Another—and quite different—sub-order of this neurotic (and partially-sterilised) type, in losing its higher potential of motherhood has lost the racial instinct wherein personal virtue is rooted. The lives of these are free and irregular. Not measures, but men, are their vogue; to serve as admirers of their charm and talents, as spectators of their temperamental extravagances. Incapable of the emotions of love, they seek, are discontented, and seek further when they do not find in its excitements, the joys and contentment that reside alone in deep and abiding emotions. The poise and repose, the charm, the refreshment and the inspiration of true Womanhood are lacking in them. They demand increasing novelty and change of venue for their ill-ballasted powers and capricious sensibilities. And this precisely in proportion as they are deficient in those womanly emotions and illusions which endue the least and simplest things with glamour and with beauty.
This type, which can scarcely be said to live, but merely to frolic through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the nobler aspirations and the functions of the best womanhood.
V
It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a sex whereof The Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural aptitudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired—in substitution for her native ones—do not alter her inherent constitution of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some of the characteristics of an opposite sex, but never the morale; which is inborn and inherent to the natural sex-characteristics.
Faculty declines in the inverse order of its development. The bloom and beauty of the peach and of the flower are the last things to come—and the first to go. So, in forfeiting her womanly qualities, woman forfeits earliest the best of these. Love and purity and spiritual aspiration perish first; with the result that the lower-grade female Subconscious emotionalism, instinct and palpitant with animal impulse, comes into play.
Man requires to degenerate to far inferior levels than is the case with woman, before he so loses his normal rationalism as to forfeit his sense of proportion and of his responsibility with regard to material affairs, and that stern obligation to conform to environmental conditions which has been the impelling force of male development. Irresponsibility is in him an acquired—and a feminine—defect; not an inherent failing of his sex. The very basis of the manly character is a recognition of the male responsibility in life's affairs. It was the impulse of man's primal struggle. It is the mark of his civilised manhood.
Irresponsibility is, on the contrary, innate in woman. It is part of that spontaneity, plasticity, and versatility which have engendered the racial evolutionary mutations; and by way of these have engendered the progressive transitions to ever higher forms. And indispensable as her native mutability is in making her the agency of evolutionary change, it is an insecure and a dangerous basis for too heavy a super-structure of male characteristics, physical or mental; as also for too heavy a burden of male responsibilities. It disqualifies her for liberty and scope of action identical with man's, in material affairs.
The further we fit her, moreover (beyond her normal capacity), for such affairs, by artificially equipping her with masculine aptitudes, the more we unfit her for her evolutionary rôle of spontaneous advance. Her chiefest values lie in the spring and the plasticity which enable her to adapt her nature to the evolutionary impulses of life inherent in her; and thereby to engender further human evolution. For this, it is important that she shall not be moulded on those firmer and more definitely prescribed lines of masculine development which are indispensable to the pioneering of material progress. Nor should her powers be equally differentiated, or similarly expended. They must be left, in far greater degree, conserved, unformulate and unadapted.