the desirability of such conduct will not influence your social
intercourse, and perhaps even affect your calling list. A great many
things affect our calling lists, without any necessity for us to be
self-righteous and bigoted about the principle on which we make our
own circle select. There are some people who will call upon the wives
of their doctors, but not of their dentists; there are others who will
not call upon the organist who conducts them to the harmonies of Divine
Service on Sunday, but would be very glad to call upon Sir Henry Wood,
who conducts their popular concerts for them during the week. We make
our selection according to our social tastes and aspirations, and
sometimes those social tastes may include a certain amount of moral
judgment. But that moral judgment need not make us interfere; if it
keeps us at a respectful and kindly distance from those whom we cannot
regard with full charity, it keeps us sufficiently out of mischief.
Take the public hangman, for instance. I, personally, would not have
him upon my calling list. I would like to put a graduated tax upon
him and tax him out of existence. I think he is lending himself to a
base department of State service; but I also think that the State is
tempting him; and I think that, in a symbolical way, all of you who
approve of capital punishment ought to put the public hangman upon
your calling list--or not exclude him because of his profession (which
you regard as useful and necessary), but only because he happens to
be personally unattractive to you. If you exclude him, because of
his profession, while you consider his profession a necessity--you
are guilty, I think, of discreditable conduct, and in order to stand
morally right with yourselves you had better go (I speak symbolically)
and leave cards on him to-morrow.
What I mean seriously to say is this: there is a great danger to
moral integrity in any acceptance of social conditions which you
would refuse to interpret into social intercourse. If you believe
prostitution to be necessary for the safety of the home--which is the
doctrine of some--you must accept the prostitute as one who fulfils an
honourable function in the State. If you accept capital punishment,
you must accept the hangman. If you accept meat, you must accept the
slaughterman; if you accept sanitation you must accept the scavenger.
If you accept dividends or profit from sweated labour, you must
accept responsibility for sweated conditions, and for the misery, the
ill-health, the immorality and the degradation which spring from them.
We may be quite sure that far worse things come from these conditions
on which we make our profit than are contained in the majority of those
lives which, because of their irregularities or breaches of convention,
we so swiftly rule off our calling lists. If we are not willing to
forego the dividends produced for us out of our tolerated social
conditions, why forego contact with that human material which they
bring into being? But if you accept contact there, then you will have a
difficulty in finding any human material of greater abasement to deny
to it the advantage of your acquaintance.
I have purposely put my argument provocatively, and applied it to
thorny and questionable subjects, because I want to reach no halfway
conclusion in this matter, and because the real test of our spiritual
toleration is now shifting from matters religious to matters social,
from questions of doctrine to questions of daily life. To-day we must
be prepared to tolerate a propaganda of social ideas--the products of
which, if they succeeded in obtaining a hold, would in the estimation
of many be as regrettable as were the products of Calvinism or
Puritanism in the past, when they were much more powerful than now.
Our hatred of these new social ideas may be just as keen as the hatred
of Catholicism for Protestantism or of Protestantism for Catholicism,
in days when religious doctrine seemed to matter everything. More
keen it could not be. The dangers these new ideas present could not
be greater in our eyes than in the eyes of our forefathers were the
dangers of false doctrine three centuries ago. But the principle
which demands that they shall be free to state their case and to make
converts remains always the same. Nevertheless it is unlikely to be
granted without struggle except by an intelligent minority.
The religious movement of the twentieth century, I say again, is not
doctrinal but social; and its scripture is not the Bible or any written
word, but human nature itself.
We are on the brink of great discoveries in human nature, and many
of our ethical foundations are about to be gravely disturbed. The
old Manichee dread of the essential evil--the original and engrained
sin--of human nature remains with us still, and there will be a great
temptation, as there always has been, not merely to controvert (which
is permissible) but to persecute and suppress those who preach new
ideas. It is against such discreditable conduct that we have now to be
on our guard.
At the threshold of this new era to which we have come, with our old
civilisation so broken and shattered about us by our own civilising
hands, the guiding spirit of man’s destiny has its new word to say,
to which we must listen with brave ears. And first and foremost it is
this, “Stand upon thy feet--and I will speak with thee.”
WHAT IS WOMANLY?
(1911)
The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here--the
women of my audience, I mean--in a very bristling and combative frame
of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to
what is or what is not “womanly.” I hope, that is to say, that you are
not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a
man--or, for that matter, by a woman either.
For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman’s social
effectiveness until she has secured full right of way--a right of way
equal to man’s--in all directions of mental and physical activity, or,
to put it in one word, the right to experiment?
There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into
their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first
performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their
results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract
right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in
the world’s moral progress the really effective results have generally
come by shock of attack upon, or of resistance to, some cherished
conventions of the day.
Take, for example, a thing which has seemed to concern only the male
sex, but which has really concerned women just as intimately--the
history of our male code of honour in relation to the institution of
duelling. There was a time in our history when it would have been very
difficult to regard as manly the refusal to fight a duel. But it is
not difficult to-day to see in such a refusal a very true manliness.
We in this country have got rid of the superstition that honour can in
any way be mended by two men standing up to take snap-shots at each
other; and now that we are free from the superstition ourselves, we can
understand, looking at other countries--Germany, for instance--that it
must often require more courage to refuse to fight than to consent. But
we have arrived at that stage of enlightenment only because in our own
history there have been men courageous enough and manly enough to dare
to be thought unmanly and cowardly. And as with our manhood so with
our womanhood; you cannot judge of what is womanly merely on the lines
of past conventions, produced under circumstances very different from
those of our own days. You must give to women as you give to men the
right to experiment, the right to make their own successes and their
own failures. You cannot with good results lay upon men and women, as
they work side by side in the world (very often under hard competitive
conditions) the incompatible rules which govern respectively a living
language and a dead language. A living language is constantly in
flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its
grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives. In a dead language
the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is
fixed; but the use and the meaning often remain doubtful. And so, if
you attempt to determine the woman’s capabilities merely by her past
record, and to fix the meaning of “womanliness” in any way that forbids
flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of
the word very doubtful.
Now, obviously, if to be “womanly” means merely to “strike an average,”
and be as like the majority of women as possible--womanliness as a
quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord,
and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It
stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable
demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific.
To be what Henry James calls “intensely ordinary” is, from the
evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running.
We see this directly we start applying the word “manly” to men.
For we do not take that to mean merely average quality--if it did,
over-eating, over-drinking, and that form of speech which I will call
over-emphasis--would all be manly qualities--and the evolution of the
race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts
of over-indulgence. But when we say “manly,” we mean the pick and
polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to
develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes
an insistence on freedom--freedom for development, so that all that is
in him may be brought out for social use.
Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the
undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens.
And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection
toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites--of the energies
which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite
sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as
ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of
these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in
economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are
many people who (viewing this problem of woman’s subjection where the
savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is “womanly”
to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the
woman’s nature to be so more than it is the man’s; for, like Milton, in
his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word
“subjection” first and foremost. That condition, which, according to
Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was,
you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential
even to the paradisal state; and when in _Paradise Lost_ he laid down
this law of “subjection” as the right condition for unfallen womanhood,
he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to
operate. The woman was to subject herself to man--
“with submission,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making
herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side
as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.
Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure
of this--that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly
for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or
in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone
else--whether it be her children or her husband--may over-indulge.
It _is_ womanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or
starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather
than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly
or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits
to the starving of herself or of her children by a drunken or a
lazy husband is not in any positive sense womanly--for she is then
proving herself ineffective for her social task. And she would be more
effective, and therefore more womanly, if she could, by any means you
like to name, drive that lazy husband into work, or abstract from that
drunken husband a right share of his wages. And if by making his home
a purgatory to him she succeeded, she would be more womanly in the
valuable sense of the word than if (by submission to injustice) she
failed, and let her children go starved.
Then, again, a woman may see that the children she and her husband
are producing ought never to have been born. And if that is so, is it
womanly for her to go on bearing children at the dictates of the man,
even though St. Paul says, “Wives, obey your husbands”? Is she any more
womanly, if she knowingly brings diseased offspring into the world,
than he is manly in the fathering of them?
But now, come out of the home into Society--not into any of those
departments of unsolved problems where humanity is seen at its
worst--pass all those by for the moment--and come to the seat of
administration--into that great regulator of Society, the law-courts
(in the superintendence and constitution of which woman is conspicuous
by her absence). There, as in matters connected with the male code of
honour, any duty of initiative on the part of women may seem, at first
sight, to be far removed. But let us see! In the law-courts you meet
with a doctrine--a sort of unwritten law--that there are certain cases
to which women must not listen. And occasionally “all decent women” are
requested to leave the court, when “decent” men are allowed to stay.
Now, in the face of that request it must be a very painful thing indeed
for a woman to hold her ground--but it may be womanly for her to do
so. It may be that in that case there are women witnesses; and I do
not think our judges sufficiently realise what mental agony it may be
to a woman to give evidence in a court where there are only men. I am
quite sure that in such cases, if the judge orders women generally out
of court, he ought to provide one woman to stand by the woman in the
witness-box. How would any man feel, if he were called before a court
composed only of women, women judges, a woman jury, women reporters,
and saw all men turned out of the court before he began his evidence?
Would he feel sure that it meant justice for him? I think not.
Now these cases to which women are not to listen almost always
specially concern women; yet here you have men claiming to deal with
them as much as possible behind the woman’s back, and to keep her in
ignorance of the lines on which they arrive at a conclusion. Surely,
then, it would be well for women of expert knowledge and training to
insist that these things shall not be decided without women assessors,
and to be so “womanly” as to incur the charge of brazenness and
immodesty in defending the woman’s interest, which in such matters is
also the interest of the race.
But it is only very gradually--and in the face of immemorial
discouragement--that this communal or social spirit, when it began to
draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced
the reproach raised against it, of “unwomanliness,” of an intrusion
by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of
the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of
the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had
to throw over at each stage of its advance--things to which beautiful
names have been given, things which were assumed all through the
Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in
the woman’s nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish.
The ideal of woman’s life was that she should live unobserved except
when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive
husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase
enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, “Happy the woman who has no history.”
Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which
during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of
struggle, the history of woman’s social development; and every fresh
effort of that social spirit to find itself and to become effective has
always had to face, at the beginning of each new phase in its activity,
the charge of unwomanliness.
Compare that attack, fundamental in its nature, all-embracing in
its condemnation, with the kind of attack levelled against the
corresponding manifestations of the social or reforming spirit in
man. In a man, new and unfamiliar indications of a stirring-up of the
social conscience may earn such epithets of opprobrium as “rash,”
“hot-headed,” “ill-considered,” “impracticable,” “utopian”--but
we do not label them as “unmanly.” Initiative, fresh adventure of
thought or action in man have always been regarded as the natural
concomitant of his nature. In a woman they have very generally been
regarded as unnatural, unwomanly. The accusation is fundamental: it
does not concern itself with any unsoundness in the doctrines put
forward; but only with the fact that a woman has dared to become their
mouthpiece or their instrument. Go back to any period in the last 200
years, where a definitely new attempt was made by woman toward civic
thought and action, and you will find that, at the time, the charge
of “unwomanliness” was levelled against her; you find also that in
the succeeding generation that disputed territory has always become
a centre of recognised womanly activity. Take, for instance, the
establishment of higher training for girls; there are towns in this
country where the women, who first embarked on such a design, were
jeered and laughed at, and even mobbed. And the same thing happened in
an even greater degree to the women who sought to recover for their own
sex admission to the medical profession: and while the charge levelled
against them was “unwomanliness,” it was yet through their instincts
of reserve and sex-modesty that their enemies tried to defeat them.
Even when they gained the right of admission to medical colleges there
were lecturers who tried, by the way they expressed themselves in their
lectures, to drive them out again.
Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she
volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the
opposition to a woman’s invasion of a department where men had shown a
hopeless incompetence at once based itself on the plea that such a task
was “unwomanly.” Though in their own homes from time immemorial, women
had been nursing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, servants,
masters, through all the refined and modestly-conducted diseases to
which these lords of creation are domestically subject, directly one
woman proposed to carry her expert knowledge into a public department
and nurse men who were strangers to her, she was told that she was
exposing herself to an experience which was incompatible with womanly
modesty. Well, she was prepared to let her womanly modesty take its
risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty
or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the
charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember,
for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great
work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home,
their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so,
breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to
be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home,
the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless
campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so
raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige
alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women
which we have in our hospitals to-day.
Take again the special and peculiar opposition which women had to face
when they began to agitate against certain laws which particularly
affected the lives of women and did cruel wrong to them even in their
home relations. Read the life of Caroline Norton, for instance--a woman
whose husband brought against her a public charge of infidelity, though
privately admitting that she was innocent; and when, after that charge
was proved to be baseless, she separated from her husband, refusing to
live with him any more, then he, in consequence of that refusal cut
her off absolutely from her children, though they were all under seven
years of age. That wrong, which our laws had immemorially sanctioned,
roused her to action, and it was through her efforts, so long ago as
1838, that the law was altered so as to allow a mother of unblemished
character right of access to her own children during the years of early
infancy!
And that is how the law still stands to-day--a woman’s
contribution--the most that could be done at the time for justice
to women. But there is no statue to Caroline Norton in Parliament
Square--or anywhere else, so far as I know.
But what I specially want to draw attention to is this--that when
she wrote the pamphlet with which she started her agitation all
her relatives entreated her not to publish it, because it would be
an exposure to the world of her own private affairs. By that time,
however, Caroline Norton had learned her lesson in “womanliness,” and
she no longer said “Happy is the woman who has no history.” Her answer
was: “There is too much fear of publicity among women: with women it
is reckoned a crime to be accused, and such a disgrace that they wish
nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it.”
Does not that set forth in all its weakness the conventional womanly
attitude of the period?
The Bill which, through her efforts, was brought three times before
Parliament, was at first defeated. How? By the votes of the Judges,
to whom the House of Lords left the matter to be decided. And Lord
Brougham, in speaking against that Bill used this line of argument:
There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity
inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those
which are not necessary--the necessary hardships being the greater;
and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that
the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind!
Was ever a more perverted and devilish interpretation given to the
Scripture, “To him that hath shall be given, and from her that hath not
shall be taken even that which she hath.”
Let us remember that we are the direct descendants and inheritors of
the age and of the men who pronounced these unjust judgments, and that
no miracle has happened between then and now to remove the guilt of
the fathers from the third and the fourth generation. Heredity is too
strong a thing for us to have any good ground for believing that our
eyes, even now, are entirely opened. There are many of us who cannot
drink port at all, because our grandfathers drank it by the bottle
every night of their lives.
We inherit constitutions, personal and political--we also inherit
proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied
and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs
expressed once--else they had not become proverbs--an almost universal
contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have
of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no
more. But their source and incentive are still quite recognisable; and
their dwindled spirit still lives in our midst.
There was one, for instance, on which genteel families were brought up
in the days of my youth--a rhymed proverb which laid it down that--
A whistling woman and a crowing hen
Are hateful alike to God and men.