I have now come to the end of my undertaking. I have called my work A Vindication, because I sincerely meant it as a book friendly in spirit to the female sex, and one in which the worst that can be said about them is shown to be but the outcome of their best, or at least but the result of a misuse or abuse of their best. I have attempted to show that their virtues, like their vices, are all derived from the unalterable vital instincts which their evolutionary rôle, as the mothers of the race, have gradually implanted in them and fixed in them for ever. Not the smallest suspicion of hostility or bitterness towards women has animated me in writing one line of the preceding pages. It is my conviction that those who misunderstand women, who wish to make them more negative, and who flatter them into the belief that their present and traditional inferiority to man is not natural but “artificial,” are the true enemies of womankind. It is they who are now contriving woman’s unhappiness, and who, in conspiring to rob her of the greatest joys of which her body and spirit are heirs, distract her attention from their nefarious scheme by holding before her prizes which, in the ripeness of time, she herself recognizes as mere baubles.
The possibilities of human nature are so incalculable, and the freaks of adaptation so manifold, that it is by no means impossible to destroy the woman in woman and to convert her into a creature in which masculine instincts and aspirations come into constant conflict with a non-masculine physique and a non-masculine racial history. As an ideal achievement this is not impossible. The only question humanity has to decide is whether such a metamorphosis is desirable; whether in the interests both of woman herself and the species in general, such a transformation will be for the good. It is true, as we have seen, that it will never be possible to rear female geniuses equal to male geniuses, because these extremes in men seem to be due to a purely masculine tendency to greater variability; but a more modest programme of masculinization is certainly not impossible. Make woman honest, upright, straightforward, however; make her impartial; make her scrupulous; make her the reverse of vulgar; destroy her love of petty power, her vanity and her sensuality; and what, in sooth, will you have achieved? You will have undermined the very instincts that Nature has implanted in her to secure the survival of the species at all costs, and in the face of everything. If that is desirable, if that is an ideal worthy of our aspirations, then certainly let us do all in our power to realize it. If, however, it is possible to entertain the smallest shadow of doubt concerning the wisdom of this course; if by the exercise of a little humility we can question whether our nineteenth-century or our twentieth-century ideals can possibly be more profound and more far-sighted than the eternal sagacity of Nature; if there are still reasons for feeling that it is not woman as I have described her in these pages, but man himself—man as we know him in this post-war Europe of 1922—who is really in direst need of transformation; then, it seems to me, that it is above all important to pause and carefully to take our bearings before we make this daring plunge; for we cannot now with any pretence of honesty or good faith claim that it is a plunge into the unknown.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[232] Op. cit., pp. 210, 211.
[233] For a detailed discussion of the relationship of the painter, sculptor, poet, architect and musician to the great social builder and artist, see my Introduction to Van Gogh’s Letters (Constable & Co., London).
[234] See Lecky (Op. cit., vol. II, p. 360). Speaking of women he says: “They are little capable of impartiality or of doubt; their thinking is chiefly a mode of feeling.” See also Buckle (The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge), the whole argument of which is to the effect that woman’s thinking is emotional. Weininger also says (Op. cit., p. 100): “With the woman, thinking and feeling are identical,” but this testimony is not nearly as valuable as that of the two former writers, who can in no way be suspected of misogyny.
[235] On this whole question cp. Sir Almroth E. Wright (Op. cit., p. 35): “Woman’s mind attends in appraising a statement primarily to the mental images which it evokes, and only secondarily—and sometimes not at all—to what is predicated in the statement ... accepts the congenial as true, and rejects the uncongenial as false; takes the imaginary which is desired for reality, and treats the undesired reality which is out of sight as non-existent.”
[236] With the softening of men in an effeminate civilization, women are, of course, not alone in holding this attitude to truth. Many men, even among the most cultivated, are unable to-day to separate pleasantness from truth; for to do so implies a control of emotion by reason which is not the forte of modern mankind. Not only men writers during the war, but also politicians, proved beyond doubt their own and their male audiences’ inability to regard truth rationally; and at the present time you are quite as likely to be flatly contradicted by a man as by a woman, if you enunciate an unpleasant truth before an ordinary crowd.