THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW
“Decay,” said Seithenyn, “is one thing, and danger is another.
Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old,
I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I
will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I
do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works
well: it keeps out the water from the land and it lets in
the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cup-bearer,
fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their
wisdom; and, if we were to be so rash as to try to mend it, we
should only mar it.”
“The stonework,” said Teithrin, “is sapped and mined: the piles
are rotten, broken and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices
are leaky and creaky.”
“That is the beauty of it,” said Seithenyn. “Some parts of it
are rotten, and some parts of it are sound.”
“It is well,” said Elphin, “that some parts are sound: it were
better that all were so.”
“So I have heard some people say before,” said Seithenyn;
“perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very
unamiable sort of people who are in the habit of indulging
their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give
elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity,
elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by
its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the
rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity.
There is nothing so dangerous as innovation.”—THOMAS LOVE
PEACOCK, _The Misfortunes of Elphin_.
The women’s movement is a great movement of adaptation. It is not
directed against the community, nor against any section of the
community. It is not anti-man: no movement for the liberation of woman
can do man anything but good; for modern men to try to keep women in
the old ways, while they go ahead, is a ridiculous attempt to produce
an anachronism which is foredoomed. It is not anti-social: when people
bring this accusation against it, they generally mean that it is
anti-maternal; but the progressive women desire that motherhood should
be as free and beneficent and instructed as human effort can make it,
and they desire, too, that it shall be possible for far more women to
have the opportunity of motherhood. It is not anti-democratic; for the
extension of liberty and representation to the masses of women will
diminish the privileges of the few. It is the anti-suffragists who are
anti-democratic. They tell us that the opposition of women to their own
enfranchisement is unprecedented and proves that there must be some
great harm in liberty, which women feel, while men have never resisted
their own enfranchisement. This is not true. Slaves, even male slaves,
have been known to object to manumission. But, as a matter of fact, if
you will inquire, you will find that nearly all the opposition of women
is directed against the enfranchisement of other women, not themselves.
Most anti-suffragists will agree that some women are fit for the vote.
Scarcely any woman thinks that she herself is unfit; it is _the other
women_ who are unfit. When Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks of the incurable
political ignorance of women, she does not mean that _she_ is ignorant.
_It is the other women who are ignorant._ Men have been every bit as
strongly convinced that _other men_ should not have the vote. It is
undemocratic, it is arrogant, it is profoundly selfish, but it is human,
not feminine, to endeavour to maintain privilege.
We are in for very big changes—social, economic and political. No one
can doubt it. In what spirit are we going to make those changes? They
are long overdue, and the amount of needless suffering caused by our
slowness in adaptation is appalling. Dead creeds cumber the ground in
all directions, and men make no serious effort either to resuscitate or
decently to bury them. We say one thing and we do the other, and we merit
the certificate given to us by international acclamation, of being the
most canting nation on earth. Some of us do not like change. When did
older people ever like change? Change implies thinking, and if there is
one thing the majority of people hate more than another it is thinking.
There is always in most of us a pathetic hope that some day we shall come
to a state where the machinery of life will go of itself and we shall
be safe and free from the necessity—so exhausting—of eternal vigilance.
Free also from the terrible necessity of judging for ourselves and from
the difficult task of loving our neighbour as ourselves. But those who
hate change—the catlike people with whom I have every sympathy—should
ask themselves, “Am I going to stop just here? And, if so, why? Is this
really the warmest, prettiest spot, and is there room for the others
here?” Most people who know even a corner of life, as it is for the less
fortunate, would admit that the present does not offer the most perfect
conditions imaginable for all. “But it might be worse, and so we will not
move, for fear of worse befalling. All the efforts of our forefathers,
all their mistakes and sacrifices and heroisms we will accept, but this
generation will not add one brave deed to the record of time.” If this
opinion were universal, this generation would be dead, and rotting fast.
A certain type of man is never tired of boasting that this is a “man’s
world” and that men have made it. They certainly have made many things,
some good and some bad. But whatever they have made of the world, this
type of man expects woman to be an impossible She,—impossible in the
world he has chosen to make around her. This kind of man professes to
admire beauty, peace, the amenities of life, and these are to be given
him, if you please, by woman. He does not see that man has himself
largely destroyed the beauty, peace and amenity of life. He has created
the modern industrial system; he has taken women’s work out of the
home; he has filled the air with smoke and clangour; he has polluted
the rivers; he has based the growth of millions of pounds upon the
destruction of millions of human bodies; he has driven the humane spirit
out of his activities, and then he has called upon woman to maintain it
alone. She cannot do it alone. It is not reasonable to expect women to
be capable of what Whitman finely calls “sane, athletic motherhood,” in
the midst of the noise and cruelty and dirt and meanness in which the
daughters of the poor are reared, or of the futility and silliness to
which so many of the daughters of the rich are heirs.
Women may not have produced great works of art, but they are artists in
life. They are often said to be nearer nature than men. Certainly they
seem to have a keener sense of reality and of essentials. They can be
the greatest inspiration, when they are intellectually alive, when they
have joy and freedom. In families where the women’s movement has opened
the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women:
jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes
make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and
honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of
them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship
of sexes, classes and ages.
It is this genius for living that must be altogether liberated, and with
it we shall see an immense liberation of the organising and governing
power of women. The union of practicality and ideality, of which I have
already spoken, must be used to its utmost. Women are less pompous and
less wasteful than men. They “cut the cackle” and get to business sooner;
I cannot conceive of a body of women tolerating the sort of thing that
goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating
themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they
are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up
with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their
concern.
The growth of humaner notions is both the fruit and the promise of
comradeship; it is seen in the change of ideas about education and about
crime and will appear in the ideas about war. People are realising that
many vices are the result of the absence of healthy pleasures. We shall
not need to punish so much for cruelty, drink, and sexual offences, when
we have given people other things to think about and live for; nor for
idleness and theft, when we have made employment safe. The reforms of
the future are going to be constructive, not punitive, and in all these
women’s gifts will be priceless.
Men who wish to keep women in subjection justify themselves by two
claims: (1) Those of men, their needs and appetites; (2) those of
children. With regard to the needs of men, it is certainly essential that
women should understand them, else they will be as stupid about men as
men have been about women, and few conditions are so fertile in suffering
as stupidity. The men, therefore, who, like Sir Almroth Wright, declare
that men will not tolerate epicene institutions, are hopelessly wrong,
for if there are to be two worlds, the man’s and the woman’s, and if all
their work and their thinking are to be done apart, and if men are all
the same to go on arranging the lives of women, with whom they have no
relations but physical relations of sex, there will be less and less of
that understanding, without which there can never be peace. Men who say
greedily, “This world is ours, and we will give you just so much of it as
we please, and it is for you to be thankful,” are blaspheming. The world
is not theirs to give, and although woman cannot fight man with physical
force, let man not think that to give woman her liberty is to confer a
favour upon her. It is only to do his duty, as a man is bound to do.
The men who are afraid women will not see eye to eye with them on the
matter of men’s temptations, use a double-edged argument, when they
declare that there must be a double standard of sexual morality. It is
sometimes based upon the physiological fact that a man can “have” a
hundred children in the time that it takes a woman to “have” one. But
this is to misuse words. A man does not have a child, nor does a woman:
a man and woman together have a child. And, if we even conceded that
promiscuity in a man would not be wrong, provided he could be promiscuous
by himself, how can anyone defend promiscuity in a man, if it infallibly
involves the corruption of women? Those who wish to defend promiscuity
must find a better weapon than the double standard; for if promiscuity
is bad in a woman, it must be bad that a man should corrupt a woman, and
there is the added stain on this particular badness that it is mean and
cowardly as well, for when he has corrupted her in this way, he not only
deserts her, but he hales her before his tribunals and punishes her.
When men advocate the subjection of women for the sake of the child,
it is difficult to speak with patience of the monumental conceit and
arrogance of the notion. Women do not sentimentalise so much about
children, because they are a part of women’s work, and you do not
sentimentalise about your work. I have said (Chapter XIII.) that
girls ought not to be expressly trained to be mothers, and to prevent
misunderstanding, it may be well to touch upon positive education.
Nothing in all the circumstances of a girl’s upbringing ought to be
allowed to injure her health, and, in consequence, her physical capacity
to bear healthy children. Much of the anxiety expressed as to whether
a girl may be perfectly healthy, as an individual, and yet unable to
bear children, is misplaced. It is quite true that the finest types of
women are likely to be less prolific than the more degraded type. The
feeble-minded are the most prolific of all. It seems you cannot have
both quantity and quality. But the great need of the world is precisely
quality. Healthy girls are not sterile, and the causes of sterility
are not to be found in the women’s movement; they are to be found in
idleness and luxury on the one hand, and in poverty on the other; beyond
everything, they are to be found in vice and excess. The miserable health
of the women of our working classes—the enormous majority of our women,
that is to say—is one of the greatest dangers and social crimes of the
day. But even all middle-class girls are not as healthy as they might be.
There is a certain amount of overpressure in lessons and in games, and
one knows of many cases where girls at home are worried into sickness
by the conflicting claims upon them. Sometimes one hears of grotesque
ignorance on the part of school- and house-mistresses, even on the part
of mothers, of the very elements of personal hygiene. Girls should be
taught from an early age to practise the hygiene of their own bodies, and
to take a pride in being and keeping fit, and they should not think shame
of easing off when they are not fit. It is most important in schools
to get a sensible public opinion that encourages neither slackness
nor prudery, and it is for the teachers to be well enough grounded in
physiology to know how to direct and maintain this public opinion. A
considerable amount of toughening is good for girls as for boys. Looking
into the causes of overpressure, both mental and physical, one sees that
most of it would never have occurred, if men had not made it so hard for
women to get opportunities. Men have in the past so often argued that
women and girls should have the desired opportunities, if they could
fulfil the same conditions as boys and men, and I can remember in my
schooldays a tremendous pressure to show that girls could fulfil the
same conditions as boys. The women of the future will claim freedom and
endowment when they fulfil the conditions suitable for women and girls.
Girls, as well as boys, should, _before puberty_, be taught the simple
facts of sex, and this should be done in connection with other simple
science teaching. They will accept these facts quite serenely, if they
are not greatly stressed and differentiated from other knowledge. They
should not be troubled with pathology until they are full grown. Boys and
girls should be brought up together, and the barrack system of living
should be entirely abolished for both sexes. This does not mean that boys
and girls should do all the same things, either in work or play; these
should be adapted to the ascertained capacities of the individuals and
not arranged on rigid _a priori_ schemes. If the girl has grown to young
womanhood with a healthy and active body and mind, she will have all the
essentials for good motherhood, and if she wishes to learn the details of
mothercraft, by all means give her opportunity to do so. But it is not
necessary, or even desirable, to force every young woman to do this. If
she is broadly developed as a human being, she can learn mothercraft when
she is about to marry. Then, indeed, she should learn it, and the man who
is about to marry should also study the duties of parentage.
It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a
girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has
left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work.
This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good
mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless,
vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her
parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all
her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic
daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get
it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising
to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by
their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to
their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage
purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.
Women, who bear the children, will be increasingly concerned, as they
grow in mental stature, with the quality of the children produced.
Theirs, it is said, is the task of handing on the torch of life. They
must ask themselves, with ever deepening sense of responsibility, what
is the life they are making? Is it worthy? And, while sterility will
rightly trouble them, because it is the result of disease, they will not
allow themselves to be frightened by the smaller birth-rate per woman.
They will perhaps think that the best remedy would be to make motherhood
possible for the millions of maidens, now childless against their will.
As they know more, they will recognise with joy that a woman’s natural
instinct to give herself when she loves and not otherwise, is a sound
racial instinct, and that many problems will be solved when the action of
natural selection is counter-balanced by sexual selection. When invited
by reactionaries to widen still further the breach between men and women,
and to admire the effects of specialisation and division of labour, women
will perhaps ask themselves what these have done, even in the industrial
world, and question whether they desire the same results in the family.
The worker has lost his old joy in the work; the product of his work has
lost beauty and excellence; the relations between employer and employee
have become inhuman. Do we really wish, we women, to see these results in
the home? Do men?
And woman not only bears the child, but she is its natural protector
and guardian. In the way civilised men regard assaults on children, in
their helplessness to protect the child from bad men,—and women,—in the
monstrous absurdity of the phrase “the criminal child,” and all the
cruelties and stupidities involved in that phrase, one sees how men,
with the best intentions, have failed, because they would insist upon
doing women’s work. Man is legally, by the laws man has made, the only
parent of the child, and the condition of the child truly reflects this
legal fiction. When men go abroad for a living, for adventure, for glory
or for plunder, what becomes of their regard for the child? They beget
everywhere, children, surely the most deserted on earth, who have neither
father nor country, and they leave the problem of half-breeds as a most
bitter inheritance for their children’s children. Letourneau says that
legal monogamy has for its object the regulation of succession and the
division of property; so Hagar and Ishmael in all times and nations have
been repudiated.
Now, at last, there are signs that the light is breaking. Knowledge is
showing men that neither their own happiness nor the welfare of the child
can ever be served by the subjection, the crippling or the thwarting
of women. And intelligent men are coming over in their thousands. Even
a very rough crowd in the Midlands, that had been stoning the women’s
suffrage pilgrims, because they were supposed to be militants, cried
out to them as they went home, after a meeting, “We are all for it!”
meaning they were all for the enfranchisement of women, although they
felt so shocked at the violence of the militants that they felt impelled
themselves to resort to worse violence.
Men have said to us over and over again, “You are quite right. You ought
to get it, and you will get it. Go on fighting. It is a woman’s question,
and you women must solve it for yourselves.” It is strange to women that
such men have not seen the baseness of this attitude. It is strange that
they cannot see that they alone have the power, and that, under their
fair words, they are in effect saying, “Get it, if you can,” for all the
world like a bullying big boy who has stolen the smaller boy’s bread. It
is strange that they should be willing in this matter to show themselves
so inferior to women; for when did women ever say to their menfolk: “Your
freedom, your dignity, your ideals are nothing to me. These are men’s
questions; let them settle their affairs without our help”? Just as
women have carried men in their arms, when they were weak and whimpering
and ugly, till they could run alone; just as women have nourished the
babes at their breasts, and given their lives for them, so have we women
(in the words of Miss Anna Shaw) “carried all the weak causes in our
arms, until they were strong and could run alone, and then—then—they
forgot us!” In the French Revolution, at Peterloo, in the American
crusade against slavery, among the Boers in South Africa, in the Chinese
revolution, in Ireland now, when did women ever separate their lives and
interests from those of men?
There is this excuse for the men: first, that they are by nature slower
than women, and are only now awakening to the fact that, while men’s
lives have changed greatly during the past century, women’s lives have
changed immensely more, and that something like a complete revolution
has taken place in the education and industrial position of women,
and they cannot be expected to be the same as they were before these
changes; and, secondly, that unlimited power is more demoralising even
than subjection. Where men are treating women as equally human, the
sense of comradeship is growing. One of the most moving speeches made at
Budapest, at the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance
in June 1913, was a very simple statement by Miss Jenny af Forselles,
a Finnish Member of Parliament. She said that, in the great national
sorrow and the terrible struggle with a less civilised nation, their
solace and inspiration was the comradeship between the women and men.
Those who heard her will not forget the quiet thrill of her aspiration,
expressed in her Biblical, slightly archaic German—“_Wir wollen seyn ein
einig Volk_,” and the hope it gave, that in some distant day the union of
peoples might be a union of the whole _free_ people.
I have refrained as much as possible from dogmatism about the true nature
of Woman and about what women will do. I know some people confidently
assert that women are better than men, and that women are going to
perform miracles. Well, some of us think that the movement itself, now,
is miraculous, and have had ample reward in the comradeship of men in the
movement.
“Divinity hath surely touched my heart;
I have possessed more joy than earth can lend;
I may attain what time shall never spend.
Only let not my duller days destroy
The memory of thy witness and my joy.”
Our faith would be weak if it could be dashed by the human faults in
women, and of women in the movement as well as all the other women. It is
cowardice, merely, to turn from the complex, fascinating, troublesome,
real woman to a vapid ideal, or a devitalised norm. We must understand
the real women and the real men, and have faith in them. Fear and
distrust are no leaders for brave folk. The prayer which the worker in
human material must ever have at heart is, “Lord, I believe; help Thou
mine unbelief.”
_Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh_
FOOTNOTES
[1] The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in twelve months
raised, at headquarters and among its affiliated societies, £42,000. I
have assumed that the Women’s Social and Political Union raised as much.
It seems likely that if we add together all the other societies (thirty
odd), and also reckon the immense amount of money spent in travelling and
so forth by voluntary workers, the total of £100,000 is well within the
mark.
[2] _Realities and Ideals: The Work of Woman_, by Frederic Harrison, p.
125.
[3] _Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women_, by A. V. Dicey, K.C.,
LL.D., Hon. D.C.L.
[4] _The Social Evil in Chicago_, p. 114.
[5] _Sex Antagonism_, by Walter Heape, F.R.S.
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