A few years before the war, a rage for compiling useless statistics swept over Europe and the United States. When it was at its height, some active minds bethought them that children might be made to bear their part in the guidance of the human race. Accordingly a series of questions—some sensible and some foolish—were put to English, German, and American school-children, and their enlightening answers were given to the world. One of these questions read: “Would you rather be a man or a woman, and why?” Naturally this query was of concern only to little girls. No sane educator would ask it of a boy. German pedagogues struck it off the list. They said that to ask a child, “Would you rather be something you must be, or something you cannot possibly be?” was both foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice were of value only when the will was a determining factor.
No such logical inference chilled the examiners’ zeal in this inquisitive land. The question was asked and was answered. We discovered, as a result, that a great many little American girls (a minority, to be sure, but a respectable minority) were well content with their sex; not because it had its duties and dignities, its pleasures and exemptions; but because they plainly considered that they were superior to little American boys, and were destined, when grown up, to be superior to American men. One small New England maiden wrote that she would rather be a woman because “Women are always better than men in morals.” Another, because “Women are of more use in the world.” A third, because “Women learn things quicker than men, and have more intelligence.” And so on through varying degrees of self-sufficiency.
These little girls, who had no need to echo the Scotchman’s prayer, “Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’ ourselves!” were old maids in the making. They had stamped upon them in their tender childhood the hall-mark of the American spinster. “The most ordinary cause of a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is reserved for the American woman to remain unmarried because she feels herself too valuable to be entrusted to a husband’s keeping. Would it be possible in any country save our own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining “Why I am an Old Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the explanation? Would it be possible in any other country to hear such a question as “Should the Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked, and seriously answered? Would it be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who was not an American to consider even the remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a detached class, who shall form “the intellectual and economic élite of the sex, leaving marriage and maternity to the less developed woman”? What has become of the belief, as old as civilization, that marriage and maternity are developing processes, forcing into flower a woman’s latent faculties; and that the less-developed woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen and powerful stimulus? “Never,” said Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin, young or old, produced a work of art.” One makes allowance for the Latin point of view. And it is possible that M. de Goncourt never read “Emma.”
There is a formidable lack of humour in the somewhat contemptuous attitude of women, whose capabilities have not yet been tested, toward men who stand responsible for the failures of the world. It denotes, at home and abroad, a density not far removed from dulness. In Mr. St. John Ervine’s depressing little drama, “Mixed Marriage,” which the Dublin actors played in New York some years ago, an old woman, presumed to be witty and wise, said to her son’s betrothed: “Sure, I believe the Lord made Eve when He saw that Adam could not take care of himself”; and the remark reflected painfully upon the absence of that humorous sense which we used to think was the birthright of Irishmen. The too obvious retort, which nobody uttered, but which must have occurred to everybody’s mind, was that if Eve had been designed as a care-taker, she had made a shining failure of her job.
That astute Oriental, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, manifested a wisdom beyond all praise in his recognition of American standards, when addressing American audiences. As the hour for his departure drew nigh, he was asked to write, and did write, a “Parting Wish for the Women of America,” giving graceful expression to the sentiments he knew he was expected to feel. The skill with which he modified and popularized an alien point of view revealed the seasoned lecturer. He told his readers that “God has sent woman to love the world,” and to build up a “spiritual civilization.” He condoled with them because they were “passing through great sufferings in this callous age.” His heart bled for them, seeing that their hearts “are broken every day, and victims are snatched from their arms to be thrown under the car of material progress.” The Occidental sentiment which regards man simply as an offspring, and a fatherless offspring at that (no woman, says Olive Schreiner, could look upon a battle-field without thinking, “So many mothers’ sons!”), came as naturally to Sir Rabindranath as if he had been to the manner born. He was content to see the passion and pain, the sorrow and heroism of men, as reflections mirrored in a woman’s soul. The ingenious gentlemen who dramatize Biblical narratives for the American stage, and who are hampered at every step by the obtrusive masculinity of the East, might find a sympathetic supporter in this accomplished and accommodating Hindu.
The story of Joseph and his Brethren, for example, is perhaps the best tale ever told the world,—a tale of adventure on a heroic scale, with conflicting human emotions to give it poignancy and power. It deals with pastoral simplicities, with the splendours of court, and with the “high finance” which turned a free landholding people into tenantry of the crown. It is a story of men, the only lady introduced being a disedifying dea ex machina, whose popularity in Italian art has perhaps blinded us to the brevity of her Biblical rôle. But when this most dramatic narrative was cast into dramatic form, Joseph’s splendid loyalty to his master, his cold and vigorous chastity, were nullified by giving him an Egyptian sweetheart. Lawful marriage with this young lady being his sole solicitude, the advances of Potiphar’s wife were less of a temptation than an intrusion. The keynote of the noble old tale was destroyed, to assure to woman her proper place as the guardian of man’s integrity.
Still more radical was the treatment accorded to the parable of the “Prodigal Son,” which was expanded into a pageant play, and acted with a hardy realism permitted only to the strictly ethical drama. The scriptural setting of the story was preserved, but its patriarchal character was sacrificed to modern sentiment which refuses to be interested in the relation of father and son. Therefore we beheld the prodigal equipped with a mother and a trusting female cousin, who, between them, put the poor old gentleman out of commission, reducing him to his proper level of purveyor-in-ordinary to the household. It was the prodigal’s mother who bade her reluctant husband give their wilful son his portion. It was the prodigal’s mother who watched for him from the house-top, and silenced the voice of censure. It was the prodigal’s mother who welcomed his return, and persuaded father and brother to receive him into favour. The whole duty of man in that Syrian household was to obey the impelling word of woman, and bestow blessings and bags of gold according to her will.
The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or seeks to embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as opposed to the intellectual, feminist. “The Mother State of which we dream” offers no attraction to many plain and practical workers, and is a veritable nightmare to others. “Woman,” writes an enthusiast in the “Forum,” “means to be, not simply the mother of the individual, but of society, of the State with its man-made institutions, of art and science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and social, needs to be mothered.”
“Needs to be mothered”! When men proffer this welter of sentiment in the name of women, how is it possible to say convincingly that the girl student standing at the gates of knowledge is as humble-hearted as the boy; that she does not mean to mother medicine, or architecture, or biology, any more than the girl in the banker’s office means to mother finance? Her hopes for the future are founded on the belief that fresh opportunities will meet a sure response; but she does not, if she be sane, measure her untried powers by any presumptive scale of valuation. She does not consider the advantages which will accrue to medicine, biology, or architecture by her entrance—as a woman—into any one of these fields. Their need for her maternal ministration concerns her less than her need for the magnificent heritage they present.
It has been said many times that the craving for material profit is not instinctive in women. If it is not instinctive, it will be acquired, because every legitimate incentive has its place in the progress of the world. The demand that women shall be paid men’s wages for men’s work may represent a desire for justice rather than a desire for gain; but money fairly earned is sweet in the hand, and to the heart. An open field, an even start, no handicap, no favours, and the same goal for all. This is the worker’s dream of paradise. Women have long known that lack of citizenship was an obstacle in their path. Self-love has prompted them to overrate their imposed, and underrate their inherent, disabilities. “Whenever you see a woman getting a high salary, make up your mind that she is giving twice the value received,” writes an irritable correspondent to the “Survey”; and this pretension paralyzes effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is to be at the end of our usefulness.