FOOTNOTES:
[102] In the Laws of Manu (Bk. IX, 89) there is a passage which seems to show that spinsterhood of this kind is specially recommended by the religious Founder of Brahmanism. In Bk. IX, verse 89, we read: “But the maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s house until death, than that he should ever give her to a man destitute of good qualities.”
[104] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 105), where, referring to the vital impulses of woman, she says: “When these are not expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved things, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations.”
[105] “With reference to the marked predominance of female suicides [in England] over male suicides in the 15-20 age period, Ogle remarks that this is also ‘the only period in which the general death rates, as shown in the Registrar-General’s returns, is higher in the female sex, and also is marked, as the census returns for 1881 show, by an exceptionally higher rate of lunacy (exclusive of idiocy or imbecility) for females than for males.’... In France, the chief age at which men commit suicide is from 40 to 50, while for women it is between 15 to 20.” (Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, pp. 382-383.) The census of 1911 also gives higher figures for female than for male lunacy—a difference of 10,000, and these are chiefly unmarried women. The unmarried numbered 54,223, the married 21,299, widowed 9,229.
[106] H. Ellis, Op. cit., p. 388: “There are some who believe (Dr. H. Campbell amongst them) that although the number of women of all ages who commit suicide is less than the number of men, many more women than men contemplate suicide habitually, i.e. many more women than men are suicidal, although they may not always carry it into practice.”
[107] The facts collected by the psycho-analysts, Freud and Dr. E. Jones, on this phenomenon were not new to me. I had already observed them in numerous cases, and my observations on the point were but confirmed by the psycho-analysts’ theory of the transference of orgastic sensations from the genitalia to other parts of the body.
[108] See Martial, III, 82, 9; also Senecae Dialogorum Liber XII, 10, 3. While Hugo Blümner in his Römischen Privataltertümer (1922), p. 399, gives a brief description of this practice.
[109] See Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London, 1918), p. 599. In regard to this question parents are also entitled to ask what influence the spinster’s outlook on life has upon their children, particularly upon their daughters. It is impossible entirely to divorce from one’s moral influence upon children the prejudices and prepossessions of one’s particular position in life, and one’s general attitude towards fundamental problems. Now, since the spinster’s particular position in life is an abnormal one, it is questionable whether she can help her influence from imparting something of her own abnormality. When we bear in mind that, according to the census of 1911 there were 187,283 female teachers in England and Wales, 171,480 of whom were unmarried, the gravity of this aspect alone of spinsterhood cannot be denied.
[110] And neurosis in later life.
[111] “The most serious manifestation of disordered conduct in hysteria is, however, the development of the appetite for teasing—for giving pain and annoyance to others” (see Charles Mercier, M.B., Sanity and Insanity, London, 1890, p. 215). Long after Mercier wrote this his views were confirmed by the school of psycho-analysts. I give the reference to Mercier to show that the fact was observed before the psycho-analysts, so much detested in certain quarters, had come to the fore.
[112] See Dr. Wrench’s Grammar of Life (Heinemann, 1908), p. 76.
[113] Freud deals with this point in many places in his works. See particularly his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte Folge (1918), Chapter III (Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose), p. 117.
[114] The harm, however, does not cease with the work of the spinsters themselves. Their influence in this direction has become a national evil. Volumes could be filled with examples of this false and short-sighted humanitarianism, but the following case, taken from The News of the World on Jan. 1, 1922, at a time when rates in almost all parishes in and around London were anything between 17s. and 20s. in the £, is typical of thousands of others. “Rochford Board of Guardians, Essex, are confronted with the problem of dealing with a man who is both a leper and insane. The patient is a native of Mauritius. It was stated at a Board meeting that the man lived for some time in a cottage in a rural parish, and his wife looked after him, but she was unable to do so any longer. Formerly the man was in the Leper Colony at Bicknacre, Essex—an institution carried on by the Society of the Divine Compassion, assisted by the Sisterhood of St. Giles—but his mental state was such that he could not remain there. Asylum authorities who were approached refused to accept the case, and the Board of Control supported them in their attitude. It was also stated that the Ministry of Health would not deal with the matter. Consequently the man had to be cared for by the Guardians. A building was prepared for him, and efforts made to secure three male nurses, though only two have been obtained. The cost of three nurses is twelve guineas a week. Eventually the Board decided to send a deputation to the Ministry of Health.” The influence of the spinster’s frantic and unthinking humanitarianism is recognizable here.
[115] See Mercier, Op. cit., p. 220. The author continues: “They [the feelings in question] take the shape of religious emotion, and expression for them is found in observance of ceremonial and in devotion to a ritual.” The fact that the first initiation into religious fervour of this kind frequently starts by the young girl’s wild adoration for an older woman—her school mistress or her Sunday-school teacher—is not mentioned by Mercier, but it is important.
[116] Large numbers of the women in the Suffrage movement were of this type. Nor is it possible to exonerate such women entirely from a charge of jealousy of the young girl, when their efforts are obviously directed towards making her, like themselves, ill-adapted, discontented and physiologically miserable.
[117] See The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. VIII, p. 349. The author proceeds: “Accordingly it is amongst the young men and women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this eccentric type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of all ebullient feeling must be perilous” ... etc.
[118] For an interesting discourse, uninfluenced by the recent psychoanalytical school, on the connexion between sexual and religious emotion, see Mercier, Op. cit., pp. 220-223.
[119] Thus Dr. E. Jones argues (Op. cit., p. 217), “Civilization has reached, or is on the point of reaching, the limit, beyond which unguided sublimation can no longer be successfully maintained.”
[120] See Byron’s letter to John Murray, Feb. 7, 1821: “The truth is that in these days the grand ‘primum mobile’ of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. This is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.” This was written a hundred years ago, and is still true to-day.
[121] Dr. Vintras and Parent Duchatelet both concur in representing English prostitution as about the most degraded and at the same time the most irrevocable.
[122] Throughout this discussion I mean by prostitution not any form of illicit hetero-sexual relations but commercial and promiscuous unchastity.
[123] Speaking of the prostitute Lecky says: “But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in their pride of untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame” (History of European Morals, London, 1899, Vol. II, p. 283).
[124] Let all who doubt this consult the literature on the subject (even our own Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th and 11th editions), and also consult people who have been engaged in rescue work.
[125] It is for this reason that a man who gives a girl an illegitimate child is really more kind and merciful than the man who seduces her while taking precautions to prevent issue. But it will take some time before the world can possibly be expected to see the matter in this light.
[126] Those who, like Lombroso and Ferrero, argue that prostitutes are born, and that there is a specific class of women, which may be called potentially whorish from birth, will naturally join issue with me, and deny that the childless fate of the prostitute is her severest penalty. I cannot accept the evidence that I have read, however, in La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée, to show that prostitutes are a class of women apart (as regards primary and secondary characteristics and instincts). I feel very much more inclined to agree with Emile Faguet, who thinks that all prostitutes start their illicit amours with a strong monogamic bias, and that it is only subsequently that circumstances drive them to promiscuity. See Le Feminisme (Paris, 1910), p. 254: “La vérité est que la prostituée née est excessivement rare.... Les autres prostituées sont des femmes qui out commencé par être monogames comme leurs sœurs, et qu’une première déchéance a jetées dans la classe des femmes pour tous.” Thus Faguet concludes (p. 255): “La prostituée, j’ai cru le montrer, est un être dénaturé.” This I believe to be much nearer the point than Lombroso’s elaborate thesis.
[127] John ii. 15, 16.
[128] Rom. viii. 6, 10, 13.
[129] Rom. viii. 6-8.
[130] Her behaviour in this respect will be dictated not only by an instinctive desire to spread a negative doctrine broadcast as an end in itself, but also by a feeling of very real and very stubborn envy towards all those who can enjoy a side of life from which she is completely shut off. This envy may extend even to her attitude towards young women of all classes, so that she will do everything in her power, under the cover of philanthropic motives, to keep them from such pastimes as flirtation, from actually falling in love, or from spending what she believes to be “too much time” in the company of the other sex. See also p. [246] ante.
[131] It is true that the negative spinster was not alone in this support of the war from secret sex motives. The old men of all nations also saw in the war a golden opportunity of expressing their natural secret hatred and jealousy of the young males of their circle, and, whether consciously or unconsciously, seized on the patriotic motive in order to vent these passions. The flood of letters that poured into the Times office from sexagenarians, septuagenarians and octogenarians, imploring the authorities to continue the war at the time when there was some talk of peace, was an expression of this unconscious but radical loathing of young men by the old.
[132] See, however, the exceptions mentioned on p. [248] ante. For a woman’s confirmation of the fact that negative women are increasing in England, see Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit.), pp. 82-85, and many other passages.
[133] The number of women workers (married and unmarried) in 1911 was 4,830,734. Of these about 1,500,000 were employed as domestic servants and hospital nurses. In 1917 the total was 5,889,734. About 173,000 of this increase came from domestic service, so that the total for domestic servants and nurses in 1917 would appear to have been 1,827,000.
[134] It should also be borne in mind that work outside home necessarily throws men and girls constantly into each other’s company. Unless, therefore, a certain degree of subnormality in the sexual and emotional nature of each sex be presupposed, they cannot work side by side without having their attention diverted and their nerves harassed, by the constant provocation of sex stimuli to which they cannot and must not respond. To assume indifference and callousness here, as modern business, commercial and official employers do, is, however, to take for granted that the modern generation of young men and girls are sufficiently below par to be able to resist being thrown together constantly without being distracted by each other’s presence. But this is not only an insult to the best among the young people, but it is also placing a premium on the subnormal; because the latter alone are able to overcome the difficulty with ease; and thus happy survival or success is reserved nowadays to those types which are least desirable from every point of view except that of the Puritan.
[135] Later on in the chapter he even comes very close to my own view of the matter, and of the fatal detachment of these females from the stream of Life when he asks “whether the yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of the sap.”
[136] Let anyone attempt to write a novel or any kind of popular work that does not pander to their sentimentality and their distorted views of life, and see how much success he will have. They have established their ascendancy in England by such steady and insidious means, that three-quarters of our population, including our leading critics and publicists, are not even aware that Feminism is their ruling creed. They reveal it, however, in every word they write on the sex question.
[137] According to the last Census there were in 1911 55,286 unmarried women engaged in nursing (including midwives), 57,952 engaged in domestic service in hotels, 1,172,449 engaged in domestic service in private houses, 22,789 engaged as day girls, and 26,900 engaged as charwomen in England and Wales alone.
[138] On this point also the wisdom of the ancient Hindus should be an example to us. In the Laws of Manu (Book IX, verse 4) we read: “Reprehensible is the father who gives not his daughter in marriage at the proper time.”
[139] Now, the dread lest a daughter should not be self-supporting at twenty-one leads parents in all poorer middle-class families to sink all thoughts of marriage and making her fit for marriage beneath the consideration of providing her with a calling. The ideal of independence for women, from being pursued for purely economic reasons, has come to be pursued for its own sake, as if independence were in itself a desirable condition for the female. But even if we concede the point that dependence on certain modern men amounts to ignominy, we should not allow the argument to assume a shape which must identify woman’s chief source of happiness with her relation to the man to whom she becomes related; and we ought always to correct it by considering that, in the long run, man is only a means to an end where woman is concerned, and that independence which is achieved without the experience of motherhood, even if such independence saves the woman from association with a third or fourth-rate man, is only equivalent to clutching at the shadow to let the substance go.
[140] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 126): “Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood—and more particularly Motherhood—they have made, all along the line, not for the true emancipation of woman but for her commercialization, merely.”
[141] Speaking of the hostile attitude of most women towards his Don Juan, Byron wrote to Mr. Murray on October 12, 1820, as follows: “The truth is that it is too true, and the women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons.” Again writing of Madame Guiccioli’s dislike of Don Juan, he says (July 6, 1821): “It arises from the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions, and to keep up the illusion which is their empire. Now Don Juan strips off this illusion.... I never knew a woman who did not protect Rousseau, nor one who did not dislike De Gramont, Gil Blas, and all the comedy of the passions, when brought out naturally.”
CHAPTER X
The Virtues and Vices of Women
Whether we appeal to folklore, to the proverbs of the nations, or to the earliest legends of mankind, we invariably encounter in the traditional wisdom of humanity judgments upon woman which are more or less unanimous in condemning her bad temper, her disloyalty, her dishonesty, her vanity, her malice and her indolence. The very attitude of the common people towards witchcraft, after the Reformation, points to a curious popular readiness to believe in the evil influences of the female; for the fact that aged women and not aged men were the suspected parties in the persecutions against supposed cases of necromancy, is significant, even if we deny the validity of the charges that were brought against these unfortunate wretches. In another work[142] I have dealt with the two principal legends of antiquity—that of Pandora and that of Eve—in which woman is specifically identified with the introduction of evil on earth, and I shall have to return to this subject here; for it cannot be merely a coincidence that in these oldest of human myths there is this connexion between woman and evil. In the Law Book of Manu, which represents ancient Hindu opinion, the character of women meets again with the same charges. We read:
“Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal to their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this world.
“Knowing their disposition, which the Lord of creatures laid in them at the creation, to be such, (even) man must strenuously exert himself to guard them.
“When creating them, Manu allotted to woman (love of their) bed, (of their) seat and (of) ornament, impure desires, wroth, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct.”[143]
Lombroso and Ferrero actually regard deception as being “physiological” in women. They ascribe it to her weakness (which makes it necessary for her to rely on craft to achieve her ends), to her periodical functional disturbances, to her modesty, to the pretences necessary to acquiring an ascendancy over man, to the duties of maternity, and to one or two other inevitable circumstances in her life.[144] In Chapter VII of their work, they adduce the testimony of such acute psychologists as Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Schopenhauer, Weininger, Molière, to support their contention that in woman lying is instinctive. We might add Shakespeare, Luther, Byron, Nietzsche, La Bruyère, and many others to the list. No matter where we turn, or to whom we refer, we find, more or less, the same verdict. It lies recorded even in an Arab proverb,[145] just as it lies, though perhaps more obscurely, in most of that “tinsel of sentiment” with which, utterly false as it is, woman insists upon veiling the natural relations of the sexes; while we must not forget that for hundreds of years a great and very profound people—the Mussulmans of Europe and Asia—have denied woman a soul.
The evidence of profound psychologists, the substance of myths, the content of national proverbs, the personal experience, in short, of all those who have learnt to know women generation after generation, all point to this conclusion, that there is a certain duplicity and unscrupulousness in their nature, against which it is only a matter of ordinary caution for man to be on his guard.
On the other hand, in all countries with a modern, democratic outlook, where woman’s influence is in the ascendant, and where men are inclined to a pronounced romanticism of thought, there is no quality, no jewel of human virtue, too priceless for woman to be thought worthy of it.
Perhaps the most radical attempt to contradict the tradition of ages, concerning woman, and to cast suspicion for ever upon all those who might venture to criticize her adversely, was made by that gallant but, alas! henpecked English “philosopher,” John Stuart Mill, than whom no writer is perhaps more responsible for the sudden access of strength that the Feminist movement acquired in the latter half of the nineteenth century in England. And, before proceeding with our inquiry, it will be necessary to pause in order to deal with his views and to dispose of them; for, since they represent the maximum that can be said on the other side, in accomplishing this, we shall have dealt vicariously with most of what has been advanced as scientific argumentation against the verdict of the rest of mankind.
John Stuart Mill admitted that all his writings, except his Logic, were as much his own work as that of the lady, Mrs. Taylor, who ultimately became his wife. He was not ashamed to acknowledge that Mrs. John Taylor was “in part the author of all that is best” in his writings; and speaking of his treatise on Liberty, Mr. W. L. Courtney says it “was written especially under her authority and encouragement.” The same author referring to the famous work The Subjection of Women, which is going to occupy our attention, writes: “Mill’s share was the result of discussions and conversations with his wife.”[146]
Now, quite early in this book on women, the following important remark occurs: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”[147]
The ingenuity of this sentence, its plausibility in the eyes of ignorant and prejudiced people, and its dark innuendo, make it one of the most astonishing utterances that ever issued from the lips of an alleged philosopher. If it be more than an insincere attempt to quash all discussion and inquiry regarding the subject for ever, it can mean only two things.
(1) The word “now” definitely restricts the allegations concerning the nature of women to the present age. “What is now called the nature of women,” therefore is implicitly contrasted with what was once called the nature of women. The first possible meaning of the sentence is therefore as follows: “As compared with what used to be called the nature of women, what is now called the nature of woman is an entirely artificial thing.”
In order to dispose of this first possible meaning, we have only to reply to Mrs. Taylor (for it is obvious that Mill would only have referred us to her if we had addressed ourselves to him), that, as the present view of woman’s nature does not differ entirely from the traditional and ancient view—where there exists no difference between the two, we may presumably postulate eternities, or constant factors. And, so long as we abide by those characteristics, in which the testimony of the present age concurs with tradition and hoary antiquity, we escape, even if we do not respect, her ruling.
(2) The words, “an eminently artificial thing,” are surely a begging of the question. Everybody, even the most be-Taylorized thinker, ought to be able to see this. For, it may be asked, what at present can be called natural and what can be called artificial in civilized man and woman? Is it natural to wear clothes, or is it artificial? Is it natural to use implements instead of our fingers at meals? Is it natural to speak English? Two thousand years ago no one on earth spoke English. In the days of Caractacus, if anyone had stood up to address a crowd in English, he would have been suspected not only of artificiality, but of dangerous insanity. Is the speaking of English now artificial? This is not quibbling. We are bound to suspect insincerity in anyone who, at this late hour, uses the distinctions “artificial” and “natural” of civilized man or woman—particularly when they do so without giving us exact definitions of these words. Many thousands of years ago in Egypt, a certain woman, the wife of Potiphar, Pharaoh’s captain of the guard, cruelly betrayed a man who flouted her advances. Similar cases have happened since. We are all familiar with the saying: “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.”[148] Is this tendency in woman to retaliate upon him who scorns her, the mortification she feels at his rebuff, artificial or natural? Popular tradition in many countries tells us that women are habitual liars. Lombroso points out that their weakness, relative to man, has induced them to use craft and deceit to achieve their ends. Is woman’s weakness relative to man natural or artificial? If it is natural, is her tendency to use craft and deceit also natural? If her weakness is artificial, when and how did it become so, and when and how did prevarication come to her support?
Those who are acquainted with The Subjection of Women will probably reply that Mrs. Taylor, or Miss Helen,[149] did feel it incumbent upon them to state a little more precisely what they meant by the use of the word artificial; for Mill proceeds to write as follows: “It may be asserted, without scruple [fine scruples these!!!], that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”[150] This means that a “true,” a “natural” woman once fell into man’s hands, and that since that time she has been distorted out of all recognition.
But we may very relevantly ask Mesdames Taylor, how, when and where they have had the unique privilege of coming across this wholly “true” and “natural” woman? Presumably, she was not only a “true” woman, but also a “truthful” woman; she was not only a “natural” woman, but a guileless, honest woman, devoid of all malice and vanity—in fact quite unlike the woman Manu knew, or the woman Adam knew. At what period in history did she appear and fall into the distorting hands of man? By what scientific process have Mesdames Taylor acquired any knowledge of her? We only know of woman as she is seen to-day, in history, in the literary remains of antiquity, and in savage tribes. Whence comes this alleged “true” and “natural” woman, beside whom the woman we know is only a distorted caricature? To postulate a norm that is wholly hypothetical, and then to argue that by the side of that gratuitous creation, the woman that we know, and have seen mirrored in history, in the tradition of mankind, and in the work of our acutest psychologists, is a monstrous distortion, may prove a useful means of clouding the issue, but can hardly be allowed to pass as an argument. And the fact that Mill, the logician, the critic of Spencer and Sir William Hamilton, wrote this, and the whole of the remaining paragraph, surely demonstrates how very far he was from being himself when he wrote this particular book.[151]
We therefore deny the possibility of any second meaning to Mesdames Taylor’s sentence, except this, that, like “true” women in argument, they are trying to foist a spurious distinction upon their opponents, with their two words “artificial” and “natural,” so that henceforth all those who allege anything but pleasant things about women, may be promptly gagged with the retort “Artificial!”
A little later on in his Subjection of Women we read the following: “For, however great and apparently ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be, the evidence of their being natural differences could only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which could not possibly be artificial—the residuum, after deducting every characteristic of either sex, which can admit of being explained from education or external circumstances.”[152]
In this sentence it is difficult not to discern the voice of the female collaborator in two distinct vibrations: the general sentiment and the irrational argument; for, apart from the fact that it amounts practically to a drastic and final veto against all such discussions as the one I am engaging in at the present moment, it relies upon wholly specious but plausible biological phraseology for its persuasiveness. In it, moreover, we not only find a reiteration of the counterfeit argument, but also an attempt to dress it in a delusively scientific garb.
According to the evolutionary hypothesis, about which Mrs. and Miss Taylor must have known (for they moved in circles where these matters were discussed, and The Subjection of Women appeared eight to ten years after The Origin of Species) it is impossible to say precisely what is and what is not the outcome of external circumstances in women. In fact it is ridiculous to speak of a possible residuum after the influence of external circumstances has been deducted. The evolutionary hypothesis postulates a method according to which it is conceivable that biological transformations have occurred in the past. This method can be summed up in the following words: The survival of the fittest (the best adapted to life’s circumstances) through the operation of natural selection. But this very law presupposes the action of environment on the organism. It may make every allowance possible for an innate power in the organism to evolve along certain lines (Darwin gave some weight to this factor), but it must reckon with the influence of external circumstances notwithstanding. In fact, “adapted to environment” is exactly what is meant by “fit,” and no more. In the light of this theory—and this is the only accepted theory with which they could have been familiar—what becomes of Mesdames Mill and Taylor’s supposed “residuum,” when once the results of external circumstances have been deducted? It may mean nothing at all. It may mean the original protoplasm from which all life is supposed to have sprung. It may mean a remote member of the anthropoid ape class, or an antediluvian squirrel.
It was, however, never intended that it should undergo so severe an inspection. It is simply one example, flagrant but instructive, of a woman’s “natural” duplicity or dishonesty. If accepted, it makes all inquiry into the nature of man and woman, even on the broadest lines, utterly impossible. If taken seriously, it renders every conclusion you can possibly draw concerning that nature utterly invalid. —And this, indeed, is its precise intention. This is exactly the function it was expected to perform. Mrs. Taylor and her daughter could hope to achieve no more by it.
Advance any opinion on woman’s nature, consonant or not with a sane view of the women of to-day, the women of history, the women of myth, and the women of tradition, and immediately Mrs. Taylor would shoot up from behind her neatly framed and quasi-learned sentence, and declare that your opinion was quite incompatible with her alleged and hypothetical “residuum.”[153] All argument was thus stifled for ever, all discussion, all inquiry, all belief! But what did Mrs. Taylor care? With all those who were susceptible of being duped by her verbal conjuring, she had achieved this remarkable success, that she had silenced them on the subject of her sex’s vices and virtues.
These sentences, and many more like them, constitute the burden of the argument in The Subjection of Women, and make it not only valueless, but also dangerously misleading. The pamphlet remains the most unhappy record of Mill’s character as a thinker.
It is impossible here to examine this hermaphrodite pamphlet line by line; but the fact which makes the disingenuousness of these early lines so monstrous is that the remainder of the book depends upon them, evolves necessarily from them, and falls entirely to the ground if it be deprived of them. When, therefore, it is remembered that this book has exercised a potent influence over half a century of English life,[154] and that its principles have formed the basis of many hundreds of books of the same kind, and of a movement which ultimately fixed the coping-stone into the arch of stupidity supporting our political life, we cannot too severely condemn, not only the carelessness of a man who could so imperfectly distinguish senile sentimentality from his duty to the public, but also the unscrupulousness of two full-grown females who could take advantage of an old man’s blind infatuation in order to mar books, written under his own signature, with the dialectical tactics of contentious and indignant housewives.[155]
Even if we examine the historical value of the ostensibly historic basis of Mill’s contention, we find it entirely unsubstantiated by fact. Mill says: “What is now called the nature of women is an entirely artificial thing—the result of forced regression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”
Taken up by a thousand angry female voices, this came to mean at the end of the nineteenth century that, if women were as they were—inferior to man in intellectual power, in honesty, in reliability, in social instincts, in taste, etc.—it was because throughout their history as a sex they had been oppressed and deprived of the opportunities of improvement.
Now, even if the first part of the sentence were true (and we have already shown how false it is), the latter part remains utterly untenable.
The fact that women throughout their history have had to play the part of mothers, and therefore to stay very much at home, cannot be meant as the artificial factor in their evolution. We cannot therefore conceive of Mrs. Taylor’s having been so palpably foolish as to suppose that it was their motherhood that constituted this “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation.” Have there been “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation” in other respects—at least in the history of our race?
Men of the J. S. Mill school say that you can trace women’s bondage throughout the ages, that you can see how they have been withheld both from places of responsibility and from opportunities for intellectual development ever since the dawn of history. But is this a fact? Is the evidence in favour of this view? Personally, I am convinced that the evidence is entirely against it.
Within the limits naturally described by their destiny as mothers, we can, on the contrary, positively assert that, at least in England and France, nothing—no obstacle, no restriction and no harsh measure whatsoever have stood in the way of women’s development.
Throughout the whole of its history, our people have been careful to place no barrier in the path of women’s advancement. It is rather the other way; everything has been done to enhance and to promote their importance.
Speaking of the early Teutonic tribes, from which we partly sprang, Tacitus emphasizes the prominent rôle that was allowed to the women for generations. “They neither scorn to consult them, nor slight their answers,” said Tacitus. “They even believe that a certain sanctity and prescience characterize the female sex. We have seen Veleda ... long revered as a deity by many. Aurima, besides, and many more, were formerly treated with the same veneration, but not with slavish adulation, nor as if they were goddesses.”[156] Speaking of the neighbours of the Suiones, the Sitones, Tacitus says, they “differ in submitting to a female ruler; so far have they degenerated, not only from liberty, but even from slavery.”[157] Gibbon, after referring more particularly to those women in the early Teutonic tribes who were revered as goddesses, goes on to say: “The rest of the sex, without being adored as goddesses, were respected as the free and equal companions of soldiers; associated even by the marriage ceremony to a life of toil, of danger and of glory.”[158]
“Even more marked than among the Teutonic and Frisian races,” says Dr. Browne, “was the recognition of women in the early Celtic races, whose blood—somewhat diluted—is in our veins.”[159] Two hundred years before the coming of Christ, in the league between Hannibal and the Celts, there was the following clause: “If the Celtae have complaints against the Carthaginians the Carthaginian commander in Spain shall judge it. But if the Carthaginians have anything to lay to the charge of the Celtae, it shall be brought before the Celtic women.”[160]
As regards the women of Anglo-Saxon England, the evidence of their freedom and high cultivation is so voluminous that it would be impossible to quote it in detail. We have only to mention such names as Rowena, Guiniver, Bertha, Ethelburga, Eanfled, Redburga and Osburga[161] the mother of Alfred the Great. Editha, the consort of Edward the Confessor, appears to have been a remarkable woman. The Saxon historian, Ingulphus, speaks highly of her learning and her domestic gifts, while Edith, or Alfgith, Harold’s wife, seems to have been at least a creature of refined sentiments. We also know that all mixed monasteries in Anglo-Saxon times were ruled over by able women.[162] “In 694 five Kentish abbesses were present at the Council of Beckenham and signed the decrees above all the presbyters,”[163] and Anglo-Saxon women also became the heads of monastic institutions in Thuringia. Dr. Browne tells us, moreover, that 1250 years ago those of our English ancestors who could afford it sent their daughters to Paris to be educated.[164]
With the arrival of the Normans, the already important position of women could but be still further enhanced; for, the Normans having attained to an even higher grade of civilization, brought with them the notion, created and taught by the troubadours and minstrels of France and Italy, that the softer sex was entitled, not only to the protection and tenderness, but also to the homage and service of all true knights.[165] Certainly if Emma, wife of Ethelred, and subsequently of Canute, represented the type of Norman women, they must have been a remarkable breed. I do not attach as much blame to her, as some are inclined to do, for sacrificing the interests of her children by her first husband to those by her second marriage with the Danish conqueror—and this seems the gravamen of the charges brought against her, even by Edward the Confessor; for we have to remember two circumstances in mitigation of this charge: (1) Her possible greater love for her second husband; (2) His ascendancy over her, to which it is a credit to her to have yielded, and consequently the likelihood of his having been himself responsible for her attitude to the children of the first bed. In any case, the fact that Edward the Confessor himself fell at her feet imploring her pardon with tears, after she had successfully passed through the ordeal of walking barefoot unscathed over nine red-hot ploughshares in Winchester cathedral, in order to clear herself of the charges brought against her by her foes; and the fact that he submitted to the discipline at the high altar, as a penance for having exposed her to such a test of her innocence, are, to my mind, overwhelming evidence in her favour. On this score, alone, I feel safe in concluding that she must have been a remarkable woman not only for her own time, but for all time.[166]
In the Middle Ages, therefore, women may be said to have enjoyed a position, not only of untrammelled freedom, but of exceptional honour. Matilda of Scotland, Adelicia of Louvaine, the third Matilda, Berengaria, Eleanor of Castille, were creatures who could only have deployed the qualities they did deploy, in an age in which every opportunity was afforded for female education and development. And, indeed, Mill himself sees an objection to his argument here;[167] for all historians are unanimous. Women were voting in municipal elections in France as early as 1316 and 1331. Guizot, writing of the women of the Middle Ages, says: “Quand le possesseur de fief d’ailleurs sortait de son château pour aller chercher la guerre et les aventures, sa femme y restait, et dans une situation toute différente de celle que jusque’là les femmes avaient presque toujours eue. Elle y restait maîtresse, châtelaine représentant son mari, chargée en son absence de la défense et de l’honneur du fief. Cette situation élevée et presque souveraine, au sein même de la vie domestique, a souvent donné aux femmes de l’époque féodale une dignité, un courage, des vertus, un éclat qu’elles n’avaient point déployés ailleurs, et elle a, sans nul doute, puissamment contribué à leur développement moral et au progrès général de leur condition.”[168]
We know that women surgeons were quite common in the Middle Ages;[169] Queen Philippa had one, Cecilia of Oxford[170]; the Middle Ages also produced many women writers; while there is even reason to believe that the ordinary duties of motherhood—which presumably Mill and his female authority would have regarded as part of the factors making for women’s subjection—were evaded by certain mediæval mothers.[171]
When we come to more recent times, with the more plentiful material that lies to hand, we are able to demonstrate beyond a doubt that, if ever women had limitations forcibly imposed upon the development of their intellect or character, it was certainly not in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In France in 1576 they were voting for the elections of the States-general, and in the same century they held seats in the States Assembly of Franche-Conté. As regards protection of the female in France in this and the following two centuries, it was rigorous to the point of being inhuman. In 1579 there was a law that made rape a capital offence.[172] In 1709 a certain Sieur La Gravigne was condemned to capital punishment for having seduced a girl with whom he had eloped; in 1712 a member of the Paris Parliament was ordered to pay 60,000 livres damages (or 200,000 francs) for breach of promise, and in 1738 the Parliament at Dijon condemned the Marquis de Tavannes to death for having eloped with a Demoiselle de Bron.[173]
Miss Alice Clark has gone to great pains to collect some of the evidence that may be adduced on this subject, in so far as England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is concerned, and speaking of the women of the sixteenth century she says: “The ladies of the Elizabethan period possessed courage, initiative, resourcefulness and wit in a high degree. Society expected them to play a great part in the national life and they rose to the occasion; perhaps it was partly the comradeship with their husbands in the struggle for existence which developed in them qualities which had otherwise been atrophied.”[174] Of the women of the seventeenth century, she has shown how many were their opportunities of becoming self-reliant, versatile and resourceful. “At the beginning of the seventeenth century,” she tells us, “it was usual for the women of the aristocracy to be very busy with affairs—affairs which concerned their household, their estates, and even the Government.... Among the nobility the management of the estate was often left for months in the wife’s care.... In addition to the household accounts, those of the whole of Judge Fell’s estate at Swarthmore, Lancashire [circa 1670-1680] were kept by his daughter Sarah.” These accounts “show that the family affairs included a farm, a forge, mines, some interest in shipping and something of the nature of a bank.... A granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell, the wife of Thos. Bendish, was also interested in the salt business, having property in salt works at Yarmouth in the management of which she was actively concerned,”[175] etc., etc.
“A book might be wholly filled with the story of the part taken by women in the political and religious struggles of the period,” says Miss Clark. “They were also active among the crowd who perpetually besieged the Court for grants of wardships and monopolies or patents.”[176]
“From the women who begged for monopolies which if granted must have involved much worry and labour if they were to be made profitable,” continues Miss Clark, “we pass naturally to women who actually owned and managed businesses requiring a considerable amount of capital. They not infrequently acted as pawn-brokers and money-lenders.... The names of women often occur in connexion with the shipping trade and with contracts.... Women’s names appear in lists of contractors to the Army and Navy,”[177] etc., etc. In short, I cannot do better than refer the reader to Miss Clark’s excellent treatise; and should he leave it still thinking, with Mesdames Taylor, that the Subjection of Women is clearly demonstrated at least by the life of the seventeenth century, he will have formed an opinion strangely at variance with the facts adduced.
Now, in the face of all this evidence—and I do not pretend to know, much less to have adduced, a hundredth part of it—in view, moreover, of the prominent part that women, even of the most obscure origin, played in the literature of the eighteenth century, and the independence with which they moved in society, how can it any longer be maintained, with any semblance of honesty, that there has been, as if from malice aforethought, a male conspiracy to achieve the subjection of women?
In trying to explain away certain female characteristics, which are as unanimously testified to to-day as they have been in all ages of history, by ascribing them to a distortion of “true” or “natural” woman—whoever or wherever she may be—as if woman were only just at this moment coming into her own, as if in fact she were only just emerging from a dark and stifling obscurity that had stunted her, Mill and his followers are guilty of a deliberate lie. They imply that which it is incumbent upon them to prove, and they do so with the full-throated sentimentality of romanticists, who cannot be quite sensible, who must have a tear in their eye, and a lump in their throat, when they pronounce the word “Woman.”
But the falsehood, palpable as it was, succeeded by means of its flattering innuendo, in convincing every woman in Great Britain, who had reasons for being discontented and disgruntled. Indeed, so flattering was the innuendo, that even if the alleged subjection was not a historical fact, it was felt that at least it ought to have been. And what was this flattering innuendo in Mrs. Taylor’s falsehood?—It was this: That if hitherto women had produced no outstanding work, no epoch-making masterpiece in the arts or in the sciences, if, in fact, European women had not been so very different from the women of tradition and antiquity, it was not because men were specially gifted, or radically different from them, but simply because European women had been stunted by oppression!
This was much too fascinating a lie ever to be suspected or distrusted by the overweening champions of Women’s Rights, either in the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century; hence the eager speed with which it was swallowed down—hence too Mill’s inordinate popularity! A large majority of women, it is true, were a little too thoughtful, or a little too well informed, to be duped by it; but the disgruntled and arrogant minority won the day.[178]
It is perfectly true, of course—indeed nothing could be plainer—that man, throughout the ages, even of European history, has been unable to relieve woman of those duties which, as a mother, and therefore as a homekeeper, have necessarily devolved upon her;[179] but neither has he been able to relieve himself of the duties of the soldier, the sailor, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water. Nobody in his senses, however (unless he were infatuated with a second Mrs. Taylor), would argue that because man has been unable to relieve woman of those duties, therefore he has distorted her “true” nature.
For the truth is, the fact remains (securely as Mill was blinded to it) that even in those departments of social life which for centuries, almost from time immemorial, have constituted practically the undisputed domain of woman—woman’s Empire, woman’s peculiar field for enterprise and initiative, where her independence and supremacy have been unchallenged—in cooking, clothing and child-care, such ineptitude, such inability to improve, such gross and stubborn stupidity have been shown, that only when men took over these departments of knowledge, as special branches of study, was there any sign, any hope, any certainty of progress being made.
Even if we were so easily hoodwinked as to be led to admit that woman’s relative intellectual inferiority, her lack of creative and inventive ability in other spheres, did not constitute a natural sexual characteristic, but were the outcome of a deliberate attempt on our part to withhold from her the opportunities of acquiring ability in those spheres, how are we to explain the marked deficiency of intelligence and initiative which she has shown as a sex in the elaboration and perfection of those arts or sciences, such as cooking, clothing, and child-care, which have practically been her exclusive domain for ages? Here she was supreme. Here she was entirely free and untrammelled. By now she could have converted each of these pursuits into an exact science. She has had the time, the hereditary bias, and the accumulated knowledge of tradition, all on her side. And yet, as we know, it was only when men took these departments in hand, that they began to wear the aspect of properly regulated and scientific occupations.
To-day the high authorities, the only authorities, on cooking are all men. To-day, if a woman for some reason or other is unable to nurse her new-born child, she cannot turn to the traditional wisdom of her sex,[180] she cannot even turn to a classical work on child welfare written by one member of her sex, she must turn to man; for the high authorities on this subject, at the time of writing, are all men like Dr. Eric Pritchard, or else women who have learnt all they know directly from them. To-day, every fashion, whether of men’s or of women’s clothing, is entirely the creation of the male mind. A group of men in England direct the former, and a group of men in France autocratically prescribe the latter.
The only circumstance that could possibly make me regret the death of a woman like Mrs. Taylor, many years before my own birth, is that it has rendered me unable to confront her with these facts, and to ask her how she accounts, or how she would have made poor Mill account, for this colossal, incurable and wellnigh incredible lack of ability in thousands of generations of women, in occupations where they had everything their own way for centuries.
In England, in the Middle Ages, a proverb was current to the effect that “God sent us meat and the devil ordained the cooking of it.”[181] The cooking of food, which has remained in the hands of women for a longer period in England than in France, is, in England, notoriously atrocious. The clothing of women, which in England is more remote from the male focus of inspiration than in France, is in England proverbially inferior—despite fashion-books and a constant cross-Channel stream of British fashion-spies. While the fact that child-welfare centres are being opened up everywhere (inspired originally by male doctors, and the results of male research), in order to teach women how to take care of their babies, is surely proof enough of the abysmal ignorance into which the traditional mother of history has sunk, regarding a calling which has been her own exclusive field from the beginning of time, and which she ought to have perfected at the very dawn of history.
If Mill had, with one masterly shake of his muddled head, removed those soft pink fingers from his brow, he might possibly have seen all this, and have left his MS. in some conspicuous place where his wise housemaid (who consigned Carlyle’s French Revolution to the flames) might have done the same by his own Subjection of Women. But with characteristic confusion he mistook erotic vividness for mental vision, and thus added one great intellectual blunder to the many which contributed towards forming late nineteenth-century opinion.
Unlike man, whose nature is more variegated and more subject to variation, woman is possessed of a primum mobile that we can recognize—that is to say, she is actuated by a mainspring, a ruling motive, that we can observe in operation. As we have seen, this primum mobile constitutes her the chief custodian and preserver of Life, and the chief promoter of Life’s multiplication. In fact, these two functions constitute her principal importance, and endow her with her great power and her great value. Everything else in woman is of minor significance. If, therefore, we assume at this stage in our treatise—for the point has been demonstrated often enough—that the positive woman’s incessant and unconscious impetus is in the direction of Life and its multiplication, we may expect to find in woman all the virtues that guarantee the survival of the species, and all the vices which Life itself reveals in the pursuit of this same object.
Seeing that the pursuit of Life and its multiplication is in Nature an activity that is untrammelled by any moral consideration whatsoever, we may ask ourselves, whether in view of the difficulty of improving upon Nature’s methods in this respect, and in view, moreover, of the fact that woman is a child of Nature, we are not justified in recognizing in woman a primum mobile that is also completely a-moral.
If we are so justified, then it follows that all woman’s deeper characteristics, as Nature’s characteristics, are not moral but immoral, not social but unsocial, not lawful but lawless.[182]
Let us proceed to examine this statement more narrowly. A woman’s deepest characteristics are termed by us unmoral. What does that precisely mean? We have admitted that what constitutes woman’s greatest value and her greatest power is that she is the chief supporter of the vital functions—the promotion and preservation of Life. If, therefore, she is also immoral, it must mean that, in the fulfilment of her destiny, she has often to run counter, as Nature does, to our standard of moral integrity. Therefore, that if she were moral, this would be a hindrance and an obstacle in the way of her destiny. But how will she reveal this immorality, or a-morality?—My reply is, in being like Nature utterly unscrupulous in the means she adopts to achieve her vital end—that is to say, more intent on the vital end than on anything else, such as truth, honour, justice, fair-play, etc., etc. For morality means scruples, it involves the necessity of regarding scruples as obstacles in the way of certain actions. If, therefore, we can show that woman, like Nature, is unscrupulous in her promotion and preservation of Life, we will have gone some way towards establishing the fact of her immorality.
Before, however, we proceed with this inquiry, we should like to remind all readers, who at this point may begin to feel their cheeks mantling with indignation, that, since from the optimist’s point of view it is desirable for the human species to survive, a very high sanction indeed prevails over woman’s vital unscrupulousness, however surprising and unexpected its consequences may prove to be.[183] For instance, if, as we hope we have already abundantly shown, woman’s chief and deepest concern is the multiplication and preservation of life, it is obvious that, when confronted by a situation in which a lie will secure her vital end, and one in which truth will defeat it, she will naturally and instinctively choose to lie—not because she necessarily prefers to lie, but because she is more concerned about the end in view than the means she adopts to achieve it, and every lie to her is a “white” lie that secures her vital end. If then from a vital indifference to truth she ultimately reveals an ordinary indifference to truth in the common and less vital circumstances of everyday life, we must blame, not a fundamental perversity of her nature, which would seem to suggest that moral obliquity is a deep-rooted and ineradicable element of her psyche, but a self-preservative characteristic of the race which, though manifesting itself, as it were, unnecessarily and provokingly in everyday affairs, nevertheless, if absent altogether, would prove the most serious menace to the survival of humanity. In the form of a simile we might say that, just as the good army marksman annoys us when, in peace-time, he disturbs our quiet moments with his incessant revolver or rifle practice, and his insatiable desire to “pot” anything and everything, yet we applaud and defend his love of his fire-arm and his skill with it, when, in time of war, he and his like defend our homes and ourselves by “accounting” for numbers of the enemy.
Is that clear? In plain English, to take an extreme case, if a girl is to be equipped with that ability for wiles and small deceptions which, despite adverse circumstances, are to enable her to secure a lover and a husband and a large family early in life; if, moreover, she is to be prepared to go to extreme lengths to defend and promote the welfare of her children (as all good mothers are), and also to secure their survival and success over the heads of other and possibly more deserving or better children (as all good mothers are prepared to do[184]); if, moreover, in her relations with her husband and her children, she is to display that tact and diplomacy which always secure her the victory in domestic negotiations; then, it seems to me, we have a creature whose special gifts will extend beyond her family and its vital concerns, and invade all the other circumstances of her life, and who will inevitably practise wiles and small deceptions in those conditions where life, its multiplication and preservation are not necessarily in question.
The fact, however, that such a creature may be detected again and again in some act of unscrupulousness, not necessarily concerned directly with Life, or some vital interest, does not mean that she is perverse or depraved for the sake of perversity and depravity, as ends in themselves, but simply that her vital unscrupulousness cannot well be confined to the business of Life and its multiplication, and cannot exist as a useful characteristic of her being, without manifesting itself in conditions and circumstances where no vital consideration is at stake. In other words, if you are to have a good house-dog, who will protect you from burglars at night, you must warn your milkman and your dustman, although they have no dishonest intention in entering your garden, not to go too near him, for his useful characteristic is bound to manifest itself in circumstances and conditions where its usefulness is not vital.
When from folklore and myth, from national proverbs and tradition, and from the text-books of the oldest religions, therefore, we learn that woman is two-faced, or false, or treacherous, or disloyal, while we cannot expect these sources of information to give us also their reasons for their verdict, we have at least a hint that something deeper is in question than an obliquity of mind. For one would have thought that centuries of schooling would have eradicated these characteristics from women, and that if they have failed to do so, something more essential to woman’s nature than a mere perversion of mind may be suspected. Neither is it enough to point, as Lombroso does, to woman’s relative weakness, to her periodical functional disturbances, to her modesty, etc., to account for a trait so universally attested.[185]
The positive woman who is disloyal to her absent husband is not disloyal from weakness, she is disloyal owing to the vital impulse of her large and important reproductive organs, which, after a spell of idleness, clamorously demand employment. The woman who lies about her age, or about her antecedents, or about any other circumstance of her life, in order to secure a husband or a lover, does not do so because she is relatively weaker than the man she wishes to secure, but because, again, her unconscious mind urges her to procure fertilization at all costs.
The unfairness of the attitude of most psychologists and other men to the phenomenon of unreliability and deception in woman, consists in the fact that they condemn it without understanding it; while those who neither condemn it nor understand it stubbornly, stupidly, and sentimentally deny it in the face of all the overwhelming evidence in proof of its existence. But when once you admit that duplicity and disloyalty in women are part of a vital principle making for the multiplication and preservation of life, and serving the best interests of the species, you are no longer even entitled to condemn those same characteristics when they happen to operate in circumstances and conditions inconvenient to yourself. You cannot always expect to have it both ways, and if the species profits by a certain principle in the female, it must expect to pay for that principle somewhere, somewhen.
To attempt to make woman perfectly honest and upright would therefore be to attack the most vital impulse within her[186]—that impulse which causes her to be eager to the point of unscrupulousness in securing and preserving a multiplication of life. And yet there are many wise fools, both men and women, who have solemnly set themselves that object, and are striving to achieve it by every means in their power.
If we observe Nature herself engaged upon the same task that constitutes woman’s principal concern in life, we observe the same unscrupulousness. Nature stops at nothing to achieve this end. All means are good to her: rapine, deception, falsehood, usurpation of rights, bullying, stealth, robbery, invasion, and complete indifference to quality and desirability.
Life in Nature is a continuous process of inter-racial and intra-racial struggles for power and supremacy, with no principle, except the one of “more life” in each race or species, governing the whole. Every species behaves as if it alone had the right to exist on earth, irrespective of all other claims. The fact that there are more species of parasites than of any other kind of organism shows that this universal process of rapine and deception is pursued without any natural exercise of favour for what, from the human standpoint, can be called desirability. The parasite kills the human genius just as readily as it kills the cow, and the locusts devour the food which is the only sustenance of the ewe and her lamb. Without scruple, and without favour, Nature’s one cry is “Life!” and evermore “Life!” and whether the success of the struggle falls to what we should call the “nobler” species, or to the “inferior,” is a matter of utter indifference to her.
When men like Weininger, Lombroso, Havelock Ellis, and many others, inveigh against Nature turned woman, and see the same unscrupulousness concentrated on one form of survival—human survival—the fact that they do not trace this characteristic to a positive and vital source makes their moral condemnation of women worthless and unworthy of a scientific thinker.[187]
In woman I recognize some of the principal virtues that make for a continuance of the human species on earth: (1) Unreflecting constancy to the demands of Life;[188] (2) Untiring interest in the processes of Life and its multiplication (which in its minor ramifications lead to that intense concern about all human affairs, which, in opprobrious language, is called “a love of scandal-mongering”); (3) A capacity for desperate bravery in defending or succouring human life; (4) A capacity for single-minded devotion to her own offspring (which in its minor ramifications often manifests itself in the virgin, and in the spinster of all ages, as a single-minded devotion to a purpose, to an idea, or to a cause); (5) A capacity for bodily purity, or chastity, which in the more passionate type of woman is based upon an instinct to withhold herself until her heart and her affections are captured (this in its spiritual ramifications leads to intellectual obstinacy, conservatism, or fanaticism. Thus a woman’s citadel of opinions, like her bodily citadel, is only liable to capitulation when her heart and her affections are engaged).
These five cardinal virtues of woman constitute her eternal claim to glory and to respect; in each of them she is a natural mistress, a gifted virtuosa. They are of so much value, of so much moment, to the human species, that they overshadow every catalogue of foibles and vices that has ever been drawn up against her by a Weininger or a Schopenhauer, and she who possesses them can afford even to forgive a Weininger or a Schopenhauer. Noble as they are in themselves, they can claim in addition the highest possible sanction and testimonial that it is possible for a human character to receive—the sanction and testimonial of Human Survival itself, without which no virtue on earth can hope to last or to prevail, and by the side of which the mere applause and approval of one or many generations of men is but as a pair of bellows puffing in the wind.
To appreciate these virtues of woman at their proper worth, however, a stronger and more vital generation of people is needed than any that has appeared, in England at least, for the last 250 years. The very fact that, at the present day, the general concensus of opinion among men would accord to women quite a different set of virtues, is a sufficient sign of the degeneracy that has occurred.
To-day, for instance, a Parliament of Englishmen or Anglo-Saxons would, in enumerating woman’s virtues, speak about—(1) Her moralizing influence on Society;[189] (2) Her unselfishness (whatever that may mean!); (3) Her powers of self-sacrifice (this is the result of sick values and a confusion of thought—see pp. [77-79]); (4) Her intuition (a great myth, the outcome of woman’s habit of saying the first thing that enters her head, and which, according to the laws of chance, must be right sometimes); (5) Her humanitarianism (a mischievous misunderstanding)—all weak, or at least, fictitious qualities, that no full-blooded woman would ever do anything more than pretend to possess, and which made Huxley say “that woman’s virtue was man’s most poetic fiction!”
If, however, we choose to dwell on the five cardinal virtues that derive directly from the great vital impulse within her, and to think of the many useful minor virtues that spring from them, we have a list which, if it is less goody-goody than the above, is both hardier and more compatible with reality.
From (1), which we call the Unreflecting constancy to the demands of Life, we can see the following as derivatives: (a) Woman’s constancy to the circumstances (and therefore to the man) who enables her to meet the demands of Life. (b) Her intensely keen sense of self-preservation, when the danger threatening her is not life-promoting. This accounts for her caution, her sagacity in suspecting the unfamiliar, and her over-anxiousness in public thoroughfares, or on railway platforms, on board ship, and in the neighbourhood of restive horses, etc. (c) Her quick recognition of the fact that a given environment cannot procure the demands of Life—hence her mobility, tractableness, docility, amenability, and readiness to follow at great personal risk, until such time as she has found the environment that can procure her the demands of Life. In all communities where marriage is difficult owing to a superfluity of women, girls thus show a tendency frequently to change their environment, and are quite unconscious that in so doing they are pursuing tactics which are calculated to enable them to meet Life’s demands. Thus, they will leave home to study Political Economy, or Sculpture, and when that fails they will change over to child-welfare, or to nursing, and if that fails they will try secretarial work—giving as their reason at each change, that the previous work “did not satisfy them.” If economic pressure compels, they will of course be forced to remain in one occupation, whether it satisfies the demands of Life or not; but those who can afford it, will, as a rule, be restless until they find an environment which promises them fertilization. (d) Her ability to put up with any number of inconveniences and discomforts, provided that the demands of Life are procured for her—hence her stoicism in poverty, or any other kind of distress, despite the fact that her children share it; hence her cheerful courage in those vital inconveniences connected with an existence in which the demands of Life are being met—illness, the incessant clatter of many children, the hard work that a number of children imposes upon a poor female parent, etc., etc. (e) Her ability to treat all life emotionally. The very quality of unreasoning or unreflecting constancy to the demands of Life, involves an impulsive attitude towards them. I used the word “unreflecting” purposely. It is because woman does not pause to reflect whether it is proper, or expedient, or right, that she should perform a certain action to meet the demands of Life, that she can be so thoroughly relied upon to perform it punctually. If she reflected, it would presuppose hesitation, therefore delay, therefore possibly inaction. But it should be remembered that this attitude is a purely emotional one, and since the business of Life, with the various relationships the family creates, is largely a matter of the emotions too, and not of the reflective or reasoning faculties, it follows that the tradition or history of woman’s mental life is largely confined to the play and the exercise of the emotions. Life, as far as normal woman is concerned, is a matter of affection, of attachment and devotion, first to the man of her heart, and lastly to the children of her blood. Where she may be expected to be practised, gifted and versatile, therefore, is precisely in this sphere of the emotions; for they alone are capable of directing that unreflecting form of action that the demands of Life impose upon her. A mistress of feeling, therefore, we cannot expect her to be so perfect at reflection.[190]
From (2), which we call the Untiring interest in the processes of Life and its multiplication, we can see the following derivations: (a) Woman’s helpfulness and readiness to be of use in all those circumstances in a neighbour’s, friend’s, or relative’s home, in which she comes in close contact with Life’s most serious business, at moments of child-birth, serious illness, and death, and particularly at moments of great domestic upheavals, such as times of serious disagreement, and all tragic occurrences, between couples. The fact that these virtues necessarily involve such an all-embracing interest in human affairs, that a love of scandal is an almost inevitable counterpart of them, is not difficult to see. The evils of scandal-mongering, however, are grossly exaggerated. All decent, humane and humanity-loving people revel in scandal, and I have never yet met a woman who was worth knowing who was not an inveterate scandal-monger. “The proper study of mankind is Man,” said Pope, and he was entirely right. But what is scandal-mongering, and the exhaustive discussion of one’s acquaintances, relatives and friends, but an essential description of that “proper study”? Husbands who do not sympathize with their wives’ love of scandal, and who refuse to join with them in expatiating on tittle-tattle, are usually inhuman and narrow men, such men as make good engineers, good mathematicians, good chemists, and good sailors or explorers. These men will expect their wives to listen breathlessly when they discuss sport or some other futile subject as remote as possible from humanity, and yet will show impatience if their wives discuss the marital relations of their next-door neighbour. (b) This virtue makes women very observant of little odd characteristics in their fellow-creatures. And if women are, as a rule, such good mimics and imitators, it is due partly to the earnestness with which they observe other men and women (the other reason for their power of imitation I shall give under (5)). Women will frequently draw wrong conclusions from the traits they have observed—this I do not deny—but the interesting point is that they usually observe the traits.
From (3), which we called Desperate bravery in defending and succouring human life, we can see the following derivatives: (a) The readiness to incur mortal risk for a child of their own (quite common); for a husband (very rare, except in early days of marriage when children have not yet arrived); for a loved human creature of any kind. (b) A certain foolhardy and reckless daring in engaging overwhelming odds for the sake of achieving a vital purpose (a woman will assault a man twice her size and three or four times her strength at such moments). (c) A capacity for a fierce unrelenting hatred towards enemies, deceivers, or betrayers of those she loves. (d) In the realm of the spirit, a readiness to perform a mad feat of intrepidity to defend or promote an idea (Miss Emily Davison in that marvellous rush at the King’s horse in the Derby of 1913.[191] We loathed the cause for which she fought, but we honoured and admired the fierce single-mindedness with which she and the other militant suffragettes fought for it).
From (4), which we call A capacity for single-minded devotion to her own offspring, we can see the following derivatives: (a) Woman’s unswerving tenacity of purpose in serving and ministering to those she loves. (b) Her indefatigable industry on behalf of those who depend on her, so that she is able, like a horse, to work herself to death, provided she loves and knows she is loved. (c) In the spiritual realm, her capacity for fanatical adherence to a cause, to a belief, to a faith, and her corresponding fierce antagonism to those who oppose that cause or faith. (d) Her pride in her own offspring and her consequent tendency to undervalue or to dislike the offspring of others. When this sentiment is stimulated to its zenith by the fact that the offspring of others happen to be the offspring of the former possessor of her man’s love, you get the staggering cruelties of the stepmother. Thus in woman’s nature does good merge into evil, and evil merge into good.[192]
It is certainly in this capacity for single-minded devotion to her own offspring that, generally speaking, the greatest beauty of woman’s character is revealed; and to one who has experienced it in all its perfection and intensity, there is perhaps some pardonable difficulty in speaking about it either with calm or with moderation. The very effort of seeking, in writing, a suitable expression for his feelings in this matter may well seem to a man to subject them to a limitation and temperateness which he can hardly regard as sincere; and, ultimately, in the coldness of the printed page, he can perceive, at best, but a poor travesty of the sentiments he wished to convey.
Everything connected with this virtue is at once so useful to the race, and so unique and unforgettable as an individual experience, that it seems only fitting to pause for a moment here to dwell on one or two of its most stirring features. Passing over the first months and years when the only force between helpless, pitiably dependent life, and death—or at least neglect—is precisely this mother’s instinct, this jealous care, when inarticulate infancy can neither acknowledge, return thanks for, nor, what is perhaps more perplexing, realize all the thousand and one services that are cheerfully performed in order to promote its growth and its comfort; passing over, too, those moments of the silent watcher, of the sleepless sentry, in which, during times of danger, every breath is a prayer, and every smile a song of thanksgiving; we would like more particularly to concentrate upon that period of early childhood, on that age of babbling tongue and unsteady gait, when most of that which is to be of use in life, and indeed most of that which is never to be forgotten in life, is learnt at the mother’s side. Not that we would wish to reduce by one iota the importance of the former period, the most wonderful aspect of which is, perhaps, the joy that is felt by either side in simply playing its appointed rôle; but rather because in the latter period both parties are conscious of this same joy, and are in a position to prolong it, transmute it and preserve it, until long after that age when the positions become reversed, and dependence has begun on the side of the once protecting mother.
There is in the child of a good mother, a spirit so confiding, so receptive, so perfectly trustful, that possibly at no other age are the pre-requisites for sound education more completely present than in those first years of life at the dawn of which a fold of the mother’s skirt still offers a substantial amount of support to legs that are learning both bearing power and balance. What happens then, and how it happens, will, of course, never be properly recorded; for lessons are given and lessons are learnt without sufficient conscious effort on either side for the method to be made a subject of exact knowledge. But the result is gradually made manifest by the marvellous transformation of an inarticulate little animal, whose whole horizon is bounded by food, sleep and apparently purposeless limb-exercises, into a creature that can express its wishes, demand explanations of the things about it, learn to recognize the first rules of decent behaviour, and, what is more, shed its own fresh light on the problems of existence; and, if what it learns later on may, from the standpoint of material utility, bear a more imposing and less chaotic aspect, certainly nothing it has failed to learn at this period will ever be acquired at any subsequent stage of its existence. It cannot be said that it has mastered any definite system of thought, or that it has memorized any particularly striking fact; it may not even have learnt the very patience and gentleness which its mother has constantly exhibited in her care of it. Nevertheless, it has learnt things which, in solemn truth, can be said to be little short of priceless.
Let it not be suspected, however, because we can find only vague phraseology for our purpose, that we wish to claim for this early education an indispensable character that it really does not possess. What is it then that makes it almost impossible to give a more narrow description of it without losing all grasp of its magnitude and importance?—It is the fact that, from this education are derived those qualities of heart and mind which, though hardly ever referred to at critical moments in a man’s life, are nevertheless among the most serviceable and powerful of life’s weapons. The man who has had a good mother has learnt to feel a certain confidence in his own unaided efforts, because the best in him has been diligently sought, encouraged, and brought to the fore; he has acquired a certain vigorous sanguineness and courage because, having started life so well, in such a glorious morning of sunshine, he is conscious of stored-up warmth within him, upon which he can fall back in his moments of loneliness, gloom and trouble; but, above all, he has been launched forth into the world with at least one solid experience, one ineffaceable impression of human kindness and human beauty, and this, while it gives him a perpetual criterion of value and criticism, shielding him from the specious and the base, also prevents him from ever feeling that despair and doubt about himself and his fellows which in moments of deep tribulation paralyses effort and precludes the possibility of hope.
This is what the equipment amounts to, with which a loving mother can endow her son. Quite apart from the joys that are derived from deep filial emotions, and from that unique relationship of a mother to her son, these are among the chief benefits that the relationship necessarily involves. Most of the great men in history owe their greatness partly to this equipment; most of the great men in history—Schopenhauer, Byron, de Quincey—whose relationship to their mothers was not ideal, reveal in their works the effects of this deficiency; and he who ventures to question that here, indeed, I have laid my finger on what is quintessential in the education that a good mother gives to her child, and incapable of satisfactory substitution by any other means in her absence, is one of those unfortunates from whom life has withheld this most precious of all her blessings.
It is here that woman excels; it is here that she can defy all competition, and it is in this rôle that the best in herself, and some of the best in mankind, is developed and sustained. Anything else that she may do must be always second best to this; and those who, by misrepresentation and appeals to vanity, persuade her while she is yet quite young that there are callings better than, or at least as good as, motherhood for her, are enemies not only of woman, but also of the species.
From (5), which we call A capacity for bodily purity or chastity, which is based upon an instinct to resist fertilization until heart and affection are engaged, we can see the following derivatives:[193] (a) Woman’s tendency to a certain rather becoming dignity and pride, which come to their zenith at the moment of the most heated appeal made by the lover who has failed to engage her heart and affection. This on the spiritual side leads to a power of renitency against conviction and persuasion, which frequently makes of woman a most powerful and reliable ally in a secret movement, or in a secret intrigue. (b) Since the demands of Life make it necessary, when once woman has abandoned her attitude of chaste resistance, to yield wholly and unreservedly to the male, there is in all women a certain sequaciousness, a certain docility, a marked predilection in favour of subservience and subordination to those who have engaged their affections, which makes of woman the most naturally constituted follower, disciple, servant, that it is possible to find. On the spiritual side, it makes her acutely subject to guidance and direction, to receptivity, to suggestion[194] and to imitation. But seeing that sequaciousness, imitation, whether in regard to opinion, mannerism or fashion, is the reverse of original production, and involves an absence or a weakness of the initiating power of personality, we are bound to recognize in woman, as a direct consequence of her necessary physical and psychological surrender, when once the attitude of chastity has been abandoned, a lack of originating power, a lack of that prehensile attitude of mind which seizes and does not wait to be seized, and which is behind all male emancipation, aggression, originality and inventiveness. This, indeed, is the other reason which under (1) we said we had yet to give for woman’s power of imitation.[195] Thus Arabella Kenealy calls the sex-instinct “in the normal girl, responsive rather than initiative.”[196]
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.