Emancipation of woman is not of American invention. The “movement,”
like most others that are truly momentous, began in Europe and has
broken through and broken down more formidable barriers of law,
custom and tradition there than here. It is not true, as dogmatically
affirmed by a noted American writer, that the English married woman
is “virtually a bondwoman” to her husband; that “she can hardly go
and come without his consent, and usually he does not consent;” that
“all she has is his.” If there is such a thing as “the bitterness of
the English married woman to the law,” underlying it there is such a
thing as ignorance of what the law is. The “subjection of woman,” as it
exists to-day in England, is customary and traditionary—a social, not
a legal, subjection. Nowhere has law so sharply challenged that male
dominion whose seat is in the harder muscles, the larger brain and the
coarser heart. And the law, it may be worth while to point out, was
not of woman born; nor was it handed down out of Heaven engraved on
tables of stone. Learned English judges have decided that virtually,
even the term “marital rights” has no longer a legal signification. As
one writer puts it, “The law has relaxed the husband’s control over his
wife’s person and fortune, bit by bit, until legally it has left him
nothing but the power to prevent her, if he is so disposed and arrives
in time, from jumping out of the window.” He will find it greatly to
his interest to arrive in time when he conveniently can, and to be so
disposed, for the husband is still liable for the wife’s torts; and if
she make the leap he may have to pay for the telescoping of a subjacent
hat or two.
In England it is Tyrant Man himself who is chafing in his chain. Not
only is a husband still liable for the wrongs committed by the wife
whom he has no longer the power to restrain from committing them, but
in many ways—in one very important way—his obligation to her remains
intact after she has had the self-sacrifice to surrender all obligation
to him. Moreover, if his wife has a separate estate he has to endure
the pain of seeing it hedged about from her creditors (themselves not
altogether happy in the contemplation) with restrictions which do
not hamper the right of recourse against his own. Doubtless all this
is not without a softening effect upon his character, smoothing down
his dispositional asperities and endowing him day by day with fresh
accretions of humility; and that is good for him. I do not say that
woman’s autonomy is not among the most efficacious agencies for man’s
reclamation from the sin of pride; I only say that it is not indigenous
to this country, the sweet, sweet home of the assassiness, the happy
hunting ground of the whiplady, the paradise of the vitrioleuse.
If the protagonists of woman suffrage are frank they are shallow; if
wise, uncandid. Continually they affirm their conviction that political
power in the hands of women will give us better government. To proof of
that proposition they address all the powers that they have and marshal
such facts as can be compelled to serve under their flag. They either
think or profess to think that if they can show that women’s votes will
purify politics they will have proved their case. That is not true;
the strongest objection to woman suffrage would remain untouched. Pure
politics is desirable, certainly, but it is not the chief concern of
the best and most intelligent citizens. Good government is devoutly
to be wished, but more than good government we need good women. If all
our public affairs were to be ordered with the goodness and wisdom
of angels, and this state of perfection were obtained by sacrifice
of any of those qualities which make the best of our women, if not
what they should be, nor what the mindless male thinks them, at least
what they are, we should have purchased the advantage too dearly. The
effect of woman suffrage upon the country is of secondary importance:
the question for profitable consideration is, How will it affect the
character of woman? He who does not see in the goodness and charm
of such women as are good and charming something incalculably more
precious than any degree of political purity or national prosperity may
be a patriot; but also he has the distinction to be a pig.
I should like to ask the gallant gentlemen who vote for removal of
woman’s political disability if they have observed in the minds and
manners of the women in the forefront of the movement nothing “ominous
and drear.” Are not these women different—I don’t say worse, just
different—from the best types of women of peace who are not exhibits
and audibles? If they are different is the difference of such a nature
as to encourage a hope that activity in public affairs will work an
improvement in Woman? Is “the glare of publicity” good for her growth
in grace and winsomeness? Would a sane and sensible husband or lover
willingly forego in wife or sweetheart all that the colonels of her
sex appear to lack, or find in her all that they appear to have and to
value?
A few more questions—addressed more particularly to veteran observers
than to those to whom the world is new and strange. Do you think that
when all women are armed with the ballot they will compel a return to
the old _régime_ of reverence and delicate consideration—extorting
by their power the tribute once voluntarily paid to their weakness?
Is there any known way by which women can at the same time be our
political equals and our social superiors, our competitors in the sharp
and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread, and the objects of our
unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present predicts the future;
of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive female hearts feel
the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory, some women enjoy
under this _régime_ of partial “emancipation” all women pay. Of the
coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of the sex have
not a groat and can bear the situation with tranquillity. They have
either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without the
means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford to
defy eviction.
While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world,
setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with
true sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves,
a very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity
which was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better,
generally, than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but
their goodness was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and
more or less independent of environmental influences. We are changing
all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing and public
speaking, and they are sure to disclose, even to the unthinking,
certain defects of character in themselves which their silence had
veiled. Their competition, too, in the several kinds of affairs will
slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them to
temptations that will distinctly lower the morality of their sex. All
these changes, and many more having a similar effect and significance,
are occurring with rapidity, and the stated results are already visible
to even the blindest observation. In accurate forecast of the new order
of things conjecture fails, but so much we know: the woman-superstition
has already received its death wound and must soon expire.
Everywhere, and in no reverential spirit, men are questioning the
dear old idolatry; not “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,”
but dispassionately applying to its basic doctrine the methods
of scientific criticism. In the various movements—none of them
consciously iconoclastic—engaged in overthrowing this oddest of modern
superstitions there is something to deprecate, and even deplore, but
the superstition can be spared. It never had much in it that was either
creditable or profitable, and all through its rituals ran a note of
insincerity which was partly Nature’s protest against the rites, but
partly, too, hypocrisy. There is no danger that good men will ever
cease to respect and love good women, and if bad men ever cease to
adore them for their sex when not beating them for their virtues the
gain in consistency will partly offset the loss in religious ecstasy.
Let the patriot abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that only
the low class woman will vote—the unlettered wench of the slums, the
raddled hag of the dives, the war-painted _protégée_ of the police.
Into the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to
move. The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty
will thunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every
ear; pride, interest, the lust of victory—all the motives that impel
men to partisan activity will act with the same power upon women as
upon men; and to all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the
polls will be added the suasion of men themselves. The price of votes
will not decline because of the increased supply, although it will in
most instances be offered in currencies too subtle to be counted. As
now, the honest and respectable elector will habitually take bribes
in the invisible coin of the realm of Sentiment—a mintage peculiarly
valued by woman. For one reason or another all women will vote, even
those who now view the “right” with aversion. The observer who has
marked the strength and activity of the forces pent in the dark drink
of politics and given off in the act of bibation will not expect
inaction in the victim of the “habit,” be he male or she female. In the
partisan, conviction is compulsion—opinions bear fruit in conduct. The
partisan thinks in deeds, and woman is by nature a partisan—a blessing
for which the Lord has never made her male relatives and friends
sufficiently thankful. Not a mere man of them would have the effrontery
to ask her toleration if she were not.
Depend upon it, the full strength of the female vote will eventually be
cast at every election. And it would be well indeed for civilization
and the interests of the race if woman suffrage meant no more than
going to the polling-place and polling—which clearly is all that it
has been thought out to mean by the headless horsemen spurring their
new hobbies bravely at the tail of the procession. That would be a
very simple matter; the opposition based upon the impropriety of the
female rubbing shoulders at the polls with such scurvy blackguards
as ourselves may with advantage be retired from service. Nor is it
particularly important what men and measures the women will vote for.
By one means or another Tyrant Man will have his way; the Opposing
Sex can merely obstruct him in his way of having it. And should that
obstruction ever be too pronounced, the party line and the sex line
coinciding, woman suffrage will then and thenceforth be no more, and
the “majority” will again rule. In the politics of this bad world
majorities are of several kinds. One of the most “overwhelming” is made
up of these simple elements: (1) a numerical minority; (2) a military
superiority.
If not a single election were ever in any degree affected by it, the
introduction of woman suffrage into our scheme of manners and morals
would nevertheless be one of the most momentous and mischievous events
of modern history. Compared with the action of this destructive
solvent, that of all other disintegrating agencies concerned in our
decivilization is as the languorous indiligence of rosewater to the
mordant fury of nitric acid.
Lively Woman is indeed, as Carlyle would put it, “hell-bent” on
purification of politics by adding herself as an ingredient. It is
unlikely that the injection of her personality into the contention
(and politics is essentially a contention) will allay any animosities,
sweeten any tempers, elevate any motives. The strifes of women are
distinctly meaner than those of men—which are out of all reason mean;
their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous.
That their participation in politics will notably alter the conditions
of the game is not to be denied; so much, unfortunately, is obvious;
but that it will make the player less malignant and the playing more
honorable is a proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of
gorgeous nonsense with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness than
in the service of almost any other delusion.
The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is
not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need
uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is
accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who
are not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they
do not affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with
ours. In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a
hundred avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred
by unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the
factories; like Charles Lamb’s fugitive pigs, they have run up all
manner of streets. Does any one think that in that time there has
been an advance in professional, commercial and industrial morality?
Are lawyers more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been
served by a “saleslady” does one leave the shop with a feebler sense
of injury than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter—a
duller consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed
hands? Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial
to the colder virtues? In studios of artists is the “sound of revelry
by night” invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the
immoral books—the books dealing with questionable “questions”—always,
or even commonly, written by men?
There is one direction in which “emancipation of woman” and enlargement
of her “sphere” have wrought reform: they have elevated the _personnel_
of the little dinner party in the “private room.” Formerly, as any
veteran man-about-town can testify if he will, the female contingent of
the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable. That element
now remains upon its reservation; among the superior advantages enjoyed
by the man-about-town of to-day is that of the companionship, at his
dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable vocation. In the
corridors of the “French restaurant” the swish of Pseudonyma’s skirt
is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the Princess Tap-tap
(with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the “emporium” of
Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the receipt of
customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison Hash. That
the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this emancipation of
Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the “private room” is too
obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the table talk of
good young women who earn their own living.
I do not wish to be altogether ironical about this rather serious
matter—not so much so as to forfeit anything of lucidity. Let me say,
then, in all earnestness and sobriety and simplicity of speech, what
is known to every worldly-wise male dweller in the cities, to every
scamp and scapegrace of the clubs, to every reformed sentimentalist
and every observer with a straight eye—namely, that in all the several
classes of young women in our cities who support, or partly support,
themselves in vocations that bring them into personal contact with
men, female chastity is a vanishing tradition. In the lives of the
“main and general” of these, all those _desiderata_ which have their
origin in personal purity, and cluster about it, and are its signs
and safeguards, have almost ceased to cut a figure. It is needless to
remind me that there are exceptions—I know that. With some of them I
have personal acquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect
withheld from any woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune
and calls it emancipation—to their need and calls it a spirit of
independence. It is not from these good girls that you will hear the
flippant boast of an unfettered life, with “freedom to develop;” nor is
it they who will be foremost and furious in denial and resentment of my
statements regarding the morals of their class. They do not know the
whole truth, thank Heaven, but they know enough for a deprecation too
deep to find relief in a cheap affirmation of woman’s purity, which is,
and always has been, the creature of seclusion.
The fitness of women for political activity is not in present question;
I am considering the fitness of political activity for women. For
women as men say they are, wish them to be and try to think them,
it is unfit altogether—as unfit as anything else that “mixes them
up” with us, compelling a communication and association that are not
social. If we wish to have women who are different from ourselves in
knowledge, character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally
as physically—and in these and in all other expressible differences
reside all the charms that they have for us—we must keep them, or they
must keep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think
this obvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it would
be understood by the Daughters of Thunder. Possibly the Advanced One,
hospitably accepting her karma, is not concerned to be charming to
“the likes o’ we”—would prefer the companionship of her blue gingham
umbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name in
the newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucous
voice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. When
we no longer find women charming we may find a way to make them more
useful—more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have them
make themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the world
between them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that
has its origin in the very differences which the colonels of their sex
are striving to abolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of
his laws is going to be suspended in deference to woman’s desire to
achieve familiarity without contempt. If she wants to please she must
retain some scrap of novelty; if she desires our respect she must not
be always in evidence, disclosing the baser side of her character, as
in competition with us she must do—as we do to one another. Mrs. Edmund
Gosse, like “Ouida,” Mrs. Atherton, and all other women of brains,
thinks that the taking of unfair advantages—the lack of magnanimity—is
a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds, with reference to
men’s passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly of “emancipation,”
that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the storm; and she
utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, “Ouida” has uttered:
“How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise _en masse_ and
throw the whole surging lot of us into convents and harems?”
It is not likely that men will “rise _en masse_” to undo the mischief
wrought by noisy protagonists of woman suffrage working like beavers
to rear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine tolerance
and inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for
the wreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little
farther up the sands of time, “loll out its large tongue, lick the
whole labor flat.” The work has prospered so far only because nobody
but its promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention
from those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its
cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to
all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of
men—themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions—to set
a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not point out why they
do so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain
in the valley of the shadow of ignorance.) Valuing it, they purpose
having it, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they
perceive that in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the
remoteness of their lives and interests from the lives and interests of
men—their seclusion from the influences of which men’s own vices are
a main part—an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for
repression of the shouters.
In the orchestration of mind, woman’s instruments might have kept
silence without injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface
the impress of her touch upon the world, and by those who come later
the blank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large city
and look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but it
represents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man.
Nowhere in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all
the work of men’s hands, and before it was wrought into form and
substance, existed as conscious creations in men’s brains. Concealed
within the visible forms of buildings and ships—themselves miracles of
thought—lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no human
life is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enough
to hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs and
see woman’s part of this prodigious exhibition—the things that she has
actually created with her brain—what kind of display would it be? It is
probable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from first
to last would not have sufficed, if directed into one channel, for the
genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.
“There is no sex in brain,” says the Female Militant. I beg her pardon:
there is sex in every organ, every tissue, every cell and atom of
the human body; but in nothing do men and women differ so widely, so
conspicuously, so essentially as in mind. They think after altogether
different methods; their mental processes are to a clear and competent
observation without resemblance to ours. So different is the mental
constitution of the two sexes that whereas all see not mainly with the
eye, but with the judgment, the understanding, even the outer aspect of
things is, I am persuaded, not the same to a woman that it is to a man.
I have taken some trouble to test this theory, with results of the most
interesting character, which I purpose giving to the world some day. It
is my conviction that if a man who had lived all his life in New York
were to become a woman while passing along Broadway she would be unable
to find her way home without inquiry.
I once heard a woman who had playfully competed with men in a jumping
match gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt.
Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mental
achievement by repressive education and custom. But even in regions
where they have ever had full freedom of the quarries they have not
builded themselves monuments. Nobody, for example, is holding them from
greatness in poetry, which needs no special education, and music, in
which they have always been specially educated; yet where is the great
poem by a woman? where the great musical composition? In the grammar of
literature what is the feminine of Homer, of Shakspeare, of Goethe, of
Hugo? What female names are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven,
Mozart, Chopin, Wagner? Women are not musicians—they “sing and play.”
In short, if woman had no better claim to respect and affection than
her brain; no sweeter charms than those of her reason; no means of
suasion but her power upon men’s convictions, she would long ago have
been “improved off the face of the earth.” As she is, men accord her
such homage as is compatible with contempt, such immunities as are
consistent with control; but whereas she is not altogether filled with
light, and is, moreover, imperfectly reverent, it is but right that in
obedience to scriptural injunction she keep silence in our churches
while we are worshipping Ourselves.
She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of
us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out
her little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it
over the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen
her sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough
that we have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in
celebration of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that
with never a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex. That she
is indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for
its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack
at accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to a suitable
doom—this does not satisfy her. No; she has taken unto herself in these
evil days that “intelligent discontent” which giveth its beloved fits.
To her flock of graces and virtues she must add our one poor ewe lamb
of brains. Well, I tell her that intellect is a monster which devours
beauty; that the woman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine
in face, figure, action. And so, with a reluctant farewell to Lovely
Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hasten to overtake the
receding periphery of her “sphere.”
One moment more, mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor—which
were affliction and calamity—by “defining my position” in the words
of one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensible
exaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women—have an
acute animosity to your sex, adoring each individual member of it. What
matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am in bondage to
your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparable utility and
dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit—to be mothers of men.