The fitness of women for political activity is not in present question; I am considering the fitness of political activity for women. For women as men say they are, wish them to be and try to think them, it is unfit altogether—as unfit as anything else that “mixes them up” with us, compelling a communication and association that are not social. If we wish to have women who are different from ourselves in knowledge, character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally as physically—and in these and in all other expressible differences reside all the charms that they have for us—we must keep them, or they must keep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think this obvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it would be understood by the Daughters of Thunder. Possibly the Advanced One, hospitably accepting her karma, is not concerned to be charming to “the likes o’ we”—would prefer the companionship of her blue gingham umbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name in the newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucous voice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. When we no longer find women charming we may find a way to make them more useful—more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have them make themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the world between them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that has its origin in the very differences which the colonels of their sex are striving to abolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of his laws is going to be suspended in deference to woman’s desire to achieve familiarity without contempt. If she wants to please she must retain some scrap of novelty; if she desires our respect she must not be always in evidence, disclosing the baser side of her character, as in competition with us she must do—as we do to one another. Mrs. Edmund Gosse, like “Ouida,” Mrs. Atherton, and all other women of brains, thinks that the taking of unfair advantages—the lack of magnanimity—is a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds, with reference to men’s passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly of “emancipation,” that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the storm; and she utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, “Ouida” has uttered: “How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise en masse and throw the whole surging lot of us into convents and harems?”
It is not likely that men will “rise en masse” to undo the mischief wrought by noisy protagonists of woman suffrage working like beavers to rear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine tolerance and inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for the wreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little farther up the sands of time, “loll out its large tongue, lick the whole labor flat.” The work has prospered so far only because nobody but its promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention from those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of men—themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions—to set a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not point out why they do so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain in the valley of the shadow of ignorance.) Valuing it, they purpose having it, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they perceive that in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the remoteness of their lives and interests from the lives and interests of men—their seclusion from the influences of which men’s own vices are a main part—an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for repression of the shouters.
In the orchestration of mind, woman’s instruments might have kept silence without injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface the impress of her touch upon the world, and by those who come later the blank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large city and look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but it represents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man. Nowhere in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all the work of men’s hands, and before it was wrought into form and substance, existed as conscious creations in men’s brains. Concealed within the visible forms of buildings and ships—themselves miracles of thought—lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no human life is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enough to hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs and see woman’s part of this prodigious exhibition—the things that she has actually created with her brain—what kind of display would it be? It is probable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from first to last would not have sufficed, if directed into one channel, for the genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.
“There is no sex in brain,” says the Female Militant. I beg her pardon: there is sex in every organ, every tissue, every cell and atom of the human body; but in nothing do men and women differ so widely, so conspicuously, so essentially as in mind. They think after altogether different methods; their mental processes are to a clear and competent observation without resemblance to ours. So different is the mental constitution of the two sexes that whereas all see not mainly with the eye, but with the judgment, the understanding, even the outer aspect of things is, I am persuaded, not the same to a woman that it is to a man. I have taken some trouble to test this theory, with results of the most interesting character, which I purpose giving to the world some day. It is my conviction that if a man who had lived all his life in New York were to become a woman while passing along Broadway she would be unable to find her way home without inquiry.
I once heard a woman who had playfully competed with men in a jumping match gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt. Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mental achievement by repressive education and custom. But even in regions where they have ever had full freedom of the quarries they have not builded themselves monuments. Nobody, for example, is holding them from greatness in poetry, which needs no special education, and music, in which they have always been specially educated; yet where is the great poem by a woman? where the great musical composition? In the grammar of literature what is the feminine of Homer, of Shakspeare, of Goethe, of Hugo? What female names are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner? Women are not musicians—they “sing and play.” In short, if woman had no better claim to respect and affection than her brain; no sweeter charms than those of her reason; no means of suasion but her power upon men’s convictions, she would long ago have been “improved off the face of the earth.” As she is, men accord her such homage as is compatible with contempt, such immunities as are consistent with control; but whereas she is not altogether filled with light, and is, moreover, imperfectly reverent, it is but right that in obedience to scriptural injunction she keep silence in our churches while we are worshipping Ourselves.
She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out her little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it over the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen her sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that we have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex. That she is indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack at accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to a suitable doom—this does not satisfy her. No; she has taken unto herself in these evil days that “intelligent discontent” which giveth its beloved fits. To her flock of graces and virtues she must add our one poor ewe lamb of brains. Well, I tell her that intellect is a monster which devours beauty; that the woman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine in face, figure, action. And so, with a reluctant farewell to Lovely Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hasten to overtake the receding periphery of her “sphere.”
One moment more, mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor—which were affliction and calamity—by “defining my position” in the words of one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensible exaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women—have an acute animosity to your sex, adoring each individual member of it. What matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am in bondage to your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparable utility and dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit—to be mothers of men.
A MAD WORLD
LET us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet should pass through a “belt” of attenuated matter having the property of dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That space is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that we are at one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at another spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in the wake of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still agitated by our passage through them,—all this is as good as known. It is almost as certain as it is that in our little annual circle round the sun are points at which we are stoned and brickbatted like a pig in a potato-patch—pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what? What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward which we speed?—into what malign conditions may we not at any time plunge?—to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to a jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human brain, minding us all madwise.