Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

If, in heightening the fury of the economic war, she achieved her own adaptation and contentedness; if in complicating the economic difficulties of large societies, she achieved any specific result, valuable to the community and unobtainable without her, her presence would be as much a boon as is that of the mother, or any other active contributor to the main stream of Life. But, seeing that she neither succeeds in securing her own happiness, nor in promoting the happiness of the society in which she finds herself—for, apart from nursing, domestic service and certain trades connected with drapery and women’s and children’s apparel, it is difficult to point to any extra-domestic occupation that is typically women’s work—it is doubtful whether she may not be regarded as a burden on the community and an aggravation of its already enormous problems.

It should not be forgotten that industry, commerce, the professions and the Civil Service are but institutions organized for the purposes of Life. The main stream of Life certainly runs through them, and derives its security, its relative permanence and its fluency from their harmonious functions, but they exist for Life, and not Life for them. It is Life that is important, the channels through which it flows are only significant, as auxiliary to the main purpose.

Now the spinster, by being wholly divorced from any direct connexion with the main stream of Life, for which society and the Empire exist, is severed from the most important phenomenon on earth that can justify existence. The next best course is to obtain an indispensable foothold in the machinery that makes the stream of Life, as we have said, more secure, more permanent and more fluent. The moment, therefore, it can be shown that the spinster can lay no valid claim to this one remaining indispensable foothold, but rather that she only clogs, impedes and retards the machinery that assists Life, her last justification for existence vanishes; and whatever the work may be that she is doing, however “useful” it is, we fail to make out her claim to toleration the moment it can be shown (1) that the work would be done as well or better by a man or a married woman, (2) that she is not assisting but only retarding the machinery that makes the main stream of Life possible.

In short, it amounts to this: Society does not exist for the spinster. Life does not flourish when it is cultivated too luxuriously in its cul-de-sac ramifications. The main stream is too important.

But there is another and even sadder aspect to the entrance of women into the arena of commercial, industrial and financial occupations.

One of the greatest tragedies of life for modern women is precisely the havoc that these occupations have made of modern men. The Alcibiades type of man, the complete man, the man who, while he can wield a sword as well as anyone, can also sob over a sonnet, direct a difficult transaction with shrewdness and sound judgment, be an ardent lover, a dutiful father, and also a being capable of wisely directing and ordering his womenfolk at every juncture of their lives, is now extinct. The versatility of gifts and catholicity of tastes which once characterized the normal man, has been destroyed by two hundred years of occupations that are not only emasculating and besotting, but alas! also specializing. All men nowadays are specialists, and frequently specialists in the most dehumanizing form of labour. The Leviathan of Commerce and Industry, Trade and Finance, by compelling them to eschew other interests and other activities, has reduced the gamut of their capabilities and their tastes to the limits necessary for making them contented workers in one of the many narrow and monotonous ruts of modern life, and pari passu with this metamorphosis there has also occurred a corresponding decline in physical and particularly in sexual vigour.

But until recently women had escaped this influence. The very dullness and specialization of men, which frequently makes women despair of meeting the male of their dreams (who still continues to be the “complete man”), had until quite recently not infected the female.

The reader will object that because the bulk of women in the past were engaged in more domestic duties, it does not follow that these duties were not besotting or dehumanizing.

This is not really true. The women who advance this view are generally lazy and frivolous, and prefer to pay even the price of their own besotment, in order to get out every day and meet clammy-fingered clerks in stuffy offices.

The work of the home differs in many ways from the work of the factory or the office, and always to the advantage of domestic pursuits.