Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

All of us, as we look around and behold our big cities, our municipal authorities and their offices, our streets, our traffic on those streets, our railways, our Parliament, our system of Judicature, our industries, our commerce, and finally the land beyond with all its agricultural and mining activities; all of us who can with one sweeping glance comprehend the immensely vast and intricate activities which go to make a modern nation, have sometimes a lucid moment when we can abstract from the wild and confusing tangle of our environment the idea of the purpose for which it is all there, the idea of the force for which it is organized—in short the underlying fact which gives the city, the country beyond, and all the activities we see, a sense, a genuine meaning.

This purpose, this force, this fact, is the Stream of Life that runs through our organized State, and to which all these activities, all these complex conditions, do but minister. The factory is thus beheld, not as an end in itself, but like art, like railways, like the bus service and the Government, it is only an instrument serving the most important thing of all, the Stream of Life, Human Life.

Now it is precisely from this most important thing of all that the spinster feels herself most radically and hopelessly severed. She may minister to it indirectly, through the factory, the municipal or Government offices, the studio, the nursery or the scientific professions; but her importance will be commensurate with the relation she bears to it. She is one step removed from the main stream, she does not directly flow with it; before the most important thing on earth, the thing that gives everything else its sense, she is and can only be a spectator. This is the additional anguish she must feel as a creature cheated of her proper calling. The artist with whom we have compared her, who suffers the mortifying experience of pursuing a vocation (accountancy) not his own, may after all be flowing with the Stream of Life, and form part of it. The additional anguish of being “out of it,” in this sense, he need not necessarily feel. He experiences only half the spinster’s spiritual distress.

Nor will it necessarily console her, or reconcile her to her relatively unimportant fate as spectator, to point to the pain, the passion, the disappointment, the hardships, the disease and the poverty that lash the main Stream of Life like a flail. If she is honest, she will tell you just what everybody else feels—that she would risk all these things to be in it.

But there is yet something more she endures, which the artist doomed to accountancy is spared. Provided he be wise and observes the essential rules of hygiene and sound diet, there is no reason, despite his abandoned mission, why his body should suffer very severely. While he may deplore his wasted capacity for art, he may nevertheless live a healthy sexual life and become a happy father.

The positive spinster, on the other hand, cannot well escape the physical penalty of her total sexual abstinence. The rebuff offered to her reproductive system by the long, endless wait is neither passed over by Nature nor forgiven. Such elaborate preparations as have been made in her body for a specific consummation cannot end in nothing, without certain very definite reactions, which it is neither fanciful nor fantastic, but rather helpful, to describe collectively as a profound physiological disappointment. The fact that this physiological disappointment does not enter consciousness as a disappointment has nothing whatever to do with its reality.

The energy that has been waiting and waiting to be used endeavours to discharge itself. Since it cannot find the customary and normal channels of discharge, it disperses itself erratically along any channel that it can find—usually the nerves—and it does this angrily because of the impetus it has acquired through being checked. The thwarted instincts show their revolt in internal conflict with the other instincts of life, and may be so powerful as to convert a girl hitherto consistently yea-saying into a radical nay-sayer, or a suicide.[104] Hence the strong tendency to suicide in very positive girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty, when the passions are most impetuous, and waiting leads to the maximum amount of conflict.[105] The fact that the number of suicides among women increases where their occupations bring them in contact with men, and that the same association with men also increases their tendency to lunacy and criminality,[106] supports the view that the physiological expectancy, by being increased owing to the presence of a strong sexual stimulus, leads to a greater conflict when it is disappointed.

The discharge of the sexual energy along nervous channels may lead to every variety of neuropathic symptoms. The woman may become the victim of phobias, obsessions, melancholia, morbid self-contempt, or morbid self-esteem (narcissism), facial tics, other spasms, insomnia, vicious secret habits, and hallucinations. Owing to the fact that other parts of her body, away from her sexual organs (the throat, œsophagus, or bowel, etc.), may attempt to find compensation for the inexperienced sexual sensations, she may find a morbid pleasure in consuming highly condimented foods, or foods which she can swallow in a bulky bolus[107]—bananas, new bread, pastry, insufficiently masticated hard foods, such as bread-crusts, apples, and even raw vegetables. This propensity, while quickly inducing indigestion, may, by giving a false appetite, cause her to be taken for a glutton. A case has been known of a girl who, addicted to this method of pseudo-sexual satisfaction, used to employ artificial means of vomiting up her food, like the more dissipated Romans of old, in order to be able to enjoy a fresh bout of swallowing.[108] The effects of this kind of abuse upon the alimentary canal may well be imagined, and even where it is not carried to extremes, must in the long run lead to all the most distressing forms of chronic dyspepsia.

Furthermore, the instinctive effort which every woman will make, in cases of vague physiological distress, to conceal her bodily misery from her friends and relatives, frequently leads to consistent affectation. It is not necessary that the nature of the bodily misery should have reached consciousness in order that affectation, as a means of concealment, should be indulged in. It is sufficient that the physiological distress should have been communicated vaguely as distress to the brain. From the moment this has occurred there will be a tendency in all brave women, who incline to show a bold and happy face to the world, to practise every kind of affectation. Their speech, their voice and even their laugh will strike their friends as over-strained or peculiar. Some will habitually make strange grimaces, others will smile in a set, exaggerated way, or over-emphasize their horror at objects disliked and their pleasure at objects approved. The affectation may even affect their gait, so that they will walk with a bold manly stride in which an unconscious attempt will be made to demonstrate to the outside world excessive self-assurance and happy adaptation, in order to conceal the reverse of these feelings which are agitating their spirits. As time goes on these affectations will become fixed habits that no training and no changes in environment can remove.

There may be attempts at sterile compensation, taking the form of an excessive fondness for children, or a desire to fondle or to have power over them. This is particularly obnoxious, and entirely justifies psychologists like Dr. E. Jones in strongly deprecating the too exclusive teaching of children by unmarried teachers.[109] It may look very sweet to behold the spinster of from twenty-five to forty manifesting her affection for a child and kissing, nursing or instructing it. But when it is remembered that the spinster in question is not merely giving herself very well-defined pleasure by the immediate touch of the soft downy skin of the child, or by the sense of power over it, but may also be rousing in the child itself certain pleasurable feelings, or certain notions, that do not fail to become registered on its memory, and may induce either regrettable sexual precocity or a distorted view of life,[110] the behaviour of the spinster appears in a less innocuous light. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that such attempts at sterile compensation by unmarried women are hard to prevent; for the spinster’s action at such times is quite unconscious, and she is usually so far from realizing what she is doing, that if you were to enlighten her upon her conduct she would be both indignant and disgusted. There can be little doubt, however, that the spinster’s strong predilection in favour of the teacher’s calling is largely due to this blind pursuit of some kind of power over the young.