The only circumstance that could possibly make me regret the death of a woman like Mrs. Taylor, many years before my own birth, is that it has rendered me unable to confront her with these facts, and to ask her how she accounts, or how she would have made poor Mill account, for this colossal, incurable and wellnigh incredible lack of ability in thousands of generations of women, in occupations where they had everything their own way for centuries.
In England, in the Middle Ages, a proverb was current to the effect that “God sent us meat and the devil ordained the cooking of it.”[181] The cooking of food, which has remained in the hands of women for a longer period in England than in France, is, in England, notoriously atrocious. The clothing of women, which in England is more remote from the male focus of inspiration than in France, is in England proverbially inferior—despite fashion-books and a constant cross-Channel stream of British fashion-spies. While the fact that child-welfare centres are being opened up everywhere (inspired originally by male doctors, and the results of male research), in order to teach women how to take care of their babies, is surely proof enough of the abysmal ignorance into which the traditional mother of history has sunk, regarding a calling which has been her own exclusive field from the beginning of time, and which she ought to have perfected at the very dawn of history.
If Mill had, with one masterly shake of his muddled head, removed those soft pink fingers from his brow, he might possibly have seen all this, and have left his MS. in some conspicuous place where his wise housemaid (who consigned Carlyle’s French Revolution to the flames) might have done the same by his own Subjection of Women. But with characteristic confusion he mistook erotic vividness for mental vision, and thus added one great intellectual blunder to the many which contributed towards forming late nineteenth-century opinion.
Unlike man, whose nature is more variegated and more subject to variation, woman is possessed of a primum mobile that we can recognize—that is to say, she is actuated by a mainspring, a ruling motive, that we can observe in operation. As we have seen, this primum mobile constitutes her the chief custodian and preserver of Life, and the chief promoter of Life’s multiplication. In fact, these two functions constitute her principal importance, and endow her with her great power and her great value. Everything else in woman is of minor significance. If, therefore, we assume at this stage in our treatise—for the point has been demonstrated often enough—that the positive woman’s incessant and unconscious impetus is in the direction of Life and its multiplication, we may expect to find in woman all the virtues that guarantee the survival of the species, and all the vices which Life itself reveals in the pursuit of this same object.
Seeing that the pursuit of Life and its multiplication is in Nature an activity that is untrammelled by any moral consideration whatsoever, we may ask ourselves, whether in view of the difficulty of improving upon Nature’s methods in this respect, and in view, moreover, of the fact that woman is a child of Nature, we are not justified in recognizing in woman a primum mobile that is also completely a-moral.
If we are so justified, then it follows that all woman’s deeper characteristics, as Nature’s characteristics, are not moral but immoral, not social but unsocial, not lawful but lawless.[182]
Let us proceed to examine this statement more narrowly. A woman’s deepest characteristics are termed by us unmoral. What does that precisely mean? We have admitted that what constitutes woman’s greatest value and her greatest power is that she is the chief supporter of the vital functions—the promotion and preservation of Life. If, therefore, she is also immoral, it must mean that, in the fulfilment of her destiny, she has often to run counter, as Nature does, to our standard of moral integrity. Therefore, that if she were moral, this would be a hindrance and an obstacle in the way of her destiny. But how will she reveal this immorality, or a-morality?—My reply is, in being like Nature utterly unscrupulous in the means she adopts to achieve her vital end—that is to say, more intent on the vital end than on anything else, such as truth, honour, justice, fair-play, etc., etc. For morality means scruples, it involves the necessity of regarding scruples as obstacles in the way of certain actions. If, therefore, we can show that woman, like Nature, is unscrupulous in her promotion and preservation of Life, we will have gone some way towards establishing the fact of her immorality.
Before, however, we proceed with this inquiry, we should like to remind all readers, who at this point may begin to feel their cheeks mantling with indignation, that, since from the optimist’s point of view it is desirable for the human species to survive, a very high sanction indeed prevails over woman’s vital unscrupulousness, however surprising and unexpected its consequences may prove to be.[183] For instance, if, as we hope we have already abundantly shown, woman’s chief and deepest concern is the multiplication and preservation of life, it is obvious that, when confronted by a situation in which a lie will secure her vital end, and one in which truth will defeat it, she will naturally and instinctively choose to lie—not because she necessarily prefers to lie, but because she is more concerned about the end in view than the means she adopts to achieve it, and every lie to her is a “white” lie that secures her vital end. If then from a vital indifference to truth she ultimately reveals an ordinary indifference to truth in the common and less vital circumstances of everyday life, we must blame, not a fundamental perversity of her nature, which would seem to suggest that moral obliquity is a deep-rooted and ineradicable element of her psyche, but a self-preservative characteristic of the race which, though manifesting itself, as it were, unnecessarily and provokingly in everyday affairs, nevertheless, if absent altogether, would prove the most serious menace to the survival of humanity. In the form of a simile we might say that, just as the good army marksman annoys us when, in peace-time, he disturbs our quiet moments with his incessant revolver or rifle practice, and his insatiable desire to “pot” anything and everything, yet we applaud and defend his love of his fire-arm and his skill with it, when, in time of war, he and his like defend our homes and ourselves by “accounting” for numbers of the enemy.
Is that clear? In plain English, to take an extreme case, if a girl is to be equipped with that ability for wiles and small deceptions which, despite adverse circumstances, are to enable her to secure a lover and a husband and a large family early in life; if, moreover, she is to be prepared to go to extreme lengths to defend and promote the welfare of her children (as all good mothers are), and also to secure their survival and success over the heads of other and possibly more deserving or better children (as all good mothers are prepared to do[184]); if, moreover, in her relations with her husband and her children, she is to display that tact and diplomacy which always secure her the victory in domestic negotiations; then, it seems to me, we have a creature whose special gifts will extend beyond her family and its vital concerns, and invade all the other circumstances of her life, and who will inevitably practise wiles and small deceptions in those conditions where life, its multiplication and preservation are not necessarily in question.