[55] That is why the world’s greatest love stories—those of Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff and the elder Catherine (in Wuthering Heights)—are all stories of a love that was never consummated. In poetry and fiction, as in life, it is felt that for a great love romance to remain at its lofty level of passion and desire, the couple enacting it must never have an opportunity of living together as man and wife.
[56] Naturally these remarks do not apply to the large and ever-increasing number of women nowadays to whom every stage in the process of child-bearing, from the preliminaries to the weaning, is a torment and a source of disgust. But such women are too abnormal, whatsoever their numbers may be, and too sick and below par to be called positive healthy women, or to be reckoned with in any discussion regarding what is characteristic of happy and successful functioning. They are the kind of women who can truly regard matrimony and maternity as states of self-sacrifice.
[57] Of course this can only happen where the woman is inclined to pronounced negativeness, otherwise the longing for children drives her away from a husband who cannot or does not give them to her.
[58] The writer has known one case in which it lasted for years. Sometimes, in extreme cases, where the girl is too decent to be sacrificed for a lifetime, there is a nullity suit, and the man produces doctors who declare that he is perfectly normal. Of course he is perfectly normal! What is wrong about him is the whole of his upbringing and the effects of absurdly Puritanical notions about sex, acting upon a peculiarly sensitive nature. For such men are usually extremely desirable and acutely sensitive. They cannot, however, overcome the ridiculous prejudices that prevailed regarding sex in the atmosphere in which they have been reared.
[59] It should be noted that this does not apply to working-class women. The men of the working classes may be coarser and more brutal than the men of the wealthier classes, but they are also very much more normal, easy, natural, and gifted in the matter of sex, and from this point of view generally make excellent husbands. They may sometimes strike their wives, but they also know how to love them. The nullity suits and the bad lovers are to be found in the so-called “upper” classes.
[60] August Strindberg, in a letter written in the autumn of 1888, refers to England as “a nation of bigots that has delivered itself up into the hands of its women,” and later on speaks of “England’s trousered women.”
[61] I mean here, by “male characteristics,” only such traits as can be safely emulated and acquired by the female without the sacrifice or impairment of her reproductive functions, or of the instincts and virtues that derive from them (see chapter [X]).
[62] See Journal Anthropological Institute, Feb., 1892, p. 307. See also Bancroft, quoting Heame (Native Races), Vol. I, p. 117, where a North American Indian Chief of some nomadic tribe, speaking of the women said: “There is no such thing as travelling any considerable distance in this country without their assistance.” Evidently here too it was an advantage to the race for the women to be as nearly masculine in their characters as possible. Australian women, like Cuban women, used to fight beside their men and were very formidable. The former, when on the march, are said to have hardly troubled to halt for so slight a performance as child-birth. The newly-born infant was wrapped in skins, and the mother marched on with the rest.
[63] I shall deal with other standpoints in the chapter on the Old Maid.
[64] This solution of the problem of the manly woman, who is not undesirable, will thus be seen to be the very reverse, the flat contradiction, of that advanced by the decadent Weininger. He argues that the male woman does and ought to marry the female man, and the modern, decadent world, more or less agrees with him. But this means an accentuation of her maleness, a triumph of her maleness, at the cost of her femaleness—obviously an undesirable result, both from the standpoint of the race and the family, the only two standpoints from which the monogamic marriage has any meaning or can find any justification.