I
JASON AND MEDEA
_Is there a Sex War?_
A feature of modern life is that matrimonial quarrels, like modern
war, are carried on on a large scale, involving not individuals, nor
even small groups of individuals, but both sexes and whole classes
of society. In the past, Jason and Medea, neither of them quite an
exemplary character, measured their strength against one another as
individuals; and, though each voiced the wrongs and the naked brutality
of their sex, it did not occur to either to seek in politics or in
social reform a solution or a compromise. Jason, indeed, as the
reactionary face to face with a turbulent and insurgent female, called
to his aid the powers of kingship and the State――to suppress and exile,
but not to remedy. Medea, driven mad――like so many able and remarkable
women――by the contempt and ingratitude of men as individuals or in the
mass, and aware that the law was a mockery where she was concerned,
expressed herself in savage protest after the manner of a militant
suffragette. While I can open my newspaper to-day and read of mothers
desperate with hunger, misery, or rage drowning themselves and their
children, I cannot bring myself to look upon Medea as some elemental
being from a dark and outrageous past. As for Jason, he never did
appear to anybody as other than an ordinary male.
During the last twenty or twenty-five years, when women were struggling
for their right as citizens to a vote and to a decent education, began
what has been called the sex war. No woman would deny that we began
it, in the sense that we were rebels against a system of masculine
repression which had lasted almost unbroken since the beginning of
history. In a similar sense, the proletarian to-day begins the class
war. Those who remember the heroic battles of suffrage days know that
the sequence of events was as follows: We made our just demands and
were met with ridicule. We followed with abuse――all the pent-up anger,
misery, and despair of centuries of thwarted instinct and intelligence.
Man retaliated with rotten eggs. We replied with smashed windows; he
with prison and torture. People forget so readily, that it is well to
remember that this was in the immediate past; it is not a nightmare
picture of one of those future sex wars with which our modern Jasons
delight to terrify the timorous of both sexes.
Is there a sex war? There has been. It was a disgraceful exhibition,
and would not have come to a truce so soon, but that it was eclipsed
by the still more disgraceful exhibition of the European War. In 1918
they bestowed the vote, just as they dropped about a few Dames and
M.B.E.’s, as a reward for our services in helping the destruction of
our offspring. Had we done it after the fashion of Medea, the logical
male would have been angry. They gave the vote to the older women,
who were deemed less rebellious. Such is the discipline of patriotism
and marriage, as it is understood by most women, that the mother will
sacrifice her son with a more resigned devotion than the younger
woman brings to the loss of her lover. There may be more in this
than discipline. If honesty of thought, speech, and action were made
possible for women, it might transpire that on the average a woman’s
love for her mate is more compelling than love for her offspring.
Maternal instinct――genuine, not simulated――is rarer, but, when found,
more enduring.
There was a promise, as yet unredeemed by any political party――for the
politician has yet to be found who will realize that the sex problem
is as fundamental in politics as the class war, and more fundamental
than foreign trade and imperial expansion――to extend this franchise
on equal terms with men. “Good fellowship” between the sexes as
between classes was the key-note of the war. It was held that women
had proved their mettle and that mutual aid was to be the basis of all
future activities, public and private. The sex question was deemed
settled, and everyone was led to suppose that all inequalities would
be gradually eliminated. On this partial victory and this promise
feminists called a truce, and abandoned the tactics of militarism.
But you never know where you have Jason. He was a soldier, mark you,
and a gentleman. Forbidden open warfare, he takes to sniping. He snipes
the married women out of those posts for which they are peculiarly
fitted――as teachers or maternity doctors――although it is against the
law to bar women from any public activity on the ground of marriage.
He cheats unemployed women out of their unemployment insurance more
craftily and brutally than he cheats his fellow-men. Instead of
realizing that the competition of women in industry and the professions
is a competition of population pressure rather than of sex, he seeks by
every means in his power to drive woman back to matrimonial dependence
and an existence on less than half a miserably inadequate income; and
then he mocks at her when she claims the right to stem the inevitable
torrent of children whose advent will but aggravate man’s difficulties
as well as her own. But worse than all the sniping is the smoke-screen
of propaganda. While feminists have, in a large measure, stayed their
hand, anybody who has anything abusive to say of women, whether ancient
or modern, can command a vast public in the popular press and a ready
agreement from the average publisher.
It is a very insidious propaganda. Thus the fashion-papers tell us
that grandmamma’s ways are coming back into their own; elsewhere
we are flattered for the frank honesty of the modern girl and then
warned not to ask for equal pay or opportunity.[1] Again, we hear that
woman, like the Labour Party when in office, has done nothing with
the opportunities given her by the vote; or that the country rejected
the women candidates wholesale. This, regardless of the fact that the
steady increase of the Labour poll has been due in great part to the
votes and more to the organization and propaganda of large numbers of
intelligent working women who know not only what they want, but how to
get it. They are backed now by many of the middle-class women who were
young enough to be revolted by war politics in 1914, and are old enough
to claim their citizenship in 1924. Hundreds of thousands of others,
now between twenty and thirty, mothers, professional and working women,
will make themselves heard before long. To them, the principle of
feminine equality is as natural as drawing breath――they are neither
oppressed by tradition nor worn by rebellion. I venture to think that,
had the Labour Party machine been less dominated by the masculine
perspective, to which the equal franchise bill was a matter of
secondary importance, they would not have lost so heavily in the 1924
election. Votes for women at 21 would have greatly increased the poll
of many Labour candidates. I have seen young mothers almost sobbing
outside the polling-station on polling-day because they had no vote to
cast for the future of themselves and their children. As for the defeat
of women candidates, everybody, including the leader-writers who spread
the adverse propaganda, knew perfectly well that the majority of them
stood in constituencies where even a man of their party would not have
had the ghost of a chance. Here again Jason at headquarters displayed
his well-known chivalry.
[1] Lovat Fraser in a cunning article in _The Sunday Pictorial_,
January 4, 1925.
It is no part of my thesis to maintain that women display their
feminism in proportion as they vote for any particular political
party――Labour, for example. But I do suggest that it is the progressive
working woman rather than the woman of the middle class who will in the
future make the most important contribution to the thought of feminism
and to a solution of our practical difficulties. One of the most
inveterate anti-feminists, the author of _Lysistrata_, as an avowed
anti-democrat, has based his thesis and his strictures on observations
that do not go beyond the bounds of upper- and middle-class people,
barely even beyond the bounds of the night club or the suburban
dance-hall. In his eyes we are to blame for everything. Our worst
crime is to “blaspheme life and man”; our next, not to have prevented
food being put into tins; our next, to have adhered faithfully to that
ascetic view of life and sex so firmly instilled into us by medieval
monks and bullying Puritan fathers and brothers. We are to blame for
the industrial revolution in that we let weaving, spinning, milling,
and baking go out of our hands. We are to blame for the iniquities of
doctors in that we did not maintain our position as the dispensers
of healing potions and simples. We are to blame in that we have not
learned to bring forth our children without pain, those children
whose brows bear the marks of obstetric instruments that were used
to spare their mothers, and whose lips have not been laid to those
inhuman mothers’ breasts. (There are no scars of war, O Jason!) Where
is salvation for us, and how shall we rid us of the burden of our
iniquity? We who have waxed so arrogant that we have even aspired to
let science build our children outside their mothers’ bodies must
humble ourselves once more and take upon us the whole duty of woman.
We must use our votes to restore aristocracy[2] and take the food out
of tins; spin and weave, no doubt, the while we nurse and bear our
yearly child, delivering it over to infanticide when necessary, since
birth-control is artificial and displeasing to the male. In our leisure
moments――of which, doubtless, we shall find many under this humane
_régime_――we are to discover by what means of diet, or exercise it
may be, we can fulfil our maternal functions with pleasure instead of
suffering.
[2] An ingenious method of accomplishing this suggests itself.
Since women do not sit in the House of Lords, suppose that
all Peers’ wives, following the example of the Duchess of
Atholl, stand for Parliament where their husbands have
estates. This would obviate the necessity, now felt by
Conservatives, of restoring the veto of the House of Lords.
A joke, you say? No, no, my poor Medea, it is a man called Rousseau,
risen from the dead. Not long ago he preached this sort of thing to
women who pinched their waists and wore a dozen petticoats. They were
not educated enough to follow Voltaire, so they listened to what
Rousseau called the Voice of Nature. Soon thereafter, they found they
were being abused for being less civilized, more ape-like than the
male, irrational and unsuited to take a part in public life. So they
tried again, poor things, and then there was an awful thing called
the Industrial Revolution, and the food got into tins. They may be
pardoned, as may all of us, if at this point they became a little
bewildered. Some people blamed science, some civilization, some the
meat-trusts and the millers, but the true culprit, as ever, was Woman.
A thousand voices cried her down――she hadn’t enough children; she
had too many; she was an ape; she was a dressed-up doll; she was a
Puritan; she was an immoral minx; she was uneducated; they had taught
her too much. Her pinched waist was formerly abused――now it was her
slim and boyish body. Eminent surgeons[3] committed themselves to the
view that the boyish figure with its pliable rubber bust-bodices and
corselets would be the ruin of the race, that race which had been
superbly undegenerate through four centuries of armour-plate corset
and eighteen-inch waists, that race which, then or now, can hardly
compete in toughness with the Chinese, among whom the boyish figure has
been for centuries the ideal, and whose women cannot conceivably be
accused of shirking any of the responsibilities of maternity. Others
told us that the woman-doctor has no nerve to tend confinements, and
conveniently forgot that, since the world began, and until quite modern
times, it is women who have ministered to one another in that agony
which now as in the past is the lot of every mother. Is there truth
in the words of Jason? Is there truth or justice in the passion of
Medea? Let us not ask the protagonists, but let us summon the inquiring
intelligence of Hypatia to find us a way out of the intolerable tangle
in which their quarrelling has landed us.
[3] Sir Arbuthnot Lane, for whom I have hitherto entertained an
entirely unqualified admiration, in a recent article. _Vide
The Weekly Dispatch_, December 28, 1924.