THE WOMAN’S WOMAN: A PERSON
“… And, if we think of it, what does civilisation itself rest
upon—and what object has it, with its religions, arts, schools,
etc., but rich, luxuriant, varied Personalism? To that all
bends, and it is because toward such result Democracy alone, on
anything like Nature’s scale, breaks up the limitless fallows
of humankind, and plants the seed, and gives fair play, that
its claims now precede the rest.”—WALT WHITMAN, _Democratic
Vistas_.
In the last chapter mention was made of the tyranny of an ideal. Man
thinks of the qualities he finds desirable in a woman and compounds an
ideal woman out of these qualities, and then proceeds to call “unsexed”
the real women of flesh and blood who do not conform or pretend to
conform to this ideal. The older women have very naturally helped him to
maintain these ideals; they were reared in them, and they have feared
lest it might be difficult to find provision for their daughters, unless
they kept the daughters strictly to the dedicated ways. They were wrong,
as timid people nearly always are wrong. The free woman, with a character
and a will of her own, is not only happier and more useful, but she is
proving herself far more attractive than the colourless submissive ideal.
We have been wearied out with talk of the ideal woman, and now there
comes a change, but it is more apparent than real. We hear now a good
deal about a person called by the name of Normal Woman. Men who have done
good work in some particular corner of scientific research have been
largely responsible for the respect with which this talk about Normal
Woman has been received, but when you come to look at her, you will find
that she is merely Ideal Woman dressed up in scientific terms, and that
the author of her being is no other than the Old Adam. It often seems
to me that the common people, with no notion of general principles or
of scientific and philosophic methods, cannot wander so fantastically
far from truth and justice and common humanity as your man of science,
when his sex-vanity has been hurt or his prerogative of pure egoism has
been disturbed. The denunciations of scientific men have, fortunately,
been robbed of many of their terrors by the work of women in biology and
medicine. It would be only human if scientific women showed traces of
their sex in their work, just as men do, but that these are very slight
is suggested by the complaint of Sir Almroth Wright, who declared, in
his widely read letter to _The Times_ (March 1912), that medical women
violated the “modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has
been built up,” by putting above these their scientific “desire for
knowledge.” One has seldom read a more splendid tribute to the courage
and candour of women,—a tribute all the more splendid because so entirely
involuntary,—for women know how scientific men of the type of Sir Almroth
Wright have made the path of scientific knowledge a very Calvary for
modest women. It is nothing to men of this type that the modesties of our
civilisation should in the past have led to our women being handled and
examined in hospital by youths of the sort common among medical students;
that the reticences of this same civilisation should have led to many
men and nearly all women being ignorant of all that goes to the building
of a healthy and moral nation. Sir Almroth declares that man “cannot and
does not wish to work side by side with women.” Some men may not, but Sir
Almroth is slandering his own sex when he makes the assertion for all
mankind. The pioneer work of women of science was made possible by the
existence of large numbers of scientific men willing to teach women. We
may make a pretty shrewd guess at the reasons why some scientific men do
not wish women to study science, for have not the medical and scientific
women already, by their work, exploded many of the old fictions about
women, and so put heart and hope into millions of women who felt their
powers, but hardly dared believe in them, because of the dead weight of
what they were told was science? They have now learned that all that is
put forth by a scientific man is not science, and that when sex comes
into his calculations it is apt to be a very serious disturbance to
clear thought. It seems to be a fact that men are as a rule far more
conscious than women of the existence of sex in every relation of life,
and if there be something in the speculations of biologists concerning
the presence of male and female elements in the human female, there may
be a very profound reason for this difference in outlook; but it seems
like midsummer madness to say that the one of the two sexes who is most
homogeneous in the elements of sex shall be the only one who shall have
freedom to know and speculate and experiment, for it is clear that that
one would be the one less likely to have sympathies wide enough to
include both sexes.
What is the line the scientific reactionaries adopt? They abandon Ideal
Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation,
to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is
peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women;
they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed
to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained.
When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that
woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly
the logical result of this tyranny of thought. It simplifies the side
of life which has no obvious reference to themselves if they can make
pigeon-holes all of one size and shape, label them Normal Woman and
stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste
is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes’ bed was
for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then
found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and
children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be
those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence
on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn’t exist; she is
a figment of men’s minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree
from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the
biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or
exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has
only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Brontë, of the
limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had
so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and
of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman
loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Brontë did not love children;
yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them,
and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have
been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Brontë had been given
the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was
a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she
herself might have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn
courage of this woman of genius during years of soul-imprisonment and
starvation should surely help to break down these stupid and wasteful
cruelties.
The enthusiasts for Normal Woman do not entirely deny that here and
there an exceptional woman may suffer from the restrictions of a woman’s
life, but they suggest that these sufferings are exaggerated, and affect
only the exceptional women, and in any case only matter to the sufferer
herself. It is wonderful with what complacency people can contemplate the
sufferings of others; wonderful, too, the assumption that “exceptional”
women are negligible, as if it were not, after all, only among the
exceptional that we might hope to find genius. These people will tell
you that women have never done anything which the world would have
missed, except the one work of mothering the race. Therefore to this work
they should be restricted. Women will never, so they say, be anything
but third-rate in arts or sciences or crafts; they can be superlative
mothers; let them concentrate on that. If they do not, it is darkly
suggested that they will lose even the capacity for mothering, and then,
where will they be? And, what is worse, where will men be?
Sometimes these views are advanced with all the thunders of an angry
prophet; sometimes, more in sorrow than in anger, it is suggested that
woman will sooner or later return to weep on the breast of man, and
beg to be allowed, like Katharine, the Shrew, to lay her hand beneath
his foot. To do otherwise would argue in the fair sex (to use the
denunciatory language of Sir James FitzJames Stephen) a “base, mutinous
disposition,” which we sincerely hope she has not. In the words of Mr.
Garvin (_Pall Mall Gazette_, 30th July 1913), “we can only hope that,
whatever the woman of the future may prove to be, some of the womanliness
which we knew when Victoria was Queen will remain in her, and that, when
the first force of revolt is spent, she will once more realise the full
glory of wifehood and motherhood. On that point we have no great fear,
for, whatever her vagaries, woman will remain woman at heart.” I should
like to rescue this exquisite piece of fatuity from oblivion, to make
merry the hearts of future generations of men and women.
Now, as regards genius, we may know how much genius women have in some
hundreds of years, when they have been free to develop according to
their natures. The kind of emotional tyranny to which women have been
subjected is the most crushing of all, and men have never had to undergo
this particular sort of tyranny, so that it is not in the least true to
say that if women had had any genius it would have overcome tyranny, as
men’s genius has done. No man has ever known what it is to be born of
the more sensitive, sympathetic, conscientious and affectionate sex,
and to be reared in an atmosphere where insult and hate followed on
any expression of genius, where cold discouragement was the best that
a woman could expect from her own people, and where the wooing from
her own work has taken that most insidious of all forms for duty-loving
woman—the claims of others to her care and service. Those who hold the
theory of the norm would, however, exclaim “God forbid that women should
become geniuses! We don’t _like_ women geniuses, and, moreover, genius
will interfere with motherhood.” If one of the necessities for genius
is intense egotism (because no great work can be done without intense
concentration, and this is impossible if the attention is perpetually
switched off in order to do other people’s bidding), there is something
to be said for the notion that genius will interfere with motherhood;
that is to say, with the capacity or the desire of the genius to fulfil
the ordinary functions of motherhood. It is a common assertion that a
woman fulfils herself completely in motherhood, but this is manifestly
not true of the woman who wants to think about the higher mathematics, or
who has a genius for organising masses. This does not dismay me at all.
Why, after all, should the genius be a mother? And if she be, could she
not find motherly women to bring up the children? It is mere delusion
to insist that in all cases, without exception, the mother is the best
person to tend the babies, and no one even suggests that the mother
should be the sole educator of children when they have passed babyhood. I
am not apprehensive that the mass of women will ever become geniuses and
so cease to provide the men and women of the future. It seems clear to
common sense that geniuses will be few, and that it is mere cant for men,
who contemplate quite serenely the existence of several million spinsters
in England, to cry out in dismay at the notion of a singular genius, here
and there, as the mysterious forces of nature may provide. The existence
of these millions of spinsters _is_ an exceedingly serious matter,
because many of them probably desire intensely to be mothers, and would
be good ones; but it is only when the egoistic man fears that the unmated
woman may be active and content, that his sensitive vanity is up in arms,
and he is dismayed at the notion of a woman, of her free choice, forgoing
man. He is content there should be millions of spinsters, if only they
are unhappy.
Perhaps a eugenist will here intervene and say that we want the best
women to be mothers, and therefore the potential genius should sacrifice
her individual opportunity, in order to become the possible mother of
male geniuses. But it will not be easy to persuade the woman of the
future that she should resist the inspiration which she knows she feels,
in order to produce children who may not, and, in fact, probably will
not, possess the inspiration. It is very natural for man to say to woman,
“You shall give me not only your love, you shall give me your genius”;
but she cannot do it, for in the very dark and difficult problems which
heredity presents to us, it is rare indeed to find a genius the son of a
genius. If George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never written
a line, we may doubt exceedingly whether the work of Maurice or of Robert
Barrett would have been any better than it was. I once heard a youthful
politician, now in Parliament, gravely oppose the eligibility of women
to Parliament, on the ground that, if women went into Parliament, their
babies would tumble into the fire. Now, quite apart from the circumstance
that very few of the wives of existing Members of Parliament act all day
and night as fireguards, there was this absurdity that there are only six
hundred and seventy Members of Parliament, and, if they were every one of
them women, there would still be many millions of mothers left to look
after the babies. It might—we may grant this to the alarmists—be very
uncomfortable if all women were, or tried to be, geniuses and Members
of Parliament, but the mere fact that they are not forbidden will not
make them all throw their energies in these directions, any more than it
afflicts men so.
Like so much of the talk about women, this about genius is very little
relevant to any practical problem. Even if it were true that women had
never shown, and never would show, genius in art or abstract science,
this is no reason for preventing them from using what ability they
have in the directions they prefer, and it seems very likely that they
have genius in directions hitherto almost forbidden to them; I mean
in organisation, and leadership, and in the power to govern. They
have certainly demonstrated their possession of many of the qualities
upon which the strength of the community is founded, and it is to the
advantage of the community that they should be allowed the free exercise
of those qualities.
Reactionary men of science try to frighten us, however, by maintaining
that the energetic use of any of woman’s strength is contrary to healthy
and efficient motherhood. They go on making these assertions, in spite
of the fact that women who live a laborious life, provided they are
not starved or neglected when they bring forth children, do it with
far greater ease than women who live in luxury and idleness. They talk
of metabolism and the necessity of a young girl storing up nourishment
during the years of her adolescence, as if a human creature were nothing
but a chemical factory and warehouse rolled into one. By the persistent
and wilful neglect of the mind, they are able to arrive at the most
astounding conclusions, and one wishes one could send them back half a
century to the nursery of those days, and make them learn that “Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” It is not only idle
hands, but idle hearts and minds that are a danger. If a girl’s mind is
caged and her education concentrated upon sex, it is not mothers you are
rearing, but lunatics, deficients, hystericals, and anæmics. The people
who talk as if a girl should be trained from childhood up for motherhood,
quite overlook the very real possibility of tiring out the instinct
before its time of fruition. There are very many girls who would have
had quite a healthy and natural fondness for babies, but who have had
the feeling literally worn out by premature exercise or by sentimental
pawing. A girl-child is not a small woman, and just as we should all
disapprove any attempt to make “little fathers” of the boys, so we should
disapprove the unhealthy endeavour to make “little mothers” of the girls.
If there is something pathetic about the small girl drudge, stunted with
carrying about heavy babies, there is something peculiarly offensive
about the prim little girl who rebukes her brothers for tearing their
clothes or dirtying their hands, when she ought herself to be likewise
engaged.
From the Census reports it appears that in England and Wales there are
nearly three and a half million spinsters over twenty years of age;
many of these will never marry, and the cruelty of bringing them up
to a vocation, which they will never be called upon to fulfil, should
be repugnant to all decent feeling, even if it would not in itself
constitute a danger. Such considerations do not trouble the sciolist
with a theory to run, for he calls the maidens a “superfluous portion
of the population,” or “waste products of our female population,”[5]
and proceeds to talk as if they could be set aside. But this piece of
Podsnappery would bring its own punishment, if it were widely adopted,
for undoubtedly the parasitic woman would be, in the future, as she has
been in the past, the most deadly enemy of man. The only sex-antagonism
that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to
repress or to get the better of the other. There is, in fact, absolutely
no practicable issue for this way of thinking except the simple plan of
the lethal chamber for the “waste products.”
The training of women as breeders only, would involve the complete
subjection of women to men, and consequently their complete dependence
on men; it would involve the return to pre-factory days (in itself,
perhaps, no bad thing, only no one knows how to do it), and to a state of
things which has been partly remedied by the Married Women’s Property and
Custody of Children Acts; a state in which it was possible to pass and
to administer the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts. It would mean that
women would no longer have university education and would be compelled,
as they used to be, to accept the assertions of men with regard to the
state of the law and the construction of their own bodies. It means
the withdrawal of women from the work of local councils and poor law
administration, from inspection, and from teaching. It means a state of
things which has never existed anywhere on this earth, and to avoid which
most women would prefer a thousand deaths. All this for the purpose of
producing finer children; but since the girl children would be of use
only for further breeding purposes, one may say that women would make
all these tremendous sacrifices for the sake of producing finer men. It
is a stiff demand to make even of the self-sacrificing sex! But would it
have the anticipated results?
The question brings us to the well-fought battle-ground of breeding
_versus_ environment. When a suffragist procession in the States
carried a banner declaring, “We prepare our children for the world;
we must prepare the world for our children,” there was an outcry from
some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a
nutshell: the first was woman’s job, the second was man’s. It was for
woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment.
A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further
division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do.
But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce
the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even
if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with
a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental
health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child
all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of
the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of
the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the
course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select
her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So that the first
part of the division of labour manifestly cannot take place. The man must
take part in preparing our children for the world. Can we really say that
man alone does or can prepare the world for our children? It is too late
in the day to tell us that, when every year that passes shows us more
plainly the injurious effects upon the race of the industrial system,
which is so largely the product of men’s minds, and of the great social
evils which were treated of in Chapters X. and XI., and which men have
so largely agreed to consider “necessary.” The theory of the cow-woman,
who shall do nothing but bear and suckle babies, is not, as some people
would have us believe, a revival of what once was and may be again. It
never was. The masses of women have always worked very hard indeed. Nor
will women be brought to accept it for the future. Degraded as women
often have been, they have always had the one safeguard of work, even
if it were not the work they would have chosen, and may have had to be
done under unfavourable conditions. In complex modern society the work
of women is even more necessary than in simpler days; only now there is
more need than ever there was of intelligence, adaptability, scientific
knowledge and organisation among women, for they cannot even be efficient
mothers under modern conditions if their minds do not keep pace with
knowledge and the arts of living.
Important, even of vital importance, as the work of physical motherhood
is, and disastrous as everyone must admit would be any social
developments which impaired this, it is a monstrous distortion to talk
as if physical motherhood were the only work of women. The maidens, the
widows, the women who are having no more children, have endless natural
spheres of usefulness and happiness, if only men will leave them free.
There is a good deal to be said for the view that a large number of
unmarried women were needed to get the women’s movement well going. As
a matter of fact, the leaders of the three chief suffrage societies are
married women, and there are of course a very large number of wives in
the women’s movement; but women with young children can scarcely see the
wood for the trees, and such a gigantic piece of work as the organisation
of the hitherto unorganised half of humanity has been one which has,
of necessity, taken all the time and energy of very many women. Never
again, in all probability, will there be such need for many women who
can travel light. It is admitted that marriage may often be a brake on
the man pioneer; much more must it be so for the woman pioneer. It will
not take us a hundredth part of the time to use our liberty that it has
taken to win our liberty. Many a man, one is proud to record, has done
his utmost to strengthen the hands of his wife in the movement which
they both believe in; but the husband is not unknown who likes to see
all the other women progressive, only not _his_ wife. And, of course,
there are very many mothers whose children absorb, while they are young,
the greater part of their energies. Children grow up and the mothers
very often have two-score years to put in after the babies have left
off coming. As women’s lives widen, there will be fewer of the mothers
who bore their grown-up sons and nag their grown-up daughters. The work
of such experienced matrons in the great organised work of mothering,
care committees, schools for mothers, guardians of the poor, education
authorities, is invaluable. But so long as the idiotic restrictions upon
the civic work of women exist, and so long as women have not the means
of independence, this work will still only be done by few of those who
could do it so well. And the rest will still be like paddle-wheels out of
water, wasting energy in a great whirring.
The men who speak of the maidens as waste products might also be invited
to consider the millions of unmarried men, and to ask themselves whether
these men really could marry, and whether there are not already very many
men, who can marry only because they have devoted sisters who shoulder
the burden of the old folk and the invalids; nay, more, who help, out of
their difficult earnings, to keep their nephews and their nieces.
The conclusion is that not men alone, and not women alone, can either
prepare children for the world or the world for children. But both
together can. The analogy of division of labour won’t work when it is
human beings that are being made. “Male and female created He them,” and
both are indispensable. Therefore both must be equipped with knowledge
and given liberty.
“What will the women do then?” cry the faithless. Nobody knows, and that
is one of the things that make life so hugely interesting.
“… That roar,
‘What seek you?’ is of tyrants in all days.”