Leave her alone then; leave her to work out her own salvation, and like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, to venture single-handed in search of that true Womanhood which according to some theorists has yet to be found, and has never yet been allowed a free development, and what happens?—She ceases from being a true Woman at her very first step into the wilderness of isolation. She denies her principal characteristic, her distinctive individuality, by the very act of desertion constituted by her flight into so-called freedom and autonomy. For the only power that rules Woman with an iron hand, the only power that moulds her destiny and actuates her behaviour and aspirations, she can never desert; and that is a power far more inexorable and irresistible than the power of man. It is the power of Life itself, with which she is much more deeply, secretly and thoroughly in touch than we are, or could ever hope to be. We are an amputation from Life, to which we return only at odd intervals, as it were to pay tribute: she is Life’s uninterrupted stream that receives this tribute.
I repeat, therefore, that while we have the power to make Woman miserable and ill—a power which for the last 250 years in England we have exercised with ever-increasing folly—we have no more right to boast that we have moulded or directed her evolution than we have a right to boast of having shaped the stars and the moon. And those women who allow us this boast and who accuse us of having arrested their development (whatever that may mean), or of having distorted their true individuality, fall with treacherous perfidy to their sex, into the ranks of Woman’s worst enemies.
How have we made Woman miserable and ill?
Let me explain what misery and illness means:
Put a mole to live upon a concrete floor, lay a frog in a parched sandy plain, and confine the agile cat to a space only just large enough to allow it to lash its tail, and you will have succeeded so thoroughly in thwarting the primary instincts of these three animals—the subterranean life of the mole, for which its large forelegs and its whole body crave; the amphibious life of the frog after which its webbed feet and nimble limbs hanker, and the stalking, hunting and prowling lust of the cat to which all its magnificent body is so superbly adjusted—that you will have made them utterly and desperately miserable and probably ill as well.
What have you done? You have deprived them of their primary adaptations. The same holds good of Woman. Millions of women to-day are hopelessly irrevocably deprived of their primary adaptations, and even those who are given their primary adaptations, so frequently receive them in a form that is inadequate and unsatisfying, effete and inferior, that even among the married women of our day there is a depth of disappointment, disillusionment and vague dissatisfaction that makes some of them even more miserable than their single sisters. The latter, at least, are still able to hope against hope (a wonderful power in women); the others can only await the end, knowing the worst and knowing that everything is hopeless.
How do we men absolve ourselves from the blame of this? For it is certainly we who mould society and ourselves, even if we do not mould women. How do we try to evade, escape, circumvent the main issue?—We have the effrontery to teach Woman the doctrine that since we fail them both in quantity and quality, there is a life away from us and the children they could have from us that is worth living. We do not scruple to tell them that they can be happy, content, comfortable, without the surroundings to which they are primarily adapted. We abet and promote a process by which millions of our women deliberately turn their backs upon their primary adaptations, and spring to our side like neuters in the arena of our active life, our besotting duties, our drudgery! But not content with undermining their health and their happiness by denying the just privilege of their primary adaptations, we undermine their spirits by casting them like convicts into the wheels of the very machine that has already reduced us to such pale shadows of our former selves, such faint echoes of manhood, that they were rightly growing dissatisfied with us.
But not only that, we taught them that they could find happiness in this independence, in this single-handed struggle—happiness! Aye, there were even some women who arose and assured their sisters that we were right and that they could live lives, yes, and enjoy Life, in this independent isolation!
If this were not all visible before us, many would still refuse to believe it. Unfortunately it is all only too true! This incredible farce is our present-day existence—our age!
We have actually not refrained from telling young girls that they can live a life away from their principal adaptations!