And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to
develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called
our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally
conceivable kind of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly
ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric
lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that
he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was
only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any
telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to
keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you
can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he
earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that
high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision
of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected
half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles
indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in
every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who
does not “give her best,” but gives her all.
Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need
not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is
that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is
like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire
is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to
excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is
earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the
fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original
and artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably be
told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to
illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the
wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking
stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything
like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty
of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not
a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive
schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;
a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not
one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her
second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in
what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary,
they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse
of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman
that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come
almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman’s professions, unlike the child’s, were all truly and
almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her
universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the
substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.
I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I
doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the
absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but
I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do
not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
general servant.
The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its
way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way
back is the lunatic’s. There must in every machine be a part that moves
and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes
a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns
hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the
center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience,
and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of
a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She
has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the
happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote--
“Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s’y fie,”
but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be
in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal
morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete
moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of
that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a
sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that
a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger
side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
and romantic trade.
The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing
it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of
special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult
to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the
line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became
the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.
Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who
frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially
prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural
operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be
taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught
a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time
when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there
aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a
specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more
spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and
oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race
has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to
keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this
domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply
give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination
conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called
drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges
in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul,
then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be
Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area,
teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how
this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about
the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and
narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious,
but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs.
Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its
smallness.
But though the essential of the woman’s task is universality, this does
not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely
wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than
man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if
one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three
things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in
parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has
arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason
that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman
was set to guard. One’s own children, one’s own altar, ought to be a
matter of principle--or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the
other hand, who wrote Junius’s Letters ought not to be a principle or
a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent
inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show
that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it,
too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their
office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk
and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish
wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they
do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.
*****