The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The future position of woman in society is a question that carries with it biological and psychological, as well as social and practical, issues of the widest significance, and further, it is bound up intimately with the profoundest riddles of existence. The problems remain to a great extent unsolved. But the conviction forces itself that the emancipation of woman will ultimately involve a revolution in many of our social institutions. It is this that brings fear to many. Yet we must remember that woman's emancipation is no new movement, but has always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. In the past, civilisations have fallen, in part at least, because they failed to develop in equal freedom their women with their men. It is also certain that no civilisation in the future can remain the highest if another civilisation adds to the intelligence of its male population the intelligence of its women. This in itself is enough to condemn all ideas of sex inequality.

The struggle for the Suffrage has intensified many problems which it will take all the intellectual and emotional energy of both men and women to solve. Up till now there has been little more than a fight for mere rights against male monopolies. In the near future this struggle must lead to a realisation of the duties of woman, founded on a level-headed facing of the physiological realities of her nature. It is a complete disregard of sexualogical difficulties which renders so superficial and unconvincing much of the talk which proceeds from the "Woman's Rights" platform. All efforts made to understand the sex problem, which is the woman question, must be based on the full knowledge of the physical capacity of woman and the effect that her emancipation will have on her function of race production. All effort ought to be directed towards the future welfare and happiness of the children who are to follow us. This is the goal of woman's struggle for progress, it is the sole end worthy of it.

To assume as Schopenhauer and so many others have done, down to Sir Almroth Wright's recent hysterical wail in The Times, that woman, on account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual or social development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for children, is really to state a belief in decay for humankind. Any stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with the emancipation of the actual mother. No sharp cleavage can be made between qualities that are good and masculine on the one side, and all that is feminine on the other. The view is entirely erroneous. How, for instance, can ignorance and weakness constitute at once the perfection of womankind, and the imperfection of mankind? The matter is not so simple. Man must fall with woman, and rise with her.

My first purpose is to make this clear.

To-day we are faced with the question whether the predominance of man over woman is to be regarded as a natural, and therefore inviolable, law of the male and female. Some will deny this mastery of the male. It may be said that woman sways man more than he rules her. This is true. The influence of woman is important—fearfully important. Yet the fitting answer to such glossing—if it be necessary really to point out that sexual privilege is not personal power—is that such government is exercised in one direction alone, and arises not from woman's strength, but out of her subjection. Women have rendered back to men the ill that this long sex domination has wrought upon them. None the less have we to reckon with the despotism of the male side of life. "The softening influence of woman!" ... It is a pretty phrase; but all the same women and men have been doing their best to degrade each other to a pitiful mediocrity. It is not the purifying influence of women—the theory of chivalrous moralists—but an unguided and therefore deteriorating sexual tyranny that regulates society. Let us have done with this absurd catch-phrase of "Woman's Influence." No influence worth naming as such can be exercised but by an independent mind. Women need better fields for the exercise of their love of power. The sexual sphere, which has shaped an impalpable prison around them, has barred them from that part of life which is social and broadly human; the falsely feminine has been developed to the loss of the womanhood in them. It is only in obedience to man that woman has gained her power of life. She has borne children at his will and for his pleasure. She has received her very consciousness from man: this has been her womanhood, to feel herself under another's will. There is no possible hiding of the truth; if women influence men, men command life.

But is it possible, looking forward to new conditions of society, now approaching like a long-delayed spring, to foresee a remedy? Can the woman of the future belong to herself? What are her natural disabilities, and to what extent are they modifiable by new arrangements of social and domestic life? Must she be content for the future with that dependence on the individual man which has been her fate in the past; or, on the other hand, can she take up her economic and social position in society and work therein for her own maintenance as free from considerations of her sex as a man can? These are the questions which must be faced when united womanhood begins to formulate their wants and to realise their power. It is almost idle in the present transition to speculate as to what women should or should not be, or the work they should or should not do. Women do not yet know what they want. All that can be done is to note the changes that are taking place, for we cannot, even do we wish, now change the revolutionary forces. We must seek to understand their causes, so that we may be able to direct them in the future in such ways as will tend to the greater solidarity and happiness of women and men.

In the everlasting controversy as to woman's place in Nature the majority of arguments have been based on an assumed inferiority of the female sex. Appeal has been made to anatomy to establish the difference between the natural endowment of men and women in the hope of fixing by means of anatomical measurements and tests those characters of males and females that are unalterable, because inborn, and those that are acquired, and therefore modifiable. But the obstacles in the way of anatomical investigations are very great, if only on account of the complexity of the material. Often and often it has happened that old conclusions have been overthrown by new knowledge. Indeed, it may be said that such appeal has resulted in uncertainty, and in many instances in confusion. The chief source of error has been the careless acceptance of female inferiority, which has maimed most investigations and seriously retarded the attainment of useful results. And though it is very far from my purpose to wish to deny the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine character, it is still true that a blank separation of human qualities into male qualities and female qualities is no longer possible. In no instance have the anatomists succeeded in determining with absolute distinction between the characters that belong separately to the sexes. Moreover, it has been shown that there is no such thing as a fixed woman character, but that women differ according to the circumstances under which they live, just as men differ. This brings us directly against the old problem, inferiority cannot be accepted as the sole reason of woman's present restricted position in society. Other causes must be sought for.

Many features of the social and psychic as well as the physical phenomena of human life have what we may call an organismal mainspring, and become more intelligible when traced back to these. No one, for instance, can appreciate the social significance of sex, or account for the existing sexual relationships in human societies, who does not know something of their biological antecedents. Take again the sex differences, which attain to such complexity and importance in the human civilised races, these can be explained only if their origin is recognisable. To comprehend the higher forms of life we must gain an acquaintance with the lower and more formative types. In this way we shall begin to see something of that continual upward change under the action of love's-selection that has developed the female and the male. Many problems that have brought sorrow and perplexity to us to-day will become recognisable as we ascertain their causes, and then we can do much to remove them. Thus the problem of woman must first be considered from a biological point of view. Explorations must be made into the remote and obscure beginnings of sex. We must carry our investigations back beyond the cycle of man, and trace the growth and uses of the differentiation of the sexes from the lowest forms of life.

Biology, a science hardly more than a century old, is still in the descriptive and comparative stage; it is the scientific study of the present and past history of animal life for the purpose of understanding its future history. It is of vital importance to human welfare in the future that we should learn by this comparative study of origins and of the potent past what are the lines along which progress is to be expected.

This, then, will be the first path of our discovery. We shall have to traverse many past ages of life and to consider certain humble organisms, before we shall be able really to understand woman in her true position in the sexual relationship as we find it to-day.