So long as there survives within the breast of man a spark of that Chivalry which has been both the inspiring and impelling power of his virile development, he can neither meet, nor can he treat with woman upon equal terms.
Always the aspects of her in capacities of mother, wife or love (or mistress) must intervene to disarm, and to incapacitate him from exerting his full strength against her. Whether her appeal to him be sacred or profane, accordingly—that of woman at her best or at her worst—always so long as he is man, her highest and most tender (as her basest) appeal will be by way of those woman-Unfitnesses which in every age have served as highest incentive of his Fitnesses; that he might win, safeguard and cherish her. This chivalrous instinct it was, in part—for behind it lurked the recognition of more than half a nation suffering from the wrong of Unenfranchisement—which disarmed and paralysed his action in respect of those same Suffragist outbreaks. And so long as he is man, will he be similarly disarmed and dangerously inhibited from meeting and from battling successfully with woman.
History repeats itself. And if men suppose that they have seen the last of female Militancy, and overlook the menacing truth that their own incapacity to cope with this must increase inevitably in direct proportion to woman's waxing power, they are blind, indeed, to dangerous breakers ahead.
Having sown the fickle wind of woman's variability, they are like to reap the whirlwind in her inherent non-conformability; a difficult and parlous factor such as they have never previously encountered in political and industrial administration. Such non-conformability as is seen at an extreme in the anarchy of revolutions; in which women, having lost control and balance, plunge deeper and deeper into excesses, without power, it would seem, of recoil. While men reach a maximum, recover poise, and then setting about to re-constitute order out of chaos, more often than not evolve a higher form of order than had previously obtained.
VII
Secure in their traditional superior strength, however, and with characteristic complacency in this relation, men have no suspicion of the sex-antagonism—hatred even—seething against them in Feminism. And this far from having been annealed or softened, has been, on the contrary, greatly aggravated by the concessions and new privileges lately accorded the sex.
Strange to say, the chief talk of extremist women in their new War-capacities was bitterest grievance and hostility against the male, because, although installed in masculine positions, they were denied rights identical with his; of rank and recognition, of responsibility and pay. That they held these capacities temporarily merely, and as novices and amateurs, while men held theirs as experts, for long service or for superior values by right of masculine abilities, had no weight whatsoever. Never in all her days of so-called subjection has woman been so loud and denunciatory of the injustices of The Oppressor, of his conspiracies and crimes against her, as since she has been yielded a number of those rights which Feminism claims.
Feminists will say this is because complete equality in all things has not yet been granted—has yet to be fought for. The truth is, however, that the interests and functions of men fail wholly to satisfy the wholly dissimilar natures of women. But until they have realised this—the true reason of their discontent—an ever-increasing number of women will continue to make these their coveted goal, and to chafe with anger and bitterest resentment against the other sex for denying them full measure of things—without intrinsic value for them.
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