From this fifth virtue, which, when the attitude of chastity is abandoned, becomes converted into subjection and submission, are thus derived woman’s suppleness, her plasticity, her promptness to assimilate and to form herself according to another’s pattern, and her ability to adapt herself to circumstances.

In all these derivatives of the five cardinal virtues of woman we can trace the indirect but certain connexion with the vital primum mobile in her nature, which is her deep concern about Life and its multiplication. On the same principle, therefore, it ought to be possible to enumerate the cardinal vices of woman and their auxiliary manifestations. For if a creature’s virtues are the outcome of its instincts, its bodily formation and the functions it has to perform, its vices must surely have a similar origin.

In the positive woman[197] only those vices may be recognized which are inseparable from her functions as a promoter and preserver of life, for all the other vices she may or may not have in common with man.[198] Those that are constantly characteristic of her are:—

(1) Duplicity and an indifference to truth; (2) Lack of Taste; (3) Vulgarity; (4) Love of petty power; (5) Vanity; and (6) Sensuality.

These six cardinal vices have been recognized in her in all ages; they have been censured and deplored; but no one so far, to the best of my knowledge, has ever traced them to a basic vital principle within her. No one has ever said of them, for instance, what I say of them—that to attempt to eradicate them from her nature would amount to an attack on the most solid guarantee we possess of human survival.

While discussing the derivative and minor vices that descend from these six cardinal vices, I shall, however, also show the connexion of the latter with woman’s innate vital principle, as in some cases this is not obvious at first sight.

No. 1—Duplicity and an indifference to truth—has already been discussed above, and its relation to the will to Life abundantly demonstrated. Let it suffice, therefore, to point out that an additional proof of its inveteracy in woman is to be found in the tinsel of false sentiment that women particularly have drawn over the natural relations of the sexes—a tinsel which not only promotes marriage and parenthood by concealing their sordid and tiresome side from the young male, but which also prevents both sexes in most nations from detecting this less prepossessing side of matrimony throughout their whole lifetime. If the reader wishes to test which sex really values this tinsel of false sentiment as its own, as its most powerful weapon, let him attempt to tear it away from the relations of the sexes in the presence of both women and men, and then he will see from the unreasoning fury he provokes in the former which sex is most to blame for its existence.[199]

Again, women are notorious for their tact and presence of mind in embarrassing situations;[200] indeed, the tactfulness or “diplomacy” of women is so well known in France that it has become proverbial. “On arrive par la femme,” say French “climbers,” whose ambitions exceed their gifts and who have to rely on diplomacy to achieve their ends. But the presence of mind which is but the necessary mental condition for saying the right word, for turning away wrath, suspicion, or envy, for assuaging mortified vanity, and for making people forget their shortcomings, is in reality only an essential pre-requisite of successful falsehood. Let the “lying” be as white as you choose in tactfulness and diplomacy, it matters little; what is important is to remember that neither tactfulness nor diplomacy is possible without the essential equipment of the born and resourceful liar—this equipment being an ability to say something, at a moment’s notice, which is not the natural or obvious reaction to a given stimulus or provocation. Little girls show this ability quite early, and easily outclass boys in the celerity with which they discover a plausible and innocent explanation for a reprehensible act in which they have been caught red-handed.[201] The fact that women are difficult to deal with under cross-examination is well known among lawyers, and their skill in drawing red-herrings across the path of any enquiry directed against themselves, makes them stubborn and evasive witnesses at all times when they have anything to conceal.[202]

No. 2. Woman’s fundamental lack of taste is the fact to which, in my Man’s Descent from the Gods, I ascribed the two myths of Pandora and Eve, in which woman is depicted as being the cause of the fall of man, and of the introduction of evil on earth.[203] I demonstrated this fundamental bad taste by pointing to women’s inability to select and recognize the best men, and their general preference for inferior men—the reason of this preference being the greater facility with which the latter are ruled and made amenable to women’s love of petty power. I also showed that this bad taste is rooted in the attitude of the mother to her child, which, consisting as it does, chiefly in a delight in the exercise of petty power over a helpless creature, causes women not only to prefer the baby in long clothes before the full-grown child, but also frequently to prefer the crippled or the physiologically-botched child before the hale and hearty one, because of the former’s more permanent helplessness. I showed also how women prefer lap-dogs before large dogs for the same reason, and reminded the reader that the Romans wisely left it to the father to decide which of his children should survive and which should be suppressed, because they knew that women, having no taste, and being guided only by what most gratified their lust of petty power, could not be trusted to make such a decision wisely. I also ascribed to the prevalence and ascendancy of women’s views and sentiments nowadays the fact that the world was growing so ugly and degenerate (physically); for only if we assume the woman’s attitude of irrational tenderness to cripples and the physiologically botched, can we regard them with anything else than loathing and impatience.

What I did not do, however, in Man’s Descent from the Gods, was to show the connexion between woman’s fundamental bad taste, or lack of taste, with the vital principle within her, and this I shall proceed to do now. This, however, will not prove difficult, for it amounts simply to emphasizing woman’s profound likeness to Nature, in blindly pursuing Life and its multiplication, at all costs.

If we think of the immensely precarious situation of the new-born infant or animal, its lack of all means of protection, of mobility, and of procuring nourishment independently, its lack of warmth, and frequently of the very equipment for preserving warmth (clothing in the human infant, and fur and feathers in the young animal and bird respectively), we realize at once the immense importance to the species of an instinct in the mother which makes the provision of all these deficiencies a joy, a passionate need, in fact a delight worth fighting for. If the new-born creature is to be preserved, and the species is to survive, there must be no possible loophole, no conceivable crevice or chink, in the armour of the natural instinct, through which any doubt, any hesitation whatever, may enter, as to the immediate urgency and desirability of succouring it. The moment in the life of the young creature is too critical, the situation is too precarious. Here you have pitiable helplessness, pathetic dependence, extreme vulnerability. The future of the species depends upon these unreliable qualities being turned into reliable ones by the only creature in the young one’s neighbourhood who, while being necessarily present at its birth, is in a position to offer first aid. If then there were any excuse or pretext for indecision, any humming and ha-ing over the question of desirability, the “best of the brood,” the “most promising of the litter,” etc., life’s very future would be in the balance, the precious instinct which secures the safety and the survival of the young creature would be undermined, or at least no longer impelled unreflectingly to do the right thing in the right way. There must be an uncritical unreasoning impulse to succour, to warm, to protect, and to feed, otherwise the speed, the precision and the earnestness with which these functions have to be performed would be fatally impaired, disastrously hampered. Let the struggle for existence be ever so severe subsequently, one thing must remain assured and inviolable, and that is that the mother’s instinct must not have any excuse to fail, it must not even be able to pause to question, to pick or to choose. Discernment, at this moment, would make survival doubtful; but there cannot be, there must not be, any doubt.

Besides, if organic evolution be true, it depends upon the operation of three factors: (1) The survival of the fittest through the action of (2) Natural Selection, with (3) occasional appearance of variations from type.

Now, if the female of the species is to exercise discernment before she succours her young, if her action is to be deliberative and not impulsive, what becomes of those variations which, when happy, lead to a new development of the species, or actually to a new variety of species? Happy variations are just as odd—qua type—as unhappy variations. But if the female’s instinct is to preserve life, it will preserve one just as passionately as the other. Discrimination would prove fatal to both. The very process of organic evolution, if it be a fact, therefore depends upon the lack of discrimination in the motherly instinct, and the hypothesis of organic evolution certainly assumes it.

This instinct in the female to succour young life of any kind, therefore, is useful to Nature’s scheme. It is an indispensable factor in Nature’s plan. In the lower animals it is demonstrated by the ease with which a female of one species can be made to act as foster-mother to the young of another. Books on natural history mention many such cases: cats that have reared leverets and young squirrels,[204] hens that rear ducklings, and the classical natural instance of birds like the Pipit, the Water Wagtail, etc., rearing the young of the cuckoo.[205] The latter, of course, is a parasitic abuse in Nature, of the female’s undiscriminating instinct to succour; but it is nevertheless, an excellent example of the fact I have been trying to establish.

It is true that in the human species this lack of discrimination in the female operates as a preserver both of desirable and undesirable varieties; but, as in all modern civilizations, the father is no longer allowed, as he was by ancient Sparta or Rome, to override the female’s lack of taste in this matter, and unsuccessful variations from type are more common than geniuses, it follows that the female’s point of view, now that it is supported by the State and public opinion, must lead to the survival of a vast number of undesirable human beings in our midst.

Thus, although the human female’s instinct is seen to be a vital one, and though her lack of taste must be regarded as part of the general scheme of life, it must tend nowadays to an enormous amount of degeneration.

This, however, is not precisely our point. The facts we wish to establish are, in the first place, that in woman’s rôle of mother, the blind instinct to succour, to protect, and to preserve the helpless creature that she bears is of vital importance to the race; and, secondly, that this blind instinct necessarily involves a deep-seated and incorrigible lack of taste. The fact that subsequently—that is to say, when the undesirable offspring, be it cripple, cretin or idiot, grows up—it is frequently cherished by the mother more than her whole and hearty children, is but a confirmation of the point I am attempting to make; for it shows that what appeals to the true mother, and what according to our whole argument must and ought to appeal, is not the particular excellence of a given child, not its claim to any particular form of desirability, but simply its helplessness. And, since in the cripple, the cretin and the idiot helplessness is prolonged to a much later age than in the healthy child, it is the former to which unsophisticated and simple-minded motherhood naturally inclines.

The consequences of this fundamental and vital lack of taste in women are, of course, considerable.

When we read in Manu’s Book of Laws that “women do not care for beauty,”[206] when Lombroso and Ferrero, in discussing woman’s taste state that “en général, la beauté et l’intelligence la laissent indifférente,”[207] and when we find Rousseau saying “les femmes en général n’aiment aucun art, ne se connoissent à aucun,”[208] we feel inclined to object, because we know of individual instances of women who have shown a marked feeling for beauty. Neither Lombroso, Manu nor Rousseau tells us, however, that their respective statements only refer to a specific and superficial manifestation of a deep and unalterable law. When once we realize that law, we see that these men must be right—not, however, because individual women have shown an indifference to beauty, but because the sex as a whole has no taste, and that, wherever discernment for beauty is pronounced in a woman, she either diverges from type or has undergone some special educating influence.

We are better able to understand now why the forms of art have all been man’s invention, although they have sometimes been successfully imitated by women (in the novel),[209] and why clothes, even those that fill the wardrobes of women, are all derived from an original masculine designing centre in London or Paris. We can also see why women are so prone to select and to associate with the worst and most unpromising type of men,[210] why they have no flair (except on the sexual side, and even that is by no means infallible) where men are concerned, and why even their palates and their stomachs have never assisted them in the development of the culinary art, when they had it entirely in their own hands. But let us remember again that we cannot have it both ways, and that if we educated tastelessness away in women, we should be undermining one of the most valuable and fundamental of female instincts, the consequences of which alone can we safely hope to correct, without attempting to eliminate their cause.

No. 3. Woman’s Vulgarity might be supposed to arise from her natural absence of taste. But, truth to tell, it is the outcome of a different basic principle in her. Many men have been conscious of it, but none, as far as I have been able to discover, has shown how essential it is, and how necessarily it derives from the vital functions of the female nature. Besides, there is a substantial difference between a lack of taste and vulgarity. The former is a defect, a minus. The latter is a definite quality which operates as a determined bias in an unrefined, rude and low direction. A person lacking taste may by a fluke select a tasteful thing. A vulgar person can in no circumstances be refined. It is not necessarily low, or rude, or unrefined in the mother to prefer the crippled or cretin child before the healthy one—that is simply tasteless. We could not call the mother vulgar because she prefers her child in long clothes before her grown-up child in knickerbockers. The grown-up child makes a stronger appeal to taste, owing to the greater harmony of his proportions, his articulateness, his intelligence, and his greater command over his body and its movements; but as the mother is chiefly attracted by helplessness, it is the child in long clothes that she prefers. The appeals to taste do not affect her. It is tastelessness, therefore, and not vulgarity, that elects the child in long clothes. Thus we see there is a distinct difference between the two, and the one cannot derive from the other. It can aggravate the other, add to its seriousness as a social evil, complicate and multiply its errors, but it cannot spring from it. We call that person vulgar who constantly and consciously avoids those things that bear the hall-mark of cultivation, or refinement, or careful selection, in order deliberately to pursue, select, value, and cherish those that bear the stamp of coarseness, brutality and baseness.

Now woman constantly overlooks and avoids the former and as constantly pursues the latter, and we hope to show that she cannot help acting in this way—in fact, that in so doing she is obeying a vital instinct.

The records of the lives of artists reveal one singular fact most impressively, and that is the frequency with which they have had to associate with immoral women, or women of the working classes: Heine, Gœthe, Rodin, Van Gogh, Wagner, etc.; they are all alike in this; so much so, indeed, that Weininger, with his customary superficiality, thought fit to assert that “great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.”[211] Weininger is wrong—great men have not always preferred women of this type. The point is, however, that women of the prostitute type, or women of the proletariat, are the only women who will, as a rule, have anything to do with great men when, as in the case of Wagner, Heine, Van Gogh, and Rodin, their beginnings are poor, inconspicuous, and uncertain. These artists at the outset, like many hundreds of other great men, were unsuccessful. That is the important fact as far as the sexual side of their life is concerned. Unsuccessful men find it quite difficult enough to prevail upon women of their own station in life to associate with them, but to get them as wives is out of the question. This accounts for the fact that great men are so frequently thrown upon the company of courtesans and women of lower rank.[212]

Woman has no primary interest in a great or artistic man, she does not prefer him to a successful and rich soap-boiler, and what is more, she never knows he is great until the world acknowledges him as such. In fact she is not in the least concerned with refinement of interests or with cultivation of mind in her mate. She is only deeply fascinated by the great man and the artist when he is a material success. Otherwise, not only does his extra refinement and cultivation leave her indifferent, but his very poverty repels her.

Woman, by her very nature, is bound to take this attitude. She is compelled, therefore, to be vulgar. What is the rationale of her conduct?

It is obviously as follows: Woman, like the female butterfly, the female house-fly, or the female horse-fly, has the very vital and useful instinct to deposit her eggs only there where there is a sound promise of food, and ample quantities of it, for the support of the larvæ that are to be reared from them. To consider other matters here would obviously imperil not so much the mother herself as her future offspring. Æsthetic considerations must therefore be barred. It is not the best-looking repository, or the most refined, or the most learned, or the most artistic, that is sought, but that repository which promises the richest food-supply for the coming brood. In the insect it is the leafy tree,[213] the towering dung-heap; in the human female it is the man who shows some substantial promise of being able to support the family that will come, and support it, moreover, in circumstances similar to those in which the wife herself has been reared. Thus the struggling artist, the struggling scientist, and the ambitious but penniless politician—though each may be a genius in his way—repels the true and normal woman of his own class. Their spiritual gifts count as nothing, and since woman has no flair for greatness, and cannot with certainty pick out the great man before the world has applauded him to the echo, it is only when they have become a material success that the female of their own or a superior station in life will look at them.

Now this is obviously a very useful and a very vital instinct in woman. From the standpoint of the species nothing could be more laudable than this anxious preoccupation with the future of the offspring. But it amounts to this, that by their nature women can have no primary concern about those things that bear the hallmarks of cultivation, of refinement and of greatness, and that, therefore, they are essentially vulgar.[214]

If in the Europe of to-day, and in all countries like Europe, it is material success alone that is regarded as of the highest value, and if money is the principal hall-mark of power and prestige, it is due to the ascendancy of women in our midst. Women cannot take any other point of view, and where their influence tends to prevail, as it does particularly in England and America, there you will find the worship of cash the principal religion of the community. It is true that women fall at the feet of great men and artists when they become famous. When I was private secretary to Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, at a time when he was making anything from fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, women were his principal visitors. They flocked to his studio and to his private house at Meudon as to an Oxford Street drapery sale. But, as he used to say, they left him in peace in his dirty little studio in La Rue des Fourneaux at the time when he was poor and struggling.

It is indeed one of the most pernicious results of woman’s ascendancy in any society, that this vulgar pursuit of mere material success (because it provides the surest provision for the offspring) tends to become general,[215] and it is a sign of woman’s subordination in the Hindu community, for instance, that there the most respected caste is the poorest caste.

To-day this vulgarity can be detected in every aspect of our lives. Everything, every consideration of refinement, is overlooked, provided that money be present. And the man who kills most female hearts is he who can throw a rich fur round his capture and whirl her off in a sumptuous Rolls-Royce. This to the normal decent woman is simply irresistible. She will abandon any mere artist for this experience. And though in later years, when the latter has become great in a worldly sense, she may deplore her error of judgment, she has no gifts that enable her immediately to gauge his worth, and thus to foretell his ultimate position.

It is interesting to note that neither Heine, Nietzsche nor Van Gogh ever became a material success until long after his death. But Heine, Nietzsche and Van Gogh were singularly free from the sort of female persecution that harassed Rodin and Wagner in later life, and certainly not one of them ever had a successful association with a woman of his own station or class.

Indeed, so deeply rooted is this love of material success in women that it manifests itself in those who have long ceased to be able to bear children. Thus wives who have passionately loved their husbands will learn to dislike and despise them intensely if owing to some unhappy turn in their fortunes they become material failures. Daughters will also manifest a pronounced dislike towards fathers who, for their station in life, have been inadequate material successes. I once heard a daughter of a peer talk most bitterly about her father, because he was a failure from the financial point of view. A woman will forgive anything in her man—adultery, cruelty, obesity, and stupidity,—but she cannot and will not forgive material failure.

The ramifications of this fundamental and vital vulgarity in woman are, of course, manifold. We have only to think of the ostentation of wealth, of the insistence upon the insignia of wealth and material success by women (diamonds, pearls, furs, fine external domestic appointments, etc.), and of the stampede for wealth and success in modern, women-ridden society. We have only to think of the commercial, industrial and financial immorality of modern societies, all of which are the direct outcome of the maniacal struggle for that hall-mark which alone means power and prestige in an effeminate community. Individually this vulgarity ramifies in woman as an inability to pursue refinement, unassisted or undirected; as a readiness to sacrifice refinement or else the fruits of cultivation, to any other sordid end, and as an inaccessibility to the finer nuances of thought. That is why the notion “Lady” is such absurd nonsense. It is the grossest and most palpable fiction. No “lady” has ever existed or will ever exist. As Napoleon said, “Women have no rank”;—we have seen why this must be so.[216]

No. 4. Woman’s love of petty power is obvious and hardly requires demonstrating. It arises from the species’ urgent need of some adult animal which, when the offspring is born, will take an instinctive delight in looking after it. Apart from the pleasant sensations that the healthy female—whether animal or human—derives from suckling,[217] there must also be an instinct which makes it a pleasure to nurse, to fondle, and to tend the infant of the species. This instinct can be examined under its two aspects, either as a love of petty power or as a love of dealing with something pathetically helpless. And, indeed, if some of the deepest chords in the female’s being were not moved by helplessness, where on earth should we be? What would become of our babies and our children?

As far as her relation to the child is concerned, therefore, there can be no doubt whatsoever concerning the utility to the species of woman’s love of petty power, and away from the child it is revealed in a hundred different ways: woman’s pronounced preference for lap-dogs, her fondness for teaching (when children play at school it is invariably a little girl of the party who plays the part of teacher),[218] her conscious preference for the grown-up schoolboy as a husband (that is to say, the man who is easily led by the nose), her tendency to desire to give advice to relatives and friends, in everything, so that virtually she directs their lives (this is admirably depicted by George Eliot in her descriptions of Maggie’s aunts in the Mill on the Floss), and finally her tendency to excessive self-assertion and to interference with other people’s concerns.

It is only in its ramifications that this vital instinct in woman has a deleterious influence if it is not kept in check; for her desire for petty power is always out of all proportion to her capacity for wielding any power whatsoever. For instance, in its tendency to make her favour the grown-up schoolboy type of man as a husband, it acts as a distinct drawback to the race. Because, although he proves an easy man to rule, he is by no means a desirable type from the standpoint of virile virtue. He is the type called “Promethean” in my Man’s Descent from the Gods—that is to say, a man who has no mastery of life, very little depth or understanding, and who is gifted with the qualities of the lackey rather than of the leader. The prevalence of this type of man to-day, together with the paucity of men of the masculine and leader type, is another sign of the extent to which women are having their own way. He is a man who knows nothing about women, but he is usually athletic, breezy and fond of games—i.e. he is harmless. The fact that he now stands as the pattern of the “manly” man reveals the influence of the female standpoint in our modern communities, as does also the fact that the other type of man (the masculine and manly type who understands woman, and who shows that he does) is now vilified everywhere as the “prig.”

Truth to tell, woman is less happy with the grown-up schoolboy type than with the latter type, but this she only finds out later. Her conscious choice, supported by the values of the age, inclines her to the type over which she can exercise petty power, and this man, who believes in “chivalry,” who believes in playing “cricket” (or “playing the game”) with his womenfolk, and who accepts the whole of the tinsel of false sentiment that women have succeeded in drawing over the natural relations of the sexes, has become the beau ideal of Anglo-Saxon society.

Ultimately, of course, woman suffers excruciatingly, not only as an individual, but also as a whole sex, when this type of man becomes supreme; because, since he has no mastery over life, and no understanding of life’s problems (the sex problem is only one of the many he actually creates), the societies in which he prevails gradually get into such an appalling muddle, and reveal in all their aspects such a tragic absence of the master mind, that life in all its departments becomes ever more and more difficult. A century in England of the prevalence of this type of man has brought us to our present hopeless plight, and yet there are very few men, and no women, who seem to be aware of the fact that it is the prevalence of this alleged “manly” man that is to blame.

A moment’s thought, of course, reveals at once how ridiculous even the terminology of this womanly ideal of man really is; for truly “manly” men are not ruled by their women. And yet, in the most successful novels of the day, in the most exalted circles of the land, and in the hearts of all unsuspecting virgins, he continues to be upheld as the paragon for all times and climes.

This is what we have had to pay for woman’s point of view becoming paramount.

Do not let it be thought, however, that the cure would consist in curbing, uprooting or correcting woman’s love of petty power. This should not be attempted for one instant, even if it were possible. Woman’s love of petty power is much too valuable to the species to be tampered with. The only practical cure would be the breeding of a type of masculine men over whom woman’s love of petty power could not avail.

Thus woman’s lack of taste on the one hand, her vulgarity and her love of petty power on the other,[219] are all seen to be exercising a deleterious and dangerous influence on modern society. They are harmful because they exert a continuous pull downwards against the aspiring efforts of the age; they are dangerous because they may lead to a degree of degeneration from which it may prove impossible ultimately to recover, and they are difficult and delicate to handle because, while they are persistent and incorrigible, they are, as we have seen, too vital to be tampered with without jeopardizing the survival of the species.

What in the circumstances is the solution?

The only advisable solution lies in the direction, not of changing woman—that would be suicidal to the species—but in limiting her power, in controlling her influence. Feminism, therefore, which aims at the opposite ideal, is wrong—wrong to the root. There must be a revulsion of feeling, or we perish. Woman must be re-defined. Her sphere must once again be delimited and circumscribed, if her vital and precious instincts are not, in their effort to extend “out of bounds,” to drag us steadily down into the abyss.

If woman were happier as she is, than with her influence controlled, if Feminism had brought bliss instead of anguish to millions of women, there might be at least one remaining argument—a purely hedonistic one—in favour of this nineteenth-century madness. But seeing that this is not so; in view of what every one now knows and can see and feel with his own unassisted senses, that woman has grown every day more wretched, more neurotic, and more sick, with every advance that Feminism has made, the last and only possible word remaining in its favour, the plea even of hedonism, is shown to be as inadmissible as the rest.

When, therefore, we read in the old canon of the Brahmins, “He who carefully guards his wife, preserves the purity of his offspring, virtuous conduct, his family, himself, and his means of acquiring merit”[220]; when we read “Day and night women must be kept in dependence by the males of their families ... her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth, and her sons protect her in old age, a woman is never fit for independence”;[221] we shall surely be taking a very heavy onus of responsibility upon our shoulders if we declare this policy madness and our own wisdom. Is there anything beyond our own prejudice to show that we are more wise than the Brahmins were? Is there anything in the organization of our society to show that it is more successful than that of the Brahmins? If we choose to interpret these texts merely as the unjust doctrines of a race “hostile” to women, it should be incumbent upon us to prove that, in point of fact, our women are happier in their anarchy than those women are or were in their Brahministic order. But, truth to tell, the Brahmins were a very wise race, a race that meant to last longer than we mean to last, and which, in fact, has achieved a degree of permanence far exceeding that which any European race has achieved, or can hope to achieve, unless it make a rapid volte-face in almost all its most cherished beliefs.

No. 5. Woman’s Vanity, I take it, is not open to question. If no other proof of its pre-eminence in her were available, we should find one in her universally reported modesty; for, who says modest, says also vain.[222] Since, therefore, no one has yet contested the modesty of women, I may take it that her vanity is by implication generally accepted too.

The ramifications of this vice in her are to be found in her tendency to inordinate jealousy (which arises from her incessant desire to be the centre of attraction and her intolerance of rivals in this desire); in her love of honours, titles, badges, etc. (hence her incessant spurring on of her mate to obtain them, and her impatience with him if he fails); in her tendency to adopt only showy or conspicuous callings in which tangible and visible results, and speedy applause, are sure to be obtained. (Thus Havelock Ellis says: “It is difficult to recall examples of women who have patiently and slowly fought their way at once to perfection and to fame in the face of complete indifference, like, for instance, Balzac.... It is still more difficult to recall a woman who for any abstract and intellectual end has fought her way to success through obloquy and contempt, or without reaching success, like a Roger Bacon, or a Galileo, a Wagner or an Ibsen”);[223] finally, in her constant and deep concern about her appearance, her clothes, her hair, and her neighbour’s clothes and hair, and her love of flattery. This latter derivative of her basic vanity is perhaps the worst of all, because it means that women, as a rule, are always governed in their likes and dislikes, and in their appreciation of their fellow-creatures, not by a recognition of the latter’s intrinsic worth, which they sum up once and for all, but by the manner in which their fellow-creatures treat them. A woman does not ask herself, what is the precise character of So-and-so, and value him accordingly. Her instinctive question is, how did So-and-so treat me? He may be an inferior man who dances attendance upon her and treats her well, he may be a knave; she will always prefer him before the worthy man who treats her with indifference. Madame de Staël’s adverse opinion of Napoleon was not formed until Napoleon had systematically and thoroughly snubbed her. But Madame de Staël’s adverse opinion of Napoleon is not valuable as an index to Napoleon’s true character; it is only valuable as an index to the way Napoleon treated her. Likewise with our “good Queen Bess,” it was not Leicester’s desirable qualities that so much endeared him to her; for he was a bigamist, a murderer, an incompetent and cowardly general, and a bad governor of men, as his experiences in the Netherlands proved; but the fact that he was an arch-flatterer. Even the ingenuity he displayed in designing his presents to his sovereign and lady love, reveal an unusual knowledge of woman’s weaknesses. Elizabeth’s treatment of Admiral Lord Seymour, whom she made a Privy Councillor, was also not based upon an estimate of his true worth, but upon the way in which he treated her; for the man was a convicted defaulter. See also her ridiculous behaviour with Sir James Melville in 1564 (recorded by himself) and her humiliating victimization by Dr. Dee, the alchemist.

The most cursory study of any woman’s opinion about her fellow-creatures will always reveal the same fact, that they are not based at all upon the intrinsic value of people, but on the way people treat her. This is a comparatively harmless trait so long as woman has no power; the moment, however, that she is placed in a position of wielding power, her errors of judgment affect public life, and she only accepts those men as her ministers, advisers or directors who can prostrate themselves with the best grace at her feet, and appeal most irresistibly to her vanity. Her choice of a fellow-creature may of course be right by a fluke, as for instance when he combines with general ability the power for fulsome flattery (Benjamin Disraeli); but otherwise it is almost sure to be wrong.[224]

These ramifications of the fundamental vice of vanity in woman are, I presume, disputed by no one. It only remains, therefore, to show that here again we are concerned with a vital instinct which, while it may require curbing by man, is too precious to be uprooted or suppressed. For what, after all, is this vanity in woman but the outcome of her natural impulse to attract the notice of the male—to speed up, that is to say, or to make certain of, the act of fertilization, which can only be consummated when a male has been captivated? If the female played the aggressive and prehensile rôle in the sexual act, she would only need to pursue and to overpower as the male does. Since, however, she plays the passive, receptive and submissive rôle, her only means of securing and expediting fertilization is to draw the male to her; and this instinct in the human female naturally manifests itself as a deep concern about her own personal appearance and its powers of provoking flattering attention. If intellectual brightness can add to the power she is thus able to exercise, and she has the gift for developing intellectual power, she will do so in order to add to the glamour of her person. That is why it is never safe to argue from a woman’s intellectual pursuits that she is truly interested in the subjects she is studying. It is far wiser to wait until she has given some unmistakable proof of the purity of her motives. This, however, rarely, if ever, happens.[225]

Since, however, in a contest between attractions, native beauty and native endowments generally play a greater part than dress or acquired intellectual smartness, it will generally be found that women are more bitterly jealous of each other’s bodily gifts than of each other’s wardrobes, wealth or wisdom. But woman does not consciously consider the benefit of the species, although she is constantly working for it. Thus when she is vying with other women in the business of attraction, she realizes the enormous advantage enjoyed by the rival who has the best physical endowments, and since it is her own fertilization that is alone important to her, her jealousy of the other woman or women may quite easily drive her to homicide, if she can hope to achieve a speedier triumph by this means.

Apart from sexual matters, this characteristic in the female manifests itself generally as a desire to shine, or to outshine, and to be the centre of an admiring or, at least, attentive group. Tiresome as this propensity is, particularly when a wife shows it to a marked degree, it should never be forgotten that it has a vital origin, and therefore that it should be treated with patience and toleration. A little kindly and timely explanation to a woman of one’s own circle will generally enable her to realize how foolish she has been making herself appear; and the moment she realizes this, and begins, with the aid of your explanation, to notice the self-assertiveness of other women, and its reasons, she will be on the high road to understanding the wisdom of your rebuke.

As a general rule it is best to teach women through the example of other women; because their natural loathing and contempt of other women is such, that if you can once convince your wife, or your daughter, that she is behaving, or has behaved, like a certain other woman, whom she has had opportunities of observing with disapproval, the chances are that you will have cured her spontaneously of the objectionable trait which it was your desire to suppress.

This fact, however, should be carefully noted in regard to female vanity, and that is that normally it is only a means of luring the male. When once the male has been lured, and the woman is passionate and positive, vanity is flung to the four winds, and passion will induce the woman to accept even insults from the man she loves without ceasing from loving him. The negative woman, on the other hand, whose vanity is never smothered by passion, cannot accept an insult from anyone. She hates the lover who does not keep up to the mark in worshipping her. Since she is never carried away by passion, she never forgets to ask herself the constant question—what sort of figure she is cutting in the affair; and this makes her very sensitive to adulation, neglect and insults.

No. 6. Woman’s Sensuality will be stoutly denied, not only by women themselves, but by all sentimental and women-ridden men. Owing to the lies told by the writers of the J. S. Mill type, most modern Anglo-Saxons have got it into their heads that woman has acted as a moralizing influence on man, and has thus led to a curbing and taming of the sensual impulses of humanity; in fact that civilization is largely her work.[226] With such false doctrines in their minds, it is naturally difficult to convince such people that woman is sensual; for, with cerulean-eyed innocence they exclaim: “How can sensuality moralize mankind?” True enough, it cannot; but the mistake is to suppose anything so fatuous and absurd as that women ever advanced morality by a hair’s breadth. I think I have shown sufficiently cogently that when they do exercise any influence “out of their proper bounds” it is only in order to spread their bad taste and their vulgarity. How then could their effect on humanity’s civilization and cultivation have been anything but a retarding one? The truth is that woman’s direct influence in most civilizations has been but small, and where this direct influence has been felt, whether acutely or insignificantly, it is always unfavourable.

But let us not suppose that on that account sensuality is an evil.—On the contrary, it is one of the greatest mainstays of life. Without sensuality we could not advance from one generation to another; without a love of the flesh and its joys human nature and the animal creation would come to an end in half a century. In this sense, seeing that to-day we are all Puritans—if not in deed, at least in thought—I have the best possible proof of how little woman has influenced civilization for the good. For woman is chiefly sensual. If then she had influenced civilization for the good, she must have checked Puritanism. Because even if we admit, as we must, that her sensuality must be kept within proper bounds by man, we are forced to inquire how it is that the whole of Western Europe, and all countries like it, are Puritan to-day, if woman has exercised any influence on the evolution of society, and that influence has been a good influence.

The reader may reply that this proves that woman is not sensual. But I invite him to consider the process of bearing and rearing children. Surely it is from start to finish—from the coitus to the weaning—a sensuous process; and in that sense woman’s sensuality is entirely laudable. When once this sensuous process ceases from being pleasant in all its stages, disease is present, and the species is in danger of extermination.[227] This danger may be remote, but it must be recognized. Now, how can we expect a creature to find pleasure in a sensuous process lasting over such a long period of time unless sensuality plays a great part in her constitution?

The only point we have to settle here (since we have placed sensuality among woman’s vices) is at what point does her sensuality become vicious. Now let it be thoroughly understood that two-thirds of our middle-class and certainly three-quarters of our wealthiest classes can hardly produce a positive woman among them, and, therefore, that there can be no question of sensuality in the women of these sections of the community. To be sensual a woman must at least be positive; she must at least have healthy and tonic organs, both of alimentation, etc., and of sex; hence, we shall not be thinking of the bulk of British women when we proceed to show how the natural and laudable sensuality of the positive woman becomes a vice.

Like all the other vital qualities of woman—her tastelessness, her vulgarity, her love of petty power, and her vanity—sensuality only becomes a vice when it is out of hand. It is, therefore, in greatest danger of becoming a vice when men have conceded overmuch liberty to their womenfolk, and where woman, by having her own way, can indulge her proclivities without limitation. But this is the state in which we find ourselves in England to-day, and if it were not for the fact that three-quarters of our women are negative (that is to say, too unhealthy and too atonic in their alimentary, sexual and other organs to derive any pleasure from their functions), sensuality would be one of the worst vices of the times.

How does it operate harmfully when once it has become a vice through positive women having their own way? It operates as a vice by breaking up the family unit, by unduly exhausting the menfolk of the nation, by leading to promiscuity and thence to disease, by making woman the only subject whether of agreement or disagreement among men, and by elevating to the first place among the virtues a caprine degree of masculine potency.

The way of arresting this vice, however, is not, as our ancestors of the seventeenth century thought (and did), to eradicate woman’s sensuality and to make her negative; for that is tantamount to destroying a portion of her vitality, and of her valuable vital impulses. The only remedy, here again, is to circumscribe woman’s powers, and to place each woman under the tutelage of some responsible man. But in order to do this successfully you must have the men who can undertake the charge. Besides, is it not too late to speak of this now? Has not the wrong remedy, the rearing of negative and non-sexual women, gone too far? I doubt whether, in view of humanity’s infinite possibilities, anything could have gone too far. But the revulsion of feeling that would be required to alter our present condition in suchwise as (1) to rear a majority of positive women once more, and (2) to rear the men who could take charge of them and account for their actions appears, as things are, to be so remote that, although everything is possible, it is doubtful whether precisely this thing is probable.

Certainly the choice taken by our ancestors cannot have been the right one.[228] It cannot be right to suppress a vice by eradicating or detoning the vital principle that causes it[229]; and now that we have the fruits of this method about us, in our millions of negative women, it may reasonably be asked whether we do not see the necessity of starting a counter movement which, while it will increase the proportion of positive women in our midst, will also and concurrently rear the men who can take charge of them.

“Day and night woman must be kept in dependence by the males of their families,” says Manu, “and if they attach themselves to sensual enjoyments, they must be kept under one’s control.”[230]

Thus we have seen that both in her virtues and her vices woman is entirely the creature of vital impulses. Her virtues, like her vices, arise from principles within her that are valuable—nay indispensable, to the species. Furthermore, we have seen that her vices are not vices in their origin, but only become so when certain vital principles within her get out of hand, or find expression in a way they were not intended to adopt. To attempt to correct these vices by extirpation is dangerous, seeing that to do so is to ruin instincts upon which the race depends for its survival.[231] If therefore society is to be protected from women’s vices, and the future of mankind guaranteed against the deteriorating effect of woman’s spiritual influence, the only practical remedy that does not menace the species is to emulate the great wisdom of the Orient, and to place woman once more under man’s charge. To attempt any other method, such as the one advocated by the Feminists for instance, is, as we have seen, to involve one of two difficulties: either the need of eradicating some of woman’s most vital principles in order to make her liberty innocuous to society (this we have already partially done with regard to her sensuality), or else the necessity of suffering the gradual deterioration of life through her influence, if she remain uncontrolled. Either alternative is bad; because in either event the ruin of civilization is a mathematical certainty. You cannot eradicate woman’s most vital principles without destroying her usefulness, and yet you cannot tolerate her deteriorating influence if her vital principles are allowed to get out of hand. There remains, therefore, but the alternative of restoring women to the charge of men—an alternative which involves the denial, the overthrow, and the rout of Feminism.

The only difficulty we can see in the way of this desirable reform, is the absence of the men who would be capable of carrying it out. For women themselves are already half-convinced that Feminism is wrong, and that J. S. Mill is actually the pernicious liar I have shown him to be.