ASPASIA
_The Younger Feminists_
While we have admitted that the first aim of the feminist movement was
to open to women the stores of learning, to develop their minds and
to teach them to think, and that no attempt was made to handle the
problem of sex, it is not quite fair to say that even early feminism
has consistently denied or despised the body. The schools and colleges
made it their business to give to women opportunities for physical
development, for open-air exercise, swimming, tennis, hockey, lacrosse.
The Victorian young woman learnt gradually to be ashamed of her tiny
waist and fat hips. She learnt that a healthy appetite[5] as well
became a young woman as a young man, gave up her snacks in private
and did justice to good meals taken at proper intervals. Quietly, and
without mention of the fatal word “sex,” the spinster feminists, by
emphasis on health and vigour, built up a generation of young women who
were to be frank about other desires besides eating and drinking.
[5] There may be a biological cause of the alleged smallness of
feminine appetite. Watching a raven and his consort with
fresh meat, I observed that she obtained only a minute
portion beneath the contempt of the male. Can it be that,
in the savage state, only those females survived who could
exist on the little the male allowed them? Is this a case of
sex-linked heredity?
I cannot see what is the matter with our figures. Steel rods and rubber
are more modern materials than oak beams and pink plaster. Neither
we nor our modern lovers admire the opulent Venuses, indolent and
rose-embowered, who adorned the ceilings of old-fashioned ballrooms.
They were stupid, self-indulgent creatures, not even good mothers,
whatever the sentimental elderly gentlemen in their top-hats and
whiskers may have to say. What is a good mother we will discuss in
a later chapter, but for the present it is enough to say that more
dangerous childbirths are due to narrow pelves caused by rickets than
to hips contracted by the corsets of vanity. Let the doctors turn
socialist and feed the poor, instead of spending their time lamenting
the inadequacy for childbirth of a few fashionable women who don’t
very much matter. Middle- and upper-class girls nowadays――and most
working-class girls, too――go corsetless up to maturity. They do
gymnastic exercises, and dances that give suppleness to the body.
They swim and they play out of doors. Those who are rich enough to be
adequately fed are graceful and active as kittens, and as healthy.
By the time adolescence brings, as it always does, a few years of
intensive sex-vanity, the corset can do very little harm. The muscular
little body does not tolerate it stiff, or very tight, and the bones
are well grown. The mystery of feminine dress helps the appearance of
slimness. There are few clothes, and no lumpy gathers. Beneath that
boyish outline are firm little breasts, clean arching hips, abdominal
curves and thighs, lovely as anything the Venus of Milo has to show.
Artemis fashioned this modern woman. That is admitted. Has Artemis her
vows?
I’m afraid for once we have to admit that the Bishops are right.
In spite of everything the Church can do, in spite of an education
committed, so far as the authorities can control it, to sour or
religious spinsters, the modern young woman is not very moral. It is
a pathetic picture which the author of _Lysistrata_ has drawn for us,
of sexless beings going to and fro in tube and bus-like shuttles in
a machine to dull work robbed of all joy, earning their livelihood
and turning their backs on man in response to feminist propaganda.
Man, the enemy――to be defeated in his own professions, to be repelled
in every onslaught upon feminine virtue: I wonder? I would hazard a
guess that, relatively to the population, fewer women retain their
virginity till death than in the Victorian period or the Middle Ages.
In all probability it is sex, not sexlessness, which makes women
cling so tenaciously to the right to earn their living. Marriage
brings a jealous intolerant husband, children, prying and impertinent
neighbours――degraded and humiliating slavery for the vast majority of
women. Thirty shillings a week and typing or working in a shop, a still
tongue, or a toss of the head and the assertion that independence is
the best; and, in the background a lover with whom somehow evenings are
spent――a lover who has no claim and cannot tyrannize. A lover, perhaps,
who pleads to become a husband, but has no chance unless his income is
good or secure. Marriage would change him: Aspasia knows it. Marriage
would also rob her of that thirty shillings a week, which alone stands
between her and the abyss of primeval submission. Or else Aspasia
teaches in a school or college. She is a skilled teacher, devoted to
her work and pupils. She may be a Research Fellow in some difficult
branch of learning which is to her the very breath of life. She may
be a doctor in the public service, tending and advising mothers and
children. She is lovely, vital, creative. Man approaches. There are
holidays of delight and secret dread of the scandal which will end the
work Aspasia loves――or marriage and the certainty of that end at once.
“Choose,” say the Bishops and the school-managers (often the same
thing): “Choose,” say the public authorities who support the Church
and rather wish women would get out of this indelicate profession of
surgery and medicine; “choose between love and duty to the male and
service to the community.” This is not feminism――feminists have fought
it persistently――it is medieval Christianity. It presents a choice
between physical pleasure and service to the mind or soul; it upholds
the time-honoured theory that renunciation of the world, the flesh, and
the devil is the path to duty and salvation. I am fully aware of all
the arguments about economic pressure, the primary right of married
men to work, the awful situation of their dependent children and their
wives. None of this is fundamental, and the jealous male knows it.
“Divide to conquer” is the principle in dealing with trade unions;
it works equally well in the feminist struggle. Persuade the single
women that the married woman is an unfair competitor,[6] terrify them
so far as you can into believing that to succumb to sex is something
unbecoming and disgraceful and punishable with misery everlasting,
whether in marriage or outside of it, and you can prevent the women
combining against you.
[6] This scheme no longer works, as is evidenced by the attitude
of the National Union of Women Teachers this year (1925).
Intelligent women are more appreciated than they were, and
teachers know they may all want to marry some day.
But not if Aspasia will speak. If she but would, and put an end to this
lie for ever. She could tell us how, especially during the years of
war, young women took the last step towards feminine emancipation by
admitting to themselves and their lovers the mutual nature of sex-love
between man and woman. It sounds a platitude, but is, in fact, a
revolution. Strange to say, the nearness of death from enemy bombs or
enemy fire did not intensify the thought of holiness and heaven. It
made the little footrules to measure morality look absurd; it mocked
the emptiness of female virtue. While poverty and parents forbade the
certainty of marriage, with nothing but instability and death around
them, our modern Aspasias took the love of man and gave the love of
woman, and found this union, free and full on either side, the most
priceless gift the immortal gods can bestow. There is nothing new in
this, the moralist will say――it is just wickedness. Yes, there is this
that is new: that, though these younger women may be driven from fear
of starvation to the outward acceptance of old codes and conventions,
inwardly they know they have done no wrong and will not admit a
conviction of sin. Sex, even without children and without marriage,
is to them a thing of dignity, beauty, and delight. All Puritans――and
most males so long as they can remember――have tried to persuade women
that their part in sex is pregnancy and childbirth, and not momentary
delight. As well tell a man his part is the hunting and skinning of
animals for food and clothing. To enjoy and admit we enjoy, without
terror or regret, is an achievement in honesty. We will go further
and say that polygamy, proffered by the male as a solution to our
sexless lives, is no solution at all when we are polyandrous. It is
useless to go on pretending, as both sexes do, about this question.
The plain truth is that there are as many types of lover among women
of all classes as among men, and that nothing but honesty and freedom
will make instinctive satisfaction possible for all. Grant each man
and woman the right to seek his or her own solution without fear of
public censure. Moral questions of this kind cannot be decided by some
abstract rule. It would not be wrong for a man to have six wives,
provided he and they all found mutual happiness in that arrangement;
nor for a woman to have six husbands and a child by each, if she and
they found such a life satisfactory. The wrong lies in rules that are
barriers between human beings who would otherwise reach a fuller and
more intense understanding of one another. And any man or woman of
intelligence and vitality can testify that to have known each other as
lovers is to have completed mental and spiritual, as well as physical,
understanding, and to have permanently enriched each other’s lives,
capacities, energies, imaginations. There is no need to make these
divisions into mind and body. There is no difference. A way of walking,
laughter, thoughts spoken or written, gestures of love or anger, colour
and light of eyes or hair――these are the human being, man or woman. It
is thus that modern individuals think of one another. When we think
so, it seems absurd to argue whether or no love between man and woman
should stop short of a certain kind of physical expression. It is
useless to say that a mental exchange is sufficient. On the contrary,
lovers know that it is through sexual understanding they best apprehend
the quality of each other’s minds. It is equally futile to argue that
woman is cheated of her full rights if children do not result. That is
not true.
It is said that modern human beings, by dint of not valuing the body,
are physically degenerate and lose the finest ecstasies of love. Their
digestions are poor, we are told, their breath foul, their teeth
bad. Was love more delightful, then, in the old days when baths were
unknown, when “sweet breath” in a woman was so rare as to be sung by
poets, and the reek of stale sweat was barely stifled by a strong
perfume? John Donne wrote verses to the flea he saw nestling in his
lady’s bosom. There is scarcely a fine gentleman to-day who could face
the prospect of making love to one of the fine ladies of the past six
or seven hundred years in Europe, if she could be presented to him just
as she was to her contemporary lovers. It is true that neither vermin,
filth, nor squalor――being equal for both――can stay the passion of sex
whether now or in the past, but I do not believe in the theory that
the rougher our physique the more intense our bodily delights. Health,
to be sure, is essential; but health is to be secured in the modern
world, not by a return to savagery, but by the use of intelligence. I
believe the bodies of young people of to-day to whom fair opportunities
have been given are more healthy within and without than they were
in past times. And I believe that the disappearance of religious and
moral dualism between mind and matter――not by an oppressive victory of
either, neither by rational and moral control, nor by abandonment to
sensual materialism, but by a better understanding of psychology and
physiology based on the discoveries of physical science――is bringing to
the whole of life, but especially to sex-love, maternity, the rearing
and education of children, joy and rapture and promise surpassing
anything known to the purely instinctive life of the past. Of course we
are bewildered. Civilization without decay is at last a possibility.
Let us have knowledge and patience: blaspheming and violence will ruin
all.
It is for modern women and for men who can understand the problem to
make an end to secrecy, shame, and starvation where sex is concerned.
There has been a good deal of freedom in action, but less boldness
in speech, because of the heavy penalties involved. For some women
speech is impossible; those who are secure must fight their battle.
How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male!
How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in
the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking
its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life;
then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years
of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a
success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for
the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. Feminism
led women away from the home that they might return armed and unsubdued
to make marriage tolerable. Women who have been free remember the
horror of the approach to marriage: a barrier for most of us to free
public activity; a life-long contract only to be broken in disgrace
and public disgust; aunts, uncles, social duties that exasperate and
are totally unnecessary; the common view that henceforward husband and
wife are one and indivisible, and the wife for ever to be burdened with
her husband’s duties and affairs; looks of surprise and reproach if we
enjoy other male society; constraint in the manner of men formerly our
friends; income, if we have any or can still earn, taxed as a part of
our husband’s; children, which, had we had them illegitimate, would
have been our own but now are our husband’s; worst of all, the looks
and smiles from silly women broken in to slavery, congratulating us on
having done well and made ourselves secure for life.
Let no one think this is petulant abuse. It is the accumulation of
these details, and the pressure of public opinion which gradually
destroy the nerve and independent judgment of married women who, in
their free state, have been brilliant and remarkable. It is the fact
that, by marriage, we conform and place ourselves in a line with
millions of others whose view of what we have done is entirely foreign
to our own. As a Labour Minister is corrupted by Court dress, so is
a free woman by the marriage-contract. Nothing but our desire for
children would make us endure it. We, to whom the mutual nature of
sex-love is sacred, to whom a partnership involving children is of
equal dignity on both sides, to whom the surrender of our whole being
in love is a free gift――the highest we can bestow; who would neither
bind ourselves nor others where love is non-existent; we must submit
to a contract based on rights of property and possession, buying and
selling of our bodies; a law whose conception of conjugal wrongs is
sin, punishment, and just revenge; and a Church whose utmost concession
is to bid us “serve” instead of “obey” our husbands. Build, O Aspasia,
a trade union of lovers to conquer the world, and cry aloud that
feminism is nowhere so much needed as in the home.