III.—Woman in Art, Literature, Politics, and Social Polity.
In these days, when women begin to talk of their Work with all the zeal and religious fervour that characterises the attitude of the savage towards his fetish, it behoves us to inquire what that Work may be which arouses so much enthusiasm and is the cause of the cool insolence which is becoming more and more the note of the New Woman. A very little inquiry soon convinces the seeker after the true inwardness of modern fads and fancies that Woman’s Work—so to spell it in capitals, in the manner dear to the hearts of the unsexed men and women who reckon Adam a humbug and Eve the most despitefully-entreated of her adorable sex—has nothing to do with the up-bringing of children or the management of the home. Those traditional duties are nothing less, if you please, than the slavery which man’s tyranny has imposed upon the physically weaker sex, and are not worthy of sharing the aristocratic prominence of capital letters which the desultory following of arts and sciences has arrogated. Modern doctrinaires preach heresies which would make miserable that very strong man, St. Paul, who constantly enjoined woman to silence and submission. Place aux dames is the century-end watchword, in a sense very different from the distinguished consideration which the dames of years bygone received. Place aux dames is all very well, as some one has somewhere said—but then, dames in their place, which, with all possible deference to the femininely-influenced philosophers of to-day, is not in politics, nor in any arts or sciences whatever.
Those who so blithely advocate the throwing open of the professions to woman, and invite her to work with them, side by side, in works of practical philanthropy, base their arguments on false premises. They assume, at starting, that womankind has been throughout the centuries in an arrested condition. Her mental and bodily growth has, they say, been retarded by cunningly-devised restrictions; she has not been permitted to develop or to reach maturity—she is, in short, according to these views, undeveloped man, rather than a separate and fully developed sex. Those views are, of course, merely fallacies of the most unstable kind. Woman’s place and functions have been definitely fixed for her by nature, and those functions and that place are to be the handmaid of man (or the handmatron if you like it better), and to be the mother of his children; and her place is the home. Her physical and mental limitations are subtly contrived by nature to keep woman in the home and engrossed in domestic matters; and, really, if abuse is needed at all, man does not deserve it, but to nature belongs the epithet of tyrant, if an owner must be found for the unenviable distinction.
Woman is essentially narrow-minded and individualistic. Her time has ever been fleeted in working for the individual, and the community would be badly off at this day had not the State been thoroughly masculine for a time that goes back beyond the historians into the regions of myths and fairy tales. Small brains cannot engender great thoughts; which is but another way of saying that woman’s brain is less than man’s. It is only recently that woman has organized her forces at all, and she would not have done so, even now, had she not a plentiful lack of anything to occupy her thoughts withal in these days of the subdivision of labour and of extended luxury. And so, with plenty of time to spare, she begins to ask if there is nothing that becomes her better than the ‘suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer.’ But although Carlyle said in his wrath that men and women were mostly fools, yet there be children nourished with nature’s food who have developed a certain force of intellect; and as for the chronicles of small beer, gossip and scandal-mongering have never been compulsory in women, but only unwelcome features of their nature. Idleness, luxury, and the supreme consideration with which even the most foolish feminine manifestations have been received, have always been fruitful sources of mischief, and this by-past consideration has favoured the development of vanity and the growth of the feminine Ego to its present proportions.
Woman never becomes more than an ineffectual amateur in all the careers she enters. Her practice in art and literature inevitably debases art and letters, for she is a copyist at most. In literature she never originates, but appropriates and assimilates men’s thoughts, and in the transcription of those thoughts seldom rises above the use of clichés. But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons; but she does not stop to consider that those distinguished women succeeded not because, but in spite of, their sex, and that few of the women who have made what the world terms successful careers had any of the more gracious feminine characteristics beyond their merely physiological attributes. Many of them were unsexed creatures whose womanhood was an accident of their birth.
The rush of women into the artistic and literary professions has always had a singularly ill effect upon technique, for the woman’s mind is normally incapable of rising to an appreciation of the possibilities of any medium. They have not even a glimmering perception of style, and would as cheerfully (if not, indeed, with greater readiness) acclaim Dagonet a poet as they would the Swan of Avon, although the gulf that divides Shakespeare from Mr. G. R. Sims is not only one formed by lapse of the centuries: to them the works of Miss Braddon appear as the ultimate expression of the passions, and they would as readily label a painting by Velasquez ‘nice’ as they would call the productions of Mr. Dudley Hardy ‘awfully jolly.’ Subject rather than execution wins their admiration, and the nerveless handling of a painting whose subject appeals to their imagination wins their praise while the highest attainments of technique are disregarded. For them does Mr. W. P. Frith paint the Derby Day and So Clean; for their delight are the ‘dog and dolly’ pictures of Mr. Burton Barber, the Can ’oo Talk? the ‘peep-bo’ and ‘pussy-cat’ stories in paint contrived; and for their ultimate satisfaction are they reproduced as coloured supplements in the summer and Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers.
You may count distinguished women artists upon the fingers of your hands, with some fingers to spare, and some of these achieved their fame by reason of their womanhood, rather than the excellence of their art. Angelica Kauffmann is a notable example. She attained the unique position of a female Royal Academician through Reynolds’s infatuation: she painted portraits and classical compositions innumerable, but the portraits are poor and her classicism the most futile and emasculate. Literature, too—although more women have made reputations with the pen than the brush—can show but a very small proportion of feminine genius; and (although the ultimate verdict of the critics may yet depose these) Charlotte Brontë, Fanny Burney, and George Eliot are the most outstanding names in this department. These few names compare with an intolerable deal of mediocrity, cosseted and sheltered from the adverse winds of criticism in its little day; but yet so constitutionally weak that it has withered and died out of all knowledge. The women who, like George Eliot, and her modern successor, Mrs. Humphry Ward, adventure into ethical novels, are too excruciatingly serious and possessed with too solemn a conviction of their infallibility for much patient endurance; and really, when one remembers the spectacle of G. H. Lewis truckling to the critics, intriguing for favourable reviews, and endeavouring to stultify editors for the sake of his George Eliot, in order that no breath of adverse criticism and no wholesome wind from the outer world should come to dispel her colossal conceit, we obtain a curious peep into the methods by which the feminine Ego is nourished. But the spectacle is no less pitiful than strange.
It is not often, however, that women writers present us with philosophical treatises in the guise of novels. Their high-water mark of workmanship is the Family Herald type of story-telling, even as crystoleum-painting and macramé-work exhaust the energies and imagination of the majority of women ‘art’ workers. What, also, is to say of the lady-novelists’ heroes, of god-like grace and the mental attributes of the complete prig? What but that if we collate the masculine characters of even the better-known, and presumably less foolish, feminine novels, we shall find woman’s ideal in man to be the sybaritic Guardsman, the loathly, languorous Apollos who recline on ‘divans,’ smoke impossibly fragrant cigarettes, gossip about their affaires du c[oe]ur, and wave ‘jewelled fingers’—repellent combinations of braggart, prig, and knight-errant, with the thews and sinews of a Samson and the morals of a mudlark.
Philanthropy is a field upon which the modern woman enters with an enthusiasm that, unfortunately, is very much greater than her sense. Her care is for the individual, and she it is who encourages indiscriminate almsgiving, but cannot understand the practical philanthropy which compels men to work for a wage, or organizes vast schemes of relief works. Her whole nature is individualistic, and we would not have it otherwise, for it has, in many instances of womanly women, made homes happy and comfortable, and nerved men in the larger philanthropy which succours without pauperising thousands. But she has no business outside the home.
Philanthropy, of sorts, we have always with us, and the undeserving need never lack shelter and support in a disgraceful idleness while the tender-hearted or the hysterical amateur relieving-officers are permitted to make fools of themselves, and rogues and vagabonds of the lazy wastrels who will never do an honest day’s work so long as a subsistence is to be got by begging. The fashionable occupation of ‘slumming’ made many more paupers than it relieved, and the ‘Darkest England’ cry of Mr. William Booth, whom foolish folk call by the title of ‘General’ he arrogates, is the most notorious exhibition of sentimentalism in recent years. That appeal to the charitable and pitiful folks of England was, like the Salvation Army itself, engineered by the late Mrs. Catherine Booth, and it captured many thousands of pounds wherewith to succour the unfit, the criminal, the unwashed; the very scum and dregs of the race whom merciless Nature, cruel to be kind, had doomed to early extinction. But mouthing and tearful sentimentality has interfered with beneficent natural processes, and the depraved and ineffectual are helped to a longer term of existence, that they may transmit their bodily and mental diseases to another generation, and so foul the blood and stunt the growth of the nation in years to come.
Science, anthropology, and economics have no meaning for the femininely-influenced founders of Salvation Army doss-houses: the body politic—society, in the larger sense—national life, are phrases that convey no meaning to the sobbing philanthropists to whom the welfare of the dosser is a creed and Darwinian theories rank blasphemy.
The tendency of sentimental philanthropy is to relieve all alike from the consequences of their misdeeds, and to preserve the worst and the unfittest, and to enable the worst to compete at an advantage with the best, and to freely propagate its rickety kind. Philanthropy of this pernicious sort is essentially sentimental and feminine.
But the most disastrous interference, up to the present, of sentimental fanatics—women and femininely-influenced men—has been their successful campaign against those beneficent Acts of Parliament, the Contagious Diseases Acts, framed from time to time for the protection of Her Majesty’s forces of the Army and Navy.
Those Acts, applied to the garrison towns and the dockyard towns of Aldershot, Chatham, Plymouth, Dover, Canterbury, Windsor, Southampton, and others, provided for the registration and compulsory periodical medical examination of the public women who infest the streets of those places. Horrible diseases, spread by these abandoned creatures, decimated the regiments and the crews of the ships that put in at their ports; and thus, through them, the blood of future generations was poisoned and contaminated. The women whose depravity and disease spread foul disorders among not only the soldiers and sailors, but also amongst the civil populations of these garrison towns, were free, before the application of the C. D. Acts, to ply their trade no matter what might be their bodily condition; but the operation of those measures, at first providing for voluntary inspection and examination, and afterwards making those precautions compulsory, rendered it a criminal offence for a woman registered by the police to have intercourse with men while knowing that she was suffering from disease. Such an offence, or the offence of not presenting themselves at the examining officer’s station at the fortnightly period prescribed by the Acts, rendered women of this class liable to imprisonment. If at these examinations a woman was found to be healthy, a certificate was given her; if the medical officer certified her to be diseased, she was taken by compulsion to hospital, and detained there until recovery.
Plymouth, Aldershot, and Chatham, in especial, were in a shocking condition before the Acts came into force; but during the years in which they were administered by the police, a diminution of disease by more than one-half was seen in the Army and Navy, and the registration of the women led to a very great falling-off of the numbers who obtained so shameful a living. Evidence given before the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1872 proved this beyond question, and also proved that these women not only had no objection to the medical examinations, but regarded them and the hospitals as very great benefits.
The shocking revelations as to the social condition of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse, afforded by the evidence of the police, cannot be more than hinted at in this place. It is sufficient to say that over 2000 women were put upon the registers, either as occasionally or habitually living a loose life, and that all classes were to be found in these documents, but especially girls employed behind the counters of shops during the day. The police seem everywhere to have been conscientious in the execution of their duty, and to have performed ungrateful and delicate tasks with great discretion. The registers were private and strictly confidential official documents, and both the medical examinations and the police visits to suspected houses were conducted with all possible secrecy, the police in the latter case being plain-clothes men, and not readily to be identified by the public.
And yet, in spite of the very evident benefits derived from the Acts and deposed to before the Commission by such unimpeachable authorities as the foremost medical officers of the Army and Navy, commanding officers, clergymen of the Established Church, Wesleyan ministers, the entire medical and nursing staffs of hospitals, and the police authorities themselves, these Acts were repealed, in submission to the outcries of the ‘mules and barren women,’ who, headed by the rancorous Mrs. Josephine Butler and the gushing sentimentalists from the religio-radical benches of the House of Commons, called public meetings, and shrieked and raved upon platforms throughout the country: a chorus of shocked spinsters and ‘pure’ men, whose advocacy of what they called, forsooth, ‘the liberty of the subject’ and the abolition of what they falsely termed the ‘State licensing of vice,’ has resulted in a liberty accorded these women to spread disease far and wide.
The nation, the men of Army and Navy, have reason abundant to curse the sentimental women, the maiden aunts, the religieuses, the gorgons of a mistaken propriety and a peculiarly harmful prudery, whose interference with affairs which they were not competent to direct has wrought such untoward results.
This is what a writer says in the Westminster Review: ‘The struggle for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was an ordeal such as men have never been obliged to undergo. It involved not merely that women should speak at public meetings, which was a great innovation, but that they should discuss the most painful of all subjects, upon which, up to that time, even men had not dared to open their mouths. Yet so nobly did the women bear their part all through those terrible years of trial, that they raised a spirit of indignation which swept away the Acts, but never, by word or deed, did they deservedly incur reproach themselves.’
Rubbish, every word of it! The women who spoke upon these painful subjects were under no compulsion, legal or moral, to initiate or take part in the frenzy of wrong-headed emotion, which was exhibited upon public platforms to the dismay and disgust of all right-thinking men and women. It cannot be conceded that the subject was painful to these persons, nor can the statement be allowed to go unchallenged that they did not deserve reproach. Reproach of the most bitter kind was and is deserved by the prejudiced persons who distorted facts and gladly relied upon any hearsay evidence that would seem to square with their theories, and even refused to admit the weight of incontrovertible statistics produced against their rash and windy statements. The examinations of Mrs. Josephine Butler[1] and of those two ridiculous persons, the Unitarian pastor from Southampton and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Kell, are damning indictments of their good faith and good sense. These are types of women and womanish men who take delight in the investigation of pruriency, whose noses are in every cesspool and their hands in the nearest muck-heap. Their kind stop at nothing in the way of unfounded statements, and are greedy of rumour rather than of accredited facts. Want of acquaintance with, or experience of, the subjects they dogmatise upon deterred them as little then as now from case-hardened obstinacy; and perhaps no one cut such a sorry figure before the Commission as that illogical and contradictory person, the late John Stuart Mill, the femininely-influenced author of the nowadays somewhat discredited Subjection of Women. ‘His chief ground for objection to the system’ (of the C. D. Acts) ‘was on the score of the infringement of personal liberty’ (i.e., the liberty to spread loathsome diseases); ‘but he considered it also objectionable for the Government to provide securities against the consequences of immorality. It is a different thing to remedy the consequences after they occur’—as who should say, in the manner of the proverb, Lock the stable door when the horse has been stolen.
This sham philosopher and political economist of ill-argued theories, who is to-day honoured by an uncomfortable and ungainly statue on the Victoria Embankment, forgot that England has not achieved her greatness by the study or practice of morality: and shall we fall thus late in the day by a Quixotic observance of it?
The sooner the statue of this woman’s advocate is cast into the Thames, or melted down, the better.
Woman’s influence and interference in these matters have proved an unmixed evil. It would be hopeless, however, to convince her of error: as well might one attempt to hustle an elephant.
Political women are, fortunately, rare in England. A Duchess of Devonshire, a Lady Palmerston, and the politico-social Dames of the Primrose League, these are all the chiefest and most readily-cited female politicians: and their interest was, and is, not so much in the success or defeat of this party or the other as in the return of their favoured candidate or the failure of a pet aversion. Politics have no real meaning for women: their natures do not permit of their comprehension of national and international questions. What does Empire signify to woman if her little world is distracted? and what is a revolted province to her as against a broken plate?
The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and retained by might.