III
Now that we have come to acknowledge not only that Jack’s vote is as good as his master’s, but that Jill’s vote is as good as Jack’s, we have laid the train of a further change in the relations of men and women. For just as surely as the worker has discovered that political equality does not of necessity remove economic disability, and is now beginning to demand economic emancipation, so also women will pass on from the acquisition of political equality to a demand for economic equality. Indeed, the demand is already being made. The war has served to reveal the arbitrary and illusory character of the assumptions which closed certain occupations to women. We know that the number of occupations for which women are temperamentally or physically unfitted is comparatively small. There are obvious reasons for believing that some few trades will remain permanently undesirable for women; but the immediate fact that confronts us is that the traditional line of demarcation has been swept away under the stress of war needs; and that we shall have to work out in the school of experience a new classification of occupations more consonant with the new facts.
Some years ago there was much discussion in England concerning a high legal decision that a woman was not a “person” within the meaning of a certain Act of Parliament. This was symptomatic of a general survival of the view which assigned women to a slightly sub-human class; and the vitality of this view is still more considerable than many hopeful minds are willing to think. Yet it is only when we have educated ourselves into the conception of woman which attributes to her a distinct personality of her own, with an end in and for herself, and with all the rights and privileges, the freedom and the independence appertaining to it, that we shall approach the problem of the relations of men and women from a genuinely democratic standpoint. Woman is commonly regarded as having a function rather than an individual end. It is her part to preserve the race. Her peculiar vocation is child-bearing. It cannot, however, be affirmed with too much emphasis that the perpetuation of the race is no more the task of woman than of man. The heavier end of the physical burden of race-preservation certainly falls upon the woman; but this fact does not indicate that this is the purpose for which she exists. Her traditional assignment to this role, and the consequent limitation of her circle of experience and interest, the virtual incarceration of the great majority of women to the “home,” and the denial to them of any real participation in the larger concerns of the common life, must cease if social existence is to achieve the balance necessary to stable and healthy progress.
The preservation of the race can be left to look after itself. Race-suicide only becomes a peril when the relations of men and women become perverted and unnatural as they commonly do in our present social order. When at one end of society, the bringing up of families entails an economic burden too heavy to be borne, and at the other, the hedonism which accompanies excessive wealth tends to a sensuality which refuses to accept the natural risks and to pay the natural price of the sex-relation, a poisonous arrest is unavoidably laid upon the normal operation of the sex-instincts. The most easily perverted endowment of human nature is sex, and it cannot retain a balanced and healthy functioning under disordered conditions of life. The incessant discussion of marriage and divorce misses the point largely because it ignores the background of the problem. While we regard the physical distinction of sex as the primary fact to be considered in relation to woman, and still cling to the obsession so dear to bourgeois respectability that her business is motherhood and “her place is the home,” so long, that is, as we regard her life and its purpose as dependent upon man, so long will judgment be deflected from its true pole at its very source. Wholesome and free men and women will continue to fall in love with one another and will want to have children of each other, where to-day because their relations are unwholesome and unequal, they tend only to seek possession of one another, without any disposition (not to speak of eagerness) to welcome the fruit of their union; and too often with the deliberate intention of preventing the fruitage. For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.
The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. The freedom and spontaneity of the relation between men and women is made impossible by those calculations of position and wealth which the career theory of marriage requires. While it is nominally the case that no woman is compelled to marry, it is actually the fact that many women—in the bourgeois classes, most women—are so brought up that marriage becomes their only escape from indigence. The fact of woman’s independence should be made concrete and real by requiring that every woman shall be self-supporting, that is to say, that she shall share in the necessary industrial processes of the community or do some work of acknowledged social worth. Naturally the latter category includes the bearing and upbringing of children; for than this there is no work more fundamental or of greater social worth. This requires the economic independence of the mother; and since the social reconstruction postulated in these pages, involves in some form or other the establishment of an universal minimum standard, the mother will not only be economically independent but will also be released from the harassing task of bringing up a growing family upon a stationary income.
It will be argued against such proposals as these that they endanger the sanctity of the family. But this criticism possesses neither grace nor force in a generation which has permitted industrial conditions to prevail which have virtually destroyed the home-life of the working-classes. The only assumption on which it is safe to proceed in dealing with this question is that anything entitled to be called a “home life” is quite exceptional among large masses of the population. Both the physical setting of the home—the house—and the economic condition of its members rob the home of that quality of sanctuary and base which is of the essence of a genuine home. Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. The housing question has its own importance in the problem; but of infinitely more importance to the recovery of home life is the establishment of the economic independence of the woman. So long as custom and necessity place her in a position of dependence on the man, so long will she be denied the freedom which is essential to perfect comradeship. Her present status denies the equality which is necessary to fellowship; and much of the unhappiness of modern marriage is due to the intelligible chafing of women against the conditions which dependence and inferiority of status impose upon her. That many married people succeed in overcoming this initial handicap is true; but that is due to certain qualities in themselves and does not in the least alter the fact that where marital relations go awry the evil is largely in the conditions which govern those relations in our present social order.
The relaxing of marriage ties is no remedy; it is only a relief to persons of incompatible tempers. Both the advocates and the opponents of greater facilities for divorce seem to argue their case out of all relation to the existing social environment of marriage. The evils for which a remedy is sought in easier divorce are not to be found in the nature of the marriage relation but in the conventional and legal status of women.[[34]] While the social and economic sources of the trouble are left untouched, no amount of Catholic emphasis upon the sacramental character of marriage is going to stay the demand for the greater dissolubility of a tie which existing conditions do much to make difficult and frequently intolerable. Even under the best conditions, the mutual adjustments of the man and woman in married life are not easy; but when one party enters the relation in a position of more or less explicitly acknowledged dependence and inferiority, there are seeds of ineradicable trouble.
[34]. This does not imply that the present writer does not recognise the need of some extension of the grounds of divorce in Great Britain. It simply means that he thinks that the problem cannot be rightly approached until the economic independence of women has been established.
It is not for a moment argued that the establishment of the economic independence of woman is a cure for all the ills that afflict the family. But this is fundamental; and we shall simply be beating the air so long as we do not accept this principle. For it is the only method which holds a promise of restoring the life of the home. At the same time, it is no less necessary that the woman being by reason of her motherhood economically independent should not be regarded as the economic handmaid of the state. If the endowment of motherhood is only a provision for increasing the economic and military human material of the community, then we are better without it. For the poison which vitiates our life will return to it at its most delicate and sensitive point. To regard the marriage relation simply as the means of supplying a constant stream of military and economic units for the state is to deny the spiritual nature of man at its very source, and to reimpose on ourselves the deadly incubus of materialism. This is the danger which the Eugenics movement threatens us with. To introduce the principle of selective breeding into human relations may result in a community of persons, healthy, vigorous and efficient for economic and military purposes; but we are learning how little physical heredity has to do with the ultimate purpose of life. In so far as Eugenics will lead to greater precautions against the propagation of diseased and mentally and physically degenerate persons, and quickens a greater vigilance and a more insistent demand for sound minds and sound bodies in those about to give themselves in marriage, it brings a necessary and valuable reinforcement to the influences that make for human welfare. But when it goes beyond this point, it becomes a danger to the spiritual conception of life and society. What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman.
Yet it may be held that the partnership is an affair so momentous that none should be permitted to enter it so precipitately as the marriage laws of the United States allow. Some degree of deliberation should be insisted upon before legal recognition of the union is granted. The demand for greater facilities for divorce is probably not unconnected with the extreme facility with which persons can enter upon the marriage relationship.
But the establishment of right relations between the sexes must begin before the period when men and women have reached the condition of personal independence. It should be plain that the sense of sex-difference which emerges in adolescence should not be allowed to develop in the unregulated and capricious manner in which our false modesty compels it to develop to-day. The processes of initiation into the mysteries of sex should begin sufficiently early to avert so far as possible the danger of its being discoloured and perverted by the undue obtrusion of its sense-accompaniments. There is no real reason why the frank comradeship of boys and girls should not be maintained through adolescence into youth, but the criminal negligence which we have shown concerning the means by which sex-knowledge is communicated to growing children has succeeded in creating a gulf between men and women which persists more or less permanently and constitutes the most obstinate difficulty in the way of perfect freedom of fellowship between men and women. It is no exaggeration to say that the attitude of most men to women is poisoned—perhaps beyond perfect recovery at any time—by the conditions under which as boys they received their first intimations of the nature of the sex-relation. A good deal has already been done to pave the way of change in this matter; and an increasing number of parents are assuming the responsibility of communicating this knowledge to their children. But there is still unfortunately a great mass of unhealthy prudery to be overcome before rational dealing with this problem becomes anything like universal.
The problem of the fellowship of men and women, however, extends beyond the institution of marriage. Now that the enfranchisement of women is opening up the question of their availability and qualification for national legislatures, we are confronted with a very large possibility of change in the tone and temper of government. Much nonsense is talked about the psychological differences between men and women; and of this nonsense, the emptiest is that which assumes that women are dominated by sentiment and emotion, while men are guided by reason. An unprejudiced observer, watching deliberative gatherings of men over any space of time would certainly arrive at the conclusion that the occasions on which they acted upon purely rational grounds were rare and exceptional; and it has been the experience of the present writer that in deliberative groups of men and women the women are on the whole more likely to display a dispassionate rationality in arriving at their judgments than the men. It is a region in which broad generalisations are bound to be unsound; and the progress of the higher education of women is undoubtedly obliterating any patent difference of mental operation between men and women. At the same time, there are certain differences which are embedded in the physical structure of sex and which may be therefore permanent; but so far from disqualifying women from a share in government, those very differences entitle them to it. Quite apart from the fact that the problems of food and clothing in their incidence on the home are of peculiar importance to women, and that the woman’s point of view should always be represented in discussion of the large-scale problems of production and distribution, the mind of woman brings a check and balance to the operations of the male mind which they very acutely need. There can, for instance, be no question that the male mind tends to an inordinate faith in force and coercive processes; and while it would hardly be correct to say that the female mind possesses an antithetic bias of a reasoned kind, it does normally display a certain hesitancy to apply the closure of compulsion which the too ready real-politik of a purely male assembly is prone to adopt when it sets out to translate its emotions into enactments. The truth of the matter, in fine, is this—that because humanity is bi-sexual, its affairs cannot be reasonably and fruitfully determined save through the common counsels of men and women. We have already made a beginning in the admission of women to the councils of the community. A woman has sat in the Congress of the United States; women have long been at home in British municipal bodies, and their right to a place in Parliament has been acknowledged. It is only a matter of time when the logic of the enfranchisement of women will reach its inevitable conclusion in their admission to all public deliberative bodies on equal terms with men. They have a contribution to bring to the corporate direction of affairs without which the nations can no longer do; and the fact that as a class they may take some time to become habituated to the mechanics of legislation is an argument for hastening their complete admission to it.
There were those who in the “militant” stage of the “Votes for Women” campaign foretold that the economic class-war would presently be superseded or complicated by a sex-war; and some women there were whose utterances undoubtedly pointed in that direction. For the time, however, this danger has dropped over the horizon. The war has evoked a community of suffering in which men and women alike have shared too deeply, and in which their mutual need has been too overwhelming to make the notion of a sex-war even thinkable to-day. But we should be rejoicing prematurely if we supposed that all possible sources of sex-antagonism have disappeared. The political enfranchisement of women certainly removes one source; but the new industrial complications caused by the entry of women into occupations which have hitherto been a male monopoly, and in which their employment has been fully justified by the character of their workmanship may, when the transition to peaceful life is being made, breed grievances and troubles in which the line of cleavage will be determined by the sex-factor. But if we assume the establishment of the “national minimum,” applicable to men and women alike, and therefore securing the economic independence of women, we shall have robbed this prospective danger of much of its substance. For the rest, there seems to be no reason why women should not be freely permitted to engage in occupations for which they are competent, on equal terms with men; and the comradeship of men and women in the control and the operation of industrial processes would do much to fix the now dominant sex-interest in its proper place in life. The primacy of the sex-interest in determining the relations of men and women works definitely toward the retention of women in a subordinate, parasitic and exploited position, and while this lasts, we shall still have with us the seeds of sex-antagonism. All this does not overlook the fact that there are kinds of work for which women are physically unsuited, and that there are times in the life of the married woman when she should be exempted from all manual work save of the lightest sort. But these problems are in essence present even in the working conditions of men. All men are not suited for all classes of work; and there are few men whose work is not occasionally interrupted by sickness. What is needed in the case of women is simply a further application of those principles of selection and accommodation which already operate in every industry. Unless some such position as this is frankly accepted, we may be presently confronted with a new militancy and a new sabotage at the hands of women who have tasted the experience of economic independence and are unwilling to surrender it to a convention of inequality which they claim their own war-time performance has permanently discredited.