What new contribution have women to offer the world in return for their emancipation? In the women’s movement there is a strong feeling that under the influence of the dominant male, women have had to conform to an ideal not their own, and that this forcible compression of all women into one mould—and that a mould not of their own choosing—has been bad for women, and therefore bad for women’s work, and in the end bad for men. In order to come to a clearer view of whether this is so or not, I propose in this chapter and the next to treat of the man’s woman and the woman’s woman. Everybody would probably agree that there is a very great distinction, and that, taking them in the mass, the qualities which women love and admire in women are not the same as those which, in the past, have most attracted men. This does not matter so much if the conditions of society be such as to make it possible for women to be independent of their attraction of men. But if women are kept dependent upon men for any scope or freedom or joy of life, then there may be imposed upon them an alien standard which may very seriously cripple them. It is unnecessary to labour the point that in sexual relations the qualities which make each sex attractive to the other will always be of importance. What the progressive women deprecate is that all their chances in life should be dependent on sexual charm, and some of them badly crave for a rest from sex, and they desire to be just broadly human.

Generally speaking, the conception of women which is the relic of barbarism is that they are not themselves human beings, but only related to human beings. In his sacred books man has taken care to suggest that woman was an afterthought of the Creator, and that she was “given” to man in a sense in which man was not “given” to woman. He could have her and hold her by force, and what he asked of her were the qualities agreeable to himself. Since every man has been a child and has some slight memories of childhood, the notion of certain motherly qualities being desirable in woman has existed side by side with the notion of other qualities more adapted to adult requirements; but since memory is faint, and present desire strong, the motherly qualities in a woman are of secondary attractive force to most men in determining their choice, though, undoubtedly, once mated, a man finds the motherly qualities invaluable. Men write books and poems about the beauty and sacredness of motherhood, but if one looks round the world one lives in, one finds that men are, for the most part, not charmed by the motherly qualities in women, and that the women upon whom men have in the past lavished titles and jewels and wealth are not the motherly type at all. Every woman who has lived long in the world has known many women most richly endowed for motherhood who have not attracted any men worthy to be their mates, and has known other women, with few of the qualities needed for motherhood, who have strung the hearts of a score of men round their necks as trophies. One might make a very good case to show that, in relation to men, there are really three types of women: (1) those who attract men, (2) those by whom men say they are attracted, (3) those by whom men ought (for the greatest happiness of the greatest number) to be attracted.

Ask the average man what he means by a “womanly” woman—take Mr. Austen Chamberlain: “Their qualities which we most admire are their lofty devotion to ideals, their dependence upon others, upon husband, or brother, or the hero of their imaginations, their willingness to yield their opinions, their almost passionate desire for self-sacrifice, often, it must be admitted, on behalf of objects very little worthy of their great devotion” (12th July 1910, Debate on the Second Reading of the Conciliation Bill). He proceeded to declare that these were not “political virtues,” and added, “God forbid that they should abandon their qualities, which are our pride and theirs!” It seems clear that if women generally are willing to yield their opinions to unworthy persons, it is safer not to give this disastrous tendency much practical scope, but what is really illuminating is Mr. Chamberlain’s naïve confession that he likes women to be this sort of fools. These are the qualities that are agreeable to himself, provided he can prevent women from exercising their dangerous preference for unworthy objects. One wonders if it has never occurred to Mr. Chamberlain that one reason why women crave direct representation is that they recognise that men are often devoted to women who are “very little worthy,” and that when men tell them they “consult women,” and we inquire “what women?” we discover that they are not those whom women themselves would consult or trust or follow. There is this foundation at least for the frequent statement that women “do not wish to be ruled by women.” They do not wish to be ruled by women who have been selected by men, because they know from experience that a man’s woman and a woman’s woman are not the same.

If we examine the qualities of Mr. Chamberlain’s womanly woman, we find that they are quite frankly selected for his own satisfaction, and not because they are of any use either to woman herself or to the world. He likes a woman to be dependent on a man; he likes her to give up her own opinions; he likes her to sacrifice herself, even although it be often on unworthy objects. What does the dependence of a woman on a man and her yielding of her opinions to him involve? It involves the misunderstanding and neglect of all the specifically womanly sides of life. The woman who yields her belief to a man, not by conviction, but by submission, is shirking her work, and is a traitor to the future of which she is the guardian. She is, in fact, the unwomanly woman, for she has yielded the fruits of her instinct, her knowledge, her experience as a woman, and has adopted, to command, a man’s opinion based on man’s instinct, knowledge and experience. She is “aping man” and is (what the reactionaries falsely call the progressive woman), in truth, a “feeble imitation.”

Dependence of this sort means degradation. There is a sense, of course, in which we are all, of necessity, dependent upon each other, men upon women and women upon men. But the sort of dependence which means that men do all they do for women as grace and favour, but that women do all they do for men from subjection and compulsion,—because they can’t help themselves,—is degrading to both men and women. One knows the exquisite delight there is in serving or being served by a beloved person; but all women do not love all men, and there is no joy whatever in dependence upon those whom you do not love. Even the pleasure to be derived from dependence on a loved one is a purely personal matter, and varies with individuals and with times, and is not proper matter upon which to base institutions.

As a matter of fact, women down all the ages have escaped from the degradation of entirely becoming faint echoes of men by the lesser degradation of humbugging and lying to men. Men have wanted them to yield their opinions? Very well, they would pretend to do so. But the true woman never did. She was true to the greater reality of sex. Now women are revolting against the necessity of telling even the lesser lie, and are insisting that they want to do their work unhampered by ignorance and meddling. If we take a large part of women’s work as being essentially social, the bearing and rearing of children, education and the care of the human family in all its wide interests of health and morality, how can anyone in their senses assert that a woman who has not the education and culture to know and appreciate facts is as helpful as one who has them? Yet progressives have had to fight reactionaries for every bit of education and culture. How can anyone think that a woman who suppresses her deep and peculiar knowledge of childhood is as good a mother, teacher, nurse as the woman who bravely follows the light? Or with the sympathy and insight that women have into sickness of souls and bodies, can anyone really believe that the world’s work of healing and redemption is best done if the fruits of this sympathy and insight are packed into baskets and handed over to men who, with all the other matters about which they are so much keener on their hands, will just forget the baskets and allow the fruits to rot?

There is in women—no one can doubt it who has studied their works—a peculiar combination of idealism and practicality. The one without the other is either vapid or dry: the two together can move mountains. What distinguished the work of Elizabeth Fry, of Florence Nightingale, of Octavia Hill, of Lady Henry Somerset is just this combination. What makes the reports of the women factory inspectors so much more interesting than those of the men is again the same combination. When men in the House of Commons discuss the Housing Question, or what they call Education, the dulness of the debate is enough to send one to sleep. Why is it so dull? Because it lacks both actuality and ideality. Once the speakers have lost sight altogether of the child, and can begin to fight each other on the so-called religious question, they are at home, and the House fills; once they can leave off talking about the houses which are the homes of the people and the workshops of the mothers, and get to quarrelling about some party cry, they begin to revive. The fact is, that anyone worth his or her salt is keen about his or her job. The more you separate your legislative and executive powers from your intelligence department the more you weaken those powers, and men’s legislation and administration is largely divorced from women’s intelligence.

When the fight has been made and has been justified by its success, we are all ready to acclaim the fighter, but we seem unable to grasp the principle which the fight ought to have established. Florence Nightingale was invited to go to Scutari by a broad-minded man who had faith in what she could do; but when she got out there, she found the usual reactionaries, and unless she had insisted upon having a position of undisputed authority, she would have accomplished only a small fraction of her great work. She braved the authorities, and broke open the cases of stores which were sealed with red tape. We are all ready now—probably even Mr. Austen Chamberlain—to acclaim Florence Nightingale as a womanly woman. But where was her “dependence,” her “willingness to yield her opinions”? And another point is most deserving of note. This is, that when men do get a real live woman, born “to warn, to comfort and command” among them, and have had time to get over the first little shock to their prejudices, they find what an admirable colleague or chief they have gotten, and are generous in their service and co-operation. Men are, in fact, almost always better far than their apologists will allow them to be.

In private life men must have always experienced the value of the strong-natured woman. Only some are still faithless about the value of such women in public life. They are afraid, afraid for their masculine prerogative, afraid (as I have heard it expressed) that women “will legislate men out of existence.” Well, the antidote to that is surely more co-operation between men and women, not less; more knowledge and understanding of each other’s point of view, not less. So many men are at present greatly concerned to keep women to their duty; perhaps many women are also too much concerned to keep men to their duty. There is all to be gained by putting together these aspirations for the improvement of—other people!

In an earlier chapter I have shown the danger that there lies in the low status of women in their not having pride in themselves and confidence in their work. The clinging dependence, the softness, the approachableness, the complaisance which men find so attractive in women also have their very great dangers. Women who have devoted themselves to the salving of the wrecks of womanhood know that often it has been this very softness of fibre which has been the cause of a girl’s undoing. “Be weak!” men cry; “we love you for it. It makes us feel superior!” And when they have “loved” after their fashion, they leave the human wreckage their “love” has made and pass on to “love” again elsewhere. It is as you love duckling, and cry, “Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed!” Now women are increasingly feeling that it is not womanly to be weak, it is womanly to be strong, strong for work and love and understanding.

The individual man may want individual woman to be weak for him only, but the laws which men together make require women to be strong, not even as women, but as superwomen. Because men have experienced the use of women as individuals, because they still have relics of the old barbaric ownership feeling, they desire still to keep women individual, isolated, unorganised. Now even if a woman, by her mother wit, influence and powers of cajoling and tormenting, may be supposed capable of dealing with her individual man, the situation becomes very different when man begins to band himself together with man in guilds, unions, corporations, parties and armies. He can then proceed to crush women by his organisations. The individual appeal of love and family is powerless against the impersonality of law, the combination of millions of persons all of one sex. It is curious to note that, though men have been organising themselves for centuries, and for the most part rigidly excluding women from their organisations, yet women have not complained, nor suggested that this was “anti-woman”; on the contrary, they have universally done what they could to help the men’s organisations. But now that women are beginning to organise themselves, there is raised here and there and everywhere the alarm cry of “Anti-man!” and sentimental appeals are made to women which are totally inappropriate in this connection.

Mr. Harold Owen falls into this mistake when he says (Woman Adrift, p. 234): “The relations between man and woman are not political or even social, they are personal in the highest degree, and in a kind that exists in no other relation of life whatever.” Such a mistake, like another of which mention has already been made, is only possible by the use of the rhetorical singular, and even then it does not follow that, because a man and a woman may have personal relations, there are not social and political matters of the greatest moment involved in those relations. That there are, man has acknowledged ages back, by making laws to regulate the relations of men and women. We know that a woman has no personal relations at all with the millions of men who govern the world she has to live in, and we resent the misplaced appeal to sentiment of a personal kind in such a connection. Social, political, racial sentiment there may be, but personal sentiment can only exist between individuals, and all sentiment is not good either,—the sentiment of power and ownership, for instance, when they are held over human beings.

The reactionary man is very fond of asserting that women don’t want this, that or the other. He generally can give no reason for this statement; enough that he knows it. When it is pointed out to him that all articulate and organised women do want it and say so, he declares contemptuously that these women don’t count. It is not womanly to organise. Everyone knows that the traditional woman, the womanly woman, can’t organise. Therefore these hundreds of thousands of organised women are unsexed, negligible, not to be listened to. The only woman to be listened to is “the quiet woman in the home,” and man will go forth into the world and proclaim what that quiet woman wants, and will give it to her. It does not seem to dawn upon him that it is more than a little suspicious that he should pronounce all those to be negligible who can speak for themselves.

CHAPTER XIII
THE WOMAN’S WOMAN: A PERSON

In the last chapter mention was made of the tyranny of an ideal. Man thinks of the qualities he finds desirable in a woman and compounds an ideal woman out of these qualities, and then proceeds to call “unsexed” the real women of flesh and blood who do not conform or pretend to conform to this ideal. The older women have very naturally helped him to maintain these ideals; they were reared in them, and they have feared lest it might be difficult to find provision for their daughters, unless they kept the daughters strictly to the dedicated ways. They were wrong, as timid people nearly always are wrong. The free woman, with a character and a will of her own, is not only happier and more useful, but she is proving herself far more attractive than the colourless submissive ideal.

We have been wearied out with talk of the ideal woman, and now there comes a change, but it is more apparent than real. We hear now a good deal about a person called by the name of Normal Woman. Men who have done good work in some particular corner of scientific research have been largely responsible for the respect with which this talk about Normal Woman has been received, but when you come to look at her, you will find that she is merely Ideal Woman dressed up in scientific terms, and that the author of her being is no other than the Old Adam. It often seems to me that the common people, with no notion of general principles or of scientific and philosophic methods, cannot wander so fantastically far from truth and justice and common humanity as your man of science, when his sex-vanity has been hurt or his prerogative of pure egoism has been disturbed. The denunciations of scientific men have, fortunately, been robbed of many of their terrors by the work of women in biology and medicine. It would be only human if scientific women showed traces of their sex in their work, just as men do, but that these are very slight is suggested by the complaint of Sir Almroth Wright, who declared, in his widely read letter to The Times (March 1912), that medical women violated the “modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up,” by putting above these their scientific “desire for knowledge.” One has seldom read a more splendid tribute to the courage and candour of women,—a tribute all the more splendid because so entirely involuntary,—for women know how scientific men of the type of Sir Almroth Wright have made the path of scientific knowledge a very Calvary for modest women. It is nothing to men of this type that the modesties of our civilisation should in the past have led to our women being handled and examined in hospital by youths of the sort common among medical students; that the reticences of this same civilisation should have led to many men and nearly all women being ignorant of all that goes to the building of a healthy and moral nation. Sir Almroth declares that man “cannot and does not wish to work side by side with women.” Some men may not, but Sir Almroth is slandering his own sex when he makes the assertion for all mankind. The pioneer work of women of science was made possible by the existence of large numbers of scientific men willing to teach women. We may make a pretty shrewd guess at the reasons why some scientific men do not wish women to study science, for have not the medical and scientific women already, by their work, exploded many of the old fictions about women, and so put heart and hope into millions of women who felt their powers, but hardly dared believe in them, because of the dead weight of what they were told was science? They have now learned that all that is put forth by a scientific man is not science, and that when sex comes into his calculations it is apt to be a very serious disturbance to clear thought. It seems to be a fact that men are as a rule far more conscious than women of the existence of sex in every relation of life, and if there be something in the speculations of biologists concerning the presence of male and female elements in the human female, there may be a very profound reason for this difference in outlook; but it seems like midsummer madness to say that the one of the two sexes who is most homogeneous in the elements of sex shall be the only one who shall have freedom to know and speculate and experiment, for it is clear that that one would be the one less likely to have sympathies wide enough to include both sexes.

What is the line the scientific reactionaries adopt? They abandon Ideal Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation, to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women; they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained. When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly the logical result of this tyranny of thought. It simplifies the side of life which has no obvious reference to themselves if they can make pigeon-holes all of one size and shape, label them Normal Woman and stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes’ bed was for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn’t exist; she is a figment of men’s minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Brontë, of the limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Brontë did not love children; yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them, and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Brontë had been given the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she herself might have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn courage of this woman of genius during years of soul-imprisonment and starvation should surely help to break down these stupid and wasteful cruelties.

The enthusiasts for Normal Woman do not entirely deny that here and there an exceptional woman may suffer from the restrictions of a woman’s life, but they suggest that these sufferings are exaggerated, and affect only the exceptional women, and in any case only matter to the sufferer herself. It is wonderful with what complacency people can contemplate the sufferings of others; wonderful, too, the assumption that “exceptional” women are negligible, as if it were not, after all, only among the exceptional that we might hope to find genius. These people will tell you that women have never done anything which the world would have missed, except the one work of mothering the race. Therefore to this work they should be restricted. Women will never, so they say, be anything but third-rate in arts or sciences or crafts; they can be superlative mothers; let them concentrate on that. If they do not, it is darkly suggested that they will lose even the capacity for mothering, and then, where will they be? And, what is worse, where will men be?

Sometimes these views are advanced with all the thunders of an angry prophet; sometimes, more in sorrow than in anger, it is suggested that woman will sooner or later return to weep on the breast of man, and beg to be allowed, like Katharine, the Shrew, to lay her hand beneath his foot. To do otherwise would argue in the fair sex (to use the denunciatory language of Sir James FitzJames Stephen) a “base, mutinous disposition,” which we sincerely hope she has not. In the words of Mr. Garvin (Pall Mall Gazette, 30th July 1913), “we can only hope that, whatever the woman of the future may prove to be, some of the womanliness which we knew when Victoria was Queen will remain in her, and that, when the first force of revolt is spent, she will once more realise the full glory of wifehood and motherhood. On that point we have no great fear, for, whatever her vagaries, woman will remain woman at heart.” I should like to rescue this exquisite piece of fatuity from oblivion, to make merry the hearts of future generations of men and women.

Now, as regards genius, we may know how much genius women have in some hundreds of years, when they have been free to develop according to their natures. The kind of emotional tyranny to which women have been subjected is the most crushing of all, and men have never had to undergo this particular sort of tyranny, so that it is not in the least true to say that if women had had any genius it would have overcome tyranny, as men’s genius has done. No man has ever known what it is to be born of the more sensitive, sympathetic, conscientious and affectionate sex, and to be reared in an atmosphere where insult and hate followed on any expression of genius, where cold discouragement was the best that a woman could expect from her own people, and where the wooing from her own work has taken that most insidious of all forms for duty-loving woman—the claims of others to her care and service. Those who hold the theory of the norm would, however, exclaim “God forbid that women should become geniuses! We don’t like women geniuses, and, moreover, genius will interfere with motherhood.” If one of the necessities for genius is intense egotism (because no great work can be done without intense concentration, and this is impossible if the attention is perpetually switched off in order to do other people’s bidding), there is something to be said for the notion that genius will interfere with motherhood; that is to say, with the capacity or the desire of the genius to fulfil the ordinary functions of motherhood. It is a common assertion that a woman fulfils herself completely in motherhood, but this is manifestly not true of the woman who wants to think about the higher mathematics, or who has a genius for organising masses. This does not dismay me at all. Why, after all, should the genius be a mother? And if she be, could she not find motherly women to bring up the children? It is mere delusion to insist that in all cases, without exception, the mother is the best person to tend the babies, and no one even suggests that the mother should be the sole educator of children when they have passed babyhood. I am not apprehensive that the mass of women will ever become geniuses and so cease to provide the men and women of the future. It seems clear to common sense that geniuses will be few, and that it is mere cant for men, who contemplate quite serenely the existence of several million spinsters in England, to cry out in dismay at the notion of a singular genius, here and there, as the mysterious forces of nature may provide. The existence of these millions of spinsters is an exceedingly serious matter, because many of them probably desire intensely to be mothers, and would be good ones; but it is only when the egoistic man fears that the unmated woman may be active and content, that his sensitive vanity is up in arms, and he is dismayed at the notion of a woman, of her free choice, forgoing man. He is content there should be millions of spinsters, if only they are unhappy.

Perhaps a eugenist will here intervene and say that we want the best women to be mothers, and therefore the potential genius should sacrifice her individual opportunity, in order to become the possible mother of male geniuses. But it will not be easy to persuade the woman of the future that she should resist the inspiration which she knows she feels, in order to produce children who may not, and, in fact, probably will not, possess the inspiration. It is very natural for man to say to woman, “You shall give me not only your love, you shall give me your genius”; but she cannot do it, for in the very dark and difficult problems which heredity presents to us, it is rare indeed to find a genius the son of a genius. If George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never written a line, we may doubt exceedingly whether the work of Maurice or of Robert Barrett would have been any better than it was. I once heard a youthful politician, now in Parliament, gravely oppose the eligibility of women to Parliament, on the ground that, if women went into Parliament, their babies would tumble into the fire. Now, quite apart from the circumstance that very few of the wives of existing Members of Parliament act all day and night as fireguards, there was this absurdity that there are only six hundred and seventy Members of Parliament, and, if they were every one of them women, there would still be many millions of mothers left to look after the babies. It might—we may grant this to the alarmists—be very uncomfortable if all women were, or tried to be, geniuses and Members of Parliament, but the mere fact that they are not forbidden will not make them all throw their energies in these directions, any more than it afflicts men so.

Like so much of the talk about women, this about genius is very little relevant to any practical problem. Even if it were true that women had never shown, and never would show, genius in art or abstract science, this is no reason for preventing them from using what ability they have in the directions they prefer, and it seems very likely that they have genius in directions hitherto almost forbidden to them; I mean in organisation, and leadership, and in the power to govern. They have certainly demonstrated their possession of many of the qualities upon which the strength of the community is founded, and it is to the advantage of the community that they should be allowed the free exercise of those qualities.

Reactionary men of science try to frighten us, however, by maintaining that the energetic use of any of woman’s strength is contrary to healthy and efficient motherhood. They go on making these assertions, in spite of the fact that women who live a laborious life, provided they are not starved or neglected when they bring forth children, do it with far greater ease than women who live in luxury and idleness. They talk of metabolism and the necessity of a young girl storing up nourishment during the years of her adolescence, as if a human creature were nothing but a chemical factory and warehouse rolled into one. By the persistent and wilful neglect of the mind, they are able to arrive at the most astounding conclusions, and one wishes one could send them back half a century to the nursery of those days, and make them learn that “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” It is not only idle hands, but idle hearts and minds that are a danger. If a girl’s mind is caged and her education concentrated upon sex, it is not mothers you are rearing, but lunatics, deficients, hystericals, and anæmics. The people who talk as if a girl should be trained from childhood up for motherhood, quite overlook the very real possibility of tiring out the instinct before its time of fruition. There are very many girls who would have had quite a healthy and natural fondness for babies, but who have had the feeling literally worn out by premature exercise or by sentimental pawing. A girl-child is not a small woman, and just as we should all disapprove any attempt to make “little fathers” of the boys, so we should disapprove the unhealthy endeavour to make “little mothers” of the girls. If there is something pathetic about the small girl drudge, stunted with carrying about heavy babies, there is something peculiarly offensive about the prim little girl who rebukes her brothers for tearing their clothes or dirtying their hands, when she ought herself to be likewise engaged.

From the Census reports it appears that in England and Wales there are nearly three and a half million spinsters over twenty years of age; many of these will never marry, and the cruelty of bringing them up to a vocation, which they will never be called upon to fulfil, should be repugnant to all decent feeling, even if it would not in itself constitute a danger. Such considerations do not trouble the sciolist with a theory to run, for he calls the maidens a “superfluous portion of the population,” or “waste products of our female population,”[5] and proceeds to talk as if they could be set aside. But this piece of Podsnappery would bring its own punishment, if it were widely adopted, for undoubtedly the parasitic woman would be, in the future, as she has been in the past, the most deadly enemy of man. The only sex-antagonism that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to repress or to get the better of the other. There is, in fact, absolutely no practicable issue for this way of thinking except the simple plan of the lethal chamber for the “waste products.”

The training of women as breeders only, would involve the complete subjection of women to men, and consequently their complete dependence on men; it would involve the return to pre-factory days (in itself, perhaps, no bad thing, only no one knows how to do it), and to a state of things which has been partly remedied by the Married Women’s Property and Custody of Children Acts; a state in which it was possible to pass and to administer the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts. It would mean that women would no longer have university education and would be compelled, as they used to be, to accept the assertions of men with regard to the state of the law and the construction of their own bodies. It means the withdrawal of women from the work of local councils and poor law administration, from inspection, and from teaching. It means a state of things which has never existed anywhere on this earth, and to avoid which most women would prefer a thousand deaths. All this for the purpose of producing finer children; but since the girl children would be of use only for further breeding purposes, one may say that women would make all these tremendous sacrifices for the sake of producing finer men. It is a stiff demand to make even of the self-sacrificing sex! But would it have the anticipated results?

The question brings us to the well-fought battle-ground of breeding versus environment. When a suffragist procession in the States carried a banner declaring, “We prepare our children for the world; we must prepare the world for our children,” there was an outcry from some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a nutshell: the first was woman’s job, the second was man’s. It was for woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment. A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do. But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So that the first part of the division of labour manifestly cannot take place. The man must take part in preparing our children for the world. Can we really say that man alone does or can prepare the world for our children? It is too late in the day to tell us that, when every year that passes shows us more plainly the injurious effects upon the race of the industrial system, which is so largely the product of men’s minds, and of the great social evils which were treated of in Chapters X. and XI., and which men have so largely agreed to consider “necessary.” The theory of the cow-woman, who shall do nothing but bear and suckle babies, is not, as some people would have us believe, a revival of what once was and may be again. It never was. The masses of women have always worked very hard indeed. Nor will women be brought to accept it for the future. Degraded as women often have been, they have always had the one safeguard of work, even if it were not the work they would have chosen, and may have had to be done under unfavourable conditions. In complex modern society the work of women is even more necessary than in simpler days; only now there is more need than ever there was of intelligence, adaptability, scientific knowledge and organisation among women, for they cannot even be efficient mothers under modern conditions if their minds do not keep pace with knowledge and the arts of living.

Important, even of vital importance, as the work of physical motherhood is, and disastrous as everyone must admit would be any social developments which impaired this, it is a monstrous distortion to talk as if physical motherhood were the only work of women. The maidens, the widows, the women who are having no more children, have endless natural spheres of usefulness and happiness, if only men will leave them free. There is a good deal to be said for the view that a large number of unmarried women were needed to get the women’s movement well going. As a matter of fact, the leaders of the three chief suffrage societies are married women, and there are of course a very large number of wives in the women’s movement; but women with young children can scarcely see the wood for the trees, and such a gigantic piece of work as the organisation of the hitherto unorganised half of humanity has been one which has, of necessity, taken all the time and energy of very many women. Never again, in all probability, will there be such need for many women who can travel light. It is admitted that marriage may often be a brake on the man pioneer; much more must it be so for the woman pioneer. It will not take us a hundredth part of the time to use our liberty that it has taken to win our liberty. Many a man, one is proud to record, has done his utmost to strengthen the hands of his wife in the movement which they both believe in; but the husband is not unknown who likes to see all the other women progressive, only not his wife. And, of course, there are very many mothers whose children absorb, while they are young, the greater part of their energies. Children grow up and the mothers very often have two-score years to put in after the babies have left off coming. As women’s lives widen, there will be fewer of the mothers who bore their grown-up sons and nag their grown-up daughters. The work of such experienced matrons in the great organised work of mothering, care committees, schools for mothers, guardians of the poor, education authorities, is invaluable. But so long as the idiotic restrictions upon the civic work of women exist, and so long as women have not the means of independence, this work will still only be done by few of those who could do it so well. And the rest will still be like paddle-wheels out of water, wasting energy in a great whirring.

The men who speak of the maidens as waste products might also be invited to consider the millions of unmarried men, and to ask themselves whether these men really could marry, and whether there are not already very many men, who can marry only because they have devoted sisters who shoulder the burden of the old folk and the invalids; nay, more, who help, out of their difficult earnings, to keep their nephews and their nieces.

The conclusion is that not men alone, and not women alone, can either prepare children for the world or the world for children. But both together can. The analogy of division of labour won’t work when it is human beings that are being made. “Male and female created He them,” and both are indispensable. Therefore both must be equipped with knowledge and given liberty.

“What will the women do then?” cry the faithless. Nobody knows, and that is one of the things that make life so hugely interesting.

CHAPTER XIV
SEX-ANTAGONISM
(1) Man’s Part

In the last chapter it was asserted that the only sex-antagonism that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to repress or get the better of the other. This is, in effect, to deny that the interests of the two sexes can be permanently opposed, and that, however much individuals, from the fallibility of human nature, may fall short of a proper treatment of each other, there is any excuse whatever for laws and institutions, which should be based on ethical considerations, being, as they still are, discriminative against one sex. So strong indeed is the notion still that the interests of the sexes really are opposed, that any suggestion for legislation in the interests of women is met by the outcry that it is against men. The recent debates on the Maternity Benefit are admirable illustrations of this. When it was proposed that the thirty shillings, to be devoted to the care of the mother, should be given direct to the mother, there were some men who exclaimed that this was “interfering between husband and wife,” and others, that it was “legislating against men.” This shows an extraordinary confusion of mind; for the only men “legislated against” in such a provision are the bad men, who would, if they were given the chance, steal the woman’s benefit. No good husband would be aggrieved at his wife’s own money being given into her own hands. As why indeed should he? No woman feels aggrieved that her husband should have his wages paid into his own hands. If anyone thinks that the money is in reality his, because of the paltry fourpences that he has paid (and of which the working housewife has, by her work, contributed at least half), he should read the words of Medea—

While civilisation is young, and human beings still scarcely conscious, it is natural for the stronger to have the illusion that he will be the gainer by using his strength, even tyrannically, against the creature with whom his life is inextricably entwined. It is human to be selfish; women as well as men feel the temptation; but men, by their greater strength, have more often had the power to follow their impulses, even if they were injurious to women.

There is a queer kind of apologist for brutality, who suggests that “men are so,” and that nothing better need ever be expected of them, thereby showing himself blind to all the improvements which knowledge and intelligence have already made in men’s treatment of women. Does it not matter to men that women should be injured? To read a recent volume, entitled Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, F.R.S., one would indeed suppose that it did not. Seven chapters of this book are devoted to a criticism of Dr. Frazer’s theories on totemism and exogamy. These are matters for experts, and I do not propose to express an opinion upon them, further than to say that Mr. Heape has made out a very good case for his views on the origin of these two institutions of primitive man. He does not, however, make one wish to hand over the relations of the sexes in the world we live in to even the most expert of expert biologists, for his very concentration on particular points makes him unfit for a wide view. It is to Mr. Heape’s eighth and last chapter, on “Primitive and Modern Sex Antagonism,” that I wish to take exception, and this can be done without calling into question the greater part of the book, with which it has scarcely any necessary connection.

I need not quarrel with his assertion of the original difference between man and woman with regard to sexual relations. “I think,” he writes, “it cannot be denied that while sexual passions and sexual gratification are of far more moment to the Male, the idea of the family is, in its turn, essentially a Female sentiment. The former inculcates and stimulates the roving freedom which is characteristic of the Male, the latter consolidates the family, and for the first time establishes the Female as an essential part of a social structure.” (The last sentence is dark to me, but let it pass.) The statement may be taken as broadly true of primitive man. Further, it is quite clear that Mr. Heape is uttering almost a platitude, when he states (p. 195) that “The Male and Female are complementary; they are in no sense the same, and in no sense equal to one another; the accurate adjustment of society depends upon proper observance of this fact.” No one thinks Male and Female are “the same,” nor when people speak of “equality” do they in fact use the word in a mathematical sense. What people do wrap up, in confused and misleading terms, is, that although women are not the same as men, they have many of the same properties and therefore many of the same requirements. Shylock’s plea for the Jew has been quoted with much force by women and on behalf of women: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Men cannot deny that women need food, like men, and that women catch infectious diseases, like men, and that women, like men, need satisfaction for their sexual nature, although by their actions men sometimes do not demonstrate their knowledge. But there are other needs—of the human spirit—less demonstrable, which women have as much as men: the need for freedom and joy, for pride in themselves and their work, for consciousness that the sacrifices they make are willing, not enforced. And, when women demand “equality” with men, what they are asking is, that they shall have equal opportunities to do the things they feel able to do, and also that they should have for their peculiarly feminine work—the work which men cannot do—more help, more training, more expenditure of public money, and more scope altogether to do it in ways adapted to the modern world they live in.

We start out, then, with the recognition of the difference between men and women, and I wish I could see in Mr. Heape a recognition also of the likeness and of the common interests. But this is where he comes to grief so badly. He asserts (p. 199) that “increase of luxury tends to reduce both the inclination to breed and the power of producing offspring among women, while it increases the sexual activity of men.” This is not the place to make an exhaustive analysis of this assertion, but stated roundly, like this, it seems to me to need considerable modification. If, however, we take it as proved, it would represent a serious state of things, requiring the most earnest consideration and determination on the part of all civilised men and women to face it in all its results for the whole human family. It would seem to thoughtful persons that any social condition leading to a marked widening between the reciprocal desires of the sexes was, by that very fact, a bad condition, and that if luxury really widens the breach between men and women and causes sex-antagonism, this is a very strong reason for discouraging luxury in a far more determined way than has ever been attempted. Mr. Heape has himself insisted that the female is concerned for the race and the male is only concerned for his appetitive satisfaction. His contribution to the difficult problem he has himself propounded is, to suggest that women (solely concerned for the race, mind you!) must be overridden by men; that what he calls the “errant male” should freely roam and satisfy his ever-growing appetites where and how he can; and that women should on no account be given “extended power” to face these difficulties together with men. In fact, having made out that the situation is infinitely more difficult and extreme than it is, he does his little best to envenom and embitter it by passages of this kind: “Thus extended power given to women threatens to result in legislation for the advantage of that relatively small class of spinsters who are in reality but a superfluous portion of the population (italics mine); and since their interests are directly antagonistic to the interests of the woman who is concerned in the production of children, legislation enacted on their behalf will tend to be opposed to the interests of the mothers themselves.” This dark saying is nowhere explained or illustrated, and as I am quite unable to imagine what it means, I can only suppose that Mr. Heape is using the old device of trying to sow dissension in the enemy’s ranks. For there is no mistake at all about the fact that, to Mr. Heape, woman is the enemy. But he will find it hard to convince the women in the movement that the interests of maidens are opposed to the interests of wives. It will be even more difficult than to convince us that our interests are really opposed to those of men. We think that this is “The Great Illusion,” and the other is too patently absurd, since a maiden is liable at any moment to become a wife, and, in these days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say at what age this liability ceases. Progressive women do not for one moment admit that marriage unsexes a woman, and that the moment she secures a husband she becomes hostile to the maidens, or ceases to understand them. If Mr. Heape would look at the world he is actually living in, he would see that some of the needs of the mothers in the administration of the Insurance Act were more effectively put and urged by unmarried women than by married men. I knew a woman who had a very warm discussion with a man on sex questions, what time his wife sat silent by. The man constantly declaimed about “what women wanted, what women thought,” and still the wife never spoke. Later, when the two women were alone, the one expressed a hope that she had not spoken too strongly and offended the wife, who replied, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you said what you did. You see, I can’t, because I’m his wife.”

Mr. Heape proceeds in this elegant style: “Those of us who are strongly in favour of gaining assistance from women who are qualified to give it may well be drastically opposed to the claims made by those who are responsible for the present agitation; for we are thus confronted with the probability that extended power given to women will result in the waste products of our Female population gaining power to order the habits and regulate the work of those women who are of real value to us as a nation” (italics mine). In the next paragraph he declares that he finds it difficult to “refer with equanimity” to the books and pamphlets of the women’s movement, and he mentions one odd publication, which he appears to attribute to feminists and which, he avers, holds up man to execration as “the brute beast.” We are bound to believe that Mr. Heape has seen such a pamphlet, and that he did not write it himself, but the description he himself gives of man in his book would entirely warrant the use of such a term. Men in the mass are not what Mr. Heape makes them out to be,—lascivious animals with no regard for the State, the race, the child or the woman; it is a libel on manhood. But a writer who can speak of the unmarried women as “waste products” is in a queer position to protest against his own caricature of man being called a “brute beast.” That is precisely what Mr. Heape’s man is and what the real man is not. In fact, while progressive women are always being accused of abusing men, I have never heard a woman utter such slanders on mankind as those contained in this book. Another curious instance of how men will exceed anything women ever say in condemnation of men is to be found in a remark made by a magistrate at the Sandwich Quarter Sessions in October 1912, that criminal assault by adult men on baby girls was “just one of the things that the very best people in every class of life were apt in an unguarded moment to commit.” Mr. Heape describes women as having a nervous constitution ever on the verge of hysteria and impulsive insanity; but if we are to believe him, and the Sandwich magistrate, men are far more dangerous lunatics and should certainly be put under restraint.

Let us get out of this nightmare and come to the real world as we know it. Certainly there are some blackguards and some lunatics of both sexes. Certainly there is, and perhaps always has been, some antagonism between the sexes. It is the most constant endeavour and the most firm faith of progressive men and women that this antagonism should cease. We do not believe it to be necessary and we do believe it to be altogether bad. A great deal too much is made of the differences between men and women under civilised conditions. Mr. Heape’s bogey-man is depicted as a sort of Saturn devouring his children, regardless of their welfare, desiring woman simply as the instrument of his pleasure, possessing no personal, national or racial love. Woman, on the other hand, is pictured to us as having no personal feelings towards her mate, desiring him only for the purpose of motherhood, and desiring even motherhood so faintly that the least thing will put her off it. It is difficult to have patience with a description so preposterously untrue to ordinary life. And Mr. Heape’s recommendations for dealing with this appalling condition are the most extraordinary part of the whole queer affair. For he would have us “rattle into barbarism” with open eyes. According to him, all civilisation, all the united efforts of persons to make a more endurable dwelling-place on earth, all care for the future of the race, is by origin womanly, and yet—and yet—the all-devouring male is to abandon this hardly acquired civilisation, to cease to learn of the woman, and once more to roam the world and leave his squaw to take her chance with the papooses!

To suggest that man can go on modifying his material conditions, piling luxury on luxury, and yet need not adapt himself and his sexual life to these conditions, but can remain primitive brute beast, is wilfully to blind oneself to facts, and such blindness, if it were common, would indeed be the cause of race suicide. So long as either sex preys upon the other, or enslaves the other, we are in danger of finding that man, having conquered the world, becomes his own victim.

In the writings of reactionaries on this subject there is to be found an extraordinary contradiction. Their plea for the subjection of women and for the entire dedication of women to the sexual life has to be based upon the supposed truth of the assertion that, in women, sex is the predominant factor, nay, the only factor of importance. It ought to be, they think; and it is, they assert; whereas, to man, sex is only a passing gratification, and he goes on his way and forgets all about it. Yet if it be suggested that, in the interests of the race, men might learn to control their impulses,—have, in fact, to a certain extent done so,—and that they have all the beauty and work of the world to fill their minds, these same reactionaries fill the air with cries at the sufferings and damage which such self-restraint will impose upon men. Mr. Heape himself asserts that disuse does not impair men’s sexual powers, and that it does impair those of women; yet his conclusion appears to be that men alone are not to be required to exercise self-control. Now, if sex is so tremendously strong in women, it cannot be necessary artificially to nurse it and to render all other activities impossible; if it is not so predominant after all, but women are whole human beings, just as men are, with all sorts of capacities, then it is cruel to endeavour to restrict them against their nature, and must, in the long-run, be injurious to them and to the whole of society. It is not consonant with the dignity of the Human that either male or female should be treated as a thing. Primitive men may treat women as “conveniences”; primitive women may exploit men for their own purposes; so long as they act in this primitive manner there will exist a state of war. The hope for the race lies in the Human growing up. Adult man will abandon the Great Illusion.

With regard to the supposed absence of personal feeling on the part of the woman, the supposition is altogether out of accord with the facts of life as one knows it. Women fall in love quite as whole-heartedly as men, and when a woman falls in love with a man, the sentiments that fill her being are not in the first instance consciously racial; they are personal. She desires union with her lover, just as he desires union with her, and the completest union has no use for compulsion in any form whatsoever. Those who personify vital forces are very fond of saying that “Nature” uses the love of man and woman “to further her purposes” (meaning the reproduction of the species), and there is often a sort of half-suggestion that man and woman are in reality helpless puppets whom “Nature” deludes with the mirage of love. Nothing is more misleading than these personifications of forces. Love is no delusion at all; it is the one condition under which personal appetite and racial purpose become fused into the force most productive of joy and health and beauty. Scientific men who try to reduce the relations of the sexes to mere animal appetite, and leave out of account the passion of love and the sentiment of affection are in truth less scientific than the merest girl. The growth of love is the one security for the adaptation of the Human to his environment.

Perhaps some people would say, “You talk of love, but men will not love the progressive women. It is no use arguing that they should; they don’t, as a matter of fact, and they never will.” It is true that one does not love because one should. Nothing kills love more surely than compulsion, and that is the basis of my whole plea for liberty. I have no fear whatever that women will cease to attract men, but women should not have to rely upon their power of sexual attraction for a free and varied existence. I often marvel at the lack of pride and of self-confidence in the men who advocate what amounts to starving women into sexual relations. If there are women who are unlovable, the proper penalty is to leave them unloved; it is not the proper penalty to starve them. If some women are unlovable, so, in truth, are some men, and coercion will not help them. On the contrary; what might be good comradeship is turned into hatred by coercion. And it is not only the injured person who hates; there is no hate like that of the tyrant for the object of his repression, and the literature of the world is full of this strange and terrible hatred of men for women. The early fathers of the Christian Church forgot their Master in the most scurrilous attacks on that half of humanity to which Jesus most fully revealed Himself. The gibbering fear of women showed itself in the witch trials and in the monstrous inventions of perverted monks. In recent times a little anthology entitled, Come learn of Me what Woman is, and a still more recent one by Mr. W. H. Beveridge, entitled John and Irene, show a record of literature of abuse by men which has no counterpart whatever in the writings and speeches of women. In their desperate seeking for safety there is no doubt that primitive women had to defend themselves by any device they could invent; and since men made a wicked mystery of them, they would mystify men as far as they could, for their own purposes. One sees women still doing this, and sees the traces of the old fear in the less civilised modern man’s shoulder-shrug at the incalculable female.

Men have done a vast amount of speculation and theorising about women, and have remained for the most part quite remote from the reality, which is very much simpler than all their inventions. The fact is that many of those who have poured out their venom upon women have been men whose unregulated appetites have led them to consort with women either naturally or artificially adapted to them, and they have then proceeded to expound the eternal feminine in terms of the prostitute. Many of the theories about Woman, of which we hear so much just now, are really based upon a more or less intimate acquaintance with prostitutes, and it is one of the ugliest sides of this ugly traffic that the men who buy the women seem to hate and despise them so, and they then proceed to generalise about all women on the data of the hated and despised ones. Progressive women do not hate the prostitute, but they recognise that, by weakness or by choice, she has committed a great sin against the spirit, and they rightly resent generalising about all women from knowledge (and only the most partial knowledge) of these unhappiest. Reading Schopenhauer, or Weininger, or Strindberg, one can only exclaim, “What company have these men kept!” They and a few scientific specialists appear to be the modern descendants of the authors of Malleus Maleficarum.

Owing to sex-obsession, some of these men are permanently unable to understand women, and their way of treating women is vitiated by this incapacity. It may be admitted, with reserves, that the characteristic of the love passion in woman is receptivity, but this is by no means the characteristic of woman in all relations. If one takes only the maternal impulses in women, who would deny that they were active, nay, even sometimes belligerent, if it comes to defending their children? And the coolness towards all men except the one with whom she is in love makes a woman not only peculiarly capable of friendship, but also makes her extremely intolerant of sentimental appeals to the passivity which is associated with the love passion. Women are moved by sexual impulses towards particular men, not towards men as a whole, and men will never understand women so long as they do not recognise this.

This does not mean, of course, that women feel the same towards men as they do towards each other. The differences of mind and life and outlook between men and women make the society of each vastly stimulating to the other, provided always that the women are not artificially cramped, and make a mixed society far wider and humaner than the society of either sex alone. Men scarcely yet know the extent to which they impoverish their own lives by denying a full life to women, and thereby dulling and stupefying women.

And consider, too, how hopelessly unfit man has proved himself for a judicial attitude towards woman! He has allowed his own sex-impulses entirely to obscure his judgment about women. If he is much too hard on the good women, he tries to propitiate his feminine critics by pointing out how much too lenient he is with the bad ones. He makes the law (I speak of England); he is judge and advocate and jury, policeman and jailer. When a woman is arraigned for soliciting his custom, he imprisons her, and keeps his own share of the transaction secret. When, in her despair, she abandons the child he too has abandoned, he again punishes her.

Who set man in judgment over woman?