PHYSICAL FORCE
“He will not read her good,
Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
Through that dense hood:
Through terror, through distrust;
The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:
Through all that makes of him a sensitive
Abhorring dust.”
GEORGE MEREDITH.
In the last chapter the question was put whether women are intellectually
and morally inferior to men, and the conclusion was that this was a
question incapable of solution, certainly now, and probably always;
furthermore, that, even if it were answered in the affirmative, this
would be no reason for denying to women opportunities for their fullest
development. We now come to another sort of superiority, which is
capable of proof, which has been proved to demonstration and which of
itself accounts perfectly for the subjection of women during the ages of
human development in the past. This is, of course, the superiority of
men as a whole, over women as a whole, in size, weight and muscle. It
seems doubtful whether, among races where women have the same physical
discipline as men, they are any less enduring of fatigue, and there are
some hardships, such as shortage of food, broken nights and severe pain,
which women seem better adapted to bear than men. Again, of men and women
engaged in the same employment, such as the teaching profession—in which
no one can say that women have the lighter task, for which women are
much less highly paid, and which very rarely represents the whole of the
work the woman teacher is expected to get through in the day—the women
live longer than the men. The superiority of the male over the female in
size, weight and muscle seems the only one established beyond doubt, and
as this superiority is seen in most of the animals, there is a strong
presumption that it is not entirely due to artificial conditions of
feeding, exercise and so forth. The extraordinary increase in the average
size of British girls during the last hundred or even fifty years shows,
however, that semi-starvation, lack of exercise and of the nervous energy
which comes from hope and a purpose in life, were the purely artificial
causes of the extreme weakness of the weaker sex during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments that have been made in
the reaction-time and relative sensibility of boys and girls, suffer
from the circumstance that the subjects experimented upon could not be
scientifically treated, and all that the experiments prove is that boys,
often fed and always reared differently from girls, showed slightly
quicker reaction-time, and, in a few cases, slightly more developed
sensibility. Anyone who has begun to realise the extremely complex causes
of good and bad nutrition and its close dependence on mental states will
put himself the question whether the confined, thwarted, and monotonous
lives of girls have not counted for very much in the imperfect nutrition
of their nerves and therefore in their lack of initiative and response.
But now, of this undoubted muscular superiority of men. What has it led
to? In early stages of civilisation, Might was Right. A man took what
he could and kept it if he could. Nations and governments were founded
on the same principle of self-protection and self-aggrandisement, and
empires followed. Women did not escape this law of the strongest. In
addition to what seems a congenital muscular inferiority, women had the
enormous handicap (for fighting purposes) of motherhood. The nine months
of gestation and the succeeding period of nourishing and cherishing the
infant were, and are, and always will be sufficient reason why women
cannot successfully resist men by force. Not infrequently have I heard
women, and much more frequently men, say on public platforms that it is
not true that women cannot fight; that some women are stronger than some
men, and that women are only prevented by men from enrolling in the army
and defending their country. This always seems to me the silliest stuff.
How could men prevent women from fighting if women wanted to fight and
were as strong as men? If women were as strong as men and as fond of
using their strength in fight, and if they desired their enfranchisement,
how is it that they have not fought for it and won it long ago? But the
women’s battle is a far harder one: it is to induce men to give up the
primary impulses of animal nature at the command of reason and knowledge;
to refrain from taking what they _can_ take, from commanding where they
can enforce obedience. And this is a battle which was begun ages ago, and
in every age has had its victories,—victories due, not to the pitting of
physical force against physical force, but, first, to man’s deep need
of woman, which prevented him from destroying her, as he destroyed all
other weaker creatures when he had no use for them, and, second, to the
mutual love of man and woman and their common bond in the child. Physical
force is a great and vastly important part of the forces wielded by man,
but it never has been the only one, and it is increasingly being brought
under the dominion and guidance of other forces. Women, too, have their
physical force, without which the race would be extinguished; and, in the
last resort, if we could imagine the brutality of man contemplating a war
_à outrance_ against women, their strength would be found to lie, not in
the fact that they could conquer men in a physical conflict, but that
they could die. For those who can only read what is explicit, I hasten
to add that I do not believe such a state of things could ever arise,
although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of
exterminating the enemy’s women.
If we find some of the women’s champions a little hazy on this matter,
their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of
some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of
anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance
of physical force as a “regrettable fact,” do lip-service to the gospel
of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and
probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and
heartfelt declaration that it was “only just and right that men, who
alone can enforce the law, should make the law.” Now, if it is right and
just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is
not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is
not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based
upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral
sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny
the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This
is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that
man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all
over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such
domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist
does not deny that nations can wage wars; what he says is that war, at
the present time, and between civilised countries, is “bad business.” I
do not deny that most men could knock most women down; I say it would
be bad business to use this power, and I believe that most civilised
men would agree that it would be bad business, that they have no desire
to rule women in this way, and that society will be much healthier and
happier when men as a whole abandon the practice altogether. And the
anti-suffragists who make such statements about men have so low an
opinion of them that I am ashamed for them.
Another frequent absurdity of anti-suffrage argument is the assertion
that we wish to destroy physical force, and that if we succeed, we shall
become the easy prey of other less foolish nations. Now, to wish that
physical force shall be controlled by knowledge, intelligence and right
is not to desire its destruction; on the contrary. There is no enemy of
health and vigour so subtle and so strong as ignorance and incontinence.
It is not love and kindness, temperance, soberness and chastity which sap
a nation’s strength and make its young men to fail when tested; it is
ignorance, or disregard of nature’s laws, the sweating and overcrowding
of millions, the slackness and self-indulgence of those whom their more
fortunate conditions should have made leaders of men. It is to the
interest of men that women should do their work well, and under the
dominion of physical force, of fear and compulsion, women can never do
their best work.
Women are making great claims: they are not only claiming that the men
of their own land shall not govern them by physical force alone, but
they are making what, to some quite honest people, seems an outrageous
claim,—that they should have a right to an equal share with men in
deciding foreign policy and the question of war. They claim this right,
because they believe that it would be for the good of the State, and
because they think the State owes it to them because they are citizens
and not parasites; because they are doing an absolutely indispensable
work and making sacrifices which are at least equal to the sacrifices men
make for the safety, honour and welfare of the State. Let us examine into
the grounds of this plea.
At an open-air meeting a man approached the speaker with what he
evidently regarded as a poser: “If you get a man’s rights, will you
women fulfil a man’s responsibilities?” It was a good question to ask
at an open-air meeting, where close reasoning is almost impossible,
and the answer, “No,” brought a sneering, “Ah, I _thought_ not!” and a
round of applause from the youths round the cart, who didn’t look as if
they had thought much about even a lad’s responsibilities. The heckler
was, of course, begging the question. By talking of “a man’s rights”
he did not merely mean the rights which a man can now by law exercise;
he implied that a man held these rights by virtue of certain services
rendered by him, and that, if women claimed these same rights, they must
be prepared to render these same services. I will deal in a subsequent
chapter with the question whether, as a matter of fact, voting rights
are, in modern England, dependent upon the military service or upon the
physical force of the men who exercise them. For the moment I wish to
discuss the ethical and social consequences of asserting that only one
kind of service entitles a person to liberty, and that service being the
taking of life, women, whose service consists in the giving of life,
are not entitled to liberty. “A man’s responsibilities!” Let us take
them at their very hardest. Let us contemplate the ideal world of the
anti-suffragist, where man goes out daily to his toil in the cruel world—
“commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
while woman lies “warm at home, secure and safe.” He, if fighting is to
be done, fights for home and country; she has no more arduous part than
to weep, while he is away, and welcome home the victor. But stay! This
version of affairs always assumes that the man is the victor. Have not
the vanquished wives, too? Study the picture of any war, even the most
modern and the most “civilised.” Are the women of the vanquished, the
invaded country, “secure and safe”? From the tale of the Trojan women
to the latest reports of Bulgarian or Servian atrocities, we find all
truthful records give the lie to this rosy picture. Men who go to war
have the honour and the glory, the bands and the banners, the stars and
medals and monuments and maybe the glorious death. Women die, and see
their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame
unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their
lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all
that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to
administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are
killed, are their “responsibilities” killed with them? When the flower
of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and
beget the men of the future?
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,
The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,
Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
These are only some few of the questions that surge up in a woman’s
mind when men talk as if war concerned men only. But after all, in a
modern civilised state, is war the only thing that counts? Is soldiering
the only national service? Mr. Kipling’s grandiloquent phrase about
woman’s hindering hand on the warrior’s bridle rein makes men and women
who are mentally alive smile at its ludicrous inappropriateness to the
greater part of life as we live it. And if we admit that, fighting being
a man’s business, the details of how best to fight are properly left
to men to determine, can we refuse to admit that, child-bearing and
rearing being a woman’s business, the details of how to bear and rear
children are properly left to women to determine? And if the amount of
freedom persons possess depends on the amount of service they render
to the State (a principle which, as I have shown in Chapter II., I do
not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in
offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the
human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and
sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would
assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in
modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life.
Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding
reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion
which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation
I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to
advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they
shifted man’s claim to superiority from his military to his economic
qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people
are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that
will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will
ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.
In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption
that one frequently finds implicit in much of the feminist talk of the
present day—the assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved
physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising.
There are no signs of this in literature or history. If men have enjoyed
fighting, and gloried in bloodshed, as many still do, that is because
their blood was hot within them, and the women of their age and race
loved them for it. The experiences of men and women have each made for
civilisation, and women have not the man’s obvious temptation with
fists to try conclusions, since they are for the most part foregone
conclusions. If motherhood has been for much in the education of the
race, so have science and the love of the arts and beauty. Agriculture,
manufacture, commerce, even finance have engaged men’s hearts, and
more often than not turned them from war. War is waste and the women’s
movement may be taken as the type of all the great conflicts there have
been between coercion and development, bullying and understanding, love
and hate. What has been good in war has been the life-forces, the energy,
the joy that men have put into it. They are finding other conflicts than
those with their fellow-men, into which they can put these forces, and
the women’s movement, in part the cause, is also in great measure the
effect of the disappearance of barbarism.