SEX-ANTAGONISM
(2) WOMAN’S PART
“They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,—
They rightly do inherit Heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
If men have made the mistake of attempting to repress women, we must
admit that women have taken their share of the sex war in attempting
to get the better of men. Men have insisted that women shall live by
their sex alone, and women have used their sex in every conceivable way
to accomplish their ends. Men have drawn ring-fences round women and
then twitted them with their narrowness. Men have had to bow to the
necessity of women bearing and rearing children, but whereas this is a
work requiring the broadest culture and the widest sympathies, men have
for ages restricted women’s culture and cramped women’s sympathies. Full
of vitality and personality, women have felt the heavy hand of brute
force upon them, and like all live persons, they have either fretted
and rebelled (which, when it is done by a woman, is called nagging), or
they have circumvented the oppressor by wiles and lies. True, women have
impotently raged against men, and, true, it is a pity. If you are weak
and ignorant, your rage will, half the time, be not only impotent, but
directed against the wrong things and the wrong persons. True, women
have lied to men and cheated them, and some of these women have been the
most successful in twisting men round their little fingers, while the
incurably honest women have looked on in disgust and despair. But no one
can say that women have abused men more than men have abused women—all
literature and history proves the reverse. No one can say that women have
lied to men more than men have lied to women; the deserted girl-mothers
are the witnesses.
All these mistakes are due to selfishness, and this is a human, not a
sex characteristic. It is always a difficult matter for each individual
person to determine when self-expression and self-development merge into
selfishness, and there is no short way and no simple rule by which it can
be determined. One must allow that men have greater natural temptations
to be selfish, owing to physical differences between them and women,
and the education of boys, instead of, as now, enhancing the force
of these temptations, should be directed to counteracting them. The
physical circumstances of motherhood, for instance, do not allow a woman
to escape the consequences of the sexual act as a man can. It requires
more imagination for a man to realise the cruelty of deserting a baby
than it does for a woman to realise it. The baby reminds her. So we find
that women less often desert their babies than men do. A healthy public
opinion would stimulate the man’s imagination in this direction. Again,
man’s greater physical strength makes it more easy for him to bully a
woman than for her to bully him. When, by chance, a woman is physically
stronger than a man, she does not always refrain from using her force
unchivalrously. If it be true that a man has stronger appetites than a
woman, this again increases his temptations; but one must, if one allows
this circumstance, also allow that it may give the woman an advantage,
and so tempt her to bully the man in her way, and there is no doubt some
women yield to this temptation. I sometimes see, in the very cruelty of
men to women, a hidden agony of fear lest, ultimately, women should need
men less than men need women. If this be true on the purely animal plane,
nothing could be further from the truth, if we take the whole human
creature into account, and men who, by brutality (the result of fear and
the cause of fear, too), kill the higher attractions of which they are
capable, are making a tremendous miscalculation; for they might attain
by the one what they altogether miss by the other; and this is going in
the future to be more so, not less. The women of the future will have men
on terms, or go without, and the terms must be the only honourable terms,
of love and liberty and mutual service. A man will find he has no need to
preach wifely submission to the woman whose love he has won, and he will
find that he does not want it either.
Alarmists declare that the women’s movement has caused sex-antagonism.
The preceding chapter has, I think, disposed of such an absurd
contention, and most thoughtful persons do not defend a statement so
easily refuted by literature and history. Others, with more evidence,
maintain that sex-antagonism was there, a kind of sleeping dog, which
the women’s movement has now aroused to vicious attack. It is contended
that the progressive women have stirred up normal women to rebellion,
which they never would, of themselves, have contemplated; that the
progressives are mischief-makers, who have put dangerous ideas into the
heads of people quite unable to carry them out, and the only result
will be unrest, disputes, discomfort for men, misery for women, and a
final vindication of the supreme authority of man. The progressives
will probably suffer severe castigation, but the normal women will be
kissed and forgiven, for, after all, they are only women and not quite
accountable for their actions; and, besides, men are really rather fond
of the silly things. This is the style of the commoner leader-writer in
the anti-suffrage newspapers.
We may grant at once that the women’s movement would not be where it is
but for its leaders. This is no less true of the women’s than of all
other movements. A movement does not really get going until leaders
have arisen from the ranks; the absurd mistake is to suppose that a
movement can be _kept_ going for any prolonged time by the leaders only,
without support from the ranks. For many years, the women found it
exceedingly difficult to raise up leaders from their own ranks, and a
very considerable lead was, as a matter of fact, given by men. But until
women had arisen who could carry on the leadership, progress was slow,
partial and almost entirely academic. If John Stuart Mill’s searching
analysis of women’s position had not made women think for themselves; if
his disgust and shame had raised no answering disgust and shame in women,
they would have proved themselves fit for the position they were in, and
would never have begun to stir out of it. And about that time there were
other men too, ready to help, William Lloyd Garrison and Walt Whitman and
Mazzini and Stansfeld and Henry Sidgwick, and all the other people who
did the pioneer work of helping the women to get education and training,
and of opening up careers to them. Then, although the active reformers
among men have been comparatively recent, there have been great artists,
from the earliest times, who have held the mirror up to man and shown him
his deeds towards woman. No feminist tract can compare for propaganda
purposes with _The Trojan Women_, or _Medea_. Tell a woman she has no
concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give
her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try
to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning
the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as
history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times
who have read its causes. If it were not so, we might despair of the true
causes ever appearing to all.
If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their
superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of
women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the
power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of
the war on the women’s side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to
believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who
have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable
contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature.
It is a sorry picture that is presented to us, of the “womanly” woman
cajoling and bamboozling a man into complaisance, and that state of
things cannot be described as peace, while the present state of friction
is called war. There are elements of warfare in both, but the first was
underhand and corrupting, while the foolish elements of the present
condition are patent and, as I believe, temporary. I believe this because
I feel pretty sure that there is enough fairness in the mass of men for
them not permanently to resist what is just in the women’s claim, once
the women make it plain; and secondly, because what has been foolish or
wrong in the women’s movement is the result of the old folly and wrong
which the movement as a whole is directed against: the folly of trying to
make legislative action precede education, and the wrong of fighting evil
with evil, the age-long error of retaliation.
One must grant that one hears a great deal more of sex-antagonism now
than one did even ten years ago; certainly much more than one did a
quarter of a century ago. But if anyone will take the trouble to compare
the debates in the House of Commons twenty-five years ago with the
debates now, and note the difference of tone when women are mentioned,
he cannot avoid being struck by the fact that the thing is getting
more talked about now, just because it is going. The old contempt for
women has largely gone, and has been replaced by a most serious, if
considerably bewildered effort to understand what the women would be
at. It does not lie in the mouths of men who built or maintained in the
House the monkey cage, which goes by the euphemistic name of the Ladies’
Gallery, to assert that there was no antagonism; those men both feared
and despised women. The cage will go when Englishmen realise (it takes
them some time) how ridiculous they appear to all the world by exhibiting
themselves as in terror of their own women.
In many other ways women feel the antagonism less, and one improvement of
the utmost importance to them is the enormous increase in their liberty
of going about without molestation from men. When I was a girl, it was
considered rather a bold thing for a lady to walk unescorted within the
precincts of the City of London, and there were very few restaurants
where she would have been safe from rudeness. Consider who offered this
rudeness: men. And why? because, though the woman was doing an absolutely
harmless thing, she was singular, and it was assumed that she did it
from an improper motive and was therefore fair game; or still more
simply, because the cruel lust of tormenting a helpless creature was
irresistible. What woman who has moved an inch out of shelter, but has
encountered this?
Still, the antagonism is much less than it was. How is it that we hear
more of it? The chief reason is a very simple one: women’s griefs have
become reasoned and articulate. Whereas women were fighting man by wiles
and arts, they are now appealing to his reason and finding words for
their appeal, while a few, exasperated, are hitting out rather wildly
with man’s own weapons. In order to appeal to men’s reason, women have
had to find words for their grievances and their differences, and to
give words to a thing always makes it ten times as important as it was.
The unreasonable man points to the inarticulate women and invites you to
note how satisfied they are; he then points to the articulate ones and
cries shame on them for fomenting sex-war. To the unreasonable man, it
is impossible ever to demonstrate women’s grievances, for to do so is at
once to be reproached with being “anti-man”; yet surely even he might
admit that to err is human. If he had a little of the gift of humour,
he might profitably consider the eighteenth-century treatment of women,
and ask himself if it is really not rather funny that he should be so
hurt when women at last find tongue to say what they think of the rare
old sport of woman-baiting. When the admirable Sir Charles Grandison
ejaculates, “Were it not, my dear ladies, for male protectors, to what
insults, to what outrages, would not your sex be subject?” he was not
overstating the case against the men of that day. It was not against
the other forces of nature, against hunger or cold, or wild beasts that
women most needed protection; it was against insult and outrage from
man. Man was, by far, woman’s most formidable enemy and most terrible
danger. Women are frequently invited to bewail the death of chivalry.
What chivalry meant, in these days, was the protection by individual men
of their own women against the depredations of other men. If a woman had
no “protector” of her own, or if he chanced to be a tyrant, she remained
unprotected by the State. The growth of a healthier opinion among men
has now greatly reduced the number of men who desire to “outrage and
insult” women, and has greatly increased the State protection of women.
There will perhaps always be some few men of primeval instincts, or what
is worse, of primeval instincts corrupted by modernity; but it is for
civilised men to reduce them as far as they can, to control those that
cannot be civilised, and surely not to become their apologists.
The development in England that is known as militancy is, so far,
peculiar to England, and is the result of the political situation and
of the temperament and character of two women, Mrs. Pankhurst and her
daughter Christabel, acting upon it. The fiery and self-willed nature of
Mrs. Pankhurst made her a person to whom half-measures and compromises
have always been repugnant. Her deep and passionate sex-pride gave her
an eloquence and an attractive force which drew thousands of women to
her. She voiced in a language new to the timid and the ladylike, all
the revolt that was gnawing at the hearts of women. To many women it
must have seemed that their deepest unuttered thoughts and the unuttered
thoughts of generations of women had found expression, and anyone who
has had this experience, knows what intense devotion is felt towards
the person who has the courage and the genius to utter the words. If
Mrs. Pankhurst alone had inspired the militant movement, it would have
been at once a nobler and a more terrible thing than it has proved. The
machine, that wonderful engine of advertisement and ingenuity, was the
work of other minds. Doubtless it was the machine which served to make
the lightning progress of the militant movement in its first years;
it has been the machine, however, which has largely been responsible
for the disasters of recent times. What was great and noble has become
inextricably entangled with what the public has come to regard as a
gigantic fake, and consequently the attitude of the public is either
one of amusement, to see what fresh trick ingenuity will invent, what
fresh show will be presented to the gaping crowd, or of exasperation
at what seems to them like pointless mischief. The clever exploiting
of the psychology of mobs did not go deep enough, and was, in truth,
far too cynical. There is an appalling amount of mob spirit (not by any
means confined to the common people, but to be seen even in the House of
Commons), and many of the militant devices have successfully appealed to
this; but no reform worth having was ever won from the mob, and it is the
tragic truth that much of the deeper meaning of the most selfless and
devoted sacrifice on the part of individual women has been hidden by the
very advertisement which it has received.
When the Women’s Social and Political Union sprang into public view some
eight years ago, the time was certainly ripe for a revival. Some people
still think that the Union has done nothing but harm. This has always
seemed to me an unreasonable opinion. Undoubtedly they made other work
extraordinarily difficult in some ways, and for a time. They captured
the press, but, since they did not win the approval of the press for
their object, but only secured notices by their sensationalism, it was,
for some years, actually more difficult for other workers to get any
publicity at all for their views or their work. The report of a street
row always gets precedence of the report of a peaceful meeting, and the
result of this was that, for some years, the newspapers were filled with
reports of militancy, while their columns showed nothing of the great
and steady growth of the non-militant movement, nor did they even do
justice to the educational side of the militants’ work. This condition
of things was in itself intensely provocative, and nothing is a more
striking example of women’s level-headedness and far-sightedness than the
fact that the enormous mass of suffragists refused to be provoked to any
unconsidered act of retaliation. Some of them had the political sense to
note that the newspapers which gave most prominence to militancy were
those most hostile to women’s suffrage.
It would take very much more space than I have, thoroughly to argue the
pros and cons of militancy, to distinguish its different forms, and to
disentangle its motives. Like all great movements, this one contains
people who have joined it for very different motives, and some of the
arguments by which it has been defended are mutually destructive. Its
greatest achievement in my opinion is that it woke people up and opened
their purses, in a way totally unprecedented. It made those who had never
cared realise that some women cared intensely, and made them ask why. It
made those who had been working for long years realise that there were
many yet untried methods, and that some of them were good. Above all,
it made many women feel that, if they desired the enfranchisement of
women, and if they did not like the methods of the W.S.P.U., the only
respectable thing to do was to work as hard, and give as much for what
they thought right, as these other women did. To the constitutional
suffragists, it is a matter of complete indifference who gets the credit,
when the vote is won; but it is a matter of the utmost import to them,
not only that the vote should be won, but that both women and men should
be prepared to make the best use of so great a reform.
Something can, of course, be done by telling people they _are_ ready.
This is what the early militants did. There was no real opposition in the
country; there was a very large favourable majority in the House, and
there had been a majority since 1886. One can quite conceive a revival
which would in a few years have carried mere inertia. What happened
was that the W.S.P.U. inflamed a party against the movement, and this
party was the one which by its first principles was actually pledged to
support the movement. Temper, party advantage, personal loyalties were
all aroused; but, instead of being aroused for the suffrage movement,
they were inflamed against it. It was to be war. All possible peaceful
methods had, we were told, been tried and had failed. (This was, of
course, the great and fundamental untruth. The work up to that time had
not had anything like the popular appeal of recent years.) At first, by
skilful advertisement, it almost seemed as if elections might be lost and
won by these means, and some alarm was felt in party circles; but it did
not take long to show that there were very few men who were going to vote
against their party at the command of the militant suffragists, and the
cry of “Keep the Liberal out!” became ineffective. It caused the maximum
of irritation and the minimum of effect.
The militant campaign would have succeeded if the majority of women, even
perhaps if the majority of suffragists, had backed it. I am not afraid
of making this concession, holding, as I do, that the enormous majority
of women kept out of the militant movement from ethical considerations.
It is not easy to bring the ethical case against the militants, because
they themselves waver incessantly between two positions. Sometimes they
are soldiers, fighting a battle, inflicting damage, having a “siege of
Whitehall” (to quote from one of their posters), “proving that women
can fight.” Sometimes they are martyrs, who do injury to no one but
themselves; who merely refuse to be governed without their consent; who
have adopted the Oriental device of dying on their enemy’s doorstep. Now
this second policy is the very reverse of the first, and the only thing
that can be said against it is, that it is an extreme measure which
should on no account be undertaken, until ordinary methods of education
and organisation have been fully tried. To become a martyr as soon as
you can’t get your own way, is a form of spiritual bullying that is
extraordinarily exasperating.
But the first policy cuts away the whole ground upon which the women’s
demand is based; upon this ground not only would men infallibly beat
women, but the great mass of women, as well as men, would feel that the
militant women had invited defeat. When Mrs. Leigh adjures her women
hearers to use their nails upon the eyes of men who attempt to arrest
them, does she not know that this could only succeed for as long as the
men disbelieved the women’s intentions? As soon as the men apprehended
real danger, they could effectively dispose of the women. Even if it
were not wrong, it would be futile in the extreme. But it is wrong,
inexcusably wrong, on the part of women, whose experience of life ought
to have proved to them that for women to invite physical force against
themselves is to provoke all the forces of reaction against which their
movement is, in reality, directed. Long years ago, men threw stones and
filth at women who asked for enfranchisement. Gradually public opinion
killed out this hooliganism. Then came the militants, and, by smashing
windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that,
for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from
men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can
see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the
virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how
ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by,
turn to see it ugly in themselves.
It is hypocrisy, of course, for men to say that they refuse women’s
claims because some women have been violent, firstly, because they
refused them just the same, before women became violent; secondly,
because only a few women have been violent; thirdly, because the vote was
not given to men as a reward for their abstinence from violence. In fact,
the brutalities of anti-suffragists might make the more sensitive Antis
cease, for very shame, to reproach the other side with violence, their
own side having been guilty of personal assaults of the most disgusting
nature.
Men have not yet given women the vote, partly because they are very slow
to move and indifferent about women’s questions; partly because they
are still somewhat fearful of what women may do; but chiefly because no
political party has yet seen a clear party gain to be made by it. This
last, which has been the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of this
reform, will be its great safeguard once it has been won. The women’s
vote would be on a precarious tenure if it were won by one party in the
teeth of the bitter opposition of the whole of the other party. The
peaceful and fruitful use of the vote depends upon a general conversion
of the country to the principles involved. Representative institutions
can only work well by common consent and goodwill.
Militants sometimes defend their violence by saying how trivial, after
all, it has been. This, of course, is true. But what a strange argument
to use in defence of war! “See how little damage our guns do!” And
although I am convinced that they refrain from more serious crime,
because their consciences revolt from it, they lay themselves open to the
unthinking retort that they only do not do more because they can’t; a
retort not only untrue, but provocative, to people sufficiently childish
to be “dared” into action. What women have to do is to make their demand
a formidable demand, and they cannot do this by adopting methods which
the enormous mass of women will never whole-heartedly apply. By continued
education, by well-considered and thoroughly prepared political action,
by constant readiness for negotiation, by taking men always on their best
side, and by making the help of women worth having, suffragists will
enlist an ever-growing mass of women to hard work and sacrifice, and,
what is more, they will convince men of the constructive ability of
women, and of the possibility of men and women working together in the
future.
In the course of the militant movement, one has seen a vast amount of
femininity using the old weapons, which one hopes will be gradually laid
aside. Defiance alternating with injured innocence. The smashing of a
window by a woman, who cries, when a man apprehends her, “You mustn’t
touch me! I’m a woman!” The frequent inexcusable untruth that “women
are being imprisoned for daring to ask for the vote,” and that the Home
Secretary is starving women in prison. It would have been too wonderful
if women, in their fight for liberty, had proved themselves perfect.
We have not. We have shown human foibles, like men, partisanship and
violence, like men, and we have shown some faults which, though not
specifically feminine, are the faults natural to subjected persons.
When all is said about the mistakes and faults and follies of
suffragists, those of the Government have been far greater. They
belittled the women’s movement, and treated it with the sort of sneering
contempt which is more provocative than anything in the world. They
magnified the first importunities into crimes. The early militants
were treated with monstrous and disproportionate severity, and this
contributed largely to their early popularity. They were treated like the
worst criminals, for mere impropriety, or for the technical offence of
obstruction. They were subjected to the most abominable brutalities when
they asked questions at meetings. (It was a most unhappy thought which
struck them, when they found out how easy men’s nerves and men’s passions
make it for a woman to break up a meeting.) Two Acts of Parliament and
innumerable special orders have been devised to deal with them, and
have failed. Everybody with the slightest political insight knows that
the reform must come. When Mr. Asquith (House of Commons, 6th May 1913)
attempted to define what he meant by a demand for the vote, he said—
“I mean a demand which proceeds from a real, deep-seated, and
widely diffused sense of grievance and discontent. I do not
think that my honourable Friends will dispute that that is a
fair statement of the case. Of course, I do not deny for one
moment—who could?—that there are women, and many women in this
country, including some of the most gifted, most accomplished,
most high-minded of their sex, who do feel in that way. It
would be absurd and ridiculous to disguise the facts of the
case. So, again, and this is a very serious consideration, it
is clear from the phenomena of what is called militancy, to
which I am not going to make any further reference, that there
are women whose temperaments are such that this same sense of
wrong, twisted, perverted, inflamed, as I think in their case
it is, the same sense of wrong leads to anti-social courses
which men and even women find it difficult to conceive.”
This was, in fact, a complete abandonment of the anti-suffrage position,
and a recognition that the reform must come, and come soon. If many of
the best women feel a real and deep sense of grievance, and if other
women are being “twisted, perverted, and inflamed” by this sense of
wrong, it is quite plain that it is not statesmanship, still less is
it Liberal statesmanship, by delay and coercion to make the sense of
grievance more deeply seated and more widely diffused. It is not even
humane. For who feels the grievance? Women. And against whom must they
feel it? Men. Does any man in his senses _wish_ that the grievance
shall be so deeply inbitten that it will take generations to heal? I
believe not. I believe too that every bit of work that is done to get
the vote ought to be done in such a way as to make the use of the vote
run smoothly, when at last it is attained. Militant methods, whether of
martyrdom or war, are useless for that.