The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

You see how women stand in this matter. The social ideal is becoming a very near ideal to women. And this quickening in her of the citizen spirit may well come to revive our art to a more true and social service. This is no idle fancy. Throughout the ages of patriarchal faith women have been confined in the home, so that an understanding of the needs of the home is in their blood. May not the old ideals remain for service and find expression in the new work? Much that has passed with us as art has to be swept away. Let women bring this sense of home into our civic life, and surely it will be reflected in the arts. It is the sense of fitness to the common use and needs of the larger family of the State that has been almost wholly eliminated from our architecture, our statues, our paintings, our music, and much of our literature. The arts have withered and lost their vitality in our narrow and blighting commercial society.

I do not want to weary the reader with what can only be suggestions. I am certain, however, that this vital factor of the home cannot safely be excluded from the State. Consider any one of the old mediæval towns, with its buildings, its cathedral, its churches, its halls, its homes—all that it contains a splendid witness to the civic life of its people. Contrast this with what we have been willing to accept as art in our industrial towns. In the old days the city was in a very literal sense the home of its citizens, now it is merely a centre of trade. Is it unfair to connect this with the subjection of women and the rush of male activities, that has destroyed the need of beauty and fitness which once was the possession of all? For art you must have human qualities, and you must have emotion. The time has come when we are yielding to the new forces, that yet are old. This age will leave its own track behind it, and those, who are beating out the way now, must start on the right path—freeing for the service of the future all the intellectual and emotional forces of women as well as men.

To think boldly, untrammelled by conventions from the past, to search sedulously for the truth within themselves and follow it fearlessly, this should be the faith of all those women who love art. Let them have the courage of their own deep emotions. Let them look forward into the future, instead of clinging timorously to the stone wall of their past imitation of men. Then, indeed, woman may be freed—able to give expression to those creative ideas which are wrapped up with the elements of her nature. But women must beware of sham emotion and lachrymose sentimentality. It is her own feelings she must voice, not the feelings that have been supposed to belong to her. Then, indeed, the work of women will begin to count. The two things most peculiar to woman—her pursuing-love of man and her need of a child, will find their expression in women's art.

It is an appalling commentary on the condition of our thoughts on this subject that the pregnant woman was but recently considered unfit to be represented in the statues placed on one of our public buildings. How convincingly this speaks to women, "Be not ashamed of anything, but to be ashamed."

III.—The Affectability of Woman—Its Connection with the Religious Impulse

"Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters."—Iwan Bloch.

Now, this affectability, that we have found to be a characteristic feminine feature, leads us directly to an inquiry into the part religion has played in the lives of women, and to the wider consideration of the religious impulse in general, and its close connection with the sexual instinct. I had intended to treat this subject in some detail, especially in relation to religious hypnotic phenomena, a matter of very deep significance in estimating woman's character. I should have liked, too, to have traced the influence of the early and late Christian teaching upon woman's mind, to have examined her position in the social and domestic relationship, and then to have contrasted this with the almost complete liberty and distinction enjoyed by women in Pagan culture. But the field opened up by these inquiries is too wide. The previous sections of this chapter have grown to such length that all that is possible to me now, if I am to have space for the matters I want still to investigate, are a few scattered remarks and suggestions which seem to me to throw some light on this important side of woman's life.

No one will question woman's aptitude for religion, whatever the opinion held as to what the organic basis of that aptitude may be. If we accept that woman is more sensitive to suggestion, more emotional, and more imaginative in her nature, it is plain why religion affects her more deeply than men. The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced by religious suggestion is similar in its nature to that saturation of her innermost thoughts with love, which is due in part, as I believe, to the special qualities of her sex-functions, but also, in part, to the over-emphasised sexuality produced in her by an artificial existence. Women have accepted religious beliefs as they have accepted man's valuation of temporal things, even although these may be utterly at variance with their nature and their desires.

It has been said that the disposition of woman makes her peculiarly conservative and uncritical of religious beliefs. Others suggest that there is a "specific religious sense" in women related with a higher standard of character. This I do not believe: it is part of the fiction of woman's superior morality. I think in most women is hidden an immense appetite for life, an immense capacity for expenditure of force. She does not often dare to listen to these deeps within her soul; yet the insurgent voices fill her. There is in the life of most women something wanting, some general idea, some aim to hold life together. The effort of woman—often unconscious, but always present—to realise herself in love has forced her to practise duplicity and to accept dependence. And this sense of dependence in her on a protector, not always forthcoming, and, even when present, not always able to protect, has sent her in search of something outside and beyond the known and fallible, and has prepared her to accept with eagerness any professed revelation of the infallible unknown.

We have seen again and again in the course of our inquiry how deep and natural the sex impulse is in woman, and this, combined with the much greater complexity of her sexual life, renders her position peculiarly liable to be affected disastrously by any failure of love. It must be recognised that unbounded piety is often no more than a sex symptom, proceeding from deprivation or from satiety of love, as also from love's failure in loveless marriage. It seems to me that this connection of the religious impulse with sexuality is a very important thing for women to understand. In our achievement of facing the truth in the place of evasions about fundamental things, lies the path, I believe along which woman can escape, if ever she is to escape, from the confusion of purposes that distract her at present.