man requirements, it is little wonder that it
should break out.
But when a way of escape stands open revolt
is not morally justified.
Thus, for example, a man who is born into,
but cannot support himself in, a superior class
of society is not, as long as he can find a liveli-
hood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled
to revolt.
No more is the woman who is in economic or
physiological difficulties. For, if only she has
the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands
open to her.
She can emigrate; she can go out from the
social class in which she is not self-supporting
into a humbler social class in which she could
earn a living; and she can forsake conditions
in which she must remain a spinster for con-
ditions in which she may perhaps become a
mother. Only in this way can the problem of
finding work, and relief of tedium, for the
woman who now goes idle be resolved.
If women were to avail themselves of these 157
ways of escape out of unphysiological condi-
tions, the woman agitator would probably find
it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agita-
tion for woman suffrage as the Irish Nation-
alist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement
of the land question and the grant of old age
pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate
Parliament for Ireland.
For the happy wife and mother is never pas-
sionately concerned about the suffrage. It is
always the woman who is galled either by phy-
siological hardships, or by the fact that she has
not the same amount of money as man, or by
the fact that man does not desire her as a co-
partner in work, and withholds the homage
which she thinks he ought to pay to her intel-
lect.
For this class of grievances the present edu-
cation of woman is responsible. The girl who is
growing up to woman's estate is never taught
where she stands relatively to man. She
is not taught anything about woman's phys-
ical disabilities. She is not told--she is left 158
to discover it for herself when too late--that
child and husband are to woman physiological
requirements. She is not taught the defects
and limitations of the feminine mind. One
might almost think there were no such defects
and limitations; and that woman was not al-
ways overestimating her intellectual power.
And the ordinary girl is not made to realise
woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning
capacity. She is not made to realise that the
woman who cannot work with her hands is
generally hard put to earn enough to keep her-
self alive in the incomplete condition of a
spinster.
As a result of such education, when, influ-
enced by the feminist movement, woman comes
to institute a comparison between herself and
man, she brings into that comparison all those
qualities in which she is substantially his equal,
and leaves out of account all those in which she
is his inferior.
The failure to recognise that man is the mas-
ter, and why he is the master, lies at the root 159
of the suffrage movement. By disregarding
man's superior physical force, the power of
compulsion upon which all government is based
is disregarded. By leaving out of account
those powers of the mind in which man is the
superior, woman falls into the error of thinking
that she can really compete with him, and that
she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste.
Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior
money-earning capacity, the power of the
purse is ignored.
Uninstructed woman commits also another
fundamental error in her comparison. Instead
of comparing together the average man and
the average woman, she sets herself to estab-
lish that there is no defect in woman which can-
not be discovered also in man; and that there
is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which
cannot be discovered also in woman. Which
having been established to her satisfaction, she
is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is
nothing whatever to choose between the sexes.
And from this there is only a step to the posi- 160
tion that human beings ought to be assigned,
without distinction of sex, to each and every
function which would come within the range
of their individual capacities, instead of being
assigned as they are at present: men to one
function, and women to another.
Here again women ought to have been safe-
guarded by education. She ought to have
been taught that even when an individual
woman comes up to the average of man this
does not abrogate the disqualification which
attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet--as
every one who recognises that we live in a
world which conducts itself by generalisations
will see--does it abrogate the disqualification
of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.
The present system of feminine education is
blameworthy not only in the respect that it
fails to draw attention to these disqualifications
and to teach woman where she stands; it is even
more blameworthy in that it fails to convey
to the girl who is growing up any conception
of that absolutely elementary form of morality 161
which consists in distinguishing meum and
tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours].
Instead of her educators encouraging every
girl to assert "rights" as against man, and put
forward claims, they ought to teach her with
respect to him those lessons of behaviour which
are driven home once for all into every boy at
a public school.
Just as there you learn that you may not
make unwarranted demands upon your fel-
low, and just as in the larger world every na-
tion has got to learn that it cannot with im-
punity lay claim to the possessions of its neigh-
bours, so woman will have to learn that when
things are not offered to her, and she has not
the power to take them by force, she has got
to make the best of things as they are.
One would wish for every girl who is grow-
ing up to womanhood that it might be brought
home to her by some refined and ethically-
minded member of her own sex how insuffer-
able a person woman becomes when, like a
spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of 162
man; when she proclaims that it is his duty
to serve her and to share with her his power
and possessions; when she makes an outcry
when he refuses to part with what is his own;
and when she insists upon thrusting her society
upon men everywhere.
And every girl ought to be warned that to
embark upon a policy of recrimination when
you do not get what you want, and to pro-
claim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you
are hit back, is the way to get yourself thor-
oughly disliked.
Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the
example of the militant suffragist, how revolt
and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess
oneself of what belongs to others, effects the
complete disorganisation of moral character.
No one would wish that in the education of
girls these quite unlovely things should be in-
sisted upon more than was absolutely neces-
sary. But one would wish that the educators
of the rising generation of women should, bas-
ing themselves upon these foundations, point 163
out to every girl how great is woman's debt to
civilisation; in other words, how much is under
civilisation done for woman by man.
And one would wish that, in a world which is
rendered unwholesome by feminism, every
girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the
great outstanding fact of the world: the fact
that, turn where you will, you find individ-
ual man showering upon individual woman--
one man in tribute to her enchantment, an-
other out of a sense of gratitude, and another
just because she is something that is his--every
good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she
never could have procured for herself. 164
APPENDIX
LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA
Reprinted by permission from The Times (London), March
28, 1912.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES
SIR,--For man the physiological psychology
of woman is full of difficulties.
He is not a little mystified when he encoun-
ters in her periodically recurring phases of
hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss
of the sense of proportion.
He is frankly perplexed when confronted
with a complete alteration of character in a
woman who is child-bearing.
When he is a witness of the "tendency of
woman to morally warp when nervously ill,"
and of the terrible physical havoc which the
pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is
appalled.
And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling
when he sees serious and long-continued men-
tal disorders developing in connexion with the 167
approaching extinction of a woman's repro-
ductive faculty.
No man can close his eyes to these things;
but he does not feel at liberty to speak of
them.
For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away. [From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]
As for woman herself, she makes very light
of any of these mental upsettings.
She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . . 1
None the less, these upsettings of her men-
tal equilibrium are the things that a woman
has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever
lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman
is always threatened with danger from the
reverberations of her physiological emer-
gencies.
It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets
his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He
cannot shut them to the fact that there is
1 In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is
compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant
overestimate of the number of women in London society who
suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause]. 168
mixed up with the woman's movement much
mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from
himself the physiological emergencies which lie
behind.
The recruiting field for the militant suf-
fragists is the million of our excess female
population--that million which had better long
ago have gone out to mate with its comple-
ment of men beyond the sea.
Among them there are the following dif-
ferent types of women:--(a) First--let us
put them first--come a class of women who
hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that
they may, whenever it is to their advantage,
lawfully resort to physical violence.
The programme, as distinguished from the
methods, of these women is not very different
from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.
(b) There file past next a class of women
who have all their life-long been strangers to
joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed
have in the end broken into flame. These are
the sexually embittered women in whom every- 169
thing has turned into gall and bitterness of
heart, and hatred of men.
Their legislative programme is license for
themselves, or else restrictions for man.
(c) Next there file past the incomplete.
One side of their nature has undergone atro-
phy, with the result that they have lost touch
with their living fellow men and women.
Their programme is to convert the whole
world into an epicene institution--an epicene
institution in which man and woman shall
everywhere work side by side at the selfsame
tasks and for the selfsame pay.
These wishes can never by any possibility be
realised. Even in animals--I say even, be-
cause in these at least one of the sexes has
periods of complete quiscence--male and fe-
male cannot be safely worked side by side, ex-
cept when they are incomplete.
While in the human species safety can be
obtained, it can be obtained only at the price
of continual constraint. 170
And even then woman, though she protests
that she does not require it, and that she does
not receive it, practically always does receive
differential treatment at the hands of man.
It would be well, I often think, that every
woman should be clearly told--and the woman
of the world will immediately understand--
that when man sets his face against the pro-
posal to bring in an epicene world, he does so
because he can do his best work only in sur-
roundings where he is perfectly free from sug-
gestion and from restraint, and from the onus
which all differential treatment imposes.
And I may add in connexion with my own
profession that when a medical man asks that
he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical
woman he does so also because he would wish
to keep up as between men and women--even
when they are doctors--some of the modesties
and reticences upon which our civilisation has
been built up.
Now the medical woman is of course never 171
on the side of modesty,1 or in favour of any
reticences. Her desire for knowledge does
not allow of these.
(d) Inextricably mixed up with the types
which we have been discussing is the type of
woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent
letter brought so distinctly before our eyes--
the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced
self-esteem; and who flies out at every man
who does not pay homage to her intellect.
She is the woman who is affronted when a
man avers that for him the glory of woman lies
in her power of attraction, in her capacity for
motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to
the ethics which are special to her sex.
I have heard such an intellectually embit-
tered woman say, though she had been self-
denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the
whole course of her life had a man ever as much
as done her a kindness."