THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.
I have said that the women who are in the movement are craving two
things, knowledge and scope. Many of those who are obstructing the
movement are loud in their professions that they, too, want women to know
more—about “womanly” matters; that they, too, desire that women should be
allowed to do—what they are “fit” for. And when the inquirer asks what
is womanly, and who is to be the arbiter, the reactionary replies, with
a pitying smile, that it is surely not necessary at this period in the
world’s history to ask what is womanly, and that the inquirer is rather
perverse than honest; that human nature is the same all the world over,
and much more particularly female human nature; that wise men down all
the ages have written books showing that women are instinctive rather
than logical, governed by the emotions, devoted to the individual and
regardless of the whole, incapable of concerted action; and that these
properties of woman, at any rate of normal woman, are specially devised
by Nature for the making of good mothers and for nothing else, and that,
moreover, the burden of motherhood which Nature has imposed upon women is
so great that they have, or should have, no time or capacity for anything
outside the exercise of that function.
I wish to declare at the outset that in my opinion any speculations about
women, any schemes for their education and their life-conditions which do
not take into account the fact that they alone can be the mothers of the
race, are thereby rendered worthless and foolish. We have not to consider
one generation only; even if some philosophers desire to do so, and if
individuals here and there, as they do and always will, achieve it, the
greatest of all impulses will drive to reproduction, and the strongest
of all desires, after those for self-preservation and self-fulfilment
(and frequently even before these), will be the desire of re-living in
the children and re-living better than now. I use the word re-living not
to mean that there is any survival of the conscious personality of the
individual in successive generations, but to suggest the imaginative and
purely altruistic contemplation of future generations which shall reap
where we have sown; this, I believe, is one of the deepest and purest
of those motive forces which lie beyond explanation or justification.
And when I have said this is my opinion, I wish to add that in a large
and varied experience of the so-called feminist movement, in England and
abroad, I have found the importance of motherhood more fully understood
and more religiously proclaimed by the women in the movement than by
any other women. That they are in revolt against much that law and
custom have laid upon motherhood is undoubted; also that they understand
motherhood in a far wider sense than the vulgar one, and that they do not
regard it as a specialised or vocational affair. It has been customary to
divide female humans into women and mothers; this is altogether false.
Women should not be trained to be mothers; to do so at once introduces
all sorts of arbitrary limitations and restrictions and hampers the very
mission it is designed to serve. Women should be trained to be whole
human beings; the measure of a woman’s motherhood, like the measure of
her love, is the measure of her whole nature. Cramp her nature, limit her
activities, and you cramp and limit her love and her motherhood.
Of course the reactionary replies that we are demanding for women more
than men have. That, if women have this great burden of motherhood, which
men have not, the rest of the load must be lightened in proportion. We
may all heartily agree that the load should be lightened, but who is
to decide upon that portion of it from which women are to be exempt?
Men only? Do we not find that reactionaries describe as a burden and a
care what progressives regard as a tool or a weapon? There are people
now, who, knowing that men have thought the franchise of such supreme
importance that they have rioted and fought and died during centuries of
the world’s history for the right to choose who should be their rulers,
yet assert that to give women an equal share in that choice would be to
impose a fresh burden upon them! In effect these people claim that women
do their work better when it is left to men to decide what that work
shall be and under what conditions it shall be performed; that, although
woman is the guardian of the race, and bears the burden of motherhood, it
is still to be left to man to dictate the terms of motherhood.
To us, on the other hand, it seems that no distinction of race or class
is so fundamental and ineradicable as the distinction of sex. Breeds may
be mixed, a rich man may become poor, or a poor man rich; a man may begin
life as an employed person, and end it as an employer, or _vice versa_;
alone from the cradle to the grave, man is man and woman is woman. When I
insist on this I do not overlook all the interesting and as yet unproven
speculations that are made as to the varying degrees of maleness and
femaleness that there may be in different individuals, nor do I subscribe
to the endless cocksure generalisings upon sexual variation (for until
we can separate acquired from inherited characteristics, we shall never
get very far); I am content to base the essential differences between
men and women upon the known fact that their share in reproduction is
different and produces difference of life, needs and temperament. How is
it possible then, more peculiarly in sex-relations, for men alone wisely
to prescribe to women?
For example. Because willingness to sacrifice is one of the attributes of
motherhood, it is too often assumed that the sacrifice of the woman must
be for the good of the race. Nature gives to each child two parents; man
in his wisdom makes the laws which assign one only, mother or father, as
may be most expedient for him,—never both,—and when he discusses racial
problems, he is very apt to attribute any shortcomings to the woman, who
“has only one task to perform and performs that badly.” He forgets that
the child may inherit not only personal qualities but racial poisons
from the father as from the mother, and that the liberty he denies the
woman in sexual relations (giving as his reason the sacredness of the
home and the family) has too often been used by him to the great damage
of the race. He forgets, too, that whereas fatherhood is voluntary,
motherhood by far too often is not. He adds laws to laws, dealing with
factories and workshops, and leaves the mother’s factory—the home—to take
its chance in the _sauve-qui-peut_ of industrialism. In Great Britain
he contrives a National Health Insurance Act and leaves out altogether
from its compulsory provisions the health of the mother in the home,
except for maternity benefit. In this same Insurance Act he arranges that
the maidens shall pay for the widows, and the women shall pay for the
unmarried mothers. And when death has removed the one parent whom the
law allows, public provision and private charity alike have seldom any
consolation to offer the widow who has lost her dearest, but to remove
from her motherly care all or some of the children left to her (now
undisputed) ownership. All these cruelties and absurdities are possible
because of the subjection of women.
Reactionaries on the women’s question may be divided into sentimental
and brutal reactionaries. The sentimentalists declare (very often in the
same breath) that women are not in subjection, and that they like being
in subjection, that progress lies along the lines of specialisation,
and that women should not “interfere” with men’s work. Women, they
aver, are not inferior to men, but true economy is shown by increased
division of labour: man’s to command, woman’s to obey. There is to be a
specialisation in the virtues, too. “Can we ever have,” asks Mr. Frederic
Harrison pathetically, “too much sympathy, generosity, tenderness and
purity? Can self-devotion, long-suffering and affection ever be a drug in
the market? Can our homes ever be too cheerful, too refined, too sweet
and affectionate? And is it degrading the sex of woman to dedicate her
specially to this task?”[2] (To me it seems “degrading the sex” of man
to suggest that he has no need to practise all these fine qualities,
but that he will practise them vicariously through woman, who is to be
dedicated specially to them.) The sentimentalists suggest that this
willing service women have for centuries rendered to men, and been happy
and good. The bold bad feminists have wantonly stirred up revolt, and
peace and happiness will only return when they have been routed and the
“awful rule and right supremacy” of man re-established.
I think we may dismiss without much argument the assertion that women are
not in subjection, and indeed, sooner or later, the reactionary always
gets tripped up on this ground. It is not possible to study our social
institutions without coming to the conclusion that they are the result
of the subjection of women and that many of them tend to perpetuate
that subjection. It is inconceivable that women, of their free and
enlightened will, would have chosen this position. That some women are
found to maintain that it is not subjection and they like it, is only a
proof of the mental and moral effects of subjection upon them. There is
a brave spirit which declares that “Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,” and much of women’s work has been done in that
spirit. Exceptional women have triumphed over their prison (at what
cost the life of the Brontës may show), but the world is not composed
of exceptional women, and the mass of women have been degraded by the
narrowness and irresponsibility of their lives. One is familiar with the
idealistic assertion that no one can injure you except you yourself. It
is a fine thing to hold to your sovereign will and force it to command
your life, but who can look round on the world as it is and not see
everywhere signs of how men and women degrade their fellows by cruelty,
carelessness and greed? It sounds like cant to tell the girl and boy who
have been reared in a slum and have never known decency that they need
not have allowed themselves to be degraded. It sounds like cant to tell
a woman she is not in subjection to men’s law when this law does not
allow that she is the parent of the child she has borne, and when men can
at any time, and do, deprive her of the inviolability of her own body
and of the right to earn an honest livelihood. No, it is not arguable
whether women nearly all over the world (and certainly in England) are in
subjection, and I do not intend to argue it. The only questions are, How
came they so? Are the causes eternal and irremovable? Would it be well if
they were removed?
I confess to a much higher regard for the honest brutalitarian than for
the sentimentalist; for the man or woman who says candidly that women
are subject to men because they are inferior to men, either physically,
or intellectually, or both. Even among these there is a tendency to
allow, with a shrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left
wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or
for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for
a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole
way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a
whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than
men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence
is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical
superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and
moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly
conducted entirely by the light of one’s predispositions, and which leads
nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it
except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those
who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force
they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly
the faults encouraged by subjection. Men’s standards have been applied
to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have
been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have
evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while.
It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman
has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be
that women’s lack of genius in the arts is due to some inferiority of
mind, or it may be due to an essential incapacity for or an artificial
prohibition of the passionate, concentrated egoism, which alone can
produce the greatest works of imagination. The special pleader against
women will declare that if they had any capacity at all, it would have
shown itself in music and painting, for young ladies have always been
encouraged to sing and to play and to sketch. And as for poetry, it is
only necessary to have pencil and paper and—genius. As if the kind of
parlour tricks that used to be expected of marriageable young ladies had
any relation at all to creative art! The eighteenth century or early
Victorian parent had a short way with any daughter who wished to take any
art seriously. We know how Maria Edgworth humbly submitted to have her
work blue-pencilled by her affectionate but inferior father, how Harriet
Martineau suffered from the endless task of shirt-making, how Jane Austen
hid her compositions under fancy work, lest visitors should suspect she
was that unsexed thing, an artist.
But the whole discussion whether women are mentally inferior to men is
indeed impertinent to the practical issue whether or no women should
have their lives and work controlled by men. Only by liberty of action
and scope for our powers can we develop healthily and harmoniously, and
the fact that so much of a woman’s life and experience lies altogether
outside what a man can experience should surely make men a little
diffident about dictating conditions. The opportunity to develop is not
a reward of virtue nor a prize for genius. Women, as well as men, should
have the fullest possible opportunities for development, not because
they are “equal” to men (a most unfortunate phrase), but because it is
good business, socially speaking, to develop all your human as well as
your material resources. The developed person will be more useful, more
companionable, more reasonable, more happy and more amusing than the
undeveloped. And if man be really the intellectual superior of woman, why
should he fear her competition?