CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII
SEX DIFFERENCES
The practical application of the truths arrived at—A question to be faced—The organic differences between the sexes—Résumé of the facts already established—The error in the common opinion of the true relationship of the sexes—The male active and seeking—The female passive and receiving—Is this true?—An examination of the passivity of the female—The delusion that man is the active partner in the sexual relationship—The economic factor in marriage—The conventional modesty of woman—Concealments and evasions—The feeling of shame in love—Woman's right of selection—How this must be regained by women—The new Ethic—The pre-natal claims of the child—The question of parenthood as a religious question—The responsibility of the mother as the child's supreme parent—The mating of the future—Another question—Woman's superior moral virtue—Its fundamental error—Woman's imperative need of love—The maternal instinct—Nature's experiments—The establishment of two sexes—The feminine and masculine characters are an inherent part of the normal man and woman—The female as the giver of life—The deep significance of this—The atrophy of the maternal instinct—Modern woman preoccupied with herself—The right position of the mother—Sex attraction and sex antagonism—Woman's relation to sexuality—The duel of the sexes—The prostitution of love—Man's fear of woman—Misogyny—The rebellion of woman against man—Coercive differentiation of the sexes in consequence of civilisation—The ideal of a one-sexed world—Woman as the enemy of her own emancipation—The attempt to establish a third sex—The danger of ignoring sex—The future progress of love.
CHAPTER VIII[ToC]
SEX DIFFERENCES
"Woman is an integral constituent of the processes of civilisation, which, without her, becomes unthinkable. The present moment is a turning point in the history of the feminine world. The woman of the past is disappearing, to give place to the woman of the future, instead of the bound, there appears the free personality."—Iwan Bloch.
At length we are ready, clear-minded and well-prepared, to deal with the question of woman's present position in society. Our minds are clear, for we have freed them from the age-long error that the subjection of the female to the male is a universal and necessary part of Nature's scheme; we are well prepared to support an exact opposite view, with a knowledge founded on some at least of the facts that prove this, by the actual position that women have held in the great civilisations of the past and still hold among primitive peoples, as well as by a sure biological basis. We are thus far advanced from the uncertainty with which we started our inquiry; our investigation has got beyond the statement of evidence drawn from the past to a stage whence the status of woman in the social order to-day, and the meaning of her relation to herself, to man, and to the race may be estimated. The point we have reached is this: the primary value of the sexes has to some extent, at least, been reversed under the patriarchal idea, which has pushed the male destructive power into prominence at the expense of the female constructive force. This under-valuing of the one-half of life has lost to society the service of a strong unsubjugated motherhood.
I am now, in this third and last section of my book, going to deal with what seems to me the practical applications of the truth we have arrived at. And the preliminary to this is a searching question: To what extent must we accept a different natural capacity for women and men? or, in other words, How far does the predominant sexual activity of woman separate her from man in the sphere of intellectual and social work? The whole subject is a large and difficult one and is full of problems to which it is not easy to find an answer. We are brought straight up against the old controversy of the organic differences between the sexes. This must be faced before we can proceed further.
To attempt to do this we must return to the position we left at the end of the fifth chapter. We had then concluded from our examination of the sexual habits of insects, mammals, and birds that a marked differentiation between the female and the male existed already in the early stages of the development of species, and that such divergence, or sex-dimorphism, to use the biological term, becomes more and more frequent and conspicuous as we ascend to the higher types. The essential functions of females and males become more separate, their habits of life tend to diverge, and to the primary differences there are added all manner of secondary peculiarities. We found, however, especially in our study of the familial habits, that these supplementary differences could not be regarded as fixed and unalterable in either the female or the male organism; but rather that the secondary sexual characters must be considered as depending on environmental conditions, among which are included the occupational activities, the scarcity or abundance of the food supply, the relative numbers of the two sexes, and, in particular, the brain development and the strength of the parental emotions. We followed the development of the female element and the male element. The male at first an insignificant addendum to the female, but the long process of love's selection, carrying on the expansion and aggrandisement of the male, led to the reversal of the early superiority of the female, replacing it by the superiority of the male. The female led and the male followed in the evolution process. We saw that there are many curious alternations in the superiority of one sex over the other in size and also in power of function. Below the line, among backboneless animals, there is much greater constancy of superiority among the females, and this predominance persists in many higher types. Even among birds, who afford the most perfect examples of sexual development, the cases are not infrequent in which the female equals, and sometimes even exceeds, the male in size and strength and in beauty of plumage. The curious case of the Phalaropes furnished us with a remarkable example of a reversal of the rôle of the sexes. We found further that (1) an extravagant development of the secondary sexual characters was not really favourable to the reproductive process, the males thus differentiated belonging to a lower grade of sexual evolution, being bad fathers and unsocial in their conduct; (2) that the most oppressed females are as a rule very faithful wives, and (3) that the highest expression of love among the birds must be sought in the beautiful cases in which the sexes, though maintaining the essential constitutional distinctions, are, through the higher individuation of the females more alike, equal in capacity, and co-operate together in the race-work.
It were well to keep these facts clearly in sight; for, in the light of them, it becomes evident that there is an error somewhere in the common opinion of the true relationship of the sexes. Let us go first to the very start of the matter. It is always held that the sperm male-cell represents the active, and the germ female-cell the passive principle in sexuality, and on this assumption there has been based by many a fixed standard for the supposed natural relation between man and woman—he active and seeking, she passive and receiving.
But is this really a fair statement of the reproduction process? The hunger-driven male-cell certainly seeks the female—but what happens then? The female cellule, the ovule, preserves its individuality and absorbs the masculine cellule, or is impregnated by it. Thus, to use the term "passive" in this connection is surely curiously misleading; as well call the snake passive when, waiting motionless, it charms and draws towards it the victim it will devour. Illustrations are apt to mislead, nevertheless they do help us to see straight, and until we have come to find the truth here we shall be fumbling for the grounds of any safe conclusion as to the natural relationship of the female and the male. I think we must take a wider view of the sexual relationship, and conclude that the passivity of the female is not real, but only an apparent passivity. We may even go so far as to say that the female element has from the very first to play the more complex and difficult, the more important part. Herein, at the very start of life, is typified in a manner at once simple and convincing that differentiation which divides so sharply the sexual activity of the female from that of the male. The serious part in sex belongs to the one who gives life, while in comparison the activity of the male can almost be regarded as trifling. And I believe that this view will be found to be amply supported by facts if we turn now to consider the later and human relation of the sexes. In all cases it is the same, the serious business in sex belongs to the woman. As it was in the beginning, so, it seems to me, it continues to the end—it is woman who really leads, she who in sex absorbs and uses the male.
"The passivity of the female in love," it has been said wisely by Marro in his fine work La Pubertà, "is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron towards it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed pre-occupation in the end to be attained."[313] In the examples we have studied of the courtships of birds we saw that it is by no means a universal law that the male is eager and the female coy. I need only recall the instance noted by Darwin[314] in which a wild duck forced her love on a male pintail, and such cases, as is well known, are frequent. High-bred bitches will show sudden passions for low-bred or mongrel males. According to breeders and observers it is the female who is always much more susceptible of sentimental selection; thus it is often necessary to deceive mares. Among many primitive peoples it is the woman who takes the initiative in courtship. In New Guinea, for instance, where women hold a very independent position, "the girl is always regarded as the seducer. 'Women steal men.' A youth who proposed to a girl would be making himself ridiculous, would be called a woman, and laughed at by the girls. The usual method by which a girl proposes is to send a present to the youth by a third party, following this up by repeated gifts of food; the young man sometimes waits a month or two, receiving presents all the time, in order to assure himself of the girl's constancy before decisively accepting her advances."[315]
In the face of this, and many similar cases, it becomes an absurdity to continue a belief in the passivity of the female as a natural law of the sexes. Such openness of conduct in courtship is, of course, impossible except where woman holds an entirely independent position. Still, it would not be difficult to bring forward similar manifestations of the initiative being taken by the woman—though often exercised unconsciously as the expression of an instinctive need—in the artificial courtships of highly civilised peoples. But enough has perhaps been said; and such examples can, I doubt not, be readily supplied by each of my readers for themselves. I will only remark that the true nature of the passivity of the woman in courtship is made abundantly clear from the ease with which the pretence is thrown off in every case where the necessity arises.
Nothing is more astounding to me than this delusion that the man is the active partner in sex. I believe, as I have once before stated, that Bernard Shaw[316] is right here when he says that men set up the theory to save their pride. Having taken to themselves the initiative in all other matters, they claim the same privilege in love; and women have acquiesced and have helped them, so that the duplicity has become almost ineradicable. Few women are brave enough to admit this even if they have clear sight to see the truth; they know that it is not permitted to them to exercise openly their right of choice. They understand that the male pride of possession—the hunter's and the fighter's joy—must be respected. But this makes not the least difference to the result, only to the way in which that result is gained. So the whole of our society is filled with half-concealed sex-snares and pitfalls set by women for the capture of men. The woman waits passive! Yes, precisely, she often does. But exactly the same may be said of the female spider when she has spun her web, from which she knows full well the victim fly will not escape.
There is another point that must be noticed. Under our present sexual relationships the price the woman asks from the man for her favours is marriage as the only means of gaining permanent maintenance for herself and for her children. Now that these economic considerations have entered into love she has to act with a new and greater caution, for she has to gain her own ends as well as Nature's ends. In the matriarchal society the girl was allowed openly to pick her lover, and forthwith he went with her. But to the modern woman, under the patriarchal ideals, if she shows the modesty that convention requires of her, all that is permitted is the invitation of a lowered eyelid, a look, or perchance a touch, at one time given, at another withheld.
Now, I find it the opinion of most of my men friends that such half-concealed encouragements, such evasions and drawings back are a necessary part of the love-play—the woman's unconscious testing of the fussy male. There is one friend, a doctor, who tells me that the woman's dissimulation of her own inclination has come to be a secondary sexual characteristic, a manifestation of the operation of sexual selection, diluted, perhaps, and altered by civilisation, but an essential feature in every courtship, so that the woman follows a true and biologically valuable instinct when she temporises and dissembles, and tests and provokes, and entices and repels. She is proving herself and testing her lovers before she permits that awful "merging" that no after-thought can undo.
Now, on the face of it this seems true. There is a passionate uncertainty that all true lovers feel. It is, I think, a holding back from the yielding up of the individual ego—an unconscious revolt from the sacrifice claimed by the creative force before which both the woman and the man alike are helpless agents. It is very difficult to find the truth. Throughout Nature love only fulfils its purpose after much expenditure of energy. But dissimulation on the side of the woman is not, I am sure, a true or necessary incitement to love. Love, as I see it, is a breaking down of the boundaries of oneself, the casting aside of reserve and defences, with a necessary throwing off of every concealment.
In our restricted society, where the sexual instincts are at once both unnaturally repressed and unnaturally stimulated, this openness may not be possible. Concealments and evasions may be an aid at one stage of sex evolution. Just as the half-concealed body is often a more powerful sensual stimulus than nudity; the less one sees, the more does the imagination picture. But the need of such artificial excitants speaks of the poverty of love and not of its fullness. For most of us the strain of sensuality in our loves is very strong. To have lived in the bonds of slavery makes us slaves, and the price that woman has paid is the sacrifice of her purity. The feeling of shame in love, like chastity, arose in the property value of the woman to her owner; it is no more a part of the woman's character than of the man's. Woman must capture her mate because the race must perish without her travail; she is fulfilling Nature's ends, as well as her own, whatever means she uses.
So I am certain that, as woman's right of selection is given back to her to exercise without restraint, we shall see a freer and more beautiful mating. With greater liberty of action she will be far better armed with knowledge to demand a finer quality in her lovers. Her unborn children importuning her, her choice will be guided by the man's fitness alone, not, as now it is, by his capacity and power for work and protection. We are only awakening to the terrible evils of these powerful economic restraints, which now limit the woman's range of choice. It is this wastage of the Life-force that, as I believe, above all else has driven women into revolt.
The free power of Selection in Love! Yes; that is the true Female Franchise. It must be regained by woman, to be used by her to ennoble the sex relation and thereby to cleanse society of the unfit. The means by which this most important end can be attained will be brought about by giving woman such training and education and civic rights, as well as the framing of such laws and changes in the rights of property inheritance, as shall render her economically independent. Existing marriage is a pernicious survival of the patriarchal age. The "patriarch's" wife was significantly reckoned in the same category with a man's "ox" and his "ass," which any other male was forbidden "to covet." The wife was the husband's—her owner's private property—and the curse of this dependence and the old ferocious potestas and manus, from which the Roman wife freed herself, are upon women to-day. With the regaining of their economic freedom by women—by whatever means this is to be accomplished—a truer marriage will be brought within reach of every one, and the sexual relationship will be freed from the jealous chains of ownership that cause such bitter mistrusts in the wreckage of our loves.
Mating will be a much more complex affair, and yet one much more directly in harmony with the welfare of the race. A recognition of the pre-natal claims of the child is the new Ethic that is slowly but surely dawning on womankind and on man. He who destroys human life, however unfit that life may be, is remorselessly punished by society, but the woman and man who beget diseased and imbecile children—the necessarily unfit—are not only exonerated from sin, but applauded by both Church and State. Could moral inconstancy go further than this? It is only in the begetting of men that breeding from the worst stocks may be said to be the rule. As long as in our ideas on these questions superstition remains the guide there is nothing to hope for and much to fear. The new ideal is only beginning, and beginning with a tardiness that is a reproach to human foresight. But herein lies the glad hope of the future. I place my trust in the enlightened conscience of the economically emancipated mothers, and in the awakened fathers, to work out some scheme of sexual salvation as will ensure a race of sounder limb and saner intelligence than any that has yet appeared in our civilisation.
It is woman, not man, who must fix the standard in sex. The problems of love are linked on to the needs of the race. Nature has, as we have seen, made various experiments as to which of the sexes was to be the predominant partner in this relation. But the decision has been made in the favour of the mother. She it is who has to play the chief part in the racial life. There is no getting away from this, in spite of the many absurdities that man has set up, as, for instance, St. Paul's grandmotherly old Tory dogma, making "man the head of the woman."
The differences between woman and man are deep and fundamental. And, lest there be any who fear the giving back to woman of her power, let me say that in this change there will be no danger of unsexing, least of all of the unsexing of woman. Nature would not permit it, even if she in any foolishness of revolt sought such a result, for it is her body that is the sanctuary of the race. Love and courtship will not, indeed, be robbed of any charm, that would be fatal, but they will be freed from the mockeries of love that have always selfishness in them, jealous resentments and fearing distrusts—the man of the woman, not less than the woman of the man. To-day coquetry serves not only as a prelude to marriage, but very often serves as a substitute for it; an escape from the payment of the sacrifices which fulfilled love claims. There is a confusion of motives which now force women and men alike from their service to the race. Sex must be freed from all unworthy necessities. Courtship must be regarded, not as a game of chance, but as the opening act in the drama of life. And the woman who comes to know this must play her part consciously, realising in full what she is seeking for; then, indeed, no longer will her sex be to her a light or a saleable thing. At present economic and social injustices are strangling millions of beautiful unborn babes.
There is another error that I would wish to clear up now. It is a tenet of common belief that in all matters of sex-feeling and sex-morality the woman is different from, and superior to, the man. I find in the writings of almost all women on sex-subjects, not to speak of popular novels, an insistence on men's grossness, with a great deal in contrast about the soulful character of woman's love. Even so illuminated a writer as Ellen Key emphasises this supposed trait of the woman again and again. Another woman writer, Miss May Sinclair, in a brilliant "Defence of Men" (English Review, July 1912), speaks of "the superior virtue of women" as being "primordially and fundamentally Nature's care." And again, woman "has monopolised virtue at man's expense," which the writer, with the most perfect humour and irony, though apparently quite unconscious, regards as "men's tragedy." The woman has received the laurel crown by "Nature's consecration of her womanhood to suffering," the man "has paid with his spiritual prospects as she has paid with her body."
Now, from this view of the sex relationship I most utterly dissent. I believe that any difference in virtue, even where it exists in woman, is not fundamental, that it is against Nature's purpose that it should be so; rather it has arisen as a pretence of necessity, because it has been expected of her, nourished in her, and imposed on her by the unnatural prohibitions of religious and social conventions. The female half of life has not been pre-ordained to suffer any more than the male half: this belief has done more to destroy the conscience of woman than any other single error. You have only to repeat any lie long enough to convince even yourself of its truth. But assuredly free woman will have to yield up her martyr's crown.
I grant willingly that men often talk brutally of sex, but I am certain that few of them think brutally. We women are so easily deceived by the outside appearance of things. The man who calls "a spade a spade" is not really inferior to him who terms it "an agricultural implement for the tilling of the soil." And women also express their sensuality in orgies of emotion, in hypocrisies of chastity, and in many other ways that are really nothing but a subtle sensuality disguised.
I confess that I doubt very much the existence of any special soulful character in woman's love. I wish that I didn't. But my experience forces me to admit that this is but another of those delusions which woman has wrapped around herself. Of course I may be wrong. I find Professor Forel and other distinguished psychologists lending their support to this idol of the woman's superior sexual virtue. Krafft-Ebing goes much further, holding "that woman is naturally and organically frigid." It may be then that some difference does exist in the driving force of passion in men and women. I do not know the exact character of men's love to compare it with my own, and I hesitate to write with that assurance of the passions of the other sex with which they have written of mine. Yet I believe that the male receiving life from the female is not more mindful of the physical needs of love than the woman, though possibly she has less understanding of its joys. For the woman with a much more complex sexual nature is carried by passion further than the male; the continuance of life rests with her. Under this imperative compulsion woman, if needs be, will break every commandment in the Decalogue and suffer no remorse for having done so. I think this seeking to give life remains a necessary element in the loves of all women. At its lowest it will stoop to any unscrupulousness. Bernard Shaw tells us that "if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end to the race." Perhaps this is true. Yet I think woman's love is always different in its fundamental essence from the excitements of the male. We throw the whole burden of sex-desire on to men, because we have not yet faced the truth that they are our helpless agents in carrying on Nature's most urgent work. It has been so from the beginning, since that first primordial mating when the hungry male-cell gained renewal of life from the female, it is so still, I believe it will be thus to the end.
It is when we come to the emotions and actions connected with the maternal instinct in woman that we reach the real point of the difference between the sexes. In its essential essence this belongs to women alone. The male may be infected with the reproduction energy (we have witnessed this in its finest expression among birds, where the parental duties are shared in and, in some cases, carried out entirely by the male), but man possesses, as yet, its faint analogy only. It is the most primary of all woman's qualities, and, being fundamental, it is, I believe, unalterable, and any attempt to minimise its action is very unlikely to lead to progress. It is a two-sexed world; women and men are not alike; I hope that they never will be.
This radical truth is so plain. Yet it seems to me that in the present confusion many women are in danger of overlooking it. We saw in an earlier chapter how very early in the development of life it was found by Nature's slow but certain experiments that the establishment of two sexes in different organisms, and their differentiation, was to the immense advantage of progress. This initial difference leads to the functional distinctions between the female and the male, but it goes much further than this, finding its expression in many secondary qualities, not on the physical side alone, but on the mental and psychical, and is, indeed, a saturating influence that determines the entire development of the organism into the feminine or the masculine character. Take again the fact that this dynamic action of sex has manifested itself in a continual progress through the uncounted centuries. Developed by love's selection, the differentiation of the sexes increased in the evolution of species, and as the differentiation increased the attraction also increased, until in all the higher forms we find two markedly different sexes, strongly drawn together by the magnetism of sex, and fulfilling together their separate uses in the reproductive process. These are the natural features of sex-distinction and sex-union.
The belief, therefore, is forced upon us that the characteristic feminine and masculine characters are an inherent part of the normal woman and man, a duality that goes back to the very threshold of sexuality. So Nature created them, female and male created she them. To change the metaphor, we have the woman and the man=the unit—the race. While there is no fixing of the precise nature of this constitutional difference between the two sexes, we may yet, broadly speaking, reach the truth. The female, as the giver and keeper of life, is relatively more constructive, relatively less disruptive than the male. It is here, I believe, we touch the spring of those sex differences, which do exist, in spite of all efforts to explain them away between the woman and the man. It is a quality that crops up in many diverse directions and penetrates into every expression of the feminine character.
Now, we cannot get away from a difference so fundamental, so primordial as this. The consecration of the woman's body as the sanctuary of life—that perpetual payment in giving is not safely to be altered. And this I contest against all the Feminists: the real need of the normal woman is the full and free satisfaction of the race-instinct. Do I then accept the subjection of the woman. Assuredly not! To me it is manifest that it is just because of her sex-needs and her sex-power that woman must be free. To leave such a force to be used without understanding is like giving a weapon to a child, in whose hands a cartridge suddenly goes off, leaving the empty and smoking shell in his trembling hands.
It is well to remember, however, that for all women there is conceivably no one simple rule. It is quite possible that the maternal instincts may be overlaid and even destroyed, being replaced by others more clearly masculine. In our artificial social state this is indeed bound to be so. It may be regretted, but it cannot be blamed. And each woman must be free to make her own choice; no man may safely decide for her; she must give life gladly to be able to give it well. This is why any effort to force maternity, even as an ideal, upon women is so utterly absurd. To-day woman is coming slowly and hesitatingly to a new consciousness of herself, and this at present is perhaps preoccupying her attention. But the freed woman of to-morrow will have no need to centre her thoughts in herself, for by that time she will understand. There will come a day when women will no longer live in a prison walled up with fear of love and life. And when she has done with discovering herself and playing at conquests, she will come to the most glorious day of all, when she will know herself for what she is. And to those of us who see already the goal the way is surely clear—let us work to find how best it can be made easy for all women to love gladly and to bring forth their children in joy.
Hitherto, dating from the times of the subjection of mother-right to father-right, the woman's insecure position, with her need of protection during the period of motherhood, has forced her into a state of dependence and subordination to men, which has accentuated and made permanent that physical disadvantage which, apart from motherhood, would scarcely exist, and even with motherhood would not become a source of weakness, under a wiser social organisation, which, understanding the primary importance of the mother, so arranged its domestic and social relationships as to place its women in a position of security. We have seen how this was done in Egypt, and how happy were the results; we have seen, too, that among all primitive peoples women are practically as strong as the men, and as capable in the social duty of work. It is only under the fully established patriarchal system, with its unequal development of the sexes, that motherhood is a source of weakness to women. From the time that society comes again to recognise the position of mothers and their right as the bearers of strength to the race, not only to protection while they are fulfilling that essential function for the community, but to their freedom after they have fulfilled it—the same freedom that men claim for the work they do for the community—from that time will arise a new freedom of women which will once again unite mother-right with father-right. This change will touch and vitally affect many of the deepest problems of the sexual relationship and the race.
We hear much to-day of women, and also men, being over-sexed; to me it seems much nearer the truth to say we are wrongly sexed. It is unquestionable that the progress of civilisation has resulted in a markedly accentuated differentiation between the sexes, which, through inheritance and custom, has become continually more sharply defined. Now, up to a certain point sex differences lead to sex-attraction, but whenever such variability—whether initiated by some natural process or by some intentional guidance of the pressure of civilisation—is unduly exaggerated, the way is opened up for sex-antagonism. That this, indeed, occurs may be seen from the fact we have already established, that an exaggerated outgrowth of the secondary sexual characters is not really favourable to development; the species thus differentiated being bad parents and unsocial in their conduct. The large felines, which are often inclined to commit infanticide in their own interests, the male turkey and other members of the gallinaceæ afford examples, and so does the female phalarope, whose maternal instincts are completely atrophied. Another illustration may be drawn from the debased position of the Athenian women, where the sharp separation between the sexes led, without doubt, not only to the debasing of the marriage relationship, but to the establishment of the hetairæ, and also to the common practice of homo-sexual love.
Under our present civilisation, and mainly owing to the unnatural relation of the sexes, which has unduly emphasised certain qualities of excessive femininity, sex-feeling has been at once over-accentuated and under-disciplined. Thus, an extreme outward sex-attraction has come to veil but thinly a deep inward sex-antipathy, until it seems almost impossible that women and men can ever really understand one another. Herein lie the roots, as I believe, of much of the brutal treatment of women by men and the contempt in which too often they are held. For what is the truth here? In this so-called "duel of sex," while woman's moral equality has not been recognised, women have employed their sex-differences as the most effective weapon for compassing their own ends, and men in the mass—unmindful of the truth that love is an understanding of the contrasted natures, a solution of the riddle—have wished to have it so. What significance arises out of this in the so-much-lauded cry, "Woman's influence!" "By thy submission rule," really means in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, "Rule by sex-seduction and flattery." Yes, we women cannot burk the truth—the seduction and flattery of man by woman is writ large over the face of our present society, it speaks in our literature and in our art. It is to this prostitution of love that sex-differences have carried us.
There is, of course, nothing new in these conditions; and there have always been times when men have rebelled against this sexual tyranny of woman. Misogyny is an old story. It is Euripides who betrays to us the real meaning of such revolt. In a fragment of his we read, The most invincible of all things is a woman! Men are so little sure of themselves that they fear suffering from woman an annihilation of their own personality. There is nothing surprising in this; rather it is one of Nature's laws that may not be overlooked, traceable back to that first coalescence when the female cellule absorbs the male. In one way or another, for Nature's ends or for her own, the female will always absorb the male—the woman the man; she is the river of life, he but the tributary stream. Paracelsus long ago gave utterance to the profound truth, "Woman is nearer to the world than man." Hence the army of misogynists—a Schopenhauer, a Strindberg, a Weininger, even a great Tolstoi, alike moved in a rebellion of disillusion, or satiety, against the power of woman that has been turned into turbid channels of misusage. Thence, too, the hateful Christian doctrine of the fundamentally sinful, evil, devilish nature of woman.
This rebellion of men, and their efforts to free themselves from the thrall of women has been of little avail. We have reached now a new stage in the age-long conflict of the sexes—the rebellion of the woman. There has come a time when the old cry, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" is being changed. It is woman who is whispering to herself and to her sisters, and, as she gains in courage, crying it aloud, "Men, what have we to do with you? We belong to ourselves." It is to this impasse in the confusion and antagonism of the present moment of transition that sex-differences are bringing us.
In face of this we may well pause.
What to do is another matter. But I am mainly concerned just now in trying to see facts clearly. And to me it often seems that woman is in grave danger to-day of becoming intoxicated with herself. She stands out self-affirming, postulating her own—or what she thinks to be her own—nature. In her, perhaps too-sudden, awakening to an entirely new existence of a free personality, an over-consciousness of her rights has arisen, causing a confusion of her instincts, so she fails to see the revelation begotten in her inmost self.
There is no getting away from the truth that there is this vital organic distinction between woman and man; and further, that this sexual difference does, and it is well that it should, find its expression in a large number of detailed characters of femaleness and maleness, various in value, some, perhaps, trivial, and some important. These characters are natural in origin and natural also in having survived ages of eliminative selection. But the point I want to make clear is that, side by side with these fundamental differences, have arisen in women a number of what may be called coercive differentiations, inconsistent with, and absolutely hurtful to the natural distinctions, being destructive to the love and understanding of woman and man, and not less destructive to the vigour of the race. This misdifferentiation of women, it is true, is passing, but the progressive gain in this direction is counterbalanced by a new and hardly less grave danger.
I am dealing here with what seems to me to be a perilous quicksand in woman's struggle for free development. To hear many women talk it would appear that the new ideal was a one-sexed world. A great army of women have espoused the task of raising their sex out of subjection. For such a duty the strength and energy of passion is required. Can this task be performed if the woman to any extent indulges in sex—otherwise subjection to man. Sexuality debases, even reproduction and birth are regarded as "nauseating." Woman is not free, only because she has been the slave to the primitive cycle of emotions which belong to physical love. The renunciation, the conquest of sex—it is this that must be gained. As for man, he has been shown up, women have found him out; his long-worn garments of authority and his mystery and glamour have been torn into shreds—woman will have none of him.
Now obviously these are over-statements, yet they are the logical outcome of much of the talk that one hears. It is the visible sign of our incoherence and error, and in the measure of these follies we are sent back to seek the truth. Women need a robuster courage in the face of love, a greater faith in their womanhood, and in the scheme of Life. Nothing can be gained from the child's folly in breaking the toys that have momentarily ceased to please. The misogamist type of woman cannot fail to prove as futile as the misogamist man. Not "Free from man" is the watch-cry of women's emancipation that surely is to be, but "Free with man."
Let us pass to a somewhat different instance—the perversion of the natural instincts of woman which has led to the attempt to establish what has been called a "third sex,"[317] a type of woman in whom the sexual differences are obscured or even obliterated—a woman who is, in fact, a temperamental neuter. Economic conditions are compelling women to enter with men into the fierce competition of our disordered social State. Partly due to this reason, though much more, as I think, to the strong stirring in woman of her newly-discovered self, there has arisen what I should like to call an over-emphasised Intellectualism. Where sex is ignored there is bound to lurk danger. Every one recognises the significance of the advance in particular cases of women towards a higher intellectual individuation, and the social utility of those women who have been truly the pioneers of the new freedom; but this does not lessen at all the disastrous influence of an ideal which holds up the renunciation of the natural rights of love and activities of women, and thus involves an irreparable loss to the race by the barrenness of many of its finest types. The significance of such Intellectuals must be limited, because for them the possibility of transmission by inheritance of their valuable qualities is cut off, and hence the way is closed to a further progress. And, thus, we are brought back to that simple truth from which we started; there are two sexes, the female and the male, on their specific differences and resemblances blended together in union every true advance in progress depends—on the perfected woman and the perfected man.
FOOTNOTES:
[313] See Havelock Ellis, "The Sexual Impulse in Woman," Psychology of Sex, Vol. III. p. 181, who gives this quotation from Marro.
[314] See page 111.
[315] Haddon, "Western Tribes of Torres Straits," Journal of the Anthropological Society, Vol. XIX., Feb. 1890; cited by Ellis, op. cit., p. 185.
[316] See page 66.
[317] E. von Wolzogen gives this name, The Third Sex, to a romance in which he describes a kind of barren, stunted woman, capable, however, of holding her place in all work in competition with men. The writer compares these types of women to the workers among ants and bees. See p. 62. I have quoted from Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 13.