Of this habit there are various explanations; the prevalent one regards the spider as an anomalous exception; the ferocity and superiority of size in the female not easily to be explained. This is, I think, not so. Is it not rather a picture, with the details crudely emphasised, of the action of Life-Force of which the sexes are both the helpless victims? Whether we look backward to the beginning, where the exhausted male-cell seeks the female in incipient sexual union, or onwards through the long stages of sex-evolution to our own love-passions, this is surely true.
Let me try to make this clearer by an example. It would seem but a small step from the female spider, so ruthlessly eating up her lover, to the type of woman celebrated by Mr. Bernard Shaw's immortal Ann. I recall a woman friend saying to me once, "We may not like it, and, of course, we refuse to own to it, but there is something of Ann in every woman." I need not recall to you Ann's pursuit of her victim, Tanner, nor his futile efforts to escape. Here, as so often he has done, Mr. Shaw has presented us in comedy with a philosophy of life. You believe, perhaps, the fiction, still brought forward by many who ought to know better, that in love woman is passive and waits for man to woo her. I think no woman in her heart believes this. She knows, by instinct, that Nature has unmistakably made her the predominant partner in all that relates to the perpetuation of the race; she knows this in spite of all fictions set up by men. Have they done this, as Mr. Shaw suggests, to protect themselves against a too humiliating aggressiveness of the woman in following the driving of the Life-Force? This pretence of male superiority in the sexual relation is so shallow that it is strange how it can have imposed on any one.
I wish to state here quite definitely what I hold to be true; the condition of female superiority with which sexuality began has in this connection persisted. In every case the relation between woman and man is the same—she is the pursuer, he the pursued and disposed of. Nothing can or should alter this. The male from the very beginning has been of use from Nature's point of view by assisting the female to carry on life. It is the fierce hunger of the male, increasing in strength through the long course of time, which places him in woman's power. Man is the slave of woman, often when least he thinks so, and still woman uses her power, even like the spider, not infrequently, for his undoing.
Here, indeed, is a warning causing us to think. The touch of Nature that makes the whole world kin is nowhere more manifest than in sex; that absorption of the male by the female to which life owes its continuation, its ecstasy, and its pain. It has seemed to me it is here in the primitive relations of the sexes that we may find the clue to many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power. Like the fish that cannot resist the fly of the fisherman, even when experience has taught him to fear the hidden barb, he struggles and fights for his life to escape as he realises too late the net into which his hunger has brought him.
But we may learn more than this; another truth of even deeper importance to us. It is because of this superiority of the female in the sexual relationship that women must be granted their claim for emancipation. Here is the reason stronger than all others. Nature has placed in women's hands so tremendous a power that the dangers are too great for such power to be left to the direction of untrained and unemancipated women. Above all it is necessary that each woman understands her own sexual nature, and also that of her lover, that she may realise in full knowledge the tremendous force of sexual-hunger which drives him to her, equalled, as I believe, by the desire within herself, which claims him to fulfil through her Nature's great central purpose of continuing the race. To women has been granted the guardianship of the Life-Force. It is time that each woman asks herself how she is fulfilling this trust.
It is the possession of this power in the sexual sphere which lends real importance to even the feeblest attempts of women to prepare themselves to meet the duties in the new paths that are being opened to them. Women have now entered into labour. They are claiming freedom to develop themselves by active participation in that struggle with life and its conditions whereby men have gained their development. From thousands of women to-day the cry is rising, "Give us free opportunity, and the training that will fit us for freedom." Not, as so many have mistakenly thought, that women may compete with men in a senseless struggle for mastery, but in order first to learn, and afterwards to perform, that work in society which they can do better than men. What such work is it must be women's purpose to find out. But before this is possible to be decided all fields of activity must be open for them to enter. And this women must claim, not for themselves chiefly; but because they are the bearers of race-life, and also to save men from any further misuse of their power. Then working together as lovers and comrades, women and men may come to understand and direct those deep-rooted forces of sex, which have for so long driven them helpless to the wastage of life and love.
I would ask all those who deny this modern claim of women to consider in all seriousness the two cases I have brought forward—that of the bee-hives, and even more the destruction by the female spider of her male lover. That they have their parallel in our society to-day is a fact that few will deny. I have tried to show the real danger that lurks in every form of sex-parasitism. It would lead us too far from our purpose to comment in further detail on the suggestions offered by these curious examples of sex-martyrs among our earliest ancestral lovers. Those whose eyes are not blinded will not fail to see.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] So deep-rooted has been this opinion of female inferiority that it has formed the basis of many theories of sex. Thus Richarz holds that "the male sex represents a higher grade of development in the embryo." Hough thinks males are born when the female system is at its best, females in periods of growth, reparation, or disease. Tiedman and others regard females as an arrested male, while Velpau, on the other hand, believes them to be degenerated from primitive males. See Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, p. 39.