The Old Maid and Her Relation to Society
One of the first facts to be remembered about the spinster, whether
she be a positive or a negative woman, is that she is an abnormal
being—just as the celibate priest is abnormal, and just as any
non-reproductive adult animal is abnormal—and therefore that her
impulses must inevitably find their adaptation in an abnormal manner.
This may be an unpleasant fact, and it may seem a hard thing to say;
but we are not concerned here with what is pleasant, kind-hearted, or
courteous. Our concern is much more to approach as nearly as we can
to the truth on this matter; and since the phenomenon of spinsterhood
is well known, to deal with it in a manner that will be useful to all
those who wish to arrive at a better understanding of it.
Modern people have grown so emotional and sentimental as to truth
in general, that it is becoming more and more difficult to deal in
a straightforward way with subjects having unpleasant associations,
or likely to lead to unpleasant conclusions, without incurring all
kinds of imputations that are utterly irrelevant to an honest spirit
of inquiry. The moment they leave the investigation of such obviously
harmless subjects as chess or bridge, and turn their attention to human
nature, modern people feel that the pursuit of truth must or ought to
be directed more by a constant regard for good feeling, politeness and
pleasantness, than by any rigorous endeavour to arrive at facts.
For instance, when the ordinary middle-class person of the present
day hears it said that spinsters are abnormal, cannot help acting
abnormally, and must therefore constitute an abnormal influence in
society, he finds it difficult to resist the temptation to object
indignantly: “Oh, but it isn’t their fault if they are spinsters—why
say such hard things about them?”
It never occurs to such a person that the business of discovering
the facts about a certain phenomenon is not an undertaking that can
be trammelled by considerations either of gallantry or drawing-room
etiquette, nor is it embarked upon with the object of apportioning
praise or blame. The contention that it is not the spinster’s fault
that she is a spinster, therefore, is no more relevant to an inquiry
into spinsterhood, and ought no more to influence us in the conclusions
at which we arrive concerning spinsterhood, than the fact that the germ
of tuberculosis is not responsible for being the germ of tuberculosis
ought to influence us in our inquiry into its relation to pulmonary
phthisis.
I am quite prepared to admit without further ado that there are
hundreds, possibly thousands, of noble and eminently desirable women in
England to-day who have remained spinsters from deliberate choice. I
have no doubt that if I had been a woman and had entertained anything
approximately like my present opinion of modern men, I too would
have remained a spinster, maybe from sheer nausea.[102] The majority
of modern men are so very much below even a modest idea of what man
should be, they have been so much besotted and debilitated through
generations of unmanly labours and occupations, that it is not merely
conceivable that many women should prefer not to condescend, it is
almost inconceivable that any woman can be found who imagines she has
found her match. Let us clearly define, however, what we have set
ourselves out to investigate. We have not undertaken in this chapter
to show the multifarious reasons why a woman may elect spinsterhood
as her rôle in life. We have undertaken the more important task of
discovering her relation to society when once the rôle of spinster
has been assumed. Whether she has remained a spinster from deliberate
choice, therefore, or whether she is a spinster owing to the loss of
her fiancé at sea or in a railway accident, matters but little. The
fact is that, as the result of circumstances which may or may not have
been beyond her control, she has remained unmarried. As a spinster she
will inevitably develop characteristics more or less true to type.
These characteristics will exercise some influence on her own life
and that of others. It is this influence that we propose to consider,
irrespective of the causes which brought the spinster herself into
being.
From the outset, therefore, it is as well for everybody to bear this
in mind in regard to spinsterhood in general, namely, that since the
spinsters of any country represent a body of human beings who are not
leading natural lives, and whose fundamental instincts are able to find
no normal expression or satisfaction, it follows, on _a priori_ grounds
alone, apart from any question of evidence, which we may ultimately
find for or against, that the influence of this body of spinsters on
the life of the nation to which they belong, must be abnormal, and
therefore contrary to the normal needs and the natural development of
that nation. Moreover, since the abnormal, when it is not supernormal,
tends constantly to gravitate into the morbid, it is not inconsistent
with this principle, but rather a necessary conclusion from it, to say
that the presence of a body of unadapted spinsters in any nation must
exercise a morbid influence upon the life of that nation.
The attitude of the average thinker to this conclusion is, as a rule,
to shrug his shoulders and to exclaim: “What would you do with them,
poor things? They must live!” Certainly. And it is precisely because
they must live that they cannot help exercising a baneful influence on
the life of the community. The fact that modern society can offer no
satisfactory solution of the surplus-woman question does not justify
us in overlooking the evils which are the outcome of surplus women in
our midst. The fact that we can devise no adaptation for them, does
not relieve us of the duty of investigating the nature of the evils to
which their non-adaptedness gives rise.
To concentrate upon the economic aspect of the question, and to say
as many do, that provided these surplus women can support themselves,
the problem of their lives, and the difficulty of their evil influence
upon their nation, is entirely solved, is simply to draw a red
herring across the path of our inquiry. For self-support is not even
the consummation of the life of _man_. How then could it be the
consummation of the life of _woman_, in whom a very much more elaborate
equipment than man’s for a definite calling, demands a far more
complicated range of bodily activities than any to which an occupation
providing merely self-support can possibly lead? Self-support is never
more than a means to an end. The needs of a full and complete life,
therefore, cannot be met by self-support and the industry by which it
is achieved.
Neither is it any satisfactory reply to the question, How can we
correct or eliminate the evils of spinsterhood? to point to the number
of spinsters who are doing what is called “useful work.” In the first
place, it is always wise when such a plea is advanced, to inquire into
the “useful” work in question, in order to discover (_a_) how much of
it has been rendered necessary by the very existence of spinsters in
large numbers, (_b_) how much of it is the creation of the spinsters
themselves in their resolute insistence on acquiring some importance,
(_c_) how much of it is actually harmful, (_d_) how much of it is not
essentially woman’s work at all. Finally, when these questions have
been gone into with sufficient care, we find ourselves back at the old
objection that, however useful the employment may be at which spinsters
may be working, since it cannot thoroughly adapt them (except in the
event of its conforming to two additional conditions which shall be
discussed later),[103] it must leave them still abnormal members of the
community, and therefore a morbid influence.
I propose to discuss the whole question of spinsterhood from the age
when, in healthy girls, the condition begins to prove noticeably
deleterious to health and spirits, to the time when, if marriage has
not taken place, no fertilization can occur.
I therefore have for my subject the general question of spinsterhood,
from the time when a virgin reaches the age of twenty-five, to the time
when she is fifty or more. And very naturally I propose to concern
myself not with spinsters in the legal sense, but only with spinsters
who are entitled to the epithet _intacta_.
Proceeding along the accustomed lines, spinsters shall accordingly be
classified as follows:—
(1) Positive virgins.
(2) Negative virgins.
—that is to say, (1) those whose bodies and instincts say “Yea”
emphatically to life, and who will brook no negative compromise; and
(2) those whose bodies and instincts are not sufficiently vital or
sanguine insistently to demand the fulfilment of their destiny.
It is necessary to make this sharp distinction again, because it is the
only way to be clear regarding the diversity of characteristics which
are to be found among spinsters of all nations and climes.
In Chapter III, I dealt with the question of the origin of instinctive
desire, or bodily impulse or wish. I showed how it arose from two
possible sources:—
(_a_) An ancestral habit, leading to a predisposition to perform
certain actions in a certain manner, or to function in a traditional
way in complete conformity with the lines laid down by previous
generations within a species.
(_b_) A certain correlation of bodily parts or organs, the possession
of which in itself is sufficient to suggest and to enforce a particular
course of conduct in its owner.
I showed that the blind will to function in a certain way, and the
impulse to seek the means of functioning in a certain way, must arise,
provided that these two conditions are present in an individual, and
that his body is in a sufficiently tonic state for these conditions to
operate normally.
Now in a woman the blind will to function as a mother finds its source
in:—
(_a_) The long line of female ancestors who _must_ have been mothers,
and who therefore have established an ancestral maternal habit on the
female side, which reaches the individual female with a considerable
amount of accumulated momentum through the generations that have
preceded her.
(_b_) A certain correlation of bodily parts—the large amount of space
taken up in the female body by the organs connected directly or
indirectly with procreation, the importance of these organs, and the
elaborate nervous organization contrived to bring these organs into
effective and harmonious action when once the proper start has been
given.
(1) In the unmarried woman, therefore, whose body is sufficiently
healthy and tonic to act normally, there are two forces incessantly
impelling her to the employment of her important reproductive organs,
of both of which forces she may be and usually is, childishly
unconscious: they are (_a_) her ancestral bias or habit, and (_b_) the
correlation of her bodily parts. The more perfectly formed she is and
the more healthy she is, the more importunate will these forces be, and
the less inclined will they show themselves to be put off without a
struggle.
This woman or girl I shall call the positive spinster—that is to say,
the type of unmarried female who says “Yea” emphatically to life,
and whose tendency will always be to favour those opportunities,
circumstances, and directions in her life which promise to lead her to
motherhood and the normal functioning of her body.
(2) In the unmarried woman, however, whose body is not sufficiently
healthy or tonic to act normally, there are the same forces present,
driving her to employ her reproductive organs; but the insistence of
these forces not being very great, the drive is hardly felt, or not
felt at all. The ancestral habit, although the same of course, speaks
with a fainter voice, and the correlation of organs which are less
tonic and less healthy perforce generates a less impetuous impulse.
This woman or girl I shall call the negative spinster—that is to say,
she is the type of unmarried female who either says “Nay” emphatically
to life, and who will not hasten to seize opportunities that promise
to lead to motherhood, or else she will be listless and apathetic
about the whole matter, unconsciously so, and therefore consciously
uninterested, unmoved by any of its aspects.
These two types of spinsters will now be examined separately.
(1) THE POSITIVE SPINSTER
She is usually a great conscious sufferer, sometimes both mentally
and physically; for, while she possesses the physical equipment for
marriage in a highly tonic condition, with all the potential virtues of
the mother, this equipment and these virtues never have the opportunity
of deploying their power.
She may, at the cost of great pains, develop other virtues and other
adaptations; but the fact to be remembered about her is, that the
functions for which she is best fitted and the virtues which are most
essentially hers, cannot be used in her life.
Whatever else she may become—_that_ is always her second calling. Her
true vocation will have been missed. What perfection soever she may
attain in her second calling, will always be inferior to that which she
would certainly have shown in the calling for which she was primarily
and chiefly endowed.
In addition, however, to the extra fatigue, worry, pains and distaste
always connected with pursuing a vocation not primarily one’s own, she
herself will always feel and reveal the disillusionment and bitter
regret of one who is conscious of having been designed for something
different. The mood of the artist whom circumstances have compelled to
adopt accountancy for a livelihood, will be her constant mood.
In addition to being a person pursuing a wrong vocation, in this sense,
however, she will feel something more than the artist who is doomed to
accountancy. She will feel “out of it,” as the popular expression has
it—outside that which is most thrilling, most enthralling, and most
universally interesting, outside the main _Stream of Life_ itself.
All of us, as we look around and behold our big cities, our municipal
authorities and their offices, our streets, our traffic on those
streets, our railways, our Parliament, our system of Judicature, our
industries, our commerce, and finally the land beyond with all its
agricultural and mining activities; all of us who can with one sweeping
glance comprehend the immensely vast and intricate activities which
go to make a modern nation, have sometimes a lucid moment when we can
abstract from the wild and confusing tangle of our environment the idea
of the _purpose_ for which it is all there, the idea of the _force_ for
which it is organized—in short the underlying _fact_ which gives the
city, the country beyond, and all the activities we see, a sense, a
genuine meaning.
This purpose, this force, this fact, is the _Stream of Life_ that runs
through our organized State, and to which all these activities, all
these complex conditions, do but minister. The factory is thus beheld,
not as an end in itself, but like art, like railways, like the bus
service and the Government, it is only an instrument serving the most
important thing of all, the Stream of Life, Human Life.
Now it is precisely from this most important thing of all that the
spinster feels herself most radically and hopelessly severed. She
may minister to it indirectly, through the factory, the municipal
or Government offices, the studio, the nursery or the scientific
professions; but her importance will be commensurate with the relation
she bears to it. She is one step removed from the main stream, she does
not directly flow with it; before the most important thing on earth,
the thing that gives everything else its sense, she is and can only be
a spectator. This is the additional anguish she must feel as a creature
cheated of her proper calling. The artist with whom we have compared
her, who suffers the mortifying experience of pursuing a vocation
(accountancy) not his own, may after all be flowing with the Stream of
Life, and form part of it. The additional anguish of being “out of it,”
in this sense, he need not necessarily feel. He experiences only half
the spinster’s spiritual distress.
Nor will it necessarily console her, or reconcile her to her relatively
unimportant fate as spectator, to point to the pain, the passion, the
disappointment, the hardships, the disease and the poverty that lash
the main Stream of Life like a flail. If she is honest, she will tell
you just what everybody else feels—that she would risk all these things
to be in it.
But there is yet something more she endures, which the artist doomed to
accountancy is spared. Provided he be wise and observes the essential
rules of hygiene and sound diet, there is no reason, despite his
abandoned mission, why his body should suffer very severely. While he
may deplore his wasted capacity for art, he may nevertheless live a
healthy sexual life and become a happy father.
The positive spinster, on the other hand, cannot well escape the
physical penalty of her total sexual abstinence. The rebuff offered
to her reproductive system by the long, endless wait is neither
passed over by Nature nor forgiven. Such elaborate preparations as
have been made in her body for a specific consummation cannot end in
nothing, without certain very definite reactions, which it is neither
fanciful nor fantastic, but rather helpful, to describe collectively
as a profound _physiological disappointment_. The fact that this
physiological disappointment does not enter consciousness as a
disappointment has nothing whatever to do with its reality.
The energy that has been waiting and waiting to be used endeavours
to discharge itself. Since it cannot find the customary and normal
channels of discharge, it disperses itself erratically along any
channel that it can find—usually the nerves—and it does this angrily
because of the impetus it has acquired through being checked. The
thwarted instincts show their revolt in internal conflict with the
other instincts of life, and may be so powerful as to convert a
girl hitherto consistently yea-saying into a radical nay-sayer,
or a suicide.[104] Hence the strong tendency to suicide in very
positive girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty, when the
passions are most impetuous, and waiting leads to the maximum amount
of conflict.[105] The fact that the number of suicides among women
increases where their occupations bring them in contact with men, and
that the same association with men also increases their tendency to
lunacy and criminality,[106] supports the view that the physiological
expectancy, by being increased owing to the presence of a strong sexual
stimulus, leads to a greater conflict when it is disappointed.
The discharge of the sexual energy along nervous channels may lead to
every variety of neuropathic symptoms. The woman may become the victim
of phobias, obsessions, melancholia, morbid self-contempt, or morbid
self-esteem (narcissism), facial tics, other spasms, insomnia, vicious
secret habits, and hallucinations. Owing to the fact that other parts
of her body, away from her sexual organs (the throat, œsophagus, or
bowel, etc.), may attempt to find compensation for the inexperienced
sexual sensations, she may find a morbid pleasure in consuming
highly condimented foods, or foods which she can swallow in a bulky
bolus[107]—bananas, new bread, pastry, insufficiently masticated hard
foods, such as bread-crusts, apples, and even raw vegetables. This
propensity, while quickly inducing indigestion, may, by giving a false
appetite, cause her to be taken for a glutton. A case has been known
of a girl who, addicted to this method of pseudo-sexual satisfaction,
used to employ artificial means of vomiting up her food, like the more
dissipated Romans of old, in order to be able to enjoy a fresh bout of
swallowing.[108] The effects of this kind of abuse upon the alimentary
canal may well be imagined, and even where it is not carried to
extremes, must in the long run lead to all the most distressing forms
of chronic dyspepsia.
Furthermore, the instinctive effort which every woman will make, in
cases of vague physiological distress, to conceal her bodily misery
from her friends and relatives, frequently leads to consistent
affectation. It is not necessary that the nature of the bodily misery
should have reached consciousness in order that affectation, as a
means of concealment, should be indulged in. It is sufficient that
the physiological distress should have been communicated vaguely as
_distress_ to the brain. From the moment this has occurred there will
be a tendency in all brave women, who incline to show a bold and
happy face to the world, to practise every kind of affectation. Their
speech, their voice and even their laugh will strike their friends as
over-strained or peculiar. Some will habitually make strange grimaces,
others will smile in a set, exaggerated way, or over-emphasize their
horror at objects disliked and their pleasure at objects approved. The
affectation may even affect their gait, so that they will walk with
a bold manly stride in which an unconscious attempt will be made to
demonstrate to the outside world excessive self-assurance and happy
adaptation, in order to conceal the reverse of these feelings which are
agitating their spirits. As time goes on these affectations will become
fixed habits that no training and no changes in environment can remove.
There may be attempts at sterile compensation, taking the form of
an excessive fondness for children, or a desire to fondle or to
have power over them. This is particularly obnoxious, and entirely
justifies psychologists like Dr. E. Jones in strongly deprecating
the too exclusive teaching of children by unmarried teachers.[109]
It may look very sweet to behold the spinster of from twenty-five
to forty manifesting her affection for a child and kissing, nursing
or instructing it. But when it is remembered that the spinster in
question is not merely giving herself very well-defined pleasure by
the immediate touch of the soft downy skin of the child, or by the
sense of power over it, but may also be rousing in the child itself
certain pleasurable feelings, or certain notions, that do not fail to
become registered on its memory, and may induce either regrettable
sexual precocity or a distorted view of life,[110] the behaviour of
the spinster appears in a less innocuous light. Nevertheless, it must
be admitted that such attempts at sterile compensation by unmarried
women are hard to prevent; for the spinster’s action at such times is
quite unconscious, and she is usually so far from realizing what she is
doing, that if you were to enlighten her upon her conduct she would be
both indignant and disgusted. There can be little doubt, however, that
the spinster’s strong predilection in favour of the teacher’s calling
is largely due to this blind pursuit of some kind of power over the
young.
There may also be attempts at compensation with members of the same
sex—not necessarily in the form of vicious unnatural relations, but in
the nature of patronizing friendship with younger girls. Spinsters in
the wealthy classes who organize and direct girls’ clubs are usually
seeking compensation of this kind, and receive a tremendous amount of
credit for humanitarian motives, of which they are entirely innocent.
Nevertheless, the misinterpretation of the crowd, which takes their
action to be humanitarian, is eagerly seized and adopted by them,
because it helps them to give a definite description to the merely
_compensatory_ character of their interest in the club, which even they
themselves do not, of course, understand.
Among the more wealthy spinsters, there may also be attempts at
compensation through frankly humanitarian propaganda, through the
endowment or enriching of humanitarian institutions, or through
humanitarian labours. This is usually expressed by a very deep concern
about the welfare of animals, or the poor, or the babes of the poor,
_or anything over which the assumption of power constitutes an easy
and uncompromising matter_. We should remember that the relationship
of mother to child derives more than half its exquisite pleasure for
the female from the fact that it is a relationship of almost absolute
power. This instinct to wield power, therefore, which forms an
essential factor in female psychology in its relation to the helpless,
and which explains the regret most mothers feel when their children are
first able to run about and become independent, has to be reckoned with
in the psychology of the spinster. If it cannot in her find its normal
expression, it will seek compensation in every possible way, and since
humanitarian interests offer an uncompromising outlet for its exercise,
humanitarian interests are naturally in very great favour among the
spinsters of all classes.
Intimately connected with humanitarian pursuits, particularly when
they are adopted with frenzied resolution, is however another and
less inviting psychological factor. The theory that males and
females contain in their constitution certain elements, more or less
accentuated, of the other sex, is now so widely accepted that it has
become a commonplace in all speculations upon the sex question. Now
among the characteristics which most frequently manifest themselves in
women of marked male tendencies is a proneness to sadistic expressions
of the sex instinct. The habit of teasing among hysterical girls, and
even among female children not yet pubescent, is a sign of this.[111]
In the normal life of the married female these sadistic impulses become
sublimated either by the action of the stronger male upon her psyche
and physique (which draws the masochistic elements in her to the fore)
or by the natural expression of her power over her baby or babies. In
the unmarried female, or the female without offspring, these sadistic
impulses have to be repressed or curbed. The peaceful and orderly
expression of them in modern society is hardly possible. But we are
told by psychologists that an overpowered instinct asserts itself in an
obverse character.[112] In spinsters, therefore, we should expect the
sadistic elements _in the happiest circumstances_ to become inverted
into intense humanitarianism.[113]
This explains why we so frequently encounter middle-aged spinsters
whose hard metallic faces and cruel cold eyes seem so utterly out of
keeping with their ardent participation in humanitarian movements
of all kinds. I remember one occasion when I happened to call on a
lady of this kind. I was appalled by the terrifying hardness of her
features, and yet, I must say, I was not in the least surprised when,
in the course of the conversation, she asked me (I ought to mention
the district where she lived was a very hilly one) whether I did
not suffer at the sight of the _poor_ horses in the neighbourhood.
These women, who frequently have hearts of stone, nevertheless find
compensation for the repression of their sadistic impulses in the
exercise of the most ungovernable and most obsessional humanitarianism
and sentimentality, but while their neighbours and the local clergy
applaud their lives to the echo, no one has the smallest inkling of
the true nature of the phenomenon. A child would tell at a glance
that these humanitarian and sentimental ladies were not radically
kind by nature, and those who live with them every day would probably
confirm the child’s first impression; but such is the distrust in
England of what the eye can read, and so great and instantaneous is
the respect for humanitarian zeal, particularly when it is backed by a
heavy banking account, that these women frequently die leaving a big
reputation for warm-heartedness behind them.
The fact that this feverish humanitarianism and sentimentality are
frequently most mischievous in their effects and create a number of
national abuses, besides involving the expenditure of large sums of
money on what are frequently the least desirable and least promising
elements in the nation, is concealed beneath the dramatic munificence
of the wealthy spinster’s life.[114]
In the wealthy classes, as the result of their superior cultivation,
the compensation frequently takes an active intellectual form, and
when, owing to the vague consciousness of enduring a great grievance
(common to most positive spinsters who have not successfully sublimated
their reproductive instincts), misanthropy supervenes, there may
arise a very pronounced sex-antagonism, leading the spinsters who
have developed it to engage in pursuits, or in intellectual pastimes,
where they feel they can clash with men, or where they know they can
resist or impede men in the natural business of their lives. Spinsters
seeking this kind of compensation frequently derive great satisfaction
from misogamist meditations. They will display a morbid interest in
arguments against marriage, in the statistics of insanity or disease
among married women, and in the evidence of excessive parturition
(leading to debility) among the wives of the poor. They will exercise
their influence to convert young girls to misanthropy, to misogamy,
or at least to an indifference to men; and if they can achieve this
end, under a religious cloak (which is not difficult with passionate
young girls of eighteen, whose “vague voluminous and powerful feelings,
if afforded means to do so, settle down and concentrate on a single
object,”[115]), they justify themselves on the score that they have
led such young girls into paths of purity and devotion.[116]
It would be impracticable here to deal with all the possible
manifestations of sex-repression in the female celibate. They have been
discussed very fully by other authors, and in detail they would serve
no purpose in this book. I have contented myself with hinting broadly
at those morbid results of sex-repression in the positive virgin which,
while not leading to definite lunacy or insanity, are yet common enough
to demand consideration in a discussion upon the spinster’s relation to
society; but let not any reader imagine that in the outline given above
there has been any desire to dwell upon the black side of a picture
which from whatever angle it be viewed cannot at best be a pleasant
one. There is a good deal of strong feeling among the majority of
people to-day against the belief that sex-repression need necessarily
have _bad_ results. These people say that the school of psycho-analysts
have grossly exaggerated the facts about the phenomena, and have drawn
an unnecessarily lurid description of them. But surely the question is
one concerning which it would be suicidal in a scientist to exaggerate
or overstate his case. Is it not after all common sense?
Years ago—or to be precise in the year 1840—de Quincey, comparing the
mental diseases that arise from excessive expression with those that
come from insufficient expression, or the non-expression, of deep
sensibilities, wrote as follows concerning this matter:
“Amongst the Quakers (who may be regarded as a monastic people)
anomalous forms of nervous derangement are developed, the secret
principle of which turns ... upon feelings too much repelled and driven
in. Morbid suppression of deep sensibilities must lead to states of
disease equally terrific, and possibly even less tractable; not so
sudden and critical it may be, but more settled and gloomy.”[117]
This anticipates most of what modern psychology has discovered about
repression, and can be applied just as legitimately to repression in
the physical as in the psychical sphere. But a very much earlier record
of the same common-sense view about repression, or non-expression of
natural appetites and sensibilities, is to be found in Aristotle’s
_Poetics_, where the doctrine of _catharsis_ constitutes the kernel of
all that modern psychologists would claim in regard to this particular
aspect of civilized humanity.
As the life of the individual female is prolonged, and the _tone_ of
her reproductive organs depreciates through the deleterious influence
of long idle waiting, there occurs an abatement of the unconscious
influences impelling the positive spinster to seek a fuller life.
A sort of passive adaptation to abnormality takes place in which a
balance is attained, and the restless and more afflicting symptoms
become accordingly less acute. But, with the decline in sexual vigour
and alertness, there is a corresponding falling off of good spirits,
hopefulness, and the love of life, and frequently there supervenes a
pronounced distaste for human concerns or a general depression, which
makes the spinster the proverbially embittered female of popular
tradition. The more positive she was at the outset, the more likely is
this revulsion of feeling to appear in an intolerable form—hence the
common occurrence of embittered spinsters on the Continent, where women
are, as a rule, more positive than in England.
Indeed, it can usually be taken for granted that where Nature has been
thwarted without any dire results, Nature was not originally very
strong, or not assertive enough to offer very severe resistance. The
presence of thousands of very cheerful and completely adapted spinsters
in England, therefore, far from being a good sign, is in reality a very
deplorable one; for it argues that in them Nature was not powerful
enough to offer any determined fight before allowing herself to be
completely conquered.
There are but two possible exceptions to this rule, and they occur
where the reproductive instinct has been subjected to the process
known to psychologists as _sublimation_. This innocuous transmutation
of the sex appetite and emotions may be effected either by means of
Christianity (religious fervour)[118] or Alcohol (dypsomania). When
either of these potent sublimators of the sex impulse has come into
operation, it is no longer safe to argue from the spectacle of a
cheerful and happy spinster of middle age, that in her Nature was not
very strong from the start. But, again, the fact should be emphasized
that with the spread of enlightenment on the one hand, and the general
decline in vigorous health on the other, these hitherto unfailing means
of sex-sublimation are becoming ever less and less accessible to the
women of the nation. A generation has arisen on whom the fundamental
tenets of the old faith have lost their hold, and in whom, therefore,
it is becoming ever more and more difficult for Christianity to become
a burning substitutive passion; while this same generation can no
longer undertake the alcoholic cure, owing to the fact that human
health is no longer what it was.[119]
Before proceeding to a discussion of the negative spinster, I now
propose to consider one aspect only of the positive unmarried girl of
the poorer or working classes.
There can be little doubt that in her case, very much more frequently
than in the case of the well-to-do spinster, compensation is sought
in some kind of illicit relation to the males either of her own class
or of the class above. The statistics of prostitution alone show what
an enormous contribution the women of the poorer or working classes
make to the ranks of the courtesans in Europe; and seeing what the
alternative usually is—that is to say, a life of drudgery unrelieved by
any brighter element and aggravated by all the evils of unsuccessful
repression—it is not surprising that among the more positive girls of
the poorer classes, particularly in towns, there are many who go to
swell the army of fast women.
But at this point it will be necessary for me to digress a little in
order to make quite clear my own standpoint in regard to this very
vexed question of prostitution. For it is only an evil in modern
Western Civilization because people insist on making it so.
Our civilization stands or falls as a whole. The intricate adjustments
which constitute its fabric, and the minute ramifications that wander
in all directions from every centre in its complicated organization
to every other centre, and sometimes to every other civilization,
lend to its various parts a character so interdependent and mutually
subservient, that it is no longer possible to lay hold of any important
portion of it, with a view to condemnation, without thereby condemning
the whole.
The comfortable and short-sighted people who, from the security of
their smug homes, point a finger of censure at prostitution, therefore,
have not as a rule the imaginations or the knowledge to realize that
in so doing they are bringing an indictment against the whole order of
society, including their own pathetic fastnesses of bourgeois luxury
and morality.
If prostitution exists on a large scale in modern Europe, and
prostitution is wrong, then the civilizations of modern Europe are
wrong, and it is fatuous to point to the most obvious sore, when the
whole pig is diseased. Nobody nowadays denies, perhaps, that the whole
pig is diseased? Then it is absurd to moan over this one sore.
But why is so much fuss made precisely about prostitution on its sexual
side? There is the prostitution of healthy rosy-fingered youth in
hundreds of other walks of life, and nobody, or scarcely anybody, stirs
to point it out. The young girls who to-day are sent by their parents
at the age of sixteen to twenty to bow their heads for forty-three
hours a week before a typewriter, or a ledger, or a stamping, cutting
or folding machine, get ill just as quickly, lose their beauty just
as surely, and grow depressed and spiritless just as rapidly, as
the sexual prostitute, and they get only a sixteenth or less of the
prostitute’s entertainment out of life into the bargain. Watch the
career of the girl who sells herself to the modern taskmaster of
commerce or industry! Could anything be more tragic? Could any satyr
bring about grosser degradation of health and spirits? What sympathy or
horror or righteous indignation can you rouse in the moral toads, who
inveigh against prostitution, by pointing to the rounded shoulders, the
loveless life, the listless eyes, the bloodless cheeks and hands of the
typewriter or other machine drudge? None!
They reply that the typist’s worn-out looks, her lost beauty, her faded
youth, her hopeless expression and outlook, are _not_ the result of a
life of immorality, _therefore_ she is honourable, therefore she need
not be rescued, therefore everything is all right, therefore nothing
need be done.
But enough! The wide-awake will see at once that there is cant in
the very frown that is vouchsafed to sexual prostitution—_cant_, the
inevitable ingredient of every movement and every counter-movement in
these islands.[120]
The evils of prostitution are no greater and no more tragic than
those of any other form of exploitation of the individual. That which
unnecessarily aggravates the horrors of the public courtesan’s life in
England is not necessarily the natural consequences of the life itself,
but the whole attitude of the community and of the legislature to the
question of prostitution in general.[121]
Society in England seems resolutely determined not to face and answer
the question: Is prostitution necessary or unnecessary? If it is
necessary to the kind of civilization we have evolved, then the only
honourable, the only humane, the only magnanimous course to take, is
to face it bravely and honestly, and do all we can for those women who
are contributing their lives to a public service, just as we do all we
can for soldiers and sailors in war-time, and for all public workers
who perform useful and dangerous duties for the public weal. If it is
unnecessary, then steps should be taken to find out why it continues
to exist, what flaw in our social system accounts for its survival,
despite the fact that it is superfluous; and how that flaw can be best
removed.
The general consensus of opinion among European legislators and
the European public must be to the effect that prostitution is
necessary. It is inconceivable that it should be allowed to survive as
flourishingly as it does in England and on the Continent, if public
opinion and the legislators in each country could find no excuse for
it. What is still more inconceivable, however, is the diabolical
hypocrisy of a public, which at the same time tacitly assents to it as
a social need, and yet covers with shame and contempt those who devote
their lives to making it possible.
Truth to tell, there are many grave reasons why prostitution[122] still
constitutes a necessary adjunct to our topsy-turvy, hare-brained social
system, and as long as it remains as topsy-turvy and hare-brained as
it is, the prostitute will continue to be indispensable. In view of
this fact, it is but rational, not to mention humane, to regard with
more solicitude and charity those who from what motive, or through what
circumstances soever, supply the means for its existence.
I will touch but lightly on two aspects of society which seem to
contribute chiefly to the causes making prostitution a public
necessity. I refer to (_a_) the virgin ideal in marriage, or
_parthenogamy_, and (_b_) the economic system which compels thousands
among the men of the struggling classes to marry at a date very
much later than their physiological development would indicate as
reasonable.[123]
(_a_) In order to preserve the custom of parthenogamy in conjunction
with (_b_) it is obvious that there must be some safety-valve, some
outlet for the expression of virile passions, which while being
normal is capable of safeguarding a certain large body of virgins
annually, and of preserving them from pre-connubial amours. The fact
that, at present, this safety-valve or outlet, though countenanced by
society, is entirely neglected, despised and concealed by the public,
and is thus allowed to breed many evils which are not necessary to
prostitution _per se_, is not so much a reflection on the prostitute
as upon the administration which leaves this department of social life
utterly uncared for and unorganized.
(_b_) Apart altogether from the fact that late marriages resulting from
economic pressure necessitate the existence of some relief measure
which will preclude the deleterious alternative of repression, or
unnatural vice, in young men; for the adolescent, as we have seen in
the Chapter on Marriage, it is highly desirable that there should be
some school, some opportunity for experience in sexual relations, as
there was in ancient Greece, for instance, in which the young male, in
addition to finding the means of healthily delaying marriage, may also
acquire that mastery in the mysteries of life without which his future
marriage may very seriously suffer. It is one of the most scandalous
features of modern society that, while this relief measure and this
school are allowed to exist, nothing is done to protect either the
women who supply its personnel, or the young men who resort to it, from
all the worst consequences of promiscuity and vice.
The old moralists or moralizers of the nineteenth century, now thank
goodness rapidly becoming extinct, used to justify this scandal by
arguing that the dangers attending the recourse to the prostitute
served a good purpose in two respects: (1) They offered a strong
inducement to sexual abstinence among young men, and (2) they cast
the well-merited stigma of shame and disease upon those women who
ministered to these young men’s ungovernable passions.
It is now no longer possible either medically or psychologically to
support (1), consequently the cold-blooded moral inference in (2)
falls to the ground. The evils of abstinence among men are certainly
in this country more serious than those of indulgence, while the evils
resulting from a total absence of experience in sexual matters among
young men are perhaps the worst of all.
The present obvious duty of civilization, therefore, short of so
revolutionizing society as to make parthenogamy a thing of the past,
and late marriages unnecessary, is to see that the sexual relief
measure and school that the modern world provides for its young men are
placed upon a sounder, a purer and a more humane basis, free from the
ignorant bias of puritanical busy-bodies, and secured from the dangers
that now attend them.
It only remains now to say a word on the position of the prostitute
herself. From the psychological and physical point of view the sadness
of her plight does not reside, as the Puritans of England suppose,
in the moral turpitude of her lot, or in her loathing of it—for that
is simply high-falutin’ nonsense.[124] It resides in the fact that
her very taste for her calling, or the very desire that drew her into
it—that she herself in fact—is a physiological misunderstanding. Her
calling, like that of the childless married woman, presupposes that
she will have to cry “Halt!” to a physiological process in her being,
which only finds its first step in the coitus. By a false analogy with
man’s sexual life the orgasm, which to woman is only the beginning of a
long cycle of sex-experiences which end with the weaning of the child,
is the only part of the female cycle which is vouchsafed her. Like the
barren woman, she is denied the whole of the subsequent stages of the
cycle, so rich in delightful experiences to her, and continues like a
man to confine herself to orgasms—orgasms _ad infinitum_.[125]
It is this that constitutes the sad side of the prostitute’s life. If
she have a tragedy, this is her tragedy. But for fear lest, prompted
by vague moral prejudices, we feel tempted to make too much even of
this aspect of her life—generally overlooked, by the by, in all
dissertations I have read about her—we should remember that she shares
this sad experience not only with thousands of spinsters, but also with
thousands of married women who, from some cause or other, frequently
economic pressure, are compelled to remain childless.[126]
From the national point of view, the feature about modern prostitution
(apart from the evils incidental to it which are preventable) which
is most strongly to be deprecated, is the fact that, since it is from
working-class girls that its ranks are largely recruited, the danger
is that it is upon the most temperamental and most positive of these
girls—upon the most desirable of these girls, therefore—that the
temptation to illicit relations with men is likely to exercise the most
potent influence.
(2) THE NEGATIVE SPINSTER
I now come to the consideration of the negative spinster, and when once
I shall have dealt with her, a few remarks about the characteristics
common both to the positive and negative spinster will conclude the
chapter.
The negative spinster, unlike her positive sister, is not a great
conscious sufferer from her condition. She may ail as the result of
constitutional debility incidental to the inferior vitality which
causes her to be negative; but, from the absence of that element in her
life which consummates a woman’s destiny, she will not be conscious of
suffering very severely.
The physical equipment for marriage, and the traditional impetus
derived from the ancestral habits of her sex, are both present in
her, but their urge is faint, the inner voice, far from being loud
and insistent, is barely audible, and she is harassed by little of
that importunacy on the part of her reproductive organs which compels
her sister either to adapt herself normally to life, or else to seek
compensations and to develop acute nervous symptoms in so doing.
Her own and her friends’ failure to recognize the true nature of
her condition, however, frequently, if not invariably, leads to
misinterpretations of her precise value as an individual which are as
gross as they are dangerous—_gross_ because they apply moral values to
a condition that is primarily physical, _dangerous_ because they lead
the rest of the world into a misunderstanding concerning the importance
of a normal sexual life to the individual, and the worth of life
generally.
These misinterpretations, particularly in England and America, usually
take one or all of the following forms:
(1) Miss A, the negative spinster in question, may regard herself, and
be regarded by others, as _above_ the ordinary impulses of her positive
sister, so that she and others may draw a moral from her condition,
and argue that, by means of exercising sufficient _self-control_,
and preoccupying the mind sufficiently with “elevated” thoughts, the
sex-impulse is easily overcome without any dire results whatsoever.
(2) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as too “pure”
for sexual impulses, so that, far from needing to repress or suppress
the fleshy “demons” within her, she soars to an altitude too lofty to
be reached by them.
(3) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as
_indifferent_ to men, so that she is able to assume an attitude of
philosophical detachment towards the main stream of Life, which she
contemplates from a distance as a mildly amused and sometimes scoffing
spectator.
(4) Miss A may convince herself, and convince others, that
sex-impulses, because they do not happen to be noticeable in her,
are a pure—or rather, an impure illusion. She may argue, and induce
others to argue with her, that the power of these impulses is absurdly
exaggerated by modern psychology, and that she herself is the best
proof of this absurd exaggeration.
As I have pointed out, these misinterpretations are gross, and they are
also dangerous. They are gross, in the first place, because they take
no cognizance of the fact that Miss A is a different creature from her
positive sister, an inferior and a less tonic creature, and secondly
because they give what is really a lamentable condition a falsely
enviable character by concealing its true nature beneath a number of
high-falutin’ euphemisms.
This procedure is dangerous for the following reasons:
(_a_) The Miss A’s of this world, particularly of this English world,
are increasing at such an alarming rate that very soon Miss A will be
the normal woman, and by being held up as the normal woman and the
normal ideal, will mislead the ignorant regarding the most valuable
type of woman.
(_b_) To regard a person as _above_ a normal human passion, when she is
constitutionally and congenitally beneath it, is to lend a power and an
influence to degenerates which must contaminate the national outlook on
all that is desirable in life.
(_c_) To be deceived into imagining that Miss A has achieved by
self-control what her inferior physique has made inevitable is again to
grant her a quality which, by becoming associated with her type, loses
all its instructional worth, besides attributing to her a spurious
value.
(_d_) To accept Miss A’s alleged “purity” as a fact is to remove from
purity all its positive, potent value. The pure virgin is she whose
pride and self-mastery together have protected her from condescending
except to the man who has thoroughly captivated her heart, her
imagination, her sense of the ideal, and her body. But Miss A is not
pure in this sense at all. She is simply _virgo intacta_ because no
deep instinct, no deep impulse, no wild desire, has ever driven her
forth to seek her normal adaptation.
(_e_) To accept Miss A’s mild amusement at life as that of a creature
who, having tasted and tested all life’s joys, concludes that they are
worthless, is to run the danger of scorning life without the advantage
of Miss A’s inferior physique to help one—an experiment which, if
one is positive, can only lead to disastrous results. The fact that
Miss A’s influence on young girls may lead many to try the experiment
is one of the most perilous consequences of the negative spinster’s
existence in our midst. She, in her own person, constitutes a lure
to the negation of life’s joys, to the contempt of the body and its
demands, and to the disdain of the other sex, which is next door to
sex-antagonism. Her mind is merely an instrument seeking intellectual
justifications for her body’s inferiority.
So much for the misunderstandings of the negative spinster’s true
nature, and their corresponding dangers. We may now examine her outlook
a little more narrowly, in order that we may recognize her when we meet
her, and measure her various boasts at their proper worth.
She will usually gravitate almost automatically to the Christian
Church, and become an eager exponent of its principles and an ardent
supporter of its work. She will do this, not because, like her positive
sister, she will require to sublimate impetuous reproductive instincts,
that _will_ find expression, but because the negative character of
the Church’s teaching will naturally appeal to her, and strike her as
offering to people like herself a philosophy which might have been “cut
to measure.”
“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any
man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that
is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and
the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”[127]
“Flesh is death, Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of
sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after
the flesh, ye shall die, but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the
deeds of the body, ye shall live.”[128]
“For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is
life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God.... So
then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”[129]—And so on _ad
infinitum_.
These texts will appeal to her. They will help her to a conviction,
to which she is already predisposed—that she is more godly than her
positive sister, and superior to the rest of the fleshy world. She will
notice that “body” in the text from _Romans_ is spelt with a small b,
whereas Spirit appears in the pompous parade dress of a capital letter.
She will understand this perfectly. She instinctively thinks of her
body with a small b, and of her great, lofty spirit with a capital S.
What effort is it for her to mortify the flesh, seeing that her own
flesh came to her half mortified by nature? (See Gal. v. 24.)
Like the positive spinster, she is conscious of her own unimportance,
of being cut off from the main stream of Life, consequently she exerts
every effort—even at the risk of making herself a perfect nuisance—to
prove herself _most_ important. She will try to be foremost in the work
of the Church, in the work of the parish, or in the work of the Borough
Council. If she be wealthy she will endow special missions, and back
missionaries with more zeal, but with a far more disastrous result,
than that with which most people back horses. What does she know about
the virtues, the good order, the content, the peace of Indian women,
Chinese women, or the females of the Mohammedan harem? She lives in
a country, England, where there is more misery, more disorder, more
sickness and more misunderstanding in connexion with sex than in any
country on earth; and yet by means of her wealth she is determined to
guarantee that this same misery, chaos, sickness and misunderstanding
shall be spread by her minions, the missionaries, to every quarter of
the globe.[130]
She will interfere with anything and everything, quite irrespective of
her qualifications, provided she can leave no doubt in anybody’s mind
as to her extreme importance.
Unlike her positive sister, who is generally too busy mastering or
sublimating her sex-impulses to think of much else, she will watch the
world of the flesh with perfectly unconscious but bitter envy. She will
think, as St. Paul did, that it were good for them if they could “abide
even as I,” and all her activities, all her influences, all her money,
will be directed towards favouring her type and its multiplication.
She will tend to spend her time with the people over whom it is easiest
to exercise power—the sick, the crippled, the blind, the very poor,
the inmates of prisons, and the very aged or the very young. She will
profess that she loves the poor, never dreaming that it is the power
that is so easily exercised over them that is sweet to her. She is
of course hopeless at self-analysis, and even when these facts are
pointed out to her, she is intellectually too dishonest to acknowledge
their truth.
While professing a love of all humanity, she will secretly cherish
a loathing for men, for, where all sex-impulses are absent, the
natural and radical hostility of the sexes (as seen in healthy little
boys and girls, and in animals) finds its full expression. She will
always suspect men of grossness and brutality, and never realize the
staggering brutality of her own thoughts about them, and her own secret
wishes regarding them. Whatever their politics or patriotism may be,
the hearts of all decent positive females are so tortured by war and
the death of men that war involves, that during a long tragedy like the
last War all warm-hearted women longed only for one thing, and that was
the conclusion of hostilities at the earliest possible moment. Not so
the negative spinster. She perceived in the war a means of expressing
her loathing of men under the noble mantle of patriotism, and she did
not scruple to go so far as to agitate for its prolongation as long as
possible.[131] These women could be seen during the war eating their
breakfasts with gusto, while their newspaper, folded to present the
Roll of Honour to their view, was propped up against the milk jug.
But where the negative spinster most thoroughly deceives the world
is in her cheerfulness and general absence of any signs of faulty
or unhappy adaptation. People behold her and are wont to exclaim,
“See, here is a woman who has had none of those experiences which
psychologists assure us are so essential to the happiness of the
female, and yet she is the embodiment of good cheer and general
contentedness!” True! But such people do not know how to distinguish
the negative from the positive spinster, and by confounding the two
assume too readily that it is possible, when sex-impulses have been
impetuous and insistent, to have ignored and flouted them without any
more serious result than a pleasant, contented, and thoroughly peaceful
smile.
The distressing fact is that the number of these women who in England
cheerfully survive a life in which their most important organs and
instincts have been wholly neglected and spurned, is increasing at such
a rate that there is hardly a circle in England that cannot boast of
one or two of them. And seeing that their existence is only possible
where reproductive impulses are low, atonic, and seriously below
standard, their increase is one of the surest indications we possess of
the declining vitality of our race.[132]
Although, in the negative spinster, the sex-impulses are hardly
audible to her consciousness, she reveals in her actions many of the
motivations of her positive sister. On a lower key, for instance, she
may seek compensations of all kinds for the absence of sex-expression;
the only feature that will distinguish her behaviour along this
line from that of her positive sister will be the inferior zeal or
fanaticism with which she enters into the particular compensatory
occupation or activity adopted.
She may show the same fondness for children, but in an attenuated
form; she may reveal the same delight in acquiring power over them,
both bodily and spiritually; she may manifest the usual sadistic
tendencies, with their inverted correlatives, humanitarianism, extreme
sentimentality, and hyper-sensitiveness, and she may show the same
general misanthropy, overlapping her sex-antagonism. In the negative
spinster, however, all these symptoms are likely to be very much more
faint than in her positive sister; nevertheless, she is just as likely
as the latter to die honoured and respected by her Church and the
community, for the “unselfish” humanitarianism of her life, and the
warm-heartedness she showed to everything that was feeble, degenerate,
botched, sick, very young, very aged, dumb, blind, poor or utterly
helpless.
(3) THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPINSTERS AS BREAD-WINNERS AND
INDEPENDENT FUND-HOLDERS
The thousands of spinsters of all classes who are now achieving
“independence,” both in commerce and industry—not to mention the
professions[133]—naturally only increase the acuteness of the economic
difficulties which make their self-support a necessity; for, by
competing with male labour they only aggravate the severity of the
struggle, and increase ever further and further the age at which men
can safely undertake matrimony. In this sense alone the influence of
the spinster on our economic life is a very serious one.
If, in heightening the fury of the economic war, she achieved her
own adaptation and contentedness; if in complicating the economic
difficulties of large societies, she achieved any specific result,
valuable to the community and unobtainable without her, her presence
would be as much a boon as is that of the mother, or any other active
contributor to the main stream of Life. But, seeing that she neither
succeeds in securing her own happiness, nor in promoting the happiness
of the society in which she finds herself—for, apart from nursing,
domestic service and certain trades connected with drapery and women’s
and children’s apparel, it is difficult to point to any extra-domestic
occupation that is typically women’s work—it is doubtful whether she
may not be regarded as a burden on the community and an aggravation of
its already enormous problems.
It should not be forgotten that industry, commerce, the professions and
the Civil Service are but institutions organized for the purposes of
Life. The main stream of Life certainly runs through them, and derives
its security, its relative permanence and its fluency from their
harmonious functions, but they exist for Life, and not Life for them.
It is Life that is important, the channels through which it flows are
only significant, as auxiliary to the main purpose.
Now the spinster, by being wholly divorced from any direct connexion
with the main stream of Life, for which society and the Empire exist,
is severed from the most important phenomenon on earth that can justify
existence. The next best course is to obtain an indispensable foothold
in the machinery that makes the stream of Life, as we have said, more
secure, more permanent and more fluent. The moment, therefore, it can
be shown that the spinster can lay no valid claim to this one remaining
indispensable foothold, but rather that she only clogs, impedes and
retards the machinery that assists Life, her last justification for
existence vanishes; and whatever the work may be that she is doing,
however “useful” it is, we fail to make out her claim to toleration
the moment it can be shown (1) that the work would be done as well
or better by a man or a married woman, (2) that she is not assisting
but only retarding the machinery that makes the main stream of Life
possible.
_In short, it amounts to this_: Society does not exist for the
spinster. Life does not flourish when it is cultivated too luxuriously
in its cul-de-sac ramifications. The main stream is too important.
But there is another and even sadder aspect to the entrance of women
into the arena of commercial, industrial and financial occupations.
One of the greatest tragedies of life for modern women is precisely the
havoc that these occupations have made of modern men. The Alcibiades
type of man, the complete man, the man who, while he can wield a sword
as well as anyone, can also sob over a sonnet, direct a difficult
transaction with shrewdness and sound judgment, be an ardent lover,
a dutiful father, and also a being capable of wisely directing and
ordering his womenfolk at every juncture of their lives, is now
extinct. The versatility of gifts and catholicity of tastes which once
characterized the normal man, has been destroyed by two hundred years
of occupations that are not only emasculating and besotting, but alas!
also specializing. All men nowadays are specialists, and frequently
specialists in the most dehumanizing form of labour. The Leviathan of
Commerce and Industry, Trade and Finance, by compelling them to eschew
other interests and other activities, has reduced the gamut of their
capabilities and their tastes to the limits necessary for making them
contented workers in one of the many narrow and monotonous ruts of
modern life, and _pari passu_ with this metamorphosis there has also
occurred a corresponding decline in physical and particularly in sexual
vigour.
But until recently women had escaped this influence. The very dullness
and specialization of men, which frequently makes women despair of
meeting the male of their dreams (who still continues to be the
“complete man”), had until quite recently not infected the female.
The reader will object that because the bulk of women in the past were
engaged in more domestic duties, it does not follow that these duties
were not besotting or dehumanizing.
This is not really true. The women who advance this view are generally
lazy and frivolous, and prefer to pay even the price of their own
besotment, in order to get out every day and meet clammy-fingered
clerks in stuffy offices.
The work of the home differs in many ways from the work of the factory
or the office, and always to the advantage of domestic pursuits.
In the first place it is work done for the personal ends of the worker
herself, and not for some one, or some company of people, with whom she
has not the smallest personal concern.
Secondly, it is done in her own time and in her own way.
Thirdly, an enormous amount of it is of such a nature that it is both
soothing and wholesome, while it also allows of meditation, thought and
that most precious of lost pastimes, communion with self.
Fourthly, when done efficiently and with a good heart it is so soon
dispatched that it allows of a good deal of leisure, and,
Fifthly, it is never of that nerve-racking nature which, while
demanding unremitting attention, also destroys attention owing to its
lack of interest and all personal value.[134] Now, however, that women
have become active competitors with men in those very occupations to
which modern men owe the principal features of their degeneration, it
cannot be expected that the female of the species is going to escape
any more happily than her male has done the worst consequences of
besotting and specializing labour; and it is therefore inevitable that
in a few generations we shall witness the evanescence in woman of that
catholicity of tastes and interests and that versatility of gifts which
has until lately differentiated her from her male companion.
We shall also witness in her that same bodily degeneration that has
come over man, and yet it is difficult to see how or when the movement
that now leads women to engage in these pursuits can be arrested. The
fact that this movement was largely initiated and supported by that
body of unattached females roughly grouped under the heading “Surplus
Women,” cannot well be denied; but it does not follow from this that it
is a permanent evil in our midst. For, if the problem of the surplus
woman, and of those who are misled by her, be attacked along lines
which have as their ultimate aim the marriage of all women, it does not
seem impossible that something may be done to arrest a tendency which,
from the standpoint of woman’s future, must be bad, and which, from the
standpoint of the future of the race, is nothing less than alarming.
The surprising feature about this movement which during the last
fifty years has led the bulk of girls and young women into the very
occupations to which modern man himself owes his besotment and
miserable limitations, is that those who become the victims of it—that
is to say the vast majority of women workers in Commerce, Industry, the
Civil Service and the Professions, enter joyously, and almost with a
whoop of triumph into the various callings with which they achieve what
they claim to be economic independence. Not only that, but those who
contemplate the procession of them marching into these callings, stand
and applaud and congratulate each other on the spectacle.
It is true that millions of these women in later life have the
intelligence to realize the mistake they have made, and to measure
with some approach to accuracy the deterioration it has effected both
in their minds and in their bodies in one generation. It would be too
much, perhaps, to expect young girls to anticipate these results,
when they first leave their homes to earn their own livelihood; but
what leaves one marvelling is the fact that the older elements in the
population do not seem to understand the doom which will inevitably
overtake this female army and its descendants, and that far from making
any attempt at driving it back, they shout vociferously and applaud it
as a desirable and excellent phenomenon of modern life.
The cynic may reply “All the better! You say that 200 years of
commercial, industrial and office occupations have deteriorated man,
so that modern woman has very naturally learnt to despise him. Very
well, then, if women now suffer a similar amount of deterioration, the
balance will once more be restored, and all will be well.”
All those who can derive some comfort from this reflection, in the face
of modern tendencies, are welcome to it. But to those who, like myself,
realize that hitherto the rapidity of our degeneration has been to some
extent checked by the comparative aloofness of one sex from the worst
influences of modern civilization, and that henceforth, instead of one
stream of degeneration we shall have two which will become confluent
at marriage, the future does not seem to be a very bright one, nor
does it hold out any promise of producing, from the human elements it
will contain, the individuals capable of initiating a counter movement
sufficiently powerful to arrest the tide of degeneracy that threatens
to sweep everything of value away.
With regard to the fund-holding wealthy spinster, it may be taken as a
general rule that she cannot fail to be anything else than a burden to
the community to which she belongs.
She is not only a cul-de-sac, or a blind-alley of the stream of Life,
where the forces that have produced her come to a dead stop, but she
is also the means of damming up a portion of the community’s wealth
in produce and labour in that cul-de-sac. She herself, her household
expenditure, her retinue, and her disbursements for humanitarian and
religious objects, exact a toll on the community, very little of which
is substantially helpful to the fluency or security of the stream of
Life.
He who has travelled much over England does not require to be
reminded of the countless villages and towns where the most imposing
and well-appointed private residence or residences are the homes of
precisely this kind of spinster. I could name half a dozen villages
myself off-hand where by far the most commodious and luxurious house
is the property of one, two, or three spinster ladies. About them in
smaller and conspicuously meaner houses are the other inhabitants of
the village—small families with parents struggling to make both ends
meet, with children frequently underfed and underclothed, but all of
them belonging to the main stream of Life, and constituting the only
justification there is for the existence of the very town and village
itself, the Church, and all the machinery of social life. The spinster
ladies from their wealthy fastness, with its carriage drive, its troop
of servants, its rich solid furniture, and its overfed animals, look
down upon the busy scene about them. They are not part of it, but
merely spectators drawing their profit, their life’s blood from it.
Their untutored minds, guided by local clerical influence, actively
study every means by which they can throw a cloak over the glaring
superfluousness and nothingness of their lives. Deeply conscious, as
the best of them are, of being cut off from the main stream of Life,
and perhaps a trifle piqued by the thought that, besides being severed
from it, their presence there, in the best house for miles around, is
really only a means of impeding the machinery facilitating the flow of
the stream, a means of causing friction in its movements, they make
frantic and resolute efforts to demonstrate their “importance” to those
around.
What their self-esteem, their very self-respect imposes as a duty
upon them, is to make a dramatic and incessant exhibition of being
_important_, to make a very deceptive pretence of belonging to the
main stream of Life itself. Hence the untiring energy with which they
enter into all the village or town festivities which have a public
charity for their object; hence the zeal which they show at all Church
festivals, and the regularity with which they contribute to religious
and charitable institutions both local and distant.
For all this they are looked upon, even by the ignorant villagers
themselves, as delightful and exceedingly valuable members of the
community. Nobody seems to peep beneath the elaborate manœuvres by
which they contrive to “cut a prominent figure.” Nobody seems to see in
their concern about other people’s business and welfare the conclusive
proof that they are straining every nerve to justify an existence
which, on final analysis, they know in their heart of hearts to be
utterly and criminally unjustifiable.
George Meredith is one of the few thoughtful and non-socialistic
writers who have had the courage to say what they felt about this
class of parasites on the community. In Chapter XXIII of _One of our
Conquerors_ he speaks of these “comfortable annuitants under clerical
shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyse at
home and stultify abroad.”[135] But since his references to them occur
in a work of fiction they are hardly elaborate enough to be telling, or
frequent enough to have aroused comment or to have formed the basis of
a doctrine.
Certainly one does not require to be infected with socialistic or
communistic views to feel that the vast number of these spinsters’
mansions all over the country is a bane rather than a boon. From no
political point of view, whether monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic,
democratic or socialistic, is it possible to justify them, and since
the very energy which they devote to their humanitarian form of
sex-compensation is frequently as misguided as it is only a partial
remedy for the harm they themselves are doing, they constitute a
portion of the community that must be honestly and utterly condemned by
every far-seeing thinker on the subject.
To reply to this by a shrug of the shoulders and the question, “What
would you do with them?” is simply foolish. The first great reform
consists in getting them to be regarded no longer as a harmless or
beneficent section of the community, but as a dangerous and intolerable
bane. Once this transmutation of public opinion has been achieved, it
is not a difficult matter to decide what should be done with them.
I invite any reader to take a walking tour through this country of
England, and to count the number of such parasitic females he can
find in a month’s tour. I invite him to note the grandeur of their
establishments compared with the meanness and poverty of those about
them who really belong to Life’s main stream, or are directly assisting
it; and if that experience does not convince him of the dangerous
futility of the class as a whole, he must be possessed of very singular
views concerning the proper organization of social life.
Even on their death-beds these creatures do not cease to scourge the
community to which they belong; for in the very agony of death they
bequeath their wealth and dispose of their other property in a manner
which, while it is usually thoroughly ill-advised, constitutes but one
last fierce effort to stamp the belief in their importance for ever on
the minds of those who survive them.
You are entitled to pity these women for their virgin lives, for the
serious unadaptedness of their condition, and for their lifelong and
secret conviction that they are useless; but to defend their existence
as if it were _not_ a burden, as if it were not a dangerous scourge in
our midst, would be to refuse to recognize the truth about the matter,
and this truth, however unpleasant and disturbing, can be dealt with
only if it is honestly recognized and faced.
The less wealthy among them, right down the scale to the level of those
who have only £300 a year of their own, are certainly less baneful and
onerous, seeing that they dam up less of this world’s goods in their
particular cul-de-sac; but the ultimate cumulative effect of their
combined existences constitutes an imposition not much more tolerable
than that of their wealthier sisters.
Nor should it be forgotten that a not inconsiderable portion of the
harm resulting from this peculiarly British scourge consists in the
amount of false opinion, perniciously erroneous judgments on all
things, and distorted spiritual influences, which annually emanate from
these spinsters’ homes, and which, backed as they frequently are by the
power of wealth, are spread abroad with all the prestige and pomp that
opulence can impart.
The English outlook, and English opinion generally, are to a great
extent contaminated by this spinster influence. Our politics are
no longer immune from it; our policy both at home and abroad is
largely infected by our atmosphere surcharged both with the breath
and the ideas of spinsters. Our literature is to no small extent
governed by their taste,[136] our newspapers are obviously designed
to offer no affront to their morbid sensibilities, and our stage is
entirely governed by their criticism. Feminism, with all its worst
consequences, is largely their creation—the child of their idleness and
their superfluous wealth; and if Feminism has spread so far, and become
a creed so universally and almost unconsciously accepted, it is due
largely to this large class of powerful, misguided and idle unattached
females.
They constitute a malignant power, because they are a body bound by
no responsibilities; they pursue an erratic course directed entirely
by their abnormal emotions and crazy outlook on life, because in the
first place they are abnormal, secondly because they are unguided
except by those whose advantage it is to mislead them, thirdly because
they are limited by no close family ties in the expenditure of their
wealth during life or in its disposal after death; and finally they
are a wasteful and squandering body because in their frantic efforts
to coerce their contemporaries into believing they are important,
they shrink from no extremes and no excesses in order to take up as
conspicuous and prominent a place as possible in their small world.
* * * * *
CONCLUSION
If we have correctly stated the peculiar mental attitude and physical
condition of the unmarried woman in our midst, and from this statement
have drawn the correct inferences concerning her influence upon
the community, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that permanently
unmarried females are on the whole an element in society which cannot
be regarded as very desirable.
For it is above all important to remember this—that even if we have
been wrong in our enumeration of the occupations that spinsters can
properly and usefully fill, and even if the list we have given may be
materially increased, the fact that the spinster is usefully occupied
does not remove the principal feature of her condition which exerts
an abnormal influence on society, that is to say, her radical and
inevitable abnormality both of mind and body.
Even if we have been wrong in our deductions concerning the heightening
of the economic struggle through the presence of spinsters in excessive
numbers in the professions, commerce, industry and trade, this
principal objection still stands, and it leaves us no alternative but
to consider means and ways of mitigating it.
The fact that in Great Britain the number of surplus females—that
is to say, of women who, all things being equal, cannot possibly
marry—amounts to 2,000,000 or about 5 per cent. of the population,
makes the problem of the old maid so acute, for this nation at least,
that it is impossible not to regard it as perhaps the gravest with
which legislators have to deal. For, on this basis alone, that it
is the business of every government to secure the maximum amount of
successful adaptation to the governed, the question appears to be one
which legislators can hardly shelve with impunity.
Of these 2,000,000 surplus women, it may be only just—humiliating as
the argument may be to our national pride—to argue that possibly half
are negative; that is to say, that 1,000,000 are so constituted as to
be undisturbed by their semi-moribund sex-instincts, and that a sexless
life is not merely tolerable but actually necessary to them. These
may possibly achieve contentedness by means of suitable work combined
with strong Christian influence. It is conceivable that they may even
succeed in wholly sublimating their reproductive instincts. There
still remain, however, the 1,000,000 spinsters, or 2½ per cent. of the
population, whose resistance to sublimating influences is likely to be
stubborn, and whose misery is likely to be proportionately greater—not
to mention the unhappiness they must inevitably bring, directly upon
those about them, and indirectly upon the nation at large.
The Holy Catholic Church in the Middle Ages wisely offered asylums to
this section of the population, and even more wisely organized these
asylums on lines which enabled the spinsters taking refuge in them to
find a natural vent for their surging desire for sex-compensation, in
all kinds of sentimental and humanitarian work among the sick, the
aged, the poor, etc., in which they were able to exercise power over
precisely that kind of person over whom sway is most easily obtained.
But what was peculiarly beneficial in the Catholic system was that by
this means it acquired a hold upon these women. It was able to direct
both their energies and their opinions, and thus act as a lightning
conductor protecting society from the fury of their sex-compensatory
efforts, both in their activities and in the expression and imposition
of their views. In cases where it took charge of their money, this
wealth became an instrument in the hands of a powerful and wise
organization, instead of being simply a weapon for a spinster’s whim.
But what has modern society to offer of a similar kind?
The hospitals can absorb only a small fraction of the 2,000,000 surplus
women, and domestic service can do little more. For, even if we take
these two classes of occupation as accounting for 1,335,368 unmarried
women[137] in England and Wales alone, we must remember that a very
large proportion of these do not remain in the work permanently, but
leave it for marriage at a comparatively early age. In either case
we could not affirm that either nursing or domestic service offers
any special chances for sex-sublimation. There is certainly a greater
chance of sublimation in hospital nursing, but the profession is
overcrowded as it is, and no attempt has been made to bring it wholly
under the wing of the Church.
The truth is that modern life, while it certainly offers occupations in
abundance to women and girls, makes no provision, or very little, for
those women whose work ought at once to keep them busy, and give them a
full life—that is, effectually transmute their sex-instincts.
What course should we recommend in order that the nation’s life might
absorb greater numbers of these unmarried women with the view of
properly adapting them?
In the first place it seems eminently desirable to emphasize more than
we have emphasized in the past the ideal of matrimony for every woman
up to a certain age, and to bring home to parents that marriage is
what they must seek for their daughters and what they must train them
for.[138]
This would have the beneficial effect of introducing a more resolute
effort towards marriage as an end, both in the activity of parents and
their children, which would lead to more restless endeavours being
made, than are made at present, to find suitable mates for eligible
daughters[139]—endeavours that should be prompted by sufficient
energy not to halt even at the shores of the native land.[140] These
endeavours, assisted by a Government service and the consular system,
would allow of an incessant flow of girls of fair fame to our colonies
and dependencies, and might be coupled with legislative measures for
the prevention of too heavy a flow of foreign virgins into this country.
The Government ought to keep as keen an eye on the marriage as upon
the labour market, and just as it now protects the native workman from
unfair competition resulting from excessive immigration, so it ought
to protect the unmarried females. The higher the percentage of females
in the country, the more stringent should the regulations become
forbidding young female immigrants of what class soever.
Secondly, all work, such as teaching, the practice of medicine and
law, etc., in which, according to the most reliable psychologists of
the day, the presence of unmarried women, far from being helpful (as
offering a new and essential contribution to the knowledge on the
question), only complicates the existing difficulties, and, as in the
case of teaching, is directly harmful to the children taught, should
be exclusively reserved for men, poor married women, or middle-aged
widows, as might also with advantage many occupations both in industry,
commerce and the Civil Service. This would have the effect of relieving
economic pressure, and of facilitating early marriages.
Thirdly, the Government should be carefully advised concerning those
callings which are best calculated to offer unmarried women complete
adaptation—that is to say, occupation and sublimation of the sex
instinct—and the legislature should do all in their power to encourage
women, particularly of a special type, to enter these callings.
Fourthly, when once public opinion had become convinced (which it
is very far from being to-day) that the “annuitant” spinster is at
all events, and in any circumstances, a bane, legislation might be
introduced to limit her powers and discourage her excesses, which would
go an appreciable way towards mitigating the harm she does.
Fifthly and finally, everything should be done to revive the mediæval
system of respectable and honourable sequestration for old maids,
in institutions whose functions would be at once religious and of a
kind to provide an outlet for the sex-compensatory impulses of the
positive and negative spinster. By this means they might be not only
thoroughly adapted, but also in a position to have their activities,
their opinions, and (in cases of wealthy people) their wealth, wisely
controlled by a broad policy beneficent to the nation as a whole.
It is, however, very doubtful indeed whether anything whatsoever will
be done to relieve the nation of what, in the mildest language, can be
regarded as little less than a spiritual and material scourge.
Modern society is so thoroughly and deeply saturated with feminist
prejudices and ideas, and the sentiments which most promote feminine
power and feminine tastes are so universally popular both in the Press
and in modern literature generally, that anyone who speaks on the sex
question with an honest regard for reality, and with a non-romantic
understanding of its fundamental features, is not only foredoomed to
a cold and even hostile reception, but every year finds it more and
more difficult to obtain a fair and exhaustive hearing. For, as we have
already said, the growth of Feminism has been so steady and insidious,
that thousands of men and women to-day are Feminists without knowing
it, without ever having questioned it.
A cold feverless appreciation of the radical principles underlying
the relations and the nature of the sexes, whether in fiction or in a
textbook, is now practically certain to be decried, and to be regarded
as a literary _faux pas_, and while in Byron’s days it brought a man
into evil odour, at present, after one hundred years of Progress, it
completely discredits him.[141]
It is not probable, therefore, that anything contained in this chapter
is likely to be read with sympathy or with comprehension by the
modern world; but if it conveys to a few isolated and lonely spirits
the message that they have been waiting for, and makes them feel
perhaps that, although they may not be on the eve of a deep national
antifeminist (_not_ anti-feminine) movement, they are at least not
entirely alone, it will have accomplished all that its author can
possibly expect.
FOOTNOTES:
[102] In the _Laws of Manu_ (Bk. IX, 89) there is a passage which seems
to show that spinsterhood of this kind is specially recommended by the
religious Founder of Brahmanism. In Bk. IX, verse 89, we read: “But the
maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s house
until death, than that he should ever give her to a man destitute of
good qualities.”
[103] See p. 248.
[104] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 105), where, referring to the
vital impulses of woman, she says: “When these are not expended, as
is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved
things, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations.”
[105] “With reference to the marked predominance of female suicides
[in England] over male suicides in the 15-20 age period, Ogle remarks
that this is also ‘the only period in which the general death rates,
as shown in the Registrar-General’s returns, is higher in the female
sex, and also is marked, as the census returns for 1881 show, by an
exceptionally higher rate of lunacy (exclusive of idiocy or imbecility)
for females than for males.’... In France, the chief age at which men
commit suicide is from 40 to 50, while for women it is between 15 to
20.” (Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, pp. 382-383.) The census of 1911
also gives higher figures for female than for male lunacy—a difference
of 10,000, and these are chiefly unmarried women. The unmarried
numbered 54,223, the married 21,299, widowed 9,229.
[106] H. Ellis, Op. cit., p. 388: “There are some who believe (Dr. H.
Campbell amongst them) that although the number of women of all ages
who commit suicide is less than the number of men, many more women than
men contemplate suicide habitually, i.e. many more women than men are
suicidal, although they may not always carry it into practice.”
[107] The facts collected by the psycho-analysts, Freud and Dr. E.
Jones, on this phenomenon were not new to me. I had already observed
them in numerous cases, and my observations on the point were but
confirmed by the psycho-analysts’ theory of the transference of
orgastic sensations from the genitalia to other parts of the body.
[108] See Martial, III, 82, 9; also _Senecae Dialogorum Liber_ XII, 10,
3. While Hugo Blümner in his _Römischen Privataltertümer_ (1922), p.
399, gives a brief description of this practice.
[109] See _Papers on Psycho-Analysis_ (London, 1918), p. 599. In regard
to this question parents are also entitled to ask what influence the
spinster’s outlook on life has upon their children, particularly upon
their daughters. It is impossible entirely to divorce from one’s
moral influence upon children the prejudices and prepossessions of
one’s particular position in life, and one’s general attitude towards
fundamental problems. Now, since the spinster’s particular position in
life is an abnormal one, it is questionable whether she can help her
influence from imparting something of her own abnormality. When we bear
in mind that, according to the census of 1911 there were 187,283 female
teachers in England and Wales, 171,480 of whom were unmarried, the
gravity of this aspect alone of spinsterhood cannot be denied.
[110] And neurosis in later life.
[111] “The most serious manifestation of disordered conduct in hysteria
is, however, the development of the appetite for teasing—for giving
pain and annoyance to others” (see Charles Mercier, M.B., _Sanity and
Insanity_, London, 1890, p. 215). Long after Mercier wrote this his
views were confirmed by the school of psycho-analysts. I give the
reference to Mercier to show that the fact was observed before the
psycho-analysts, so much detested in certain quarters, had come to the
fore.
[112] See Dr. Wrench’s _Grammar of Life_ (Heinemann, 1908), p. 76.
[113] Freud deals with this point in many places in his works. See
particularly his _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte
Folge_ (1918), Chapter III (_Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose_), p.
117.
[114] The harm, however, does not cease with the work of the spinsters
themselves. Their influence in this direction has become a national
evil. Volumes could be filled with examples of this false and
short-sighted humanitarianism, but the following case, taken from _The
News of the World_ on Jan. 1, 1922, at a time when rates in almost
all parishes in and around London were anything between 17_s._ and
20_s._ in the £, is typical of thousands of others. “Rochford Board of
Guardians, Essex, are confronted with the problem of dealing with a man
who is both a leper and insane. The patient is a native of Mauritius.
It was stated at a Board meeting that the man lived for some time in a
cottage in a rural parish, and his wife looked after him, but she was
unable to do so any longer. Formerly the man was in the Leper Colony at
Bicknacre, Essex—an institution carried on by the Society of the Divine
Compassion, assisted by the Sisterhood of St. Giles—but his mental
state was such that he could not remain there. Asylum authorities who
were approached refused to accept the case, and the Board of Control
supported them in their attitude. It was also stated that the Ministry
of Health would not deal with the matter. Consequently the man had to
be cared for by the Guardians. A building was prepared for him, and
efforts made to secure three male nurses, though only two have been
obtained. The cost of three nurses is twelve guineas a week. Eventually
the Board decided to send a deputation to the Ministry of Health.” The
influence of the spinster’s frantic and unthinking humanitarianism is
recognizable here.
[115] See Mercier, Op. cit., p. 220. The author continues: “They
[the feelings in question] take the shape of religious emotion,
and expression for them is found in observance of ceremonial and
in devotion to a ritual.” The fact that the first initiation into
religious fervour of this kind frequently starts by the young
girl’s wild adoration for an older woman—her school mistress or her
Sunday-school teacher—is not mentioned by Mercier, but it is important.
[116] Large numbers of the women in the Suffrage movement were of
this type. Nor is it possible to exonerate such women entirely from a
charge of jealousy of the young girl, when their efforts are obviously
directed towards making her, like themselves, ill-adapted, discontented
and physiologically miserable.
[117] See _The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey_, Vol. VIII, p.
349. The author proceeds: “Accordingly it is amongst the young men and
women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this eccentric
type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of
all ebullient feeling must be perilous” ... etc.
[118] For an interesting discourse, uninfluenced by the recent
psychoanalytical school, on the connexion between sexual and religious
emotion, see Mercier, Op. cit., pp. 220-223.
[119] Thus Dr. E. Jones argues (Op. cit., p. 217), “Civilization has
reached, or is on the point of reaching, the limit, beyond which
unguided sublimation can no longer be successfully maintained.”
[120] See Byron’s letter to John Murray, Feb. 7, 1821: “The truth is
that in these days the grand ‘_primum mobile_’ of England is _cant_;
cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always
cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. This is the
fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can
only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say _cant_ because it is
a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions;
the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided
amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before
the prevalence of this verbal decorum.” This was written a hundred
years ago, and is still true to-day.
[121] Dr. Vintras and Parent Duchatelet both concur in representing
English prostitution as about the most degraded and at the same time
the most irrevocable.
[122] Throughout this discussion I mean by prostitution not any form
of illicit hetero-sexual relations but commercial and promiscuous
unchastity.
[123] Speaking of the prostitute Lecky says: “But for her, the
unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not
a few who, in their pride of untempted chastity, think of her with an
indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair.
On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions
that might have filled the world with shame” (_History of European
Morals_, London, 1899, Vol. II, p. 283).
[124] Let all who doubt this consult the literature on the subject
(even our own _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 9th and 11th editions), and
also consult people who have been engaged in rescue work.
[125] It is for this reason that a man who gives a girl an illegitimate
child is really more kind and merciful than the man who seduces her
while taking precautions to prevent issue. But it will take some time
before the world can possibly be expected to see the matter in this
light.
[126] Those who, like Lombroso and Ferrero, argue that prostitutes
are born, and that there is a specific class of women, which may be
called potentially whorish from birth, will naturally join issue with
me, and deny that the childless fate of the prostitute is her severest
penalty. I cannot accept the evidence that I have read, however, in
_La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée_, to show that prostitutes are a
class of women apart (as regards primary and secondary characteristics
and instincts). I feel very much more inclined to agree with Emile
Faguet, who thinks that all prostitutes start their illicit amours
with a strong monogamic bias, and that it is only subsequently that
circumstances drive them to promiscuity. See _Le Feminisme_ (Paris,
1910), p. 254: “La vérité est que la prostituée née est excessivement
rare.... Les autres prostituées sont des femmes qui out commencé par
être monogames comme leurs sœurs, et qu’une première déchéance a jetées
dans la classe des femmes pour tous.” Thus Faguet concludes (p. 255):
“La prostituée, j’ai cru le montrer, est un être dénaturé.” This I
believe to be much nearer the point than Lombroso’s elaborate thesis.
[127] John ii. 15, 16.
[128] Rom. viii. 6, 10, 13.
[129] Rom. viii. 6-8.
[130] Her behaviour in this respect will be dictated not only by an
instinctive desire to spread a negative doctrine broadcast as an end
in itself, but also by a feeling of very real and very stubborn envy
towards all those who can enjoy a side of life from which she is
completely shut off. This envy may extend even to her attitude towards
young women of all classes, so that she will do everything in her
power, under the cover of philanthropic motives, to keep them from such
pastimes as flirtation, from actually falling in love, or from spending
what she believes to be “too much time” in the company of the other
sex. See also p. 246 _ante_.
[131] It is true that the negative spinster was not alone in this
support of the war from secret sex motives. The old men of all nations
also saw in the war a golden opportunity of expressing their natural
secret hatred and jealousy of the young males of their circle, and,
whether consciously or unconsciously, seized on the patriotic motive in
order to vent these passions. The flood of letters that poured into the
_Times_ office from sexagenarians, septuagenarians and octogenarians,
imploring the authorities to continue the war at the time when there
was some talk of peace, was an expression of this unconscious but
radical loathing of young men by the old.
[132] See, however, the exceptions mentioned on p. 248 _ante_. For a
woman’s confirmation of the fact that negative women are increasing in
England, see Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit.), pp. 82-85, and many other
passages.
[133] The number of women workers (married and unmarried) in 1911
was 4,830,734. Of these about 1,500,000 were employed as domestic
servants and hospital nurses. In 1917 the total was 5,889,734. About
173,000 of this increase came from domestic service, so that the total
for domestic servants and nurses in 1917 would appear to have been
1,827,000.
[134] It should also be borne in mind that work outside home
necessarily throws men and girls constantly into each other’s company.
Unless, therefore, a certain degree of subnormality in the sexual and
emotional nature of each sex be presupposed, they cannot work side by
side without having their attention diverted and their nerves harassed,
by the constant provocation of sex stimuli to which they cannot and
must not respond. To assume indifference and callousness here, as
modern business, commercial and official employers do, is, however,
to take for granted that the modern generation of young men and girls
are sufficiently below par to be able to resist being thrown together
constantly without being distracted by each other’s presence. But this
is not only an insult to the best among the young people, but it is
also placing a premium on the subnormal; because the latter alone are
able to overcome the difficulty with ease; and thus happy survival or
success is reserved nowadays to those types which are least desirable
from every point of view except that of the Puritan.
[135] Later on in the chapter he even comes very close to my own view
of the matter, and of the fatal detachment of these females from the
stream of Life when he asks “whether the yearly increasing army of the
orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud
old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of the
sap.”
[136] Let anyone attempt to write a novel or any kind of popular work
that does not pander to their sentimentality and their distorted views
of life, and see how much success he will have. They have established
their ascendancy in England by such steady and insidious means, that
three-quarters of our population, including our leading critics and
publicists, are not even aware that Feminism is their ruling creed.
They reveal it, however, in every word they write on the sex question.
[137] According to the last Census there were in 1911 55,286 unmarried
women engaged in nursing (including midwives), 57,952 engaged in
domestic service in hotels, 1,172,449 engaged in domestic service in
private houses, 22,789 engaged as day girls, and 26,900 engaged as
charwomen in England and Wales alone.
[138] On this point also the wisdom of the ancient Hindus should be
an example to us. In the _Laws of Manu_ (Book IX, verse 4) we read:
“Reprehensible is the father who gives not his daughter in marriage at
the proper time.”
[139] Now, the dread lest a daughter should not be self-supporting
at twenty-one leads parents in all poorer middle-class families to
sink all thoughts of marriage and making her fit for marriage beneath
the consideration of providing her with a calling. The ideal of
independence for women, from being pursued for purely economic reasons,
has come to be pursued for its own sake, as if independence were in
itself a desirable condition for the female. But even if we concede
the point that dependence on certain modern men amounts to ignominy,
we should not allow the argument to assume a shape which must identify
woman’s chief source of happiness with her relation to the man to whom
she becomes related; and we ought always to correct it by considering
that, in the long run, man is only a means to an end where woman
is concerned, and that independence which is achieved without the
experience of motherhood, even if such independence saves the woman
from association with a third or fourth-rate man, is only equivalent to
clutching at the shadow to let the substance go.
[140] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 126): “Feminist leaders have
shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to
sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and
eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood—and more particularly
Motherhood—they have made, all along the line, not for the true
emancipation of woman but for her commercialization, merely.”
[141] Speaking of the hostile attitude of most women towards his Don
Juan, Byron wrote to Mr. Murray on October 12, 1820, as follows:
“The truth is that it is _too true_, and the women hate everything
which strips off the tinsel of _sentiment_; and they are right, as it
would rob them of their weapons.” Again writing of Madame Guiccioli’s
dislike of Don Juan, he says (July 6, 1821): “It arises from the wish
of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions, and to keep up
the illusion which is their empire. Now Don Juan strips off this
illusion.... I never knew a woman who did not protect Rousseau, nor one
who did not dislike De Gramont, Gil Blas, and all the comedy of the
passions, when brought out naturally.”