It would seem that the first sips of liberty require to be administered to the sex with caution, however; the effects observed carefully, the doses increased warily. Otherwise, impulsive and impressionable as they are, women lose their heads; become intoxicated, and get out of hand. And once women get out of hand, it is next to impossible to bring them again under control (as was seen in the outbreaks of Feminist militancy). Civilisation forbids that men shall deal with them as with masculine rebels. And fenced thus behind the privileges of their own sex, when armed with the prerogatives of the other, they may prove dangerously difficult customers.
In ancient Greece, the wives and mothers and the other reputable women had but little or no freedom. They lived, for the most part, in seclusion; dull and unintelligent and uneventful lives. There was no pure, wholesome, and inspiring social life. The only women who were free were the hetairai, those famous ladies who shed a lurid brilliance over the corruption and decline of this great State—a decline wherewith they had, most certainly, much to do. A faction apart from the wives and mothers—although many among them were courtesans, they stood apart too from the courtesan class. Women who had found in the unfreed state of the wife and mother of their epoch, inadequate scope for their impulses and talents, they broke away from domestic conditions, to form a coterie of free lances—a cultured, brilliant and alluring band of renegades, sought and esteemed for their beauty and intelligence by all men; aristocrat, philosopher, and pleasure-seeker.
More likely than that Greece fell because she did not emancipate her women, it is that she fell because the women who emancipated themselves abandoned the rôles of wife, of mother, and other reputable functions. For these Grecian hetairai comprised, in the main, the flower of their generation. One sees them, indeed, as brilliant Racial poison-blossoms, greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's beauty and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence, passion—without transmitting any of these racial attainments to a later generation. In place of endowing their kind with such nobler light and faculty, inspiration and sweetness, as supply a people's evolutionary impulse, they abandoned the home and the sacred and spiritualising functions of true wifehood, and of the motherhood of such higher living types as are indispensable to lead a nation's progress.
A kindred movement—modified, for the present, by the more enlightened traditions of our Century—is foreshadowing itself across the higher civilisations of our day. More and more, our better types of women (the misinterpretations of the Feminist Movement having imparted a distorted bias and direction to their powers) are similarly abandoning the Home, or are withdrawing their best interests and talents from it; are evading wholly, or are gravely restricting their maternal obligations to the Race; regarding children as bye-products, merely, of life—vastly less important than some hobby or career. In place of realising the new generation as the Vanguard of Life and Evolution; that which beyond every other human achievement counts in the Universe.
Worse than this even, more and more, everywhere, women are failing in the maternal power of transmitting to offspring the health, the beauty, the abilities and aspirations which are the model and ideals of our age.
IV
A menace to the Race more alarming than that of the hard and mannish woman (who, because of her lack of womanly attractiveness, is debarred, in considerable degree, from marriage) is another and less ungraciously obvious deviation from The Normal—an order of the sex, modern and artificial, and rapidly increasing in number, over-civilised and highly-feminised both of physique and of temperament, which may be described as an Ultra-Feminine, or, in contradistinction to the Feminist, as a Feminist order.
Their womanhood but lightly rooted in neurotic systems, the women of this sect are unstable and erratic, seeking distraction for their restless, ill-balanced forces, in cards, crazes, drugs; fads and freaks. Unfitted for wifehood and motherhood—some by faulty heredity, but a far greater number by educational strain and consequent warp—some of these ultra-feminised and frequently interesting creatures absorb themselves feverishly in public movements; religious, social or political. Some are persons of irreproachable morale and ideals; devoted, gifted, wholly admirable. And being wives not seldom of men as talented, it is deplorable that warp of culture, unfitting them for motherhood, should have left such to waste their powers and aspirations in beating the thin air merely of Utopian propaganda. When, otherwise, they might have led the true and only way of Progress by endowing the Race with living presentments and evolving treasuries of the parental ideals and endowments.
The greater her charm, the nobler her character and talent, the more the pity is when woman is defective in the power to transmit her high qualities, or has power to transmit these in inferior degree only; thus sealing up for ever, or gravely impoverishing a vital spring of living faculty and individualism—a unique line of Human Ascent which no other stock can supply, and one which may have been leading up to the production of genius such as the world has not yet known.