Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

With regard to the fund-holding wealthy spinster, it may be taken as a general rule that she cannot fail to be anything else than a burden to the community to which she belongs.

She is not only a cul-de-sac, or a blind-alley of the stream of Life, where the forces that have produced her come to a dead stop, but she is also the means of damming up a portion of the community’s wealth in produce and labour in that cul-de-sac. She herself, her household expenditure, her retinue, and her disbursements for humanitarian and religious objects, exact a toll on the community, very little of which is substantially helpful to the fluency or security of the stream of Life.

He who has travelled much over England does not require to be reminded of the countless villages and towns where the most imposing and well-appointed private residence or residences are the homes of precisely this kind of spinster. I could name half a dozen villages myself off-hand where by far the most commodious and luxurious house is the property of one, two, or three spinster ladies. About them in smaller and conspicuously meaner houses are the other inhabitants of the village—small families with parents struggling to make both ends meet, with children frequently underfed and underclothed, but all of them belonging to the main stream of Life, and constituting the only justification there is for the existence of the very town and village itself, the Church, and all the machinery of social life. The spinster ladies from their wealthy fastness, with its carriage drive, its troop of servants, its rich solid furniture, and its overfed animals, look down upon the busy scene about them. They are not part of it, but merely spectators drawing their profit, their life’s blood from it. Their untutored minds, guided by local clerical influence, actively study every means by which they can throw a cloak over the glaring superfluousness and nothingness of their lives. Deeply conscious, as the best of them are, of being cut off from the main stream of Life, and perhaps a trifle piqued by the thought that, besides being severed from it, their presence there, in the best house for miles around, is really only a means of impeding the machinery facilitating the flow of the stream, a means of causing friction in its movements, they make frantic and resolute efforts to demonstrate their “importance” to those around.

What their self-esteem, their very self-respect imposes as a duty upon them, is to make a dramatic and incessant exhibition of being important, to make a very deceptive pretence of belonging to the main stream of Life itself. Hence the untiring energy with which they enter into all the village or town festivities which have a public charity for their object; hence the zeal which they show at all Church festivals, and the regularity with which they contribute to religious and charitable institutions both local and distant.

For all this they are looked upon, even by the ignorant villagers themselves, as delightful and exceedingly valuable members of the community. Nobody seems to peep beneath the elaborate manœuvres by which they contrive to “cut a prominent figure.” Nobody seems to see in their concern about other people’s business and welfare the conclusive proof that they are straining every nerve to justify an existence which, on final analysis, they know in their heart of hearts to be utterly and criminally unjustifiable.

George Meredith is one of the few thoughtful and non-socialistic writers who have had the courage to say what they felt about this class of parasites on the community. In Chapter XXIII of One of our Conquerors he speaks of these “comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyse at home and stultify abroad.”[135] But since his references to them occur in a work of fiction they are hardly elaborate enough to be telling, or frequent enough to have aroused comment or to have formed the basis of a doctrine.

Certainly one does not require to be infected with socialistic or communistic views to feel that the vast number of these spinsters’ mansions all over the country is a bane rather than a boon. From no political point of view, whether monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic or socialistic, is it possible to justify them, and since the very energy which they devote to their humanitarian form of sex-compensation is frequently as misguided as it is only a partial remedy for the harm they themselves are doing, they constitute a portion of the community that must be honestly and utterly condemned by every far-seeing thinker on the subject.

To reply to this by a shrug of the shoulders and the question, “What would you do with them?” is simply foolish. The first great reform consists in getting them to be regarded no longer as a harmless or beneficent section of the community, but as a dangerous and intolerable bane. Once this transmutation of public opinion has been achieved, it is not a difficult matter to decide what should be done with them.

I invite any reader to take a walking tour through this country of England, and to count the number of such parasitic females he can find in a month’s tour. I invite him to note the grandeur of their establishments compared with the meanness and poverty of those about them who really belong to Life’s main stream, or are directly assisting it; and if that experience does not convince him of the dangerous futility of the class as a whole, he must be possessed of very singular views concerning the proper organization of social life.

Even on their death-beds these creatures do not cease to scourge the community to which they belong; for in the very agony of death they bequeath their wealth and dispose of their other property in a manner which, while it is usually thoroughly ill-advised, constitutes but one last fierce effort to stamp the belief in their importance for ever on the minds of those who survive them.