With two million spinsters, and—if we reckon the disgruntled married women—with probably two or three million more women distributed all over England, who are prepared to malign both man and life and to cause the effect of their thwarted impulses to be felt in a thousand ways, a good deal of misery and friction must necessarily arise from modern conditions which it is extremely difficult to relieve.
But the most serious aspect of the spinster and embittered wife question, from the standpoint of the nation’s life, is the compensation which, consciously or unconsciously, these unmated women and revolted wives, particularly the wealthy and leisured ones, seek for their thwarted instincts. The mother’s fostering care never having been experienced, its joys and thrills are sought along other channels. The lust of exercising power becomes a consuming passion, and its owner is usually quite indifferent as to the means she uses to express it. Any movement, any policy, any kind of interference may supply the opportunity, and the merits of the case will always be subordinate to the urgent need of alleviating the hunger for compensatory power. Thus influences and forces are let loose which have about as much wisdom in them as accident alone can be expected to introduce into any lustful action; and, all the while, the loftiest motives will be professed for the activities pursued. The very natural discontent which arises from thwarted instincts will also tend to express itself in many instances, particularly among the disillusioned married, as a bitter hatred of man; and, as I shall show later, in its extreme form as an unconscious jealousy of healthy young women and happily married women. This will lead to an attempt to wean the latter from the lure of love and men. Signs are already visible which show that such a movement is on foot, and, although these Lysistratas of the modern world have not Lysistrata’s patriotic motives, this will not make them any the less anxious to achieve their end.
At all events, from the imperfectly concealed triumph with which such people, particularly the female working-woman leaders, will tell you that in 1923 700,000 of the 5,020,560 women-workers were directly replacing males in industry alone, it is impossible not to read the signs of hostility to the male in their general outlook; and, to examine their literature, is to become convinced of it, careful as they are to cover it up.
Among the organizers of women-movements to-day, there can be no question that there is this note of hostility to the male; and the reason of it is that women-movements are largely led either by spinsters or else by unhappy married women.
Now the attitude of Feminism towards our vast army of spinsters and disgruntled wives is that of Socialist organizations all over the world towards discontented labour elements. It is one in which the latent discontent is turned to every possible advantage for the Cause. Feminism offers no bodily solution of the problem presented by our unmated women and our disillusioned wives, and it escapes from the responsibility of so doing by consistently regarding the whole crowd as nothing more than disembodied spirits. It does not even recognize that the muddle in which we now find ourselves is chiefly due to physical degeneration: for that it is too Puritanical. All it does is to promote and intensify the very tendencies which have brought us to our present pass, and to use the power obtained from its supporters to express in every possible way, legislatively and otherwise, its general hostility to man and its radical hatred of the bodily side of life.
Meanwhile, it misses no opportunity of appealing to the vanity and mistaken ambition of its potential victims, in order to lure even the normal and desirable among modern young women in ever greater numbers into neutral pursuits and interests only fit for neuters. And it sets to work with a conscience so clean, with such a profound conviction of its rectitude, and above all with such a great display of moral indignation, that the more guileless sections of the modern world, always taken in by moral indignation, are almost led to believe that Feminism is a natural and desirable evolutionary development, on which all hope for the future depends.
Why does Feminism act with a conscience so clean and a conviction so profound of its rectitude?—Because, behind it, it feels the support of the body-despising values, which tell it that Puritanism is right, that sex-equality is at last a fact owing to the marked degeneration of man, and that man, as the traditional enemy of female “virtue,” is the enemy par excellence.