Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

As the life of the individual female is prolonged, and the tone of her reproductive organs depreciates through the deleterious influence of long idle waiting, there occurs an abatement of the unconscious influences impelling the positive spinster to seek a fuller life. A sort of passive adaptation to abnormality takes place in which a balance is attained, and the restless and more afflicting symptoms become accordingly less acute. But, with the decline in sexual vigour and alertness, there is a corresponding falling off of good spirits, hopefulness, and the love of life, and frequently there supervenes a pronounced distaste for human concerns or a general depression, which makes the spinster the proverbially embittered female of popular tradition. The more positive she was at the outset, the more likely is this revulsion of feeling to appear in an intolerable form—hence the common occurrence of embittered spinsters on the Continent, where women are, as a rule, more positive than in England.

Indeed, it can usually be taken for granted that where Nature has been thwarted without any dire results, Nature was not originally very strong, or not assertive enough to offer very severe resistance. The presence of thousands of very cheerful and completely adapted spinsters in England, therefore, far from being a good sign, is in reality a very deplorable one; for it argues that in them Nature was not powerful enough to offer any determined fight before allowing herself to be completely conquered.

There are but two possible exceptions to this rule, and they occur where the reproductive instinct has been subjected to the process known to psychologists as sublimation. This innocuous transmutation of the sex appetite and emotions may be effected either by means of Christianity (religious fervour)[118] or Alcohol (dypsomania). When either of these potent sublimators of the sex impulse has come into operation, it is no longer safe to argue from the spectacle of a cheerful and happy spinster of middle age, that in her Nature was not very strong from the start. But, again, the fact should be emphasized that with the spread of enlightenment on the one hand, and the general decline in vigorous health on the other, these hitherto unfailing means of sex-sublimation are becoming ever less and less accessible to the women of the nation. A generation has arisen on whom the fundamental tenets of the old faith have lost their hold, and in whom, therefore, it is becoming ever more and more difficult for Christianity to become a burning substitutive passion; while this same generation can no longer undertake the alcoholic cure, owing to the fact that human health is no longer what it was.[119]

Before proceeding to a discussion of the negative spinster, I now propose to consider one aspect only of the positive unmarried girl of the poorer or working classes.

There can be little doubt that in her case, very much more frequently than in the case of the well-to-do spinster, compensation is sought in some kind of illicit relation to the males either of her own class or of the class above. The statistics of prostitution alone show what an enormous contribution the women of the poorer or working classes make to the ranks of the courtesans in Europe; and seeing what the alternative usually is—that is to say, a life of drudgery unrelieved by any brighter element and aggravated by all the evils of unsuccessful repression—it is not surprising that among the more positive girls of the poorer classes, particularly in towns, there are many who go to swell the army of fast women.

But at this point it will be necessary for me to digress a little in order to make quite clear my own standpoint in regard to this very vexed question of prostitution. For it is only an evil in modern Western Civilization because people insist on making it so.

Our civilization stands or falls as a whole. The intricate adjustments which constitute its fabric, and the minute ramifications that wander in all directions from every centre in its complicated organization to every other centre, and sometimes to every other civilization, lend to its various parts a character so interdependent and mutually subservient, that it is no longer possible to lay hold of any important portion of it, with a view to condemnation, without thereby condemning the whole.

The comfortable and short-sighted people who, from the security of their smug homes, point a finger of censure at prostitution, therefore, have not as a rule the imaginations or the knowledge to realize that in so doing they are bringing an indictment against the whole order of society, including their own pathetic fastnesses of bourgeois luxury and morality.

If prostitution exists on a large scale in modern Europe, and prostitution is wrong, then the civilizations of modern Europe are wrong, and it is fatuous to point to the most obvious sore, when the whole pig is diseased. Nobody nowadays denies, perhaps, that the whole pig is diseased? Then it is absurd to moan over this one sore.

But why is so much fuss made precisely about prostitution on its sexual side? There is the prostitution of healthy rosy-fingered youth in hundreds of other walks of life, and nobody, or scarcely anybody, stirs to point it out. The young girls who to-day are sent by their parents at the age of sixteen to twenty to bow their heads for forty-three hours a week before a typewriter, or a ledger, or a stamping, cutting or folding machine, get ill just as quickly, lose their beauty just as surely, and grow depressed and spiritless just as rapidly, as the sexual prostitute, and they get only a sixteenth or less of the prostitute’s entertainment out of life into the bargain. Watch the career of the girl who sells herself to the modern taskmaster of commerce or industry! Could anything be more tragic? Could any satyr bring about grosser degradation of health and spirits? What sympathy or horror or righteous indignation can you rouse in the moral toads, who inveigh against prostitution, by pointing to the rounded shoulders, the loveless life, the listless eyes, the bloodless cheeks and hands of the typewriter or other machine drudge? None!