THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN SOCIETY
“La société crée la femme où la nature a fait une femelle.” This
reflection comes from that great novelist, but not too profound
philosopher, Balzac. It is sufficiently general to start many trains of
thought, though it is not in itself a peculiarly valuable addition to
sociological ideas. Yet Balzac’s own train of thought when he wrote it
is clear enough. He was lingering with admiration over the figure of
Diane de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan, his incarnation of all
the charm and the attraction of women. For him the opposition between
the woman and the female was no idle one. In the latter he took no
interest: she meant less to him than the hideous cowering creature with
a baby at its breast which appeared behind that rutilant and terrifying
primitive man on the cover of Mr Wells’ universal history, No. 2, means
to us. But woman, as typified in Diane the supreme example, appeared
to him as a work of art so amazingly perfected in every detail that
one can almost describe him as kissing the tips of his fingers when
he writes of her. He saw women as wonderful and beautiful refinements
of raw nature, extraordinarily complicated, subtle beyond measure, no
less alluring but more wily than the sirens, forming part of society,
it is true, but in a remote way of their own, not as companions of the
other half of humanity but as incalculable accidents of the simpler
life of men. They were in his eyes divinities, witches or devils, but
hardly ordinary human beings. Mrs Edith Wharton in her “French Ways and
their Meaning” seems, in a less enthusiastic way, to adopt the same
attitude towards French women. She boldly tells the American girl that
she is but a child in the nursery compared with this daedal repository
of feminine secrets, the French _femme du monde_. It is, in fact, the
French point of view, which accounts for the power of women, or rather
of the woman, in France and for the limitation of her activities to her
own peculiar temples. She does not waste her virtues by wafting them
at large over the dustier tracts of life, though it is possible that
the _jeunes filles en fleur_, with their golf and tennis and boyish
companionships, of whom M. Marcel Proust so engagingly writes, may come
down from their pedestals more frequently than their mothers.
However this may be, Balzac’s train of thought does not apply to
England. His reflection would not have occurred to an English novelist,
or, if it had, it would have been thrown off easily as an obvious,
not particularly pregnant, fact, without the wealth of suggestion in
the antithesis of “female” and “woman” which is implied in Balzac’s
sentence. The Englishman would be more apt to give the reflection
another turn, to say: “Nature made woman and woman makes society,”
leaving sharp the opposition between nature and society but blurring
that between the natural and the social woman, with the idea that the
two are too closely interwoven to be usefully disconnected. And that is
the English point of view. Woman in England has never been a mystery,
an intricate engine with simple aims and complicated methods, of a
different order from man with his complex aims and simpler methods. The
texture of English life is, and has always been, compounded of both as
the warp and the woof—the more active man passing rapidly between the
more stable feminine strands which keep his thread in place. Though
this interconnection has become more obvious latterly with the complete
disappearance of feudal and patriarchal traditions, earlier literature
bears abundant witness to it. The Canterbury Tales are significant
enough in this respect. In spite of occasional romanticism in the tales
themselves, we have no hedged divinities in the band of pilgrims: the
nun, the prioress and the wife of Bath all take their places naturally
in the cavalcade, and the poet insists as little on the special claims
of their femininity as he pays deference to their modesty. And where is
the mystery in Viola, Sylvia, Beatrice or Rosalind? They are palpably
of the same stuff as their lovers, and only distinguished by greater
sanity from their fools. If there be any point in mystery, it is
men, with weird compounds of good and evil in their souls, who were
Shakespeare’s mysteries. But, so far as social relations are concerned
in Shakespeare, as in England generally, men and women are part of the
same homespun which covers all the issues of life in this country.
I see no reason to doubt that it will continue to do so: even the
apparently strong antagonisms of recent years, when loud exclamations
were heard against a “man-made” world, made little difference to the
even textile process of ordinary social life, and now, since the
political enfranchisement of women, are but very feeble ghosts.
The truth is that in few societies have women always had greater
rights than in English society. The English woman is neither, like
the Frenchwoman, the flying buttress of one particular man, nor, like
the German, his beast of burden, nor like the American, his imperious
tyrant: she is, as I have already pointed out, his companion, and she
is the ideal companion because she has so long been admitted to all the
private rights of companionship. English society is held together by
English women, for the men of England have a strange aloofness from one
another and a want of curiosity about one another which is always an
astonishment to women, who can make or break men’s friendships without
an effort. English men cling to one another with such feeble tendrils
that the faintest tug pulls them apart. Yet, if women sometimes almost
involuntarily apply the tug, they are coagulators of men, linking
knots of them together by tighter bonds of familiarity than they could
have ever manufactured for themselves. They are able to perform this
function because the two sexes do not live separate lives converging at
a few fixed points, but common lives with a few divergences which are
becoming more and more reduced. Wherever you look you see them coupled
together, in tea shops and restaurants, in theatres and music-halls and
cinemas, on the hunting field and in the butt; they shop together, they
serve together, they go to church together. This state of affairs is
not without its disadvantages: it encourages, for one thing, a lower
standard of common thought than in France where the men keep more to
themselves and more together, setting a higher level of intelligence to
which women are expected to conform when the two sexes meet on common
ground. But it is the characteristic note of English society, in which
alone could women say without pose or presumption that “they like to
have their men about.” _Their_ men, mark you, not men in general, and
in a very conscious possessive sense. There is an amusing passage in
an early chapter of “Mount Music” by Miss Somerville and Martin Ross.
Major Talbot-Lowry, a middle-aged country gentleman, has just left the
room, singing. “In both his wife’s and his cousin’s faces was the same
look that often comes into women’s faces when, unperceived, they regard
the sovereign creature. Future generations may not know that look, but
in the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth
century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of apprehension
and of pity. Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so childlike.” The
authors are perhaps right in saying that future generations will not
know this look: the awe and the apprehension are giving way to more
sympathetic emotions. But the look that remains will not be unlike
the old look. It is a look of which English men are more conscious
than women suppose: they catch it early on the more innocent faces of
sisters and sisters’ friends. They know that women regard them with a
blend of tolerance and admiration, as a kind of familiar institution to
which they are bound by ties too intimate to be unravelled or analysed.
This intimate connection in the texture of society has an unmistakeable
effect upon English men. It gives them, from early days, an
inner refinement which, however rough and unpolished or cold and
uncompromising their external appearance, is nearly always to be
found behind it. Heavy-footed, wanting in delicacy and the finer
shades as they may seem in comparison with men of some other nations,
who pay more attention to finish and elegance of address, they are
in many ways more truly civilised, with less of the wild man of the
woods, the hunter, at the bottom of their natures. The manners of
an English gentleman, which are manners of the heart, not of the
dancing master or the enchanter, have, for their inward grace, no
equal in the world. And the emotion which lies behind these manners
is common to all English men, an emotion distilled of long and easy
companionship with women, in which neither took more than was given
in return, but the interchange of services and sympathies, not of
mere compliments, naturally issued from mutual recognition of worth
and mutual acknowledgement of dependence. For English women too this
intimacy, which included a consciousness of the emotions it engendered
in men, has had its peculiar grace. It has given them that frankness,
that independence without bravado, that air of being equal to any
situation, which are their remarkable qualities. At any age, even
the most flighty, they fall too naturally into the performance of
their stabilising function to waste more than a small and pardonable
amount of energy upon private timidities and pursuits betraying a
more primitive woman. They are in some sort aware of a national part
to play which it would be indecent to abandon, either from passion or
indifference. Hence they have a freer stride and a less self-conscious
attitude than those women of other countries who are only credited with
the graces and weaknesses of undiluted femininity.
But, if women stabilise, they also stratify. Men are more liquid
entities, coalescing temporarily with other men at any level without
difficulty and without feeling themselves engaged to remain at that
or any other level longer than they please. But there is a viscosity
about women—it is only another way of regarding their stabilising
function—which forbids them to flow so freely and makes it harder for
them to disengage themselves after any coalition with other entities
of their own kind. So they arrange themselves inevitably in strata,
the number of which in England is legion, which rise with an infinity
of gradation from the labourer’s cottage to the royal palace. The
process is almost too natural to be called snobbery, though its result
often gives rise to that unpleasant quality, for the feminine element
is buoyant and subject rather to the laws of expansion than those of
gravity. Mrs John Lane’s Maria, good-natured but vulgarly pushing,
will stick at nothing to penetrate the layers immediately above her:
armed with determination, selfishness and ingratitude she marches
brazenly to the attack, braving the snub to force the breach, feeling
the wound but snatching the dart from it to add to the armoury which,
from her ultimate vantage point, she will discharge upon her subsequent
imitators. And a Maria will drag a man upwards with her, protesting
but powerless, for men have not the force to abjure or to withstand
such campaigns. Comic enough in fiction, it is nauseating in reality,
especially as these pushing particles admit nothing but entirely
laudable ambitions, whereas the scale in which they so furiously
struggle to rise is not one of wit or merit, but one of trivialities,
of pennies and titles, motor cars and meals.
But if the Marias show an uncanny quickness in judging the points of
contact between the social layers, it is not the Marias who make the
layers in the first place. These are the work of all women equally, as
naturally made as birds’ nests, but for the protection of themselves
rather than of their young. Two men may meet at the office or the club,
day in day out, for years without in the least becoming involved in one
another’s domestic circumstances or becoming aware of one another’s
native layers. But it is impossible for women to meet casually for
long without a degree of mutual implication which can never be undone.
One visit by a woman to another woman’s home forms a link which the
return of that visit closes irrevocably; it can thereafter neither be
ignored nor broken without pain: whereas a man, especially a bachelor,
may flit for ever like a butterfly, sipping in all freedom the honey
where he finds it. At the bottom of this difference is the instinct
of the home, which is so peculiarly strong in Englishwomen. A home
must have stability and a definite position with regard to other
homes, it cannot vaguely exist in an indeterminate social latitude and
longitude. As map-readers would say, its coordinates must be settled
and cannot be changed without an upheaval. Stability, moreover, is
not the only quality of a home to women: they cherish its explanatory
quality also. Away from their homes they feel vague and unattached,
like travellers without passports, presenting rather a questionable
appearance, dependent for recognition rather on the goodwill of others
than on their own indubitable claims. In their homes they are solid and
substantial, answering every question before it is asked, proof against
all error, in a settled place and status with all circumstances and
attachments stretching obviously away to the limits of vision. It is
to the Englishwoman, far more than to the English man, that home is a
castle.
The consequence is that Englishwomen, no less than women of other
nations, are strongly individualistic, and stand like boulders in the
stream of modern democracy which is running towards collectivism. It is
impossible for the majority of women to sympathise with the collective
ideal, since all their instincts run counter to it. In England,
particularly, where for centuries the stratification of society has
gone quietly on without catastrophic changes, it is hard to believe
that, with political power now in their hands, women will easily
permit a profound revolution in their modes of life. So long as wages
and standards of life are in question, they may well vote with the
most progressive, even the most aggressive, party: but the old social
landmarks will not be entirely swept away unless the women, too, are
swept off their feet by a wave of circumstance or emotion. It will be
curious to see how the good Englishwoman modifies the course of history
in the near future, as she is bound to do if she in a way succeeds in
forcing a compromise between the oncoming of collectivist democracy and
her own instinctive conservatism. So far as women are concerned, every
layer of society is bound to offer resistance to eruption from below
simply for its own safety. In this matter the stationmaster’s wife will
not be behind the doctor’s or the works-foreman’s sister behind the
vicar’s. If eruption comes at all, instead of the steady but almost
imperceptible percolation which is the usual process of social change
in this country, it can only come from the lowest layers whose Marias
have nothing to lose and everything to gain by a more than usually
abrupt effort to rise. If only wise statesmanship can discount the need
for any abruptness, this eruption will never occur: the essential
changes, in my belief, can be wrought without so ruinous a disturbance
as to rend our English homespun into rags, or to snap the threads of
that womanly warp which gives it its strength and durability.
The married women, at all events, will resist to the last: the weak
threads in the womanly warp—and I mean weak in the sense of not
withstanding disruptive influences—are the bachelor women. Nowadays it
is foolish to talk of “old maids” and “_coiffer Sainte Cathérine_,” or
to use any other patronising phrase for unmarried women which implies
that they have missed the only vocation of their sex. Already before
the war this attitude was becoming _passé_ in England, and the war
has definitely bundled it into the lumber room. The enormous activity
of women, young and old, during the war cannot subside leaving no
effect at all, and one of its most permanent effects is that large
numbers of women have learned to live as self-sufficing lives as men,
working independently for an adequate return, dwelling in camps or
colonies or bachelor companionships or even in solitude, and using
their leisure as the spirit moved them. Young girls who ordinarily
would not have dreamed of leaving the home where they were doing
nothing in particular, and older women who dabbled more or less
aimlessly in existence because they could not catch a proper hold
of it, both learned the happiness which comes from doing something
in particular. They found in regular work an emancipation of which
they had never dreamed: it solved their riddles and blew away their
fantasies, besides removing them from those hundred and one insidious
little distractions which waste more than half the time of unoccupied
women. If this emancipation led to some follies, it led also to much
wisdom. The value of regularity became patent to many for the first
time: the settling effect of a definite aim for each day, the fact
that, in the long run, work passes the time much more quickly than
amusement, were revelations; and the realisation of holding a career,
albeit a temporary one, in her own two hands gave to many a woman a new
assurance and a new pride which were precious as jewels. Thereafter
they could never regard with equanimity the possibility of a return
to the older more dependent or less purposeful life. The cessation of
wartime employment obscured their immediate prospect but did not cloud
their new ideals, for they had learnt a new and healthy discontent. It
was not that the other ideal of women, marriage and a home, lost its
attraction—far from it: but, it had become clear that women need not
wait, like wares in a market place, till the arrival of a purchaser,
doing odd jobs and maintaining as long as possible the freshness of
their looks. They had realised the real virtues of the bachelor state,
which are not its opportunities for disorder, laxity and idleness, but,
in youth, its freedom, its mobility and its sense of hammering out
life with a will on the anvil of ambition, and, in maturer age, the
full interests, the easy and untrammelled relations, the opportunities
for many sided intercourse without responsibility and the power of
unhampered concentration on a purpose which are its compensations for
the inevitable loneliness.
In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter
bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea
of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English
girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as
their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the
attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they
will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity,
instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about
indefinitely in other people’s houses. Mothers and fathers it is true,
will be left forlorn a little earlier, but they will have to put up
with it, and it will teach them to preserve the charm of one another’s
society with more care against the day when, after the crowded cares of
parenthood have vanished, nothing else is left to them.
But, to return to my original point, will the bachelor woman be a
stabiliser or will she be disruptive? She will have the feminine
instinct for stability and definite surroundings: she will never become
so fluid a being socially as a man. Nevertheless, for the time of
her bachelorhood she will not so easily indulge those instincts and
will be likely, in the first flush of freedom, to hold them of small
importance. She is, moreover, apt in these days to be carried away
by her head farther than her heart would naturally take her, and her
head, like a newly hoisted sail, will belly in the wind of any ready
theorist. Girls are poor critics of ideas, and are apt to grasp at
them with a touch of flighty passion which is more dangerous than the
intellectual trifling of young men, who can play with them as keenly
yet as unemotionally as they play with tennis balls. The one foe always
lying in wait for bachelor women is hysteria, which takes the form of
flightiness in the young and of a sour wilfulness in the older who
succumb to it. Disruptive tendencies in the state will always find
fruitful ground among hysterical females, who will push a theory
to unpractical limits, not out of honest conviction, but from pure
passion. But the danger of any permanent damage, provided always that
the nation as a whole maintains its sanity, from this source need not
be too seriously considered. A career or a profession is in itself a
stabilising influence, and, now that women in England have few specific
grounds for discontents on the score of sex-inequalities, the sparks
of hysteria can fly harmlessly upwards without being gathered into a
blaze. However, we shall see. The good Englishwoman, married or single,
is riding forward at a round pace into the future. She is not likely to
lose her bearings, but we shall all suffer if she does. It rests with
her teachers to endow her richly with the faculty of finding her way,
even in the dark.