She will interfere with anything and everything, quite irrespective of her qualifications, provided she can leave no doubt in anybody’s mind as to her extreme importance.
Unlike her positive sister, who is generally too busy mastering or sublimating her sex-impulses to think of much else, she will watch the world of the flesh with perfectly unconscious but bitter envy. She will think, as St. Paul did, that it were good for them if they could “abide even as I,” and all her activities, all her influences, all her money, will be directed towards favouring her type and its multiplication.
She will tend to spend her time with the people over whom it is easiest to exercise power—the sick, the crippled, the blind, the very poor, the inmates of prisons, and the very aged or the very young. She will profess that she loves the poor, never dreaming that it is the power that is so easily exercised over them that is sweet to her. She is of course hopeless at self-analysis, and even when these facts are pointed out to her, she is intellectually too dishonest to acknowledge their truth.
While professing a love of all humanity, she will secretly cherish a loathing for men, for, where all sex-impulses are absent, the natural and radical hostility of the sexes (as seen in healthy little boys and girls, and in animals) finds its full expression. She will always suspect men of grossness and brutality, and never realize the staggering brutality of her own thoughts about them, and her own secret wishes regarding them. Whatever their politics or patriotism may be, the hearts of all decent positive females are so tortured by war and the death of men that war involves, that during a long tragedy like the last War all warm-hearted women longed only for one thing, and that was the conclusion of hostilities at the earliest possible moment. Not so the negative spinster. She perceived in the war a means of expressing her loathing of men under the noble mantle of patriotism, and she did not scruple to go so far as to agitate for its prolongation as long as possible.[131] These women could be seen during the war eating their breakfasts with gusto, while their newspaper, folded to present the Roll of Honour to their view, was propped up against the milk jug.
But where the negative spinster most thoroughly deceives the world is in her cheerfulness and general absence of any signs of faulty or unhappy adaptation. People behold her and are wont to exclaim, “See, here is a woman who has had none of those experiences which psychologists assure us are so essential to the happiness of the female, and yet she is the embodiment of good cheer and general contentedness!” True! But such people do not know how to distinguish the negative from the positive spinster, and by confounding the two assume too readily that it is possible, when sex-impulses have been impetuous and insistent, to have ignored and flouted them without any more serious result than a pleasant, contented, and thoroughly peaceful smile.
The distressing fact is that the number of these women who in England cheerfully survive a life in which their most important organs and instincts have been wholly neglected and spurned, is increasing at such a rate that there is hardly a circle in England that cannot boast of one or two of them. And seeing that their existence is only possible where reproductive impulses are low, atonic, and seriously below standard, their increase is one of the surest indications we possess of the declining vitality of our race.[132]
Although, in the negative spinster, the sex-impulses are hardly audible to her consciousness, she reveals in her actions many of the motivations of her positive sister. On a lower key, for instance, she may seek compensations of all kinds for the absence of sex-expression; the only feature that will distinguish her behaviour along this line from that of her positive sister will be the inferior zeal or fanaticism with which she enters into the particular compensatory occupation or activity adopted.
She may show the same fondness for children, but in an attenuated form; she may reveal the same delight in acquiring power over them, both bodily and spiritually; she may manifest the usual sadistic tendencies, with their inverted correlatives, humanitarianism, extreme sentimentality, and hyper-sensitiveness, and she may show the same general misanthropy, overlapping her sex-antagonism. In the negative spinster, however, all these symptoms are likely to be very much more faint than in her positive sister; nevertheless, she is just as likely as the latter to die honoured and respected by her Church and the community, for the “unselfish” humanitarianism of her life, and the warm-heartedness she showed to everything that was feeble, degenerate, botched, sick, very young, very aged, dumb, blind, poor or utterly helpless.
(3) THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPINSTERS AS BREAD-WINNERS AND INDEPENDENT FUND-HOLDERS
The thousands of spinsters of all classes who are now achieving “independence,” both in commerce and industry—not to mention the professions[133]—naturally only increase the acuteness of the economic difficulties which make their self-support a necessity; for, by competing with male labour they only aggravate the severity of the struggle, and increase ever further and further the age at which men can safely undertake matrimony. In this sense alone the influence of the spinster on our economic life is a very serious one.