Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

We try to soothe our consciences; we try to slur over our social mistakes; we sneakingly pretend to ignore the fact that our social life is wrong; and we, and even some women themselves, preach the accursed doctrine that there is a true Womanhood to be sought and found in women alone, by women alone, for women alone! We have not, cannot, will not, do our duty by Women, and we assuage their blind and often unconscious misery by this damnable falsehood which thousands of them in their trustfulness believe. We tell them that somewhere in the Far Away, in the Never-Never-Land—not in the Backwoods of Superior Bunkum—there is a True Woman, a hybrid of a misunderstood Joan of Arc and a glacier. She is alone glorying in her True Womanhood. No man has fashioned her. She has no fashioning—or fashion either, for that matter!—and she simply sits and exults in her manless, childless, splendid independence! Towards this ideal we bid our sisters strive—nay, some of our sisters themselves bid their sisters strive; and we have not enough decency left to blush at our perfidy, at our blackguardly deception!

The problem is out of hand; its difficulties have proved too much for us, otherwise we could not have the barefaced duplicity to settle it in this transparently farcical manner.

What should we think of a cattle-farmer, who, on discovering that he had not enough pasture-land for all his sheep, taught the pastureless ones, when they had grown thin and wan for want of their proper food, that there was a True Sheephood somewhere, a lofty ideal—a Sheephood that could go without pasture-land and without grass altogether; a Sheephood that was self-contained and self-reliant, independent and indisputable, and that they were to go in search of that True Sheephood, and if necessary grow thinner and less attractive every day in their search for it? We should feel that they would have to be very inferior sheep to believe this story, or, rather, very real sheep indeed! Everything in their body, from their cud-chewing molars to their long grass-digesting gut, would surely tell them that the Ideal of True Sheephood was arrant nonsense, and cruel arrant nonsense too.

No, it is impossible to accept the “True Womanhood” ideal of woman gloriously alone, emancipated from man, independent and “discovered.” Inasmuch as we have not fashioned her, and could not do so if we tried, woman is as her rôle in the course of evolution has made her. She is certainly more unhappy, more tormented, more unwell, than she ever need have been; but that is because her principal adaptation—her relation to man—is now so often entirely wrong, or alas! non-existent. I point out again: if, as some presumptuously maintain, we have been fashioning her all through the ages, she would have followed us contentedly to our present stage—a thing she has not done. There is something essentially idiosyncratic in woman then, something that defies our clumsy “fashioning” hands.

This unalterable individuality has not to be found. It is not an ideal after which we might strive. It is present, it is seated in Woman now and for evermore, and one of its principal characteristics is that it cannot brook isolation, solitude, independence, glorious singleness. The “True Womanhood” hoax of Woman refound by herself, for herself, and in herself, as if all this time her association with man and her dependence upon him had been a mistake, an error of judgment, a cramping, limiting and disturbing factor in the evolution of “Pure Woman,” is simply pure falsehood of the worst description; because it overlooks the facts precisely there where they are most glaring, most undeniable, most conspicuous.

Examine the tendrils of the vine and deny that it is a creeping plant destined to cling to a wall or to a tougher plant than itself, and you would declare yourself in so many words an ignoramus or a madman.

Examine Woman and deny that she must have two primary adaptations—that to the man and that to the child—in order simply to fulfil her destiny as it is stamped indelibly on her body; and you acknowledge yourself straight away not only an ignoramus and a madman, but a dangerous specimen of both.

Immersed as Woman obviously is, up to her shoulders in the business of Life and its multiplication, let it be said plainly and unequivocally: all those who teach her that any other business is her business, all those who, in face of the dilemma of modern problems, confuse her with tales about a true Womanhood away from Life and its multiplication; all those, in short, who beguile her with promises of happiness, contentedness, or even comfort, without her primary adaptations to man and the child, are liars both unscrupulous and criminal.

And here I have touched upon what I claim to be idiosyncratic and perfectly individual in Woman—her deep and almost whole-bodied concern with Life and its multiplication. Above all the other functional differences and similarities between the sexes, this fundamental trait must prevail as a permanent and ineradicable characteristic of Woman, and it is the bedrock on which we must build, and from which we must set out, if we wish to arrive at a clear and untainted image of Woman as distinct from Man.

When, moreover, one remembers that this principal characteristic of hers is the seed and generating force of all her will, her leading instincts and her virtues, it is simply deliberate blindness to deny that she has not a distinctive and powerful individuality that places her far outside the possible influence of those “fashioning” male hands that some have the impudence to maintain have warped or diverted the true course of her evolution.