WHAT IS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT?
“Ole Uncle S., sez he, ‘I guess
It is a fact,’ sez he,
‘The surest plan to make a Man
Is, Think him so, J. B.,
Ez much ez you or me!’”
J. R. LOWELL.
It is often said that the women’s movement is chaotic, that no one knows
whither the modern woman is going, nor even whither she wants to go;
woman is, in fact, adrift, having lost her helm (or perhaps only the
helmsman), and is going, full steam, all round the compass.
It is very much easier to make such assertions, at least they sound
less preposterous, if one keeps to the rhetorical singular and begs
the whole question at issue by assuming that women are one in need,
capacity and character, and that this eternal feminine has been once
for all dissected, understood and catalogued, and that all variations
are merely caprice. But let us drop the singular and we shall see that
although women want as many different things as there are different
women, there are two things which the women in the movement consciously
desire and strive for beyond all others, and these are knowledge and
scope. The women’s movement is one to open the doors of the world to
women: that they may know the nature of their own bodies (to every mother
her workshop), and the bodies of men, their mates, not according to the
teaching of the schools and churches, but in the light of modern science;
that they may have in their ranks women who know the condition of law
and medicine and affairs; that the mind and character of women shall be
enabled to play upon these matters with knowledge, and shall present to
the world the complementary view to that given by the mind and character
of men.
In so far as the deepest needs of men and women are one, men suffer as
well as women from the ignorance or degradation of women; a stream cannot
rise higher than its source, and men are the sons of women. In so far as
the bodies and minds, the lives and experiences of men and women differ,
in so far do both men and women suffer, if the specifically feminine
character is unillumined by science, the specifically feminine activity
hampered and checked by external law or economic necessity.
In this striving for knowledge and scope the women are in sympathy with
the spirit of the time. Scientific men have abandoned the invention of
worlds and have betaken themselves to the study of the world presented to
them, in most matters except those in which sex plays a part. Here there
are still some who talk about “Ideal Woman,” or “Normal Woman,” of being
unsexed by knowledge and liberty, as if by nature women were unwomanly,
and nothing but the stern restraints of darkness and bondage could keep
them natural. In asking that these restraints should be removed, women
are demanding the only conditions under which any really scientific
generalisations can be made about woman’s sphere and woman’s nature.
As lately as the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Norton wrote:—
“He has made me dream that it was meant for a higher and
stronger purpose, that gift which came not from man but from
God! It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others,
to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws, to ask
the nation of gallant gentlemen whose countrywoman I am, for
once to hear a woman’s pleading on the subject. Not because
I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know,
on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than
I,—more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,—have
watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that
in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others.
Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs,
but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the
power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong, which
few women are able to do.”
Mrs. Norton knew what was the state of the law, having suffered cruelly
from it, and there was, in her day, very little chance of any women
knowing the law, except through just such personal bitter suffering. Few
women, as she truly said, could combine this knowledge with the powers
of exposition, agitation and eloquence which so distinguished her. This
is less true now than it was then. Progressive women are determined that
it shall cease to be true altogether. They are increasingly devoting
themselves to studying the complex social system into which they are born
and are themselves introducing new lives; they are supplementing the
intuitions of motherhood with the reasonings of science; they are finding
in the knowledge of racial poisons justification for what has hitherto
been simple racial instinct. The defilement or the abuse of marriage by
men, which has hitherto been regarded as venial, because the wife and
child were property, acquire quite a different colour when women as well
as men know the effects upon the race. It is possible to tell devoted
ignorant wives that it is their part to endure all and never to refuse.
Medical men have kept silence, priests have preached and lawyers have
advised submission, and ignorant mothers have handed on these precepts
to their daughters. “La femme est née pour souffrir,” says one mother of
daughters; and the more woman suffers, the more truly womanly she is.
“Entbehren sollst du,” quotes the anti-suffragist,—to women only,—and
sacrifice, _quâ_ sacrifice, has been made the woman’s idol. But when
she gets to know that the sacrifice is depriving her of motherhood or
poisoning the children to come, how then? Will she be so much in love
with sacrifice? Can anyone believe that a woman will retain the old
attitude towards marriage after she has learnt the causes of many of
the congenital diseases of children, or of what are ironically termed
“diseases of women”? Whatever the view of enlightened women will be (and
I decline altogether to prophesy), of one thing we may be quite certain,
their view will be prodigiously changed by the light.
Women will not only obscurely feel, they will know; when they know, there
is no power on earth that can prevent them from acting. The only question
is whether they shall act freely, or whether their informed energy shall
be thwarted, diverted and suppressed to the point of explosiveness and
to the embitterment of their lives and characters. In Great Britain, at
the present time, this question is acute; but it is being put all the
world over, and different nations are answering it in different ways, and
finding it amazingly difficult to learn from each other’s experience. Do
we not even find English people prophesying direst results if the causes
for divorce are made equal as between men and women, and these people are
left open-mouthed when informed that in the northern portion of Great
Britain they are so? While others declare that the mere notion of a woman
being a Member of Parliament, of a jury, or of the police force, must be
the cause of inextinguishable laughter, thereby convicting themselves of
bad manners towards two European nations and the United States of America.
The wisest among those who educate the young are disbelieving in the
doctrine of original sin; they no longer regard education as violently
forcing a child into moulds; they believe that in giving scope for
natural energy the teacher is doing almost all that a teacher can
profitably do; they think that as the human race has evolved into two
sexes which are indispensable to one another, the better they understand
one another the closer will be their sympathy and co-operation with each
other, and that, therefore, the segregation of the sexes is bad. The
subjection of one sex to the other is also bad, since the slave-owner
never can really know the slave, while the knowledge the slave has of
her owner is bitter fruit. In the art of medicine, doctors are more and
more setting themselves to remove obstructions to health. Even the penal
codes of the world are slowly becoming less and less retributive. Women,
therefore, are in the direct line of progressive thought when they demand
that their vital force shall not be circumscribed and shackled, but that
men shall give them the same scope as they claim for themselves. And
progressive women declare that liberty will tend to assuage the war of
the sexes, which is as old as the domination of man.