The surprising feature about this movement which during the last fifty years has led the bulk of girls and young women into the very occupations to which modern man himself owes his besotment and miserable limitations, is that those who become the victims of it—that is to say the vast majority of women workers in Commerce, Industry, the Civil Service and the Professions, enter joyously, and almost with a whoop of triumph into the various callings with which they achieve what they claim to be economic independence. Not only that, but those who contemplate the procession of them marching into these callings, stand and applaud and congratulate each other on the spectacle.
It is true that millions of these women in later life have the intelligence to realize the mistake they have made, and to measure with some approach to accuracy the deterioration it has effected both in their minds and in their bodies in one generation. It would be too much, perhaps, to expect young girls to anticipate these results, when they first leave their homes to earn their own livelihood; but what leaves one marvelling is the fact that the older elements in the population do not seem to understand the doom which will inevitably overtake this female army and its descendants, and that far from making any attempt at driving it back, they shout vociferously and applaud it as a desirable and excellent phenomenon of modern life.
The cynic may reply “All the better! You say that 200 years of commercial, industrial and office occupations have deteriorated man, so that modern woman has very naturally learnt to despise him. Very well, then, if women now suffer a similar amount of deterioration, the balance will once more be restored, and all will be well.”
All those who can derive some comfort from this reflection, in the face of modern tendencies, are welcome to it. But to those who, like myself, realize that hitherto the rapidity of our degeneration has been to some extent checked by the comparative aloofness of one sex from the worst influences of modern civilization, and that henceforth, instead of one stream of degeneration we shall have two which will become confluent at marriage, the future does not seem to be a very bright one, nor does it hold out any promise of producing, from the human elements it will contain, the individuals capable of initiating a counter movement sufficiently powerful to arrest the tide of degeneracy that threatens to sweep everything of value away.
With regard to the fund-holding wealthy spinster, it may be taken as a general rule that she cannot fail to be anything else than a burden to the community to which she belongs.
She is not only a cul-de-sac, or a blind-alley of the stream of Life, where the forces that have produced her come to a dead stop, but she is also the means of damming up a portion of the community’s wealth in produce and labour in that cul-de-sac. She herself, her household expenditure, her retinue, and her disbursements for humanitarian and religious objects, exact a toll on the community, very little of which is substantially helpful to the fluency or security of the stream of Life.
He who has travelled much over England does not require to be reminded of the countless villages and towns where the most imposing and well-appointed private residence or residences are the homes of precisely this kind of spinster. I could name half a dozen villages myself off-hand where by far the most commodious and luxurious house is the property of one, two, or three spinster ladies. About them in smaller and conspicuously meaner houses are the other inhabitants of the village—small families with parents struggling to make both ends meet, with children frequently underfed and underclothed, but all of them belonging to the main stream of Life, and constituting the only justification there is for the existence of the very town and village itself, the Church, and all the machinery of social life. The spinster ladies from their wealthy fastness, with its carriage drive, its troop of servants, its rich solid furniture, and its overfed animals, look down upon the busy scene about them. They are not part of it, but merely spectators drawing their profit, their life’s blood from it. Their untutored minds, guided by local clerical influence, actively study every means by which they can throw a cloak over the glaring superfluousness and nothingness of their lives. Deeply conscious, as the best of them are, of being cut off from the main stream of Life, and perhaps a trifle piqued by the thought that, besides being severed from it, their presence there, in the best house for miles around, is really only a means of impeding the machinery facilitating the flow of the stream, a means of causing friction in its movements, they make frantic and resolute efforts to demonstrate their “importance” to those around.
What their self-esteem, their very self-respect imposes as a duty upon them, is to make a dramatic and incessant exhibition of being important, to make a very deceptive pretence of belonging to the main stream of Life itself. Hence the untiring energy with which they enter into all the village or town festivities which have a public charity for their object; hence the zeal which they show at all Church festivals, and the regularity with which they contribute to religious and charitable institutions both local and distant.
For all this they are looked upon, even by the ignorant villagers themselves, as delightful and exceedingly valuable members of the community. Nobody seems to peep beneath the elaborate manœuvres by which they contrive to “cut a prominent figure.” Nobody seems to see in their concern about other people’s business and welfare the conclusive proof that they are straining every nerve to justify an existence which, on final analysis, they know in their heart of hearts to be utterly and criminally unjustifiable.
George Meredith is one of the few thoughtful and non-socialistic writers who have had the courage to say what they felt about this class of parasites on the community. In Chapter XXIII of One of our Conquerors he speaks of these “comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyse at home and stultify abroad.”[135] But since his references to them occur in a work of fiction they are hardly elaborate enough to be telling, or frequent enough to have aroused comment or to have formed the basis of a doctrine.
Certainly one does not require to be infected with socialistic or communistic views to feel that the vast number of these spinsters’ mansions all over the country is a bane rather than a boon. From no political point of view, whether monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic or socialistic, is it possible to justify them, and since the very energy which they devote to their humanitarian form of sex-compensation is frequently as misguided as it is only a partial remedy for the harm they themselves are doing, they constitute a portion of the community that must be honestly and utterly condemned by every far-seeing thinker on the subject.
To reply to this by a shrug of the shoulders and the question, “What would you do with them?” is simply foolish. The first great reform consists in getting them to be regarded no longer as a harmless or beneficent section of the community, but as a dangerous and intolerable bane. Once this transmutation of public opinion has been achieved, it is not a difficult matter to decide what should be done with them.
I invite any reader to take a walking tour through this country of England, and to count the number of such parasitic females he can find in a month’s tour. I invite him to note the grandeur of their establishments compared with the meanness and poverty of those about them who really belong to Life’s main stream, or are directly assisting it; and if that experience does not convince him of the dangerous futility of the class as a whole, he must be possessed of very singular views concerning the proper organization of social life.
Even on their death-beds these creatures do not cease to scourge the community to which they belong; for in the very agony of death they bequeath their wealth and dispose of their other property in a manner which, while it is usually thoroughly ill-advised, constitutes but one last fierce effort to stamp the belief in their importance for ever on the minds of those who survive them.
You are entitled to pity these women for their virgin lives, for the serious unadaptedness of their condition, and for their lifelong and secret conviction that they are useless; but to defend their existence as if it were not a burden, as if it were not a dangerous scourge in our midst, would be to refuse to recognize the truth about the matter, and this truth, however unpleasant and disturbing, can be dealt with only if it is honestly recognized and faced.
The less wealthy among them, right down the scale to the level of those who have only £300 a year of their own, are certainly less baneful and onerous, seeing that they dam up less of this world’s goods in their particular cul-de-sac; but the ultimate cumulative effect of their combined existences constitutes an imposition not much more tolerable than that of their wealthier sisters.
Nor should it be forgotten that a not inconsiderable portion of the harm resulting from this peculiarly British scourge consists in the amount of false opinion, perniciously erroneous judgments on all things, and distorted spiritual influences, which annually emanate from these spinsters’ homes, and which, backed as they frequently are by the power of wealth, are spread abroad with all the prestige and pomp that opulence can impart.
The English outlook, and English opinion generally, are to a great extent contaminated by this spinster influence. Our politics are no longer immune from it; our policy both at home and abroad is largely infected by our atmosphere surcharged both with the breath and the ideas of spinsters. Our literature is to no small extent governed by their taste,[136] our newspapers are obviously designed to offer no affront to their morbid sensibilities, and our stage is entirely governed by their criticism. Feminism, with all its worst consequences, is largely their creation—the child of their idleness and their superfluous wealth; and if Feminism has spread so far, and become a creed so universally and almost unconsciously accepted, it is due largely to this large class of powerful, misguided and idle unattached females.
They constitute a malignant power, because they are a body bound by no responsibilities; they pursue an erratic course directed entirely by their abnormal emotions and crazy outlook on life, because in the first place they are abnormal, secondly because they are unguided except by those whose advantage it is to mislead them, thirdly because they are limited by no close family ties in the expenditure of their wealth during life or in its disposal after death; and finally they are a wasteful and squandering body because in their frantic efforts to coerce their contemporaries into believing they are important, they shrink from no extremes and no excesses in order to take up as conspicuous and prominent a place as possible in their small world.
CONCLUSION
If we have correctly stated the peculiar mental attitude and physical condition of the unmarried woman in our midst, and from this statement have drawn the correct inferences concerning her influence upon the community, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that permanently unmarried females are on the whole an element in society which cannot be regarded as very desirable.
For it is above all important to remember this—that even if we have been wrong in our enumeration of the occupations that spinsters can properly and usefully fill, and even if the list we have given may be materially increased, the fact that the spinster is usefully occupied does not remove the principal feature of her condition which exerts an abnormal influence on society, that is to say, her radical and inevitable abnormality both of mind and body.
Even if we have been wrong in our deductions concerning the heightening of the economic struggle through the presence of spinsters in excessive numbers in the professions, commerce, industry and trade, this principal objection still stands, and it leaves us no alternative but to consider means and ways of mitigating it.
The fact that in Great Britain the number of surplus females—that is to say, of women who, all things being equal, cannot possibly marry—amounts to 2,000,000 or about 5 per cent. of the population, makes the problem of the old maid so acute, for this nation at least, that it is impossible not to regard it as perhaps the gravest with which legislators have to deal. For, on this basis alone, that it is the business of every government to secure the maximum amount of successful adaptation to the governed, the question appears to be one which legislators can hardly shelve with impunity.
Of these 2,000,000 surplus women, it may be only just—humiliating as the argument may be to our national pride—to argue that possibly half are negative; that is to say, that 1,000,000 are so constituted as to be undisturbed by their semi-moribund sex-instincts, and that a sexless life is not merely tolerable but actually necessary to them. These may possibly achieve contentedness by means of suitable work combined with strong Christian influence. It is conceivable that they may even succeed in wholly sublimating their reproductive instincts. There still remain, however, the 1,000,000 spinsters, or 2½ per cent. of the population, whose resistance to sublimating influences is likely to be stubborn, and whose misery is likely to be proportionately greater—not to mention the unhappiness they must inevitably bring, directly upon those about them, and indirectly upon the nation at large.
The Holy Catholic Church in the Middle Ages wisely offered asylums to this section of the population, and even more wisely organized these asylums on lines which enabled the spinsters taking refuge in them to find a natural vent for their surging desire for sex-compensation, in all kinds of sentimental and humanitarian work among the sick, the aged, the poor, etc., in which they were able to exercise power over precisely that kind of person over whom sway is most easily obtained.
But what was peculiarly beneficial in the Catholic system was that by this means it acquired a hold upon these women. It was able to direct both their energies and their opinions, and thus act as a lightning conductor protecting society from the fury of their sex-compensatory efforts, both in their activities and in the expression and imposition of their views. In cases where it took charge of their money, this wealth became an instrument in the hands of a powerful and wise organization, instead of being simply a weapon for a spinster’s whim.
But what has modern society to offer of a similar kind?
The hospitals can absorb only a small fraction of the 2,000,000 surplus women, and domestic service can do little more. For, even if we take these two classes of occupation as accounting for 1,335,368 unmarried women[137] in England and Wales alone, we must remember that a very large proportion of these do not remain in the work permanently, but leave it for marriage at a comparatively early age. In either case we could not affirm that either nursing or domestic service offers any special chances for sex-sublimation. There is certainly a greater chance of sublimation in hospital nursing, but the profession is overcrowded as it is, and no attempt has been made to bring it wholly under the wing of the Church.
The truth is that modern life, while it certainly offers occupations in abundance to women and girls, makes no provision, or very little, for those women whose work ought at once to keep them busy, and give them a full life—that is, effectually transmute their sex-instincts.
What course should we recommend in order that the nation’s life might absorb greater numbers of these unmarried women with the view of properly adapting them?
In the first place it seems eminently desirable to emphasize more than we have emphasized in the past the ideal of matrimony for every woman up to a certain age, and to bring home to parents that marriage is what they must seek for their daughters and what they must train them for.[138]
This would have the beneficial effect of introducing a more resolute effort towards marriage as an end, both in the activity of parents and their children, which would lead to more restless endeavours being made, than are made at present, to find suitable mates for eligible daughters[139]—endeavours that should be prompted by sufficient energy not to halt even at the shores of the native land.[140] These endeavours, assisted by a Government service and the consular system, would allow of an incessant flow of girls of fair fame to our colonies and dependencies, and might be coupled with legislative measures for the prevention of too heavy a flow of foreign virgins into this country.
The Government ought to keep as keen an eye on the marriage as upon the labour market, and just as it now protects the native workman from unfair competition resulting from excessive immigration, so it ought to protect the unmarried females. The higher the percentage of females in the country, the more stringent should the regulations become forbidding young female immigrants of what class soever.
Secondly, all work, such as teaching, the practice of medicine and law, etc., in which, according to the most reliable psychologists of the day, the presence of unmarried women, far from being helpful (as offering a new and essential contribution to the knowledge on the question), only complicates the existing difficulties, and, as in the case of teaching, is directly harmful to the children taught, should be exclusively reserved for men, poor married women, or middle-aged widows, as might also with advantage many occupations both in industry, commerce and the Civil Service. This would have the effect of relieving economic pressure, and of facilitating early marriages.
Thirdly, the Government should be carefully advised concerning those callings which are best calculated to offer unmarried women complete adaptation—that is to say, occupation and sublimation of the sex instinct—and the legislature should do all in their power to encourage women, particularly of a special type, to enter these callings.
Fourthly, when once public opinion had become convinced (which it is very far from being to-day) that the “annuitant” spinster is at all events, and in any circumstances, a bane, legislation might be introduced to limit her powers and discourage her excesses, which would go an appreciable way towards mitigating the harm she does.
Fifthly and finally, everything should be done to revive the mediæval system of respectable and honourable sequestration for old maids, in institutions whose functions would be at once religious and of a kind to provide an outlet for the sex-compensatory impulses of the positive and negative spinster. By this means they might be not only thoroughly adapted, but also in a position to have their activities, their opinions, and (in cases of wealthy people) their wealth, wisely controlled by a broad policy beneficent to the nation as a whole.
It is, however, very doubtful indeed whether anything whatsoever will be done to relieve the nation of what, in the mildest language, can be regarded as little less than a spiritual and material scourge.
Modern society is so thoroughly and deeply saturated with feminist prejudices and ideas, and the sentiments which most promote feminine power and feminine tastes are so universally popular both in the Press and in modern literature generally, that anyone who speaks on the sex question with an honest regard for reality, and with a non-romantic understanding of its fundamental features, is not only foredoomed to a cold and even hostile reception, but every year finds it more and more difficult to obtain a fair and exhaustive hearing. For, as we have already said, the growth of Feminism has been so steady and insidious, that thousands of men and women to-day are Feminists without knowing it, without ever having questioned it.
A cold feverless appreciation of the radical principles underlying the relations and the nature of the sexes, whether in fiction or in a textbook, is now practically certain to be decried, and to be regarded as a literary faux pas, and while in Byron’s days it brought a man into evil odour, at present, after one hundred years of Progress, it completely discredits him.[141]
It is not probable, therefore, that anything contained in this chapter is likely to be read with sympathy or with comprehension by the modern world; but if it conveys to a few isolated and lonely spirits the message that they have been waiting for, and makes them feel perhaps that, although they may not be on the eve of a deep national antifeminist (not anti-feminine) movement, they are at least not entirely alone, it will have accomplished all that its author can possibly expect.
FOOTNOTES:
[102] In the Laws of Manu (Bk. IX, 89) there is a passage which seems to show that spinsterhood of this kind is specially recommended by the religious Founder of Brahmanism. In Bk. IX, verse 89, we read: “But the maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s house until death, than that he should ever give her to a man destitute of good qualities.”
[104] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 105), where, referring to the vital impulses of woman, she says: “When these are not expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved things, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations.”
[105] “With reference to the marked predominance of female suicides [in England] over male suicides in the 15-20 age period, Ogle remarks that this is also ‘the only period in which the general death rates, as shown in the Registrar-General’s returns, is higher in the female sex, and also is marked, as the census returns for 1881 show, by an exceptionally higher rate of lunacy (exclusive of idiocy or imbecility) for females than for males.’... In France, the chief age at which men commit suicide is from 40 to 50, while for women it is between 15 to 20.” (Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, pp. 382-383.) The census of 1911 also gives higher figures for female than for male lunacy—a difference of 10,000, and these are chiefly unmarried women. The unmarried numbered 54,223, the married 21,299, widowed 9,229.
[106] H. Ellis, Op. cit., p. 388: “There are some who believe (Dr. H. Campbell amongst them) that although the number of women of all ages who commit suicide is less than the number of men, many more women than men contemplate suicide habitually, i.e. many more women than men are suicidal, although they may not always carry it into practice.”
[107] The facts collected by the psycho-analysts, Freud and Dr. E. Jones, on this phenomenon were not new to me. I had already observed them in numerous cases, and my observations on the point were but confirmed by the psycho-analysts’ theory of the transference of orgastic sensations from the genitalia to other parts of the body.
[108] See Martial, III, 82, 9; also Senecae Dialogorum Liber XII, 10, 3. While Hugo Blümner in his Römischen Privataltertümer (1922), p. 399, gives a brief description of this practice.
[109] See Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London, 1918), p. 599. In regard to this question parents are also entitled to ask what influence the spinster’s outlook on life has upon their children, particularly upon their daughters. It is impossible entirely to divorce from one’s moral influence upon children the prejudices and prepossessions of one’s particular position in life, and one’s general attitude towards fundamental problems. Now, since the spinster’s particular position in life is an abnormal one, it is questionable whether she can help her influence from imparting something of her own abnormality. When we bear in mind that, according to the census of 1911 there were 187,283 female teachers in England and Wales, 171,480 of whom were unmarried, the gravity of this aspect alone of spinsterhood cannot be denied.
[110] And neurosis in later life.
[111] “The most serious manifestation of disordered conduct in hysteria is, however, the development of the appetite for teasing—for giving pain and annoyance to others” (see Charles Mercier, M.B., Sanity and Insanity, London, 1890, p. 215). Long after Mercier wrote this his views were confirmed by the school of psycho-analysts. I give the reference to Mercier to show that the fact was observed before the psycho-analysts, so much detested in certain quarters, had come to the fore.
[112] See Dr. Wrench’s Grammar of Life (Heinemann, 1908), p. 76.
[113] Freud deals with this point in many places in his works. See particularly his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte Folge (1918), Chapter III (Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose), p. 117.
[114] The harm, however, does not cease with the work of the spinsters themselves. Their influence in this direction has become a national evil. Volumes could be filled with examples of this false and short-sighted humanitarianism, but the following case, taken from The News of the World on Jan. 1, 1922, at a time when rates in almost all parishes in and around London were anything between 17s. and 20s. in the £, is typical of thousands of others. “Rochford Board of Guardians, Essex, are confronted with the problem of dealing with a man who is both a leper and insane. The patient is a native of Mauritius. It was stated at a Board meeting that the man lived for some time in a cottage in a rural parish, and his wife looked after him, but she was unable to do so any longer. Formerly the man was in the Leper Colony at Bicknacre, Essex—an institution carried on by the Society of the Divine Compassion, assisted by the Sisterhood of St. Giles—but his mental state was such that he could not remain there. Asylum authorities who were approached refused to accept the case, and the Board of Control supported them in their attitude. It was also stated that the Ministry of Health would not deal with the matter. Consequently the man had to be cared for by the Guardians. A building was prepared for him, and efforts made to secure three male nurses, though only two have been obtained. The cost of three nurses is twelve guineas a week. Eventually the Board decided to send a deputation to the Ministry of Health.” The influence of the spinster’s frantic and unthinking humanitarianism is recognizable here.
[115] See Mercier, Op. cit., p. 220. The author continues: “They [the feelings in question] take the shape of religious emotion, and expression for them is found in observance of ceremonial and in devotion to a ritual.” The fact that the first initiation into religious fervour of this kind frequently starts by the young girl’s wild adoration for an older woman—her school mistress or her Sunday-school teacher—is not mentioned by Mercier, but it is important.
[116] Large numbers of the women in the Suffrage movement were of this type. Nor is it possible to exonerate such women entirely from a charge of jealousy of the young girl, when their efforts are obviously directed towards making her, like themselves, ill-adapted, discontented and physiologically miserable.
[117] See The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. VIII, p. 349. The author proceeds: “Accordingly it is amongst the young men and women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this eccentric type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of all ebullient feeling must be perilous” ... etc.
[118] For an interesting discourse, uninfluenced by the recent psychoanalytical school, on the connexion between sexual and religious emotion, see Mercier, Op. cit., pp. 220-223.
[119] Thus Dr. E. Jones argues (Op. cit., p. 217), “Civilization has reached, or is on the point of reaching, the limit, beyond which unguided sublimation can no longer be successfully maintained.”
[120] See Byron’s letter to John Murray, Feb. 7, 1821: “The truth is that in these days the grand ‘primum mobile’ of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. This is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.” This was written a hundred years ago, and is still true to-day.
[121] Dr. Vintras and Parent Duchatelet both concur in representing English prostitution as about the most degraded and at the same time the most irrevocable.
[122] Throughout this discussion I mean by prostitution not any form of illicit hetero-sexual relations but commercial and promiscuous unchastity.
[123] Speaking of the prostitute Lecky says: “But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in their pride of untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame” (History of European Morals, London, 1899, Vol. II, p. 283).
[124] Let all who doubt this consult the literature on the subject (even our own Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th and 11th editions), and also consult people who have been engaged in rescue work.
[125] It is for this reason that a man who gives a girl an illegitimate child is really more kind and merciful than the man who seduces her while taking precautions to prevent issue. But it will take some time before the world can possibly be expected to see the matter in this light.
[126] Those who, like Lombroso and Ferrero, argue that prostitutes are born, and that there is a specific class of women, which may be called potentially whorish from birth, will naturally join issue with me, and deny that the childless fate of the prostitute is her severest penalty. I cannot accept the evidence that I have read, however, in La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée, to show that prostitutes are a class of women apart (as regards primary and secondary characteristics and instincts). I feel very much more inclined to agree with Emile Faguet, who thinks that all prostitutes start their illicit amours with a strong monogamic bias, and that it is only subsequently that circumstances drive them to promiscuity. See Le Feminisme (Paris, 1910), p. 254: “La vérité est que la prostituée née est excessivement rare.... Les autres prostituées sont des femmes qui out commencé par être monogames comme leurs sœurs, et qu’une première déchéance a jetées dans la classe des femmes pour tous.” Thus Faguet concludes (p. 255): “La prostituée, j’ai cru le montrer, est un être dénaturé.” This I believe to be much nearer the point than Lombroso’s elaborate thesis.
[127] John ii. 15, 16.
[128] Rom. viii. 6, 10, 13.
[129] Rom. viii. 6-8.
[130] Her behaviour in this respect will be dictated not only by an instinctive desire to spread a negative doctrine broadcast as an end in itself, but also by a feeling of very real and very stubborn envy towards all those who can enjoy a side of life from which she is completely shut off. This envy may extend even to her attitude towards young women of all classes, so that she will do everything in her power, under the cover of philanthropic motives, to keep them from such pastimes as flirtation, from actually falling in love, or from spending what she believes to be “too much time” in the company of the other sex. See also p. 246 ante.
[131] It is true that the negative spinster was not alone in this support of the war from secret sex motives. The old men of all nations also saw in the war a golden opportunity of expressing their natural secret hatred and jealousy of the young males of their circle, and, whether consciously or unconsciously, seized on the patriotic motive in order to vent these passions. The flood of letters that poured into the Times office from sexagenarians, septuagenarians and octogenarians, imploring the authorities to continue the war at the time when there was some talk of peace, was an expression of this unconscious but radical loathing of young men by the old.
[132] See, however, the exceptions mentioned on p. 248 ante. For a woman’s confirmation of the fact that negative women are increasing in England, see Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit.), pp. 82-85, and many other passages.
[133] The number of women workers (married and unmarried) in 1911 was 4,830,734. Of these about 1,500,000 were employed as domestic servants and hospital nurses. In 1917 the total was 5,889,734. About 173,000 of this increase came from domestic service, so that the total for domestic servants and nurses in 1917 would appear to have been 1,827,000.
[134] It should also be borne in mind that work outside home necessarily throws men and girls constantly into each other’s company. Unless, therefore, a certain degree of subnormality in the sexual and emotional nature of each sex be presupposed, they cannot work side by side without having their attention diverted and their nerves harassed, by the constant provocation of sex stimuli to which they cannot and must not respond. To assume indifference and callousness here, as modern business, commercial and official employers do, is, however, to take for granted that the modern generation of young men and girls are sufficiently below par to be able to resist being thrown together constantly without being distracted by each other’s presence. But this is not only an insult to the best among the young people, but it is also placing a premium on the subnormal; because the latter alone are able to overcome the difficulty with ease; and thus happy survival or success is reserved nowadays to those types which are least desirable from every point of view except that of the Puritan.
[135] Later on in the chapter he even comes very close to my own view of the matter, and of the fatal detachment of these females from the stream of Life when he asks “whether the yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of the sap.”
[136] Let anyone attempt to write a novel or any kind of popular work that does not pander to their sentimentality and their distorted views of life, and see how much success he will have. They have established their ascendancy in England by such steady and insidious means, that three-quarters of our population, including our leading critics and publicists, are not even aware that Feminism is their ruling creed. They reveal it, however, in every word they write on the sex question.
[137] According to the last Census there were in 1911 55,286 unmarried women engaged in nursing (including midwives), 57,952 engaged in domestic service in hotels, 1,172,449 engaged in domestic service in private houses, 22,789 engaged as day girls, and 26,900 engaged as charwomen in England and Wales alone.
[138] On this point also the wisdom of the ancient Hindus should be an example to us. In the Laws of Manu (Book IX, verse 4) we read: “Reprehensible is the father who gives not his daughter in marriage at the proper time.”
[139] Now, the dread lest a daughter should not be self-supporting at twenty-one leads parents in all poorer middle-class families to sink all thoughts of marriage and making her fit for marriage beneath the consideration of providing her with a calling. The ideal of independence for women, from being pursued for purely economic reasons, has come to be pursued for its own sake, as if independence were in itself a desirable condition for the female. But even if we concede the point that dependence on certain modern men amounts to ignominy, we should not allow the argument to assume a shape which must identify woman’s chief source of happiness with her relation to the man to whom she becomes related; and we ought always to correct it by considering that, in the long run, man is only a means to an end where woman is concerned, and that independence which is achieved without the experience of motherhood, even if such independence saves the woman from association with a third or fourth-rate man, is only equivalent to clutching at the shadow to let the substance go.
[140] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 126): “Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood—and more particularly Motherhood—they have made, all along the line, not for the true emancipation of woman but for her commercialization, merely.”
[141] Speaking of the hostile attitude of most women towards his Don Juan, Byron wrote to Mr. Murray on October 12, 1820, as follows: “The truth is that it is too true, and the women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons.” Again writing of Madame Guiccioli’s dislike of Don Juan, he says (July 6, 1821): “It arises from the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions, and to keep up the illusion which is their empire. Now Don Juan strips off this illusion.... I never knew a woman who did not protect Rousseau, nor one who did not dislike De Gramont, Gil Blas, and all the comedy of the passions, when brought out naturally.”