IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS BARRED, ANY PALLIATIVE OF CORRECTIVE FOR
THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN?
I
PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN
What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and Physiological
Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual Grievances of Suffragist and
Corrective.
Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suffrage with its
programme of feminism is barred as leading to social disaster, any
palliative or corrective that can be applied to the present
discontents of woman?
If such is to be found, it is to be found only by placing clearly
before us the suffragist's grievances.
These grievances are, _first,_ the economic difficulties of the woman
who seeks to earn her living by work other than unskilled manual
labour; _secondly_, the difficult physiological conditions in which
woman is placed by the excess of the female over the male population
and by her diminished chances of marriage [1]; and _thirdly,_ the
tedium which obsesses the life of the woman who is not forced, and
cannot force herself, to work. On the top of these grievances comes
the fact that the suffragist conceives herself to be harshly and
unfairly treated by man. This last is the fire which sets a light to
all the inflammable material.
[1] _Vide_ footnote, p. 138.
It would be quite out of question to discuss here the economic and
physiological difficulties of woman. Only this may be said: it is
impossible, in view of the procession of starved and frustrated lives
which is continuously filing past, to close one's eyes to the urgency
of this woman's problem.
After all, the primary object of all civilisation is to provide for
every member of the community food and shelter and fulfilment of
natural cravings. And when, in what passes as a civilised community, a
whole class is called upon to go without any one of these our human
requirements, it is little wonder that it should break out.
But when a way of escape stands open revolt is not morally justified.
Thus, for example, a man who is born into, but cannot support himself
in, a superior class of society is not, as long as he can find a
livelihood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled to revolt.
No more is the woman who is in economic or physiological difficulties.
For, if only she has the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands open
to her.
She can emigrate; she can go out from the social class in which she is
not self-supporting into a humbler social class in which she could
earn a living; and she can forsake conditions in which she must remain
a spinster for conditions in which she may perhaps become a mother.
Only in this way can the problem of finding work, and relief of
tedium, for the woman who now goes idle be resolved.
If women were to avail themselves of these ways of escape out of
unphysiological conditions, the woman agitator would probably find it
as difficult to keep alive a passionate agitation for woman suffrage
as the Irish Nationalist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement
of the land question and the grant of old age pensions, a passionate
agitation for a separate Parliament for Ireland.
For the happy wife and mother is never passionately concerned about
the suffrage. It is always the woman who is galled either by
physiological hardships, or by the fact that she has not the same
amount of money as man, or by the fact that man does not desire her as
a co-partner in work, and withholds the homage which she thinks he
ought to pay to her intellect.
For this class of grievances the present education of woman is
responsible. The girl who is growing up to woman's estate is never
taught where she stands relatively to man. She is not taught anything
about woman's physical disabilities. She is not told--she is left to
discover it for herself when too late--that child and husband are to
woman physiological requirements. She is not taught the defects and
limitations of the feminine mind. One might almost think there were no
such defects and limitations; and that woman was not always
overestimating her intellectual power. And the ordinary girl is not
made to realise woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning capacity.
She is not made to realise that the woman who cannot work with her
hands is generally hard put to earn enough to keep herself alive in
the incomplete condition of a spinster.
As a result of such education, when, influenced by the feminist
movement, woman comes to institute a comparison between herself and
man, she brings into that comparison all those qualities in which she
is substantially his equal, and leaves out of account all those in
which she is his inferior.
The failure to recognise that man is the master, and why he is the
master, lies at the root of the suffrage movement. By disregarding
man's superior physical force, the power of compulsion upon which all
government is based is disregarded. By leaving out of account those
powers of the mind in which man is the superior, woman falls into the
error of thinking that she can really compete with him, and that she
belongs to the self-same intellectual caste. Finally, by putting out
of sight man's superior money-earning capacity, the power of the purse
is ignored.
Uninstructed woman commits also another fundamental error in her
comparison. Instead of comparing together the average man and the
average woman, she sets herself to establish that there is no defect
in woman which cannot be discovered also in man; and that there is no
virtue or power in the ordinary man which cannot be discovered also in
woman. Which having been established to her satisfaction, she is led
inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing whatever to choose
between the sexes. And from this there is only a step to the position
that human beings ought to be assigned, without distinction of sex, to
each and every function which would come within the range of their
individual capacities, instead of being assigned as they are at
present: men to one function, and women to another.
Here again women ought to have been safeguarded by education. She
ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up
to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification
which attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet--as every one who
recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by
generalisations will see--does it abrogate the disqualification of
belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.
The present system of feminine education is blameworthy not only in
the respect that it fails to draw attention to these disqualifications
and to teach woman where she stands; it is even more blameworthy in
that it fails to convey to the girl who is growing up any conception
of that absolutely elementary form of morality which consists in
distinguishing _meum_ and _tuum_ [_that which is mine_ and _that which
is yours_].
Instead of her educators encouraging every girl to assert "rights" as
against man, and put forward claims, they ought to teach her with
respect to him those lessons of behaviour which are driven home once
for all into every boy at a public school.
Just as there you learn that you may not make unwarranted demands upon
your fellow, and just as in the larger world every nation has got to
learn that it cannot with impunity lay claim to the possessions of its
neighbours, so woman will have to learn that when things are not
offered to her, and she has not the power to take them by force, she
has got to make the best of things as they are.
One would wish for every girl who is growing up to womanhood that it
might be brought home to her by some refined and ethically-minded
member of her own sex how insufferable a person woman becomes when,
like a spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of man; when she
proclaims that it is his duty to serve her and to share with her his
power and possessions; when she makes an outcry when he refuses to
part with what is his own; and when she insists upon thrusting her
society upon men everywhere.
And every girl ought to be warned that to embark upon a policy of
recrimination when you do not get what you want, and to proclaim
yourself a martyr when, having hit, you are hit back, is the way to
get yourself thoroughly disliked.
Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the example of the militant
suffragist, how revolt and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess
oneself of what belongs to others, effects the complete
disorganisation of moral character.
No one would wish that in the education of girls these quite unlovely
things should be insisted upon more than was absolutely necessary. But
one would wish that the educators of the rising generation of women
should, basing themselves upon these foundations, point out to every
girl how great is woman's debt to civilisation; in other words, how
much is under civilisation done for woman by man.
And one would wish that, in a world which is rendered unwholesome by
feminism, every girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the great
outstanding fact of the world: the fact that, turn where you will, you
find individual man showering upon individual woman--one man in
tribute to her enchantment, another out of a sense of gratitude, and
another just because she is something that is his--every good thing
which, suffrage or no suffrage, she never could have procured for
herself.
APPENDIX
LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA
Reprinted by permission from _The Times_ (London), March 28, 1912.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES
SIR,--For man the physiological psychology of woman is full of
difficulties.
He is not a little mystified when he encounters in her periodically
recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of
the sense of proportion.
He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete alteration of
character in a woman who is child-bearing.
When he is a witness of the "tendency of woman to morally warp when
nervously ill," and of the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of
a disappointed love may work, he is appalled.
And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he sees serious and
long-continued mental disorders developing in connexion with the
approaching extinction of a woman's reproductive faculty.
No man can close his eyes to these things; but he does not feel at
liberty to speak of them.
"For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away."[1]
[1 From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]
As for woman herself, she makes very light of any of these mental
upsettings.
She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . .[1]
[1] In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is
compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate
of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous
disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].
None the less, these upsettings of her mental equilibrium are the
things that a woman has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever
lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened
with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.
It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the
militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is
mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder; and he cannot
conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.
The recruiting field for the militant suffragists is the million of
our excess female population--that million which had better long ago
have gone out to mate with its complement of men beyond the sea.
Among them there are the following different types of women:--
(_a_) First--let us put them first--come a class of women who hold,
with minds otherwise unwarped, that they may, whenever it is to their
advantage, lawfully resort to physical violence.
The programme, as distinguished from the methods, of these women is
not very different from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.
(_b_) There file past next a class of women who have all their
life-long been strangers to joy, women in whom instincts long
suppressed have in the end broken into flame. These are the sexually
embittered women in whom everything has turned into gall and
bitterness of heart, and hatred of men.
Their legislative programme is license for themselves, or else
restrictions for man.
(_c_) Next there file past the incomplete. One side of their nature
has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with
their living fellow men and women.
Their programme is to convert the whole world into an epicene
institution---an epicene institution in which man and woman shall
everywhere work side by side at the selfsame tasks and for the
selfsame pay.
These wishes can never by any possibility be realised. Even in
animals--I say _even,_ because in these at least one of the sexes has
periods of complete quiscence--male and female cannot be safely worked
side by side, except when they are incomplete.
While in the human species safety can be obtained, it can be obtained
only at the price of continual constraint.
And even then woman, though she protests that she does not require it,
and that she does not receive it, practically always does receive
differential treatment at the hands of man.
It would be well, I often think, that every woman should be clearly
told--and the woman of the world will immediately understand--that
when man sets his face against the proposal to bring in an epicene
world, he does so because he can do his best work only in surroundings
where he is perfectly free from suggestion and from restraint, and
from the onus which all differential treatment imposes.
And I may add in connexion with my own profession that when a medical
man asks that he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical woman he
does so also because he would wish to keep up as between men and
women--even when they are doctors--some of the modesties and
reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up.
Now the medical woman is of course never on the side of modesty,[1] or
in favour of any reticences. Her desire for knowledge does not allow
of these.
[1] To those who have out of inadvertence and as laymen and women
misunderstood, it may be explained that the issue here discussed is
the second in order of the three which are set out on p. 139 (_supra_).
(_d_) Inextricably mixed up with the types which we have been
discussing is the type of woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent
letter brought so distinctly before our eyes--the woman who is
poisoned by her misplaced self-esteem; and who flies out at every man
who does not pay homage to her intellect.
She is the woman who is affronted when a man avers that _for him_ the
glory of woman lies in her power of attraction, in her capacity for
motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to the ethics which are
special to her sex.
I have heard such an intellectually embittered woman say, though she
had been self-denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the whole course
of her life had a man ever as much as done her a kindness."
The programme of this type of woman is, as a preliminary, to compel
man to admit her claim to be his intellectual equal; and, that done,
to compel him to divide up everything with her to the last farthing,
and so make her also his financial equal.
And her journals exhibit to us the kind of parliamentary
representative she desiderates. He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his
orders from a knot of washerwomen standing arms a-kimbo.[2]
[2] I give, in response to a request, the reference: _Votes for Women,_
March 18, 1910, p. 381.
(_e_) Following in the wake of these embittered human beings come
troops of girls just grown up.
All these will assure you, these young girls--and what is seething in
their minds is stirring also in the minds in the girls in the colleges
and schools which are staffed by unmarried suffragists--that woman has
suffered all manner of indignity and injustice at the hands of man.
And these young girls have been told about the intellectual, and
moral, and financial value of woman--such tales as it never entered
into the heart of man to conceive.
The programme of these young women is to be married upon their own
terms. Man shall--so runs their scheme--work for their support--to
that end giving up his freedom, and putting himself under orders, for
many hours of the day; but they themselves must not be asked to give
up any of their liberty to him, or to subordinate themselves to his
interests, or to obey him in anything.
To obey a man would be to commit the unpardonable sin.
It is not necessary, in connexion with a movement which proceeds on
the lines set out above, any further to labour the point that there is
in it an element of mental disorder. It is plain that it is there.
There is also a quite fatuous element in the programmes of the
militant suffragist. We have this element, for instance, in the
doctrine that, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions of the
labour market deny it to her, woman ought to receive the same wage as
a man for the same work.
This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves out of sight that, even if
woman succeeds in doing the same work as man, he has behind him a much
larger reserve of physical strength. As soon as a time of strain
comes, areserve of strength and freedom from periodic indisposition is
worth paying extra for.
Fatuous also is the dogma that woman ought to have the same pay for
the same work--fatuous because it leaves out of sight that woman's
commercial value in many of the best fields of work is subject to a
very heavy discount by reason of the fact that she cannot, like a male
employee, work cheek by jowl with a male employer; nor work among men
as a man with his fellow employees.
So much for the woman suffragist's protest that she can conceive of no
reason for a differential rate of pay for man.
Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of the militant suffragist.
Every woman of the world could tell her--whispering it into her
private ear--that if a sufficient number of men should come to the
conclusion that it was not worth their while to marry except on the
terms of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman's demands would have
to come down.
It is not at all certain that the institution of matrimony--which,
after all, is the great instrument in the levelling up of the
financial situation of woman--can endure apart from some willing
subordination on the part of the wife.
It will have been observed that there is in these programmes, in
addition to the element of mental disorder and to the element of the
fatuous, which have been animadverted upon, also a very ugly element
of dishonesty. In reality the very kernel of the militant suffrage
movement is the element of immorality.
There is here not only immorality in the ends which are in view, but
also in the methods adopted for the attainment of those ends.
We may restrict ourselves to indicating wherein lies the immorality of
the methods.
There is no one who does not discern that woman in her relations to
physical force stands in quite a different position to man.
Out of that different relation there must of necessity shape itself a
special code of ethics for woman. And to violate that code must be for
woman immorality.
So far as I have seen, no one in this controversy has laid his finger
upon the essential point in the relations of woman to physical
violence.
It has been stated--and in the main quite truly stated--that woman in
the mass cannot, like man, back up her vote by bringing physical force
into play.
But the woman suffragist here counters by insisting that she as an
individual may have more physical force than an individual man.
And it is quite certain--and it did not need suffragist raids and
window-breaking riots to demonstrate it--that woman in the mass can
bring a certain amount of physical force to bear.
The true inwardness of the relation in which woman stands to physical
force lies not in the question of her having it at command, but in the
fact that she cannot put it forth without placing herself within the
jurisdiction of an ethical law.
The law against which she offends when she resorts to physical
violence is not an ordinance of man; it is not written in the statutes
of any State; it has not been enunciated by any human law-giver. It
belongs to those unwritten, and unassailable, and irreversible
commandments of religion, [_Greek_ 1], which we suddenly and
mysteriously become aware of when we see them violated.
[1 From _Antigone_ by Sophocles; "_the unwritten and unassailable
statutes given to us by the gods._" Sir Almroth had it in the original
Greek with Greek fonts.]
The law which the militant suffragist has violated is among the
ordinances of that code which forbade us even to think of employing
our native Indian troops against the Boers; which brands it as an
ignominy when a man leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his own
life; and which makes it an outrage for a man to do violence to a
woman.
To violate any ordinance of that code is more dishonourable than to
transgress every statutory law.
We see acknowledgment of it in the fact that even the uneducated man
in the street resents it as an outrage to civilisation when he sees a
man strike a blow at a woman.
But to the man who is committing the outrage it is a thing simply
unaccountable that any one should fly out at him.
In just such a case is the militant suffragist. She cannot understand
why any one should think civilisation is outraged when she scuffles in
the street mud with a policeman.
If she asks for an explanation, it perhaps behoves a man to supply it.
Up to the present in the whole civilised world there has ruled a truce
of God as between man and woman. That truce is based upon the solemn
covenant that within the frontiers of civilisation (outside them of
course the rule lapses) the weapon of physical force may not be
applied by man against woman; nor by woman against man.
Under this covenant, the reign of force which prevails in the world
without comes to an end when a man enters his household.
Under this covenant that half of the human race which most needs
protection is raised up above the waves of violence.
Within the terms of this compact everything that woman has received
from man, and everything man receives from woman, is given as a free
gift.
Again, under this covenant a full half of the programme of
Christianity has been realised; and a foundation has been laid upon
which it may be possible to build higher; and perhaps finally in the
ideal future to achieve the abolition of physical violence and war.
And it is this solemn covenant, the covenant so faithfully kept by
man, which has been violated by the militant suffragist in the
interest of her morbid, stupid, ugly, and dishonest programmes.
Is it wonder if men feel that they have had enough of the militant
suffragist, and that the State would be well rid of her if she were
crushed under the soldiers' shields like the traitor woman at the
Tarpeian rock [in ancient Rome where traitors were killed]?
We may turn now to that section of woman suffragists--one is almost
inclined to doubt whether it any longer exists--which is opposed to
all violent measures, though it numbers in its ranks women who are
stung to the quick by the thought that man, who will concede the vote
to the lowest and most degraded of his own sex, withholds it from
"even the noblest woman in England."
When that excited and somewhat pathetic appeal is addressed to us,
we have only to consider what a vote really gives.
The parliamentary vote is an instrument--and a quite astonishly
disappointing instrument it is--for obtaining legislation; that is,
for directing that the agents of the State shall in certain defined
circumstances bring into application the weapon of physical
compulsion.
Further, the vote is an instrument by which we give to this or that
group of statesmen anthority to supervise and keep in motion the whole
machinery of compulsion.
To take examples. A vote cast in favour of a Bill for the prohibition
of alcohol--if we could find opportunity for giving a vote on such a
question--would be a formal expression of our desire to apply, through
the agency of the paid servants of the State, that same physical
compulsion which Mrs. Carrie Nation put into application in her
"bar-smashing" crusades.
And a vote which puts a Government into office in a country where
murder is punishable by death is a vote which, by agency of the
hangman, puts the noose round the neck of every convicted murderer.
So that the difference between voting and direct resort to force is
simply the difference between exerting physical violence in person,
and exerting it through the intermediary of an agent of the State.
The thing, therefore, that is withheld from "the noblest woman in
England," while it is conceded to the man who is lacking in nobility
of character, is in the end only an instrument by which she might
bring into application physical force.
When one realises that that same noblest woman of England would shrink
from any personal exercise of violence, one would have thought that it
would have come home to her that it is not precisely her job to
commission a man forcibly to shut up a public-house, or to hang a
murderer.
One cannot help asking oneself whether, if she understood what a vote
really means, the noblest woman in England would still go on
complaining of the bitter insult which is done to her in withholding
the vote.
But the opportunist--the practical politician, as he calls
himself--will perhaps here intervene, holding some such language as
this:--"Granting all you say, granting, for the sake of argument,
that the principle of giving votes to woman is unsound, and that evil
must ultimately come of it, how can you get over the fact that no very
conspicuous harm has resulted from woman suffrage in the countries
which have adopted it? And can any firm reasons be rendered for the
belief that the giving of votes to women in England would be any whit
more harmful than in the Colonies?"
A very few words will supply the answer.
The evils of woman suffrage lie, _first,_ in the fact that to give the
vote to women is to give it to voters who as a class are quite
incompetent to adjudicate upon political issues; _secondly,_ in the
fact that women are a class of voters who cannot effectively back up
their votes by force; and, _thirdly,_ in the fact that it may
seriously embroil man and woman.
The first two aspects of the question have already in this controversy
been adequately dealt with. There remains the last issue.
From the point of view of this issue the conditions which we have to
deal with in this country are the absolute antithesis of those ruling
in any of the countries and States which have adopted woman suffrage.
When woman suffrage was adopted in these countries it was adopted in
some for one reason, in others for another. In some it was adopted
because it appealed to the _doctrinaire [theoretical]_ politician as
the proper logical outcome of a democratic and Socialistic policy. In
others it was adopted because opportunist politicians saw in it an
instrument by which they might gain electioneering advantages. So much
was this the case that it sometimes happened that the woman's vote was
sprung upon a community which was quite unprepared and indifferent to
it.
The cause of woman suffrage was thus in the countries of which we
speak neither in its inception nor in its realisation a question of
revolt of woman against the oppression of man. It had, and has, no
relation to the programmes of the militant suffragists as set out at
the outset of this letter.
By virtue of this, all the evils which spring from the embroiling of
man and woman have in the countries in question been conspicuously
absent.
Instead of seeing himself confronted by a section of embittered and
hostile women voters which might at any time outvote him and help to
turn an election, man there sees his women folk voting practically
everywhere in accordance with his directions, and lending him a hand
to outvote his political opponent.
Whether or no such voting is for the good of the common weal is beside
our present question. But it is clearly an arrangement which leads to
amity and peace between a man and his womenkind, and through these to
good-will towards all women.
In England everything is different.
If woman suffrage comes in here, it will have come as a surrender to
a very violent feminist agitation--an agitation which we have traced
back to our excess female population and the associated abnormal
physiological conditions.
If ever Parliament concedes the vote to woman in England, it will be
accepted by the militant suffragist, not as an eirenicon, but as a
victory which she will value only for the better carrying on of her
fight _a outrance [to the bitter end]_ against the oppression and
injustice of man.
A conciliation with hysterical revolt is neither an act of peace; nor
will it bring peace.
Nor would the conferring of the vote upon women carry with it any
advantages from the point of view of finding a way out of the material
entanglements in which woman is enmeshed, and thus ending the war
between man and woman.
One has only to ask oneself whether or not it would help the
legislator in remodelling the divorce or the bastardy laws if he had
conjoined with him an unmarried militant suffragist as assessor.
Peace will come again. It will come when woman ceases to believe and
to teach all manner of evil of man despitefully. It will come when she
ceases to impute to him as a crime her own natural disabilities, when
she ceases to resent the fact that man cannot and does not wish to
work side by side with her. And peace will return when every woman for
whom there is no room in England seeks "rest" beyond the sea, "each
one in the house of her husband," and when the woman who remains in
England comes to recognise that she can, without sacrifice of dignity,
give a willing subordination to the husband or father, who, when all
is said and done, earns and lays up money for her.
A. E. WRIGHT.
_March_ 27, 1912.