[13] Of course, I mean this intellectual positiveness only as a rational confirmation of bodily and constitutional positiveness; for frequently when I shall use the expression “positive” it will also mean the unconscious, spontaneous positiveness of a healthy body. From the context there will be no mistaking which I mean. The same remark applies naturally to the expression intellectual negativeness. For instance, St. Paul and Calvin were both intellectually as well as spontaneously negative. An unhealthy child, or an unhealthy adult, may be only unconsciously or spontaneously so.
[14] In this connexion, see pp. [98-103].
CHAPTER II
The Subject Treated Generally
In my Introduction I have said enough to show that I can be neither a so-called Woman-hater nor a Woman-despiser. And if I have departed somewhat from the common rules laid down by precedent for the writing of a book of this nature, it was because I felt compelled to safeguard some of my hardest and most unacceptable views and conclusions from the withering suspicion of having been dictated by bitterness or resentment.
Other men have written about Woman, and have said hard things about her too: Knox, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weininger are among them. Neither Knox, Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche, however, started life with such a large fund of prepossession in her favour. Neither Knox, Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche can be said to have been free, as I am, from those bitter experiences and shocks that distort one’s vision and destroy one’s focus.
If I appear to say things that are hard, therefore let it be plainly understood at this stage in my work, that I do so only because I wish to speak frankly and clearly about my subject; and that in view of the muddled and maudlin misunderstandings that now hang like a stifling mist over the female sex, it is impossible to dissipate errors or to take up a clear and definite stand at all, without occasionally seeming hard, unrelenting, metallic. Any flash may be taken for a flash of steel, particularly when one is in a fog.
My intention in writing this book was to save Woman from the cruel misconceptions that are steadily undermining her body and her character, and although there is much in my work that will try the patience and the endurance of many of my readers—particularly men and unhealthy women—I could not possibly eliminate a single one of the more provocative passages without failing in what I feel to be my duty to my undertaking.
I maintain that Woman is now miserable, wretched, desperate. I am not one of those who are certain that present woman is a product of man’s own fashioning. If she were she would not be miserable, because, step by step, as man has advanced—or declined!—she too would have changed, and thus remained his adapted and contented mate. But there is something essentially idiosyncratic in Woman, something that makes her an individual, unalterable and for ever fixed; something that nothing can fashion. You can make her miserable; you can make her sick; you cannot change her! I would go further and say, that all women from Pekin to London and Lisbon are the same; they are only a little more happy or healthy, or a little more miserable and ill, according as to whether their men do or do not understand how to treat them.
Disbelieving utterly, as I do, in the theory that Modern Woman is as man has made her—I mean apart from her wretchedness or sickness, of course—I cannot uphold the view that Woman has any destiny to work out for herself. She has no “true Womanhood” that has yet to be sought and found while we leave her alone. We cannot leave her alone. The moment we leave her alone she ceases to be true Woman: where, then, could she go alone to seek and find her “true Womanhood”?
All those who speak of a “true Womanhood” to be sought and found away from us and from the children we give her, would do both Woman and the world a kindness, a great and inestimable kindness, in henceforward for ever holding their tongues on the subject of Woman.