III
Theoretically, it might still be possible for free economic opportunity and its benefits to exist for men only or for women only; but in order to exclude a whole sex from participation in them, it would be necessary to reduce its members to the status of chattels. Now, to reduce half of humanity to slavery is practically unthinkable; it would necessitate a reversion to an order of thought that has largely been outgrown; for all social injustice, in the last analysis, is founded in an ignorance and prejudice which cause even its victims to acquiesce in it. Indeed, without this acquiescence, social injustice may be called impossible. “After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.” Because of this instinct for freedom, the subjection of any class in society can be continued only so long as that class itself fails clearly to realize the injustice of its position; when it comes into a clear realization of this injustice it will demand and eventually obtain the removal of its disabilities. The subjection of women, such as it has been, lasted only so long as women themselves acquiesced in it.[38] When they developed a sense of injury, they began to demand the equality with men which is their right, and ignorance, prejudice and superstition are yielding before the demand. There is no reason to suppose that women, having progressed thus far, would tolerate without a sharp struggle any reversion to the injustice from which they have escaped. Ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, moreover, are incompatible with the enlightenment which will be necessary in order to secure economic justice even for one-half of humanity; for that enlightenment postulates not only the desire to enjoy freedom oneself, but the desire that all people may enjoy it—that is, it postulates repudiation of the idea of dominance. Thus society not only could not endure half slave, half free; it would not wish so to endure.
Women are at present under certain disabilities which legal equality with men can hardly be expected to remove. Those disabilities are:
1. Economic: Women are the victims of unjust discriminations in industry and the professions in regard to training, opportunities, tenure of employment, and wages. They are also victimized by ill-considered “welfare” legislation sponsored by benevolent persons, and by male workers whose purpose is to rid themselves of unwelcome competition.[39]
If legal equality of the sexes were established, women might be able, under the law, to force public industrial schools to give them equal opportunities for training; they might also be able to enforce a demand for equal pay with men for equal work. It is even conceivable that they might force employers to lay off workers, during periods of depression, on a proportional basis—men and women together, in proportion to the number of each sex employed. All this, however, would entail unremitting vigilance, and great effort in getting legal enactments; it would also entail a great deal of governmental machinery, with all the waste and ineffectiveness implied by the term; and it would leave the general labour-problem precisely where it is at present. As for the matter of opportunity, so long as industry is in the hands of private concerns, I see no way by which employers can be forced under an equal-rights law to employ women where they prefer to employ men. Nor is there any certainty that legal equality will save working women from having the race “safeguarded” at their expense. But if land were put freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, all these disabilities would disappear. Women would enjoy the same freedom as men to get their living by their labour, and since there would be no such thing as a labour-surplus, their wage, like that of men, would be the full product of their labour, and not that share which employers or governmental boards thought fit to grant them. There would be no need for reformers or other benevolent persons to secure them fair hours and conditions of labour, or to get them excluded from hazardous employments; for there is no way to make a worker accept onerous conditions of labour from an employer if he have an ever-present alternative of going out and creating more agreeable conditions by working for himself. The worker whose independent position makes it possible to refuse to work an excessive number of hours or under unhealthful or dangerous or disagreeable conditions, will simply refuse, and there will be an end of it. Thus employers, instead of being prevented from exploiting women beyond a certain point, would be rendered incapable of exploiting anyone in any degree. Nor would male workers longer have any incentive to avail themselves of “protective” legislation in order to reduce the competition of women with men in the labour-market; for it is only where opportunity is artificially restricted that there are “not enough jobs to go around.”
Certain direct consequences of the economic inferiority of women might be expected to disappear when that inferiority no longer existed. Foremost among these is the demoralizing temptation to get their living by their sex. Prostitution would disappear from a society which offered women ample opportunity to earn their living without doing violence to their selective sexual disposition. Marriage would no longer be degraded to the level of a means of livelihood, as it is today for a great many women; for economic security would no longer in any wise depend upon it. This being the case, the expectation now put upon women to undertake marriage as a profession would disappear, and marriage would come to be regarded in the light of a condition, freely and voluntarily assumed by both sexes, who would jointly and equally undertake its responsibilities. Under such circumstances, one might confidently expect a further modification of institutionalized marriage which would remove all those privileges and disabilities now legally enforced on either party by virtue of the contract. The idea that woman’s place is the home—which implies that marriage, for her, necessarily involves acquiescence in a traditional sexual division of labour and a traditional mode of life—with all its disabling economic and psychological consequences, would disappear from a society in which she was able freely to choose her occupation according to her abilities. Thus, from the status of a class regarded as being divinely ordained to be the world’s housekeepers, women would emerge into the status of human beings, free to consult their interests and inclinations in the ordering of their lives, without regard to traditional expectations which, being no longer enforced by economic or legal sanctions, would have no longer any power over them.
2. Psychological: Those prejudices and superstitions which now hamper women in their development and in the ordering of their lives, might be expected to disappear from a free society. In so far as they are the consequences of woman’s subjection, they would yield before her emergence into the status of a human being, sharing equally with man in the freedom of opportunity that would result from the establishment of economic justice, and the increased cultural advantages that freedom of opportunity would bring. In so far as they are the outgrowth of primitive ignorance and superstition, they would yield before the increased intelligence and enlightenment which might be expected to result from the abundance and leisure afforded to every human being by economic freedom. Thus those artificial differentiations between the sexes which have been built up by fear, by superstitions, and by masculine dominance, would tend to disappear. Women would no longer be regarded as extra-human beings endowed with superhuman powers for good or ill; they would no longer be regarded exclusively or chiefly as a function, being no longer forced to occupy that status; theories of their mental and spiritual inferiority based on the results of centuries of subjection would yield before a more humane and scientific attitude; and as freedom promoted individuation among women, it would become evident that the traditional notions concerning the feminine nature were drawn from qualities which, having been bred by their subjection, should have been regarded as characteristics not of a sex but of a class.
3. Social: The superstitious notion that woman’s honour is a matter of sex would disappear with the masculine dominance from which it resulted. When women need no longer depend on marriage for their living or their social position, they will no longer be under any great compulsion to make their sexual relations conform to standards which have been adapted to suit the interests, desires and tastes of men. Being economically independent of men, they will be at liberty to consult their own interests, desires and tastes, in this as in other matters. They may desire to preserve those habits of virginity before marriage and chastity after it, which have been imposed upon them under masculine dominance; but they will be under no external compulsion to do so. When they have no longer a professional interest in conforming to the conventional moral code, their sexual relations will cease to be regarded as falling within the purview of morality at all; rather they will be, as those of men have been, a question of manners. For when a moral precept no longer has social or economic sanctions to enforce it, its observance ceases to be a matter of worldly interest or expediency, and becomes a matter of personal taste. Then, if it be not sound, it will be repudiated; if it be sound, the individual who allows himself to be guided by it will profit spiritually by doing so, because his obedience will respond to his own instinct for what is good, rather than to an external pressure.
The spiritual gain that will come through the release from bondage to superstition, discrimination and taboo, is incalculable. Freed from her slavery to catchwords, woman will be able to discover and appraise for herself the true spiritual values which catchwords usually obscure. Having no longer any need to preserve a fearful regard for what other people may think of her, she will be at liberty to regulate her conduct by what she wishes to think of herself; and hence she will be able to cast aside the hypocrisy, duplicity and dissimulation that must be bred in any class of people whose position in society depends not upon what they are but upon what they appear to be. Having attained to the full humanity which this emancipation implies, she will gain sufficient respect for her sex to tolerate no discriminations against it. Thus we may expect to see her sexual function of motherhood placed on a basis of self-respect, and the barbarous injustice of illegitimacy relegated to the limbo of forgotten abuses. Woman will for the first time undergo the profound and weighty experience of responsibility to herself, rather than to social institutions and arrangements which were made for her, and whose nature is not such as to command the deference of a free agent. Free from the tyranny of the expected, from the disabling consequences of surveillance and repression, women will for the first time be able to develop to their full stature as human beings, in accordance with the law of spiritual growth which has so long been thwarted and perverted by the usages of society.
I have given only a general idea of what economic freedom would do to promote human happiness. Its effect upon the lives and characters of men would be quite as emancipating as upon those of women; but this I have not space to consider in detail. In passing, however, I might remark that not the least of the benefits that men would gain by it would be relief from the worry and humiliation which the support of women so often involves at present. “I have taken mistreatment from that conductor,” said a young musician recently, “that I never would have stood for if I were single. But I have a wife, and that makes us all cowards.” A free people would outgrow on the one hand the sheepishness that fear of want begets, and on the other the arrogance bred by consciousness of power. Men would no longer need endure humiliation for the sake of keeping their jobs; and those over them would be estopped from arrogance by the knowledge that they were dealing with free men who were under no compulsion to tolerate it.
If it appear that I envisage utopian results from the institution of economic freedom, let me assume the possibility that those spiritual results which I foresee might not come about. If they did not come about, however, their failure to do so would imply a profound and inexplicable change for the worse in human nature; for if the world’s history proves anything, it is that there is in mankind a natural disposition to aspire toward what is ennobling and beautiful, and that this disposition is favoured by economic security—especially where it is not associated with irresponsible power—and thwarted by involuntary poverty. Why is it that the middle classes are regarded as the “backbone” of society, if not because they have had enough command of wealth to enable the maintenance of health and a high standard of education, without that excess and power which too often breed idleness and arrogance? Leisure and abundance stimulate independence of spirit, thought, education, creative activity. Penury leads to demoralization, ignorance, dulness. This has been the world’s experience in the past. “There is in man,” says Goethe, “a creative disposition which comes into activity as soon as his existence is assured. As soon as he has nothing to worry about or to fear, this semi-divinity in him, working effectively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps materials into which to breathe its own spirit.” Why should one assume that this spirit will pass over the material offered by life itself and the relations of human beings with one another? It has not done so in the past. Throughout mankind’s long martyrdom of exploitation, through all the struggling and hatred engendered thereby, this semi-divinity in man has been leading him towards a more humane conception of life. The spiritual peace and assurance resulting from economic justice would set all human beings free not only to share in this conception but to realize it—to establish upon earth that ideal life of man which, in the words of George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he shall one day come to know it.”