ARTEMIS
_The Early Struggles of Feminism_
When the feminist struggle began during the last century, ignorance and
beauty were the two qualities most admired in women. It is necessary
to remind our masculine critics what was the soil from which the
feminist movement sprang and what the current morality which influenced
its direction. It was customary in those days to make fun of old or
ugly women and to scorn those who showed any signs of intelligence.
A man chose a young, beautiful, and blushing creature for his bride,
and transformed her by one year of marriage and one childbirth into a
gentle and submissive matron. Ugly or intelligent women, for the most
part, paid a heavy price. Not only were they rejected in youth, and
starved of all their natural joys, but as “old maids” they were the
object of general scorn and derision. Small wonder that women adopted
artificial aids to beauty and artificial hindrances to their native
intelligence. Strongest of all the taboos laid by masculine custom and
religion on feminine minds was that regarding sex-knowledge. Their
purity was to be preserved only by ignorance, and even as matrons and
mothers it was scarcely decent for them to refer to any of the physical
changes of their bodies. It is impossible to over-estimate the strength
of this tradition, or the harm which has been worked by it to the cause
of women.
The feminists were, and are still, howled down by men on the pretence
that they invented chastity and scorn of bodily values. History
disproves such a ridiculous assertion. The early feminists were what
history and tradition made them, and could not at the time of their
rebellion have been otherwise. The origin of the stupid ideal of
womanhood against which men as well as women to-day are still fighting
was the asceticism of the Christian religion; and, unless St. Paul
was a woman in disguise, I fail to see how woman is to be blamed for
a conception of her place and duty from which she has suffered more
than anybody else. Before the conversion of the West to Christianity,
barbarian women of the North enjoyed a certain rough equality with
their husbands. They stride through the sagas, these fierce women,
brides of heroes, glad to reward the warrior with their favours, quick
to avenge an insult or a wrong. They had no need to stoop to cajolery.
Savage and untamed, they were the fit and equal mates of savage men.
Then came the monks, and the white wimples and courtly dresses and
chivalry, chants and cathedrals, and meek and reverent casting up and
casting down of eyes. The savage breast that had swelled and throbbed
untrammelled in love or anger learnt to flutter and to sigh. Quenched
were the fires of Brunhilde, her sunlit rock deserted. Agnes and
Mary, tamed and pious, sat cooing in the shade. But for meekness and
maternity, the early days of asceticism might have seen a crusade to
destroy that temptress――woman. Barely allowed a soul, she slipped
through a life of oblivion, praying that it might be a pretty crown
with which Heaven would reward her patience and submission at the last.
Then came the Puritans and denied her even that, substituting ugliness
in this life as well as the negation of body, and a heaven of people
in starched nightshirts, rendered oblivious to the horrid spectacle of
their figures by the still more horrid chanting of their nasal psalms.
A breath of rationalism――brief, soon choked, a breath of “nature”――and
so to crinolines, pantalettes, and a life still lived in terror of
hell-fire, terror of parents, dread of husband, horror of the least
breath of adverse public opinion. Anyone who reads the _Fairchild
Family_ must marvel that from such nerve-destroying parental tyranny
and the intolerable weight of prejudice and religious superstition the
nineteenth-century woman ever found the courage to rebel.
Was it astonishing that the revolt had in it something frenzied and
ascetic――that it seemed to express the anger of the spinster thwarted
and despised in the current schemes of values? I do not think the
pioneers were so much Puritan as votaries, hanging the tablet of
each achievement in the temple of Athene or of Artemis, pressing
on, breathless, swift of foot, sure of aim, in dread of the fate of
Atalanta whom the Golden Apples lured to destruction and the marital
embrace. “Chaste as the icicle, that hangs on Dian’s temple.” They had
need to be, perhaps, who, in an atmosphere of swoons and ringlets,
won for us schools and colleges, free limbs, health and the open air;
unlocked for us the classics, science, medicine, the history of our
world; drew us from our paltry, ladylike accomplishments; wrote upon
our school-books: “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed,” and
flung wide the gate into the world.
They, these pioneers, childless, unwed, created and bore thousands of
women, made them anew, body and soul, for lives of mental and physical
activity unknown in the past to any but the very exceptional few. Just
like the new learning of the Renaissance to men’s minds in Europe was
the opening of high school and university to the feminine mind of
to-day. Thousands of women of the last generation and this, who would
otherwise have passed their existence in genteel poverty and vacancy
of mind, have found their happiness in teaching, in medicine, or in
some other profession. Thousands of mothers have watched with delight
the unfolding of their children’s minds, and enjoyed co-operating over
“lessons” and arguing politics with the adolescent.
We, who in a sense are the children of the feminist pioneers, whose
thoughts embrace the universe, whose lives are one long round of mental
and physical delight, at times intense to ecstasy――we at least will pay
our tribute to those who lit the sacred fires, before we take up pen
and paper to criticize.
When one reads the lamentations of would-be intelligent men about
the iniquities of modern young people, chiefly those of the female
sex, one cannot but laugh at their method of approach. It would seem
according to them that our modern women just happened like that: no
one had a part in forming their bodies or in training their minds. In
so far as these people consider education or early training at all, it
is to blaspheme at the sex-hating feminists who have trained modern
women to dispense with their birth-right――the love of man. How this
squares with the wail of the Bishops against the sexual immorality of
the younger generation we will leave Jason or the eloquent author of
_Lysistrata_ to decide. Our business is not to condemn woman, past or
present, but to chronicle faithfully the forces that have made her, and
the aspirations which will mould her future. For she, and she alone,
shall be the arbiter of her fate, and neither man nor creed stand
between her and the realization of her ideals. Men have blasphemed
woman and life too long, and it will not be until the issues are
clearer, the battle more advanced, that the basis for co-operation
between man and woman can be finally established. There is too much
evidence at present that man, professing friendship and concern, is
still ready to snatch from us what little we have won.
To those elderly gentlemen, then, who watch with horror the upper- and
middle-class woman perpetrating similar follies to those of upper- and
middle-class men, the first question we would put is: “What education
did they give their daughters, and what was taught to their mothers
before them? What were the current ideas about feminine destiny which
encircled them in their impressionable years?” Many would answer,
still far too many, that their daughters were given the education of
a gentlewoman and fitted to become the wives of gentlemen. This we
know of old. The lady eats, drinks, digests, wears clothes, tinkles
the piano, dances, sings, handles a golf-club, submits to sex, bears
a child without the smallest notion of anatomy, turns from the whole
thing disgusted, and probably bears no more. Whose fault? Not hers.
They do not teach mothercraft or physiology in finishing schools for
gentlemen’s daughters, and it is no part of the duty of gentlemen’s
wives to reproduce their kind. Perhaps there is comfort in that.
A great many parents, however, would tell us that they gave their
daughters a good and liberal education in such schools as were
available, good ordinary boarding- and day-schools which have sprung
up during the last fifty years in response to the feminist propaganda.
Then we have the working woman, who has shared with her brothers in
what education is permitted to trickle through the elementary schools.
It must not be forgotten that this ends at fourteen.
Is there something wrong with this education of women, and if so, what?
I think we must judge that there is. The reason lies in the sense of
inferiority bred in women by so much oppression, and the natural result
that their chief aim as they struggled upwards was to prove that in
all respects they were just as good as men. The second aim was to
prove that they could jolly well do without them. In exactly the same
way the worker, rising in the social scale, seeks to prove himself a
_bourgeois_. Both efforts are mistaken. Each class and sex has that
to give to the common stock of achievement, knowledge, thought, which
it alone can give, and robs itself and the community by inferior
imitation. The feminist movement, like one dissentient voice in an
excited public meeting, was querulous, hysterical, uncertain of itself.
It dared not cry out that women had bodies. Its one hope of success
was to prove that women had minds. And it was right in this, that the
primary fact about men and women is not that they are two sexes apart,
but that they are human beings and as such should share all knowledge
in the world and make it the basis of their partnership and the rearing
of their children.
Many an ardent feminist spinster in a girls’ secondary school has
sighed over the state of public opinion which forced her to drive her
girls’ minds along channels for which they were not always suited, that
they might do well at college and show that women could surpass the
men. Many another, well drilled by a mother or tradition in ideals of
feminine virtue, gloried in the sexless learned women she was creating
and in the thought that one day they would force those savage, lustful
men to conform to the ideals which they set up for women. Why blame
her? Lay the blame where it is due. It will be but a just retribution
for that lustful male and his ideal of feminine virtue if one day, in a
world full of prohibitions, he finds himself forced to kneel before the
Mumbo-Jumbo[4] he himself built up to terrify his wives and daughters
to submission.
[4] Mumbo-Jumbo was an idol set up by the men in Nigeria to
terrify erring women. The men, but not the women, knew him
to be a fake. See _Mungo Park’s Travels_.
Feminist ideals of education, then, had the defect that they did in a
certain measure deny sex, or ignore it. The feminists had a pathetic
hope that by so doing they would convince the dominant male that a
woman might be learned and yet remain a lady. But I wish to emphasize
the fact that this feature has belonged to all education of women,
especially of ladies, from time immemorial, and it is, therefore,
unbecoming in a male, whether young or old, to use this as a cause
for reproach to our sex. We went as far as we dared with an eye to
male hostility. Young feminists to-day would be the first to admit
that it would probably have paid us to go further. There never has
been a period when education has trained women for the possibility of
motherhood, and it is time that such training was begun. There never
was a period when the education of women was completely honest, and
it is time that that training was begun. What knowledge is of more
vital importance to women than anatomy and physiology? They were
allowed it if they were to be doctors, and then only with caution.
Turning casually the pages of a book on anatomy in a girls’ secondary
school library, I found the diagrams connected with sex and maternity
carefully stuck fast. What is more calculated to inspire prying and
prurience? We have no right to blame young women for shirking marriage,
sex, or motherhood, or for moulding their figures on boyish lines, when
we carefully treat them as boys and withhold from them as long as we
can all knowledge of the difference of their physique and possibly of
their destiny. I have no wish to go back on the great achievements of
feminism, or to drive women from the professions in which they have
a just right to be employed. I want to break down the last barriers.
Artemis is slim and bold; Athene is stately. We have done well to
worship at their shrines.
But the call of Demeter the Fruitful is insistent. If we would add
to the achievements of those who came before us, let us freely admit
that we have but been playing mock modesty, and that to us the body
is no mere box to hold the mind, but a temple of delight and ecstasy:
a temple to hold the future if we will. To me the important task of
modern feminism is to accept and proclaim sex; to bury for ever the
lie that has too long corrupted our society――the lie that the body is a
hindrance to the mind, and sex a necessary evil to be endured for the
perpetuation of our race. To understand sex――to bring to it dignity and
beauty and knowledge born of science, in place of brute instinct and
squalor――that is the bridge that will span the breach between Jason and
Medea.