing as they are baldly deficient in
sentiment. Men have painted horses bolder still in line, but
nevertheless noble and beautiful in feeling.
The same is true of Literature. Mrs. Browning would have been a great
poet had she not taken her husband for model. Some of her delicate
woman-fancies, tricked out in Robert Browning's over-virile style, are
like charming women masquerading in fustian trousers.
George Eliot, too, affected the masculine both in viewpoint and
method--a bad habit which so grew upon her that her later novels are
ponderous as political treatises, and devoid of human interest.
Far different, Charlotte Bronte. True to herself and to her sex, she
wrote and has written for all time--as those others did not--as a woman,
and as only a woman could have written. Jane Austen, likewise.
The woman point-of-view and method are regarded, for the most part,
however, as mark of the amateur--the model aimed at being the eternal
masculine in mode and trend.
If the demand, "_We take all labour for our province!_" be safeguarded
by recognising and differentiating the province into two distinct and
separate--supplementary and complementary--departments, for the
respective labours of the two widely differing sexes, the claim comes
first within the range of reason and discretion.
As woman was the first doctor, so she was the first artist. Man inherits
from her not only his artistic faculty, but he derives from her his
faculty of creative inspiration. Applying his native intelligence, his
executive ability and power of sustained effort, to this end, he has so
developed The Arts as to have carried these to their modern
realisations. And though woman, in her turn, may learn of him, it by no
means follows that his standards or technique are best adapted to her
modes of inspiration, to her ideals or attainments.
Trained along the lines of natural inherences, and trained, accordingly,
without injury or warp to health or faculty by straining after standards
not their own, women would not be disqualified, as so many are now by
avocational specialisation, for wife and motherhood. They would, on the
contrary, be the better adapted. And health and charm and emotion not
having been sacrificed in them by de-sexing pursuits, such would be
eagerly sought. Thus Racial advance would be secured by its wives and
mothers having been drawn from the best orders of women; the women
naturally endowed with faculty and character; self-reliant, but
unspoiled by abnormal training.
A number of latter-day women being unfitted, alike by nature and by
inclination, for marriage, two orders of the sex should be clearly
distinguished and administered for; as being wholly different types, for
whom wholly different creeds and employments are indicated.
Those whose aims and talents incline them to public careers should be
content with the lot to which they are best suited; and content to
accept the privileges thereof, and the disabilities thereof. They should
not be greedy, and demand, at the same time, the liberty of the
free-lance and the privileges of the wife and the mother.
So with the wife and mother. She, for her part, must forgo the liberty
of the free-lance. Because, with her privileges, she has undertaken
functions and duties which, for their complete fulfilment, demand her
best powers and activities.
Men who marry are similarly restricted. The bachelor lacks the interests
and happiness of the husband and father. The husband and father lacks
the personal liberty and the freedom from responsibility enjoyed by the
bachelor.
It is women, mainly, who demand both the prerogatives of the married and
of the unmarried states. Notwithstanding that it is wholly impossible
for them to fulfil the functions of both, because it is impossible for
them to possess either the aptitudes or the energies for both.
In view of all that men have attained by devotion of their lives to the
civilised achievements which now dignify existence and ennoble faculty,
when one sees women more clamorously confident in their bounden right to
inherit lightly all that the other sex has so laboriously won than they
are reverently grateful for the inestimable human privileges and the
treasuries of Art and Mind-wealth available to them by way of these
surrendered masculine lives, it seems cause for indignation equal to
that aroused by the phlegmatic calm wherewith most men accept as
matter-of-course--instead of as matter for reverent gratitude--the gifts
of Life and Faculty, to evolve and to transmit which to them, their
mothers and all the generations of mothers before them surrendered their
lives and their powers.
Recognition of the intrinsic differences, in trend and in function,
between the sexes, should go far to dispel misconceptions and points of
variance between them. The prevailing notion that the one sex is a sort
of muddled version of the other--and not a highly-specialised
presentment of an invaluable order of qualities, with inevitable
shortcomings in the complementary order of qualities--is greatly to
blame for sex-misapprehensions and antagonisms.
II
Feminists anticipate that War-experiences will further and finally
eliminate all economic sex-distinctions, by having supplied convincing
object-lessons that their sex is able to do, and to do efficiently, all
that the other sex can do.
Far from object-lessons in the suitabilities, however, the experience
has furnished terrible examples pointing the contrary way. Because
although women have shown themselves both willing and efficient in these
new capacities, results have proved at what cost to themselves and to
life they have done men's work. Apart from a deplorable deterioration in
morale, showing both in coarseness and in viciousness, the blight of age
which has swooped upon both young and old, as direct consequence of the
hardship and strain of masculine employments, robbing them of youth and
health and joy and beauty, of repose and higher appeal, and transforming
them into the grim, drab, harassed spectres many have become, should be
warning enough, in all conscience, of whither Feminism is leading us.
Many of our young women have become so de-sexed and masculinised,
indeed, and the neuter state so patent in them, that the individual is
described (unkindly) no longer as "She" but as "It."
Dire have been the disillusionment and bitterness among our fighting
men, upon returning to the homes and wives or loves they had long
dreamed of--to find the wife or love a shattered wreck, or a strenuous,
graceless, half-male creature; the home a place of nerve-racking unrest.
It is consoling to know that a number of those who have been de-sexed
merely, and not disabled, will continue to find useful and contented
outlet for their masculine developments in filling still the places of
our fallen heroes. Cruelty lies in the fact, however, that the womanhood
of many will have been wrecked quite needlessly; by strain of
superfluously strenuous drill and marchings, scoutings, signallings, and
other such vain and fruitless imitations of the male.
The greatest care should have been exercised to have selected the
strong and able-bodied, the older women and the women of the
characteristic worker-type (corresponding to the sterile female-worker
of the bee-hive), for the rougher and the more exhausting tasks. The
young wives and mothers and the young girls should have been rigorously
excluded from such.
Of all human prerogatives, the greatest is that of being preserved, by
class, by ability, by means, or by privilege, from gravitating to levels
of work that coarsen and debase; or that, at all events, do not exercise
and foster the development of higher tastes and faculty. And this human
privilege is, in proportion to their degrees of civilisation, accorded
to women by all civilised peoples. As men have stood between them and
the perils of battle and shipwreck, the slaying of wild beasts,
pioneering, exploring, and the like, so they have stood between them and
the coarsest, ugliest, and most debasing industrial functions.
Nevertheless, Feminist anger at restriction whatsoever in the matter of
employment ignores all cause for gratitude on the part of the sex, that,
being at man's mercy as she is, civilised woman is no longer (as the
woman of inferior civilisations is still) a beast of heavy burden. Far
otherwise, indeed, Feminism aims at nothing so much as to repudiate her
established privileges, abolish all distinctions, and to make woman once
again that beast of burden the chivalry of man--at first instinctive,
later magnanimous--has progressively rescued her from being.
And yet the degree to which sex is defined in Labour (as in Life) is at
the same time the gauge and the cause of human development. Wheresoever
are found low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress, there the
women are employed in men's work. Wheresoever women are employed in
men's work, there are low intelligence, crude morale and lack of
progress.
"Thank Heaven for the War!" Feminists have said, however, "because it
has enabled our sex to prove its worth--by enabling us to quit ourselves
like men. The world knows now that women can conduct omnibuses, drive
ploughs, clean stables, kill chickens, ring and slaughter pigs, quite as
well as men can."
It is as painful as it is amazing to find intelligent and cultured
persons so blinded by the obsessions of their creed as to suppose that
in ploughing and hoeing and making munitions, women are doing finer and
more valuable work than they had been doing previously; that the woman
bus-conductor is a more important person than the children's nurse; that
to drive a cab or clean a boiler is a nobler occupation than the
teaching of music or the cleansing of clothes; that to spread manure is
more dignifying than to make beds; to amputate the limbs of wounded
soldiers is superior to the subtler, far more difficult art of medically
treating the complex ills of women and children.
That these other employments have been demanded by the times, is
undeniable; as, too, that honour and credit are due to those who well
and capably responded to the exigencies of the hour. But this does not,
in the least degree, lessen the illogic of the claim that such response
to the cruder and less-civilised demands of War proved woman's value
more than did the devotion and efficiency she was previously showing in
the far more complex and progressive arts of Peace. The main value of
her War-work was that it fitted the times. But the times have been
woefully out of joint!
III
At a recent Feminist Meeting, one of the leaders of Militancy detailed
to an audience of fierce-eyed, sombre-visaged members of her own sex,
and sundry meek-browed persons of the other, her latest exploits in the
matters of arranging Labour disputes and averting strikes of
working-men; of sending Governmental male officials to the right-about,
and of disposing, in general, of masculine concerns.
The main issue of her story was lost sight of, alike by herself and by
her audience. This was--or so it seemed to one among the latter: What
manner of men were these who required or tolerated it that a woman
should take them thus in hand, and, as though they had been whipped
children, dispose of them and their men's affairs--between worker and
employer, between man and man? What order of creature will be the sons
and the grandsons of men ever further emasculated by every further
generation of subjection by such masterful persons; female-Dominants who
arrogate the virile rights and prerogatives of their menkind; their
initiative and enterprise; their capacity to think, to speak, to plan
and to act for themselves?
The Subjection of woman by man--What was that evil compared with this
other enormity: the Subjection of man by woman, which is fast replacing
it?
Men who--saving under stress of War--permit women to usurp the functions
and prerogatives of their natural domain, in capacities of Mayor, of
Chairman of Companies and so forth, are, frankly speaking--Muffs!
Not of such sires were our great Anglo-Saxon Races gotten. Not such was
it who have made England what she is! And the England we look to will
never be the England we look to--until such effeminate blood shall have
been bred out of her sons.
The male becomes emasculate when women invade his domain. And with the
increasing Hugger-mugger of the sexes, it grows, every day, more and
more difficult for men to escape into the bracing, invigorating
environment and moral of their own sex--a moral untempered by amenities
due to the other, and one indispensable to string them to the pitch of
virile thought and action. Our sailors and soldiers and aviators are
still _men_, because woman has not so far invaded the Navy, the Army, or
the Air.
Feminine invasion everywhere else--in schools and colleges, in the arts,
in politics, in commerce and in sports--is undoubtedly enfeebling the
fibre of our manhood and the quality of masculine achievements. Man is a
pioneer; aggressive, progressive, ever breaking new ground; conquering
new territory and new forces of Nature. And this alike in politics, in
commerce, and in other material affairs. When he fails to pioneer,
reaching out to new horizons of thought and activity, engineering new
enterprises, while at the same time strengthening and consolidating all
he had already acquired--then the world, in place of progressing,
regresses. And for pioneering, whether in political or in geographical
regions, woman's presence hampers him.
The less men are in a position to escape from the other sex, the more
they lose the impetus and characteristics of their own.
The like applies to women. Women who mix too much and too freely with
men deteriorate signally in womanly values and quality.
Both sexes benefit by segregation from the other, in order to
adapt--each to its own characteristic morale and moral. Neither sex is
wholly unconstrained and candid when in company of the other--unless
both are demoralised.
Sex operates as a stimulant. And to be always under influence of a
stimulant is enervating. On the other hand, when, from over-indulgence,
Sex or any other stimulant ceases to release new inspiration and forces,
it is sign of a permanently enervated state. Or sex operates as a
hypnotic. And to be always under hypnotic influence is as destructive of
individuality as it is fatal to achievement.
The sexes require to separate, accordingly, in order to derive fresh
impulse on coming together again.
Both work more seriously and sincerely, more efficiently and more
effectively, apart; taking counsel, when need be, one of the other.
The dilettante spirit and amenities of mixed companies, destructive of
"thoroughness," are greatly to blame for that decline of British
commerce which has followed on the Feminist invasion of business-houses.
Significant of the trend is the fact that young and pretty and
inefficient girls are selected for business positions, as clerks and so
forth, while older women of experience and accredited ability are
rejected summarily. It is, doubtless, amusing and flattering to
masculine employers to be surrounded by attractive youth of the opposite
sex. But it is conducive neither to commercial enterprise nor to
achievement.
IV
Because of the intrinsic variability underlying her duality of
constitution, the happy mean and balance (difficult to all humans) are
especially difficult to woman.
Man, like herself, is of dual constitution. But he is more firmly,
because less finely, poised between his two orders of Traits. She, on
the contrary, tends to oscillate between the opposite extremes of her
two-sided nature. A bent which may be traced, throughout history, in the
excesses, in one or the other direction, that have characterised the
careers of many famous women-personages.
The Ultra-Feminine extreme, which results from lack of due balance of
her woman-side by the masculine side of her, and the Mannish extreme,
occasioned by over-development of her masculine inherences, may be
regarded as, respectively, the Scylla and Charybdis--the rocks of the
Male-traits, or the vortex of the Female-traits--whereon, equally, may
be wrecked the noblest characteristics and the highest values of the
sex, when it fails to steer clear, _in medias res_, of either.
In a number of women, the Feminist and the Femininist (Ultra-Feminine)
types alternate in the same person. In place of being stably and
permanently centred in the woman-side of them, with the masculine to
steady and intelligise, such persons act and re-act, in more or less
violent pendulum-swing, between their two orders of impulse. Thus we get
women, intellectual, progressive, strenuous, engrossed for part of their
time in serious, perhaps in public avocations--and then plunging, in
violent recoil, into social frivolities; vanities, dissipations, pranks,
intrigues, excesses.
Men, too, act between extremes. In far less degree, however. Life
demands from most of them over-accentuation and concentration of their
male-abilities, in physical and mental specialisations. And in reaction,
they plunge into follies and vices. But the more virile keep their
heads, and preserve a certain stability and conformity in their
aberrations. While effeminate men, it is mainly who lapse into vicious
excess.
Since woman supplies the inspiration and the morale of life, however,
and since her momentous function of motherhood empowers her to make or
to mar the Race whereof she is creatrix, a nation has a greater claim
upon its women, and has, at the same time, more reason and more right to
restrict their liberty of action, and to direct their bent, than it has
in the case of its men. Its survival and its downfall tremble in the
scales of Life which woman holds. To compensate her for such restriction
and limitation of her scope, obviously it owes her privileges, personal
and economic. And a subconscious recognition of this fact has been,
doubtless, the source of such privileges as she now enjoys.
There have always been, as history shows, women in whom, from faulty
heredity or culture, or from stress of circumstance, the Male-traits
have been abnormally developed; virile-brained, stout-hearted, muscular
chieftainesses, chatelaines, abbesses, matrons; or (in less agreeable
guise) amazons, shrews and viragoes. But always such were recognised as
being abnormal, and for the most part as being repellant. It was not
sought to manufacture them. It is only of late years that Mannishness
has become a serious Cult.
And now a dangerous thing has happened. Because where formerly symptoms
of Feminism attacked individuals only--and these mainly the mature and
eccentric--now the young and the normal are being indoctrinated
wholesale. Young girls taken during the malleable phases of growth and
development, and forcibly shaped to masculine modes, become more or less
irretrievably male of trait and bent; losing all power to recover the
womanly normal.
While on the other hand, there are assembling to-day, in an opposite
ever-increasing and menacing camp, those others for whom Feminism, with
its extremist, exacting, self-reliant codes and modes, has no appeal;
the pretty mindless, the idle frivolous, the pleasure-seeker, the
freakish and the conscienceless--in a word, the Ultra-Feminines; in whom
the woman-failings are unfortunately more conspicuous than are the
woman-virtues. Between these two extremes stand (and stand so far in
gratifying number) the natural, admirably-balanced, noble and invaluable
Moderates--normal women content to be normal women, and to fulfil the
destined role of such. And these are the saving grace of nations.
Apart from these, the sex is ever further and more dangerously
separating into the two extremist camps; the Mannish and strenuous, and
the Over-Feminised and purposeless, more or less idle and frivolous,
selfishly absorbed in clothes, in luxury and pleasures; exacting
masculine tribute in mind and kind, with but little return in affection
or ministry.
In place, accordingly, of that fine normal poise of the Contrasting Man
and Woman-Traits--which is the way of Evolution and of Progress--there
is being substituted in the sex this degenerative segregation of its
Traits in two wholly opposite, and equally lopsided types. And of these,
the purposeful and strenuous, all the while making for masculine
standards, are all the while further discarding the beauty, the
emotions, the delicacy and morale of true woman; while the mindless and
vain, the attractive and charming, are more and more divorcing
themselves from purpose, from seriousness, from noble endeavour and
usefulness.
And since rights accorded to women are shared by all, every new
privilege Feminists win for the sex in the sweat of their assiduous
brows--liberty, latchkeys and general latitude--the Ultra-Feminines
snatch, and apply to frivolous and profitless, or to demoralising ends;
licence, extravagances, vices.
The Ultra-Feminine, for the most part shallow and mindless (although
many clever women belong to this order), absorbed in complacent culture
of her oftentimes alluring personality, enhancing it, attiring it,
developing its charm and graces, eager of homage and of tribute, is
example of that Parasitism Miss Schreiner condemns in the sex; example
of qualities normally making for beauty, but from loss of balance, owing
to warp, hereditary or of misdirection, morbidly feeding upon
themselves.
This Parasitism is seen in its worst guise in the vast armies of
prostitutes, who in every clime and epoch ravage the fair fruits of
human life and achievement.
Against this Parasitism in herself, self-absorbing, self-indulgent,
enervating--defect of her reposefulness, of her aestheticism and vital
self-consciousness--every woman needs to be upon her guard; to repress
with firmness the smooth easy lapse it prompts toward sloth and
pleasure; to exorcise the soft dry-rot of it, by power of aspiration and
by prayer of ministry. (For noble truth it is that _Laborare est
orare_.)
The Woman's Movement did good service for the sex in the early chapters
of its history, when it made for due education of woman's higher
masculine inherences; intelligence, application, self-reliance; as also
in finding further fields of usefulness and self-expression for her.
But unfortunately in the later chapters, over-cultivation of these
traits has increasingly annulled and extinguished her own. And this with
the unforeseen, disquieting resultant that a compensatory movement has
set in apace among that other faction of the sex. So that the more
mannish the Feminists become in mode and aim, the more womanish become
the Effeminates. Thus, albeit sincerely despising and decrying this,
Feminism has nevertheless indirectly fostered the growth of Effeminacy.
While, by supplying it with ever further liberty and scope for the
indulgence of its freaks and failings, Feminist propaganda has directly
played into its hands. Motherhood strikes deeper roots of attribute even
in the Ultra-Feminine; brings thin streams of altruism to her
neurasthenic breasts. In her children she forgets clothes, grows less
greedy of masculine tribute, forgoes pleasures and excitements that had
been the breath of life to her.
The increasing emancipation of the sex from home-functions and from
womanly and mother-duties, however--claimed and obtained with a view to
further economic scope and application of its powers--has been
exultantly hailed and exploited by the Ultra-Feminines for ever further
indulgence of and wider range of action for their dangerous defects. And
Feminism will find--and this soon to its dismay--that the battle it has
waged against the other sex has been as nothing to the battle it has yet
to wage against its own, in the person of the Eternal Effeminate; idle,
luxurious, parasitic and effete, who, with her brood, engenders the
dry-rot which crumbles mighty civilisations, or topples them in
Revolution.
V
Of the two camps, the vast majority of masculines will always seek their
loves and wives among the Ultra-Feminines; frail and erratic, but
attractive and more or less womanly. So long as men are men, the
feminine graces, even in their spurious forms of Effeminacy, will
possess more vital appeal for them than do the intelligences and
utilities.
The Feminist camp, further and further commandeering the intelligent and
self-reliant, the worthy and purposeful of the sex, while more and more
discarding the charms and the softness thereof, will be further and
further deserted by men. And of the happy mean--the well-balanced woman,
at once tender and intelligent, devoted and charming--there will be ever
fewer available.
What then is the future, biological and sociological, of Races whose
wives and mothers will have been drawn mainly from the shallow-brained
and shallow-hearted, from the less dutiful, the less high and
right-minded? To say nothing of the less constitutionally-sound, the
Ultra-Feminine being, for the most part, a neurotic? The great majority
of such will decline part, indeed, in functions so dull and distasteful
as the mothering and rearing of children.
The Feminist wife, with her intelligent grip of economics and her stern
sense of citizen-duty, would fulfil her racial function (in accordance
with Malthusius) during intervals of more absorbing and strenuous
activities. But when once the novelty--which gives a certain piquancy
for some men to a mannishness some women are able to wear quite prettily
and attractively in early youth--shall have worn away, the poor
Feminist's chances of marriage will be few, indeed; save with
men-weaklings, requiring the virile support of a strong-minded,
muscular wife.
The Feminist makes a far more honest and reliable, sincere and helpful,
mate than does the Ultra-Feminine. But men prefer the latter.
Male characteristics are to be found among their male acquaintance. And
it is not a normal, nor is it a wholesome instinct in a man, to seek in
sex the traits of his own.
In the cult of Mannishness, woman loses her strongest, her noblest and
tenderest appeal for true men--the appeal of her womanhood. And losing
it, she abandons the male to the toils of the enemy camp; to those whose
womanishness partakes, at all events, of the attributes of a sex
complementary and supplementary to his own.
* * * * *
Unhappy wights! How Nature has handicapped them--in order to spur them
to their virile part of founding and providing for the family!
VI
As innocent of misappropriating that which is Caesar's as they are
ignorant of the biological verities, some Women-leaders and Prime-movers
in Feminism exact and exult in the warm young, zealous adulation and
hero-worship of their followers; never suspecting that such tribute is
rendered, in fact, to the _male_ in them. Both they and their votaries
believe themselves loyal and thrall to their finger-tips to Woman and
The Woman-Cause. Whereas they are, in reality, hero-worshipping, on the
one hand, the Male in their Cult, and on the other, the Masculine traits
of its female exponents. Against man himself and the Maleness that is
his by natural right, many are filled with hottest distrust and
aversion. Yet while sex-antagonism is thus strong in them in fealty to
their creed, Nature is strong in them too. And with gentle irony she
exacts their homage for the traits of the foe--masquerading in guise of
a female!
Heroes to worship, every naturally-constituted woman craves. And it is
the hero--far less than it is the heroine--in the Feminist leaders,
their qualities of fight and masterfulness, of virile brain and concrete
enterprise, which evoke their adherents' devotion and tribute.
Some Feminist leaders bid, indeed, as strenuously for and claim as
jealously the undivided loyalty and subjection of their flock as ever
Tyrant-Man demanded of the sex.
In schools and colleges too, the girls make gods and heroes of those of
their sex who excel in manly sports. They have never a suspicion that
their gods and heroes are not goddesses and heroines. Similars being
unattractive to one another, the exposition of woman-traits leaves woman
more or less unmoved. As Nature destined, the woman-heart goes out to
those virtues and valours which are the natural complement of her own.
This latter-day vogue is not a normal, nor a pretty development. But it
is another of the inevitable consequences of disturbing Nature's
balances. Nature's plan and her methods of administration are so perfect
that when left to herself she preserves her equilibrium and secures her
aims by the safest and, at the same time, by the simplest expedients.
When man destroys the hawks which, normally, reduce the smaller fry of
birds to their allotted quotum in the Scheme of Things, however, the
smaller fry multiply inordinately and devour his cherries and his corn.
And when he destroys the smaller fry, the slugs and grubs and _aphides_
multiply and devour his lettuces and roses.
So it is with Human traits and faculties. The balance of The Normal is
the way alone of health and happiness and progress.
There is great boast now-a-days of friendship and comradeship between
the sexes. Yet though friendship and comradeship are good allies of
love, they are but sterile, uninspiring substitutes for the profounder,
higher, vital and undying emotions of the true love-passion.
On the other hand, attachments between men and men, and between women
and women, are strengthening and intensifying; absorbing the emotion and
devotion formerly and normally bestowed on members of the opposite sex.
While attraction between persons of opposite sex becomes ever lighter
and triter in sentiment; serving more and more for brief distraction and
provocative pastime rather than for a living and abiding bond.
This misplaced affection for members of the same sex arises from the
attraction of traits of the opposite sex unduly developed in them. While
indifference to members of the opposite sex results from lack in these
of the characteristics of their sex, normally accentuated. Thus a woman
is more drawn to one of her own sex possessing virile characteristics,
physical or mental, than she is drawn to a weak-brained, emasculate man.
Masculine women are attracted likewise by the womanly graces and quality
of feminine women.
While men find in some members of their own sex, feminine traits of
sympathy and sentiment absent in women of male-proclivity. All is an
expression of the law of the Attraction of Opposites, which (normally)
causes persons of opposite sex to be strongly drawn to one another.
On the other hand, the development in himself, or in herself, of the
characteristics of the opposite sex makes members of either sex
independent of and indifferent to members of the other, by supplying
them with a spurious counterfeit of qualities it is natural to seek in
those others.
VII
Professor Drummond, from whom I quote frequently, as being one of those
biologists on the side of the angels, writes thus beautifully:
"Sex is a paradox; it is that which separates in order to unite....
There is no instance in Nature of Division of Labour being brought
to such extreme specialisation. The two sexes were not only set
apart to perform different halves of the same function, but each so
entirely lost the power of performing the whole function that even
with so great a thing at stake as the continuance of the species
_one_ could not discharge it.
"It is important to notice this absence of necessity for Sex having
been created--the absence of any known necessity, from the merely
physiological standpoint.
"Is it inconceivable that Nature should sometimes do things with an
ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance? To no one with any
acquaintance with Nature's ways, will it be possible to conceive of
such a purpose as the sole purpose.
"Had Sex done nothing more than make an interesting world, the debt
of Evolution to Reproduction had been incalculable.... What exactly
Maleness is, and what Femaleness, has been one of the problems of
the world. At least five hundred theories of their origin are
already in the field, but the solution seems to have baffled every
approach. Sex has remained almost to the present hour an ultimate
mystery of creation....
"The contribution of each to the evolution of the human race is
special and unique. To the man has been mainly assigned the
fulfilment of the first great function--the Struggle for Life.
Woman, whose higher contribution has not yet been named, is the
chosen instrument for carrying on the Struggle for the Life of
Others.
"That task, translated into one great word is Maternity--which is
nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others transfigured,
transferred to the moral sphere. Focused in a single human being,
this function, as we rise in history, slowly begins to be
accompanied by those heaven-born psychical states which transform
the femaleness of the older order into the Motherhood of the New."
Out of the misconception of Sex as having no other purpose or
significance than that of reproduction merely, there has arisen the
further misconception that, lacking other purpose or significance, the
sex-characteristics of Woman may be obliterated in her not only without
injury, but with benefit to her; as being superfluous and hampering
impedimenta merely, when reproductive issues are beside the question.
Yet since Faculty lapses first in its latest and highest developments,
sex-deterioration manifests most in the higher mental and moral
Sex-characteristics. One result, therefore, of not fostering, by culture
and by avocation, sex-specialisations upon planes of mind and aptitude,
is that, while lapsing in its higher functions, Sex remains operative
still upon the physical plane, and functions crudely--perhaps viciously
thereon. Just as intelligence becomes dense and degraded when its finer
qualities are not exercised, and their development thus raised to finer
issues. Moreover, by denying to Sex and to the rites of love any but
parental issues, the individual, emotional and spiritual issues of the
human union are ignored; a limitation all the more dishonouring, because
of the present-day misconception of parenthood as being a purely
"physical," and, accordingly, an inferior function.
There is not, of course, in all the complex marvel of human metabolism,
such an anomaly as a purely physical function. Digestion even is far,
indeed, from being such, since by way of this a slice of bread is
transformed into living personality, living thought and impulse, living
action.
Sex is manifestly a Spiritual and an Eternal Principle. Because, by way
of its essential dual differentiations and intensifying operations,
Matter becomes endued not only with Life and Faculty, but, having become
Living Matter, it becomes endued, by power of reproduction, with the
potential of eternal Life and Faculty. Even more, it becomes endued with
the potential of the eternal unfoldment of ever-further intensifying
Life and Faculty.
Sex is, in truth, for both genders, such a convergence of every
characteristic--physical, mental and emotional--in a highly specialised
focus, that the whole outlook upon life becomes highly specialised and
intensified thereby; every impression and experience becoming instinct
and charged with intrinsic meanings, vividness and colour. And this
apart wholly from relation to the other sex. Although, of course, the
focus and intensity of the traits of the one sex are _accentuated_ in
vividness and richness, in response to the complementary traits of the
other.
It is Sex that energises men to be great; great leaders of men, great
writers, great statesmen, great soldiers, great sailors,
explorers--great sinners and great saints.
Sex it is makes women great also; great mates for great men, great
mothers, writers, ministers to poor Humanity--great saints.
The mystery of Sex is, surely, Master-key to all the other mysteries of
the Cosmos.
* * * * *
VIII
In aiming at Hermaphrodism, Feminism is contriving not only at
frustration of all that Evolution has achieved in Life and Faculty, but
it is making for the extinction of Life itself.
The Hermaphrodite is incapable of parenthood. And in the degree to which
members of either sex lapse toward Neuterdom, in body or in mind, they
become incapable of transmitting to offspring all those higher
developments of form and faculty which are, essentially,
Sex-differentiations. The present-day decline in parental impulse and
affection, which shows, among other signs, in ever-decreasing
Birth-rates, is a symptom of temperamental Neuterdom; evidence alike of
Sex-decline, and, in this, of decline of that vital energy and spiritual
impulse whereof Sex is the manifestation.
Such trend toward Race-suicide denotes, in the Race, that same
neurasthenia and pusillanimity, which, in the individual, impel him to
personal suicide.
Latter-day marriage, greedily grasping all that Life and Love bestow
while grudging any due to Life and Love, is not true Marriage--but is
sacrilege.
Between this and the mating of true men and women, who, in gratitude for
Love, pay tribute joyfully to Life in lives to follow after them, is all
the vital difference, in impulse and emotion, between the Ship of
Love--with its mysterious freight--immured within a narrow lock whereof
the gate to the Beyond is sealed, and the Ship of Love launched free
upon the open sea of Human Destiny--a Shining sea of Faith and Hope,
which tides beyond the narrow mortal gateway toward a Great Unknown;
Remote, Illimitable, Veiled in Everlasting Silence.
_This_ ship fares forth upon its voyage of Mystery, beatified by full
surrender of all lesser issues to that sacred one of the Eternal
Human--a surrender which endues true marriage with tenderness and awe
and beauty.
* * * * *
_Do we not pitch our songs too low, O sweet--my Singers?_