“A book might be wholly filled with the story of the part taken by women in the political and religious struggles of the period,” says Miss Clark. “They were also active among the crowd who perpetually besieged the Court for grants of wardships and monopolies or patents.”[176]
“From the women who begged for monopolies which if granted must have involved much worry and labour if they were to be made profitable,” continues Miss Clark, “we pass naturally to women who actually owned and managed businesses requiring a considerable amount of capital. They not infrequently acted as pawn-brokers and money-lenders.... The names of women often occur in connexion with the shipping trade and with contracts.... Women’s names appear in lists of contractors to the Army and Navy,”[177] etc., etc. In short, I cannot do better than refer the reader to Miss Clark’s excellent treatise; and should he leave it still thinking, with Mesdames Taylor, that the Subjection of Women is clearly demonstrated at least by the life of the seventeenth century, he will have formed an opinion strangely at variance with the facts adduced.
Now, in the face of all this evidence—and I do not pretend to know, much less to have adduced, a hundredth part of it—in view, moreover, of the prominent part that women, even of the most obscure origin, played in the literature of the eighteenth century, and the independence with which they moved in society, how can it any longer be maintained, with any semblance of honesty, that there has been, as if from malice aforethought, a male conspiracy to achieve the subjection of women?
In trying to explain away certain female characteristics, which are as unanimously testified to to-day as they have been in all ages of history, by ascribing them to a distortion of “true” or “natural” woman—whoever or wherever she may be—as if woman were only just at this moment coming into her own, as if in fact she were only just emerging from a dark and stifling obscurity that had stunted her, Mill and his followers are guilty of a deliberate lie. They imply that which it is incumbent upon them to prove, and they do so with the full-throated sentimentality of romanticists, who cannot be quite sensible, who must have a tear in their eye, and a lump in their throat, when they pronounce the word “Woman.”
But the falsehood, palpable as it was, succeeded by means of its flattering innuendo, in convincing every woman in Great Britain, who had reasons for being discontented and disgruntled. Indeed, so flattering was the innuendo, that even if the alleged subjection was not a historical fact, it was felt that at least it ought to have been. And what was this flattering innuendo in Mrs. Taylor’s falsehood?—It was this: That if hitherto women had produced no outstanding work, no epoch-making masterpiece in the arts or in the sciences, if, in fact, European women had not been so very different from the women of tradition and antiquity, it was not because men were specially gifted, or radically different from them, but simply because European women had been stunted by oppression!
This was much too fascinating a lie ever to be suspected or distrusted by the overweening champions of Women’s Rights, either in the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century; hence the eager speed with which it was swallowed down—hence too Mill’s inordinate popularity! A large majority of women, it is true, were a little too thoughtful, or a little too well informed, to be duped by it; but the disgruntled and arrogant minority won the day.[178]
It is perfectly true, of course—indeed nothing could be plainer—that man, throughout the ages, even of European history, has been unable to relieve woman of those duties which, as a mother, and therefore as a homekeeper, have necessarily devolved upon her;[179] but neither has he been able to relieve himself of the duties of the soldier, the sailor, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water. Nobody in his senses, however (unless he were infatuated with a second Mrs. Taylor), would argue that because man has been unable to relieve woman of those duties, therefore he has distorted her “true” nature.
For the truth is, the fact remains (securely as Mill was blinded to it) that even in those departments of social life which for centuries, almost from time immemorial, have constituted practically the undisputed domain of woman—woman’s Empire, woman’s peculiar field for enterprise and initiative, where her independence and supremacy have been unchallenged—in cooking, clothing and child-care, such ineptitude, such inability to improve, such gross and stubborn stupidity have been shown, that only when men took over these departments of knowledge, as special branches of study, was there any sign, any hope, any certainty of progress being made.
Even if we were so easily hoodwinked as to be led to admit that woman’s relative intellectual inferiority, her lack of creative and inventive ability in other spheres, did not constitute a natural sexual characteristic, but were the outcome of a deliberate attempt on our part to withhold from her the opportunities of acquiring ability in those spheres, how are we to explain the marked deficiency of intelligence and initiative which she has shown as a sex in the elaboration and perfection of those arts or sciences, such as cooking, clothing, and child-care, which have practically been her exclusive domain for ages? Here she was supreme. Here she was entirely free and untrammelled. By now she could have converted each of these pursuits into an exact science. She has had the time, the hereditary bias, and the accumulated knowledge of tradition, all on her side. And yet, as we know, it was only when men took these departments in hand, that they began to wear the aspect of properly regulated and scientific occupations.
To-day the high authorities, the only authorities, on cooking are all men. To-day, if a woman for some reason or other is unable to nurse her new-born child, she cannot turn to the traditional wisdom of her sex,[180] she cannot even turn to a classical work on child welfare written by one member of her sex, she must turn to man; for the high authorities on this subject, at the time of writing, are all men like Dr. Eric Pritchard, or else women who have learnt all they know directly from them. To-day, every fashion, whether of men’s or of women’s clothing, is entirely the creation of the male mind. A group of men in England direct the former, and a group of men in France autocratically prescribe the latter.