The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

But the possibility of applying biological results to sociology with any hope of enlightenment depends on an understanding of the questions, How? and Why? It is important to know what the phenomena are, but it is yet more important to know how? and for what reason? they have come about. Thus we are led forward always from facts to their efficient causes. Women are found to differ from men in this or that respect. But this in itself decides nothing. As soon as we are informed as to any one difference, we must seek out its cause; and this we must do over and over again. Hundreds of women must be interrogated, observed and reported upon—and then what? Shall we know the answer to our problem? Certainly not. In each case we must ask: Is this difference we have found between the sexes a natural inborn quality of woman, whether it be physical or psychical, that must be regarded as a right and unalterable part of her woman character, or is it an acquired, and therefore changeable, modification that has been superimposed upon her through the artificial sexual, social and economic circumstances of her environment? The mere asking of this question will give many new discoveries.

Life is a relation between two forces: on the one hand the organism and on the other the external conditions that form the environment. These two processes are known as Nature and Nurture, they are complementary and inseparable, and they act together. Thus the organism modifies its surroundings, and is in turn modified by them. But every life possesses in great degree the power of self-adaptation, and, broadly speaking, it is true that no matter under what conditions it may be compelled to live, it will mould its own life into harmony with those conditions and thus continue its existence, and this whether it is compelled to adopt a more perfect or a less perfect character. It becomes evident that an appropriate environment is necessary if the Nature is to be expressed, or expressed fully; otherwise life cannot realise development. The environment is constantly checking and modifying the inheritance. Nurture supplies the liberating stimulus to the inheritance, and growth is limited, in exact measurement by the Nurture stimuli available. Human advancement is, of course, widely different from the slow progress in the lower forms of life, but it is fundamentally the same. Experience is continually spreading over new fields and bringing about a more wide and exact relation between the individual and the external world. It follows that any change in the environment will cause a change in the individual. To live differently from what one had been living is to be different from what one has been. These are simple biological facts.

Now, how does woman stand in this respect? No one can deny the difference of environment that in the past has acted on women and on men. Speaking from a biological standpoint, it would seem that any present inferiority of woman is mainly social, due to her adaptation to an arbitrary environment. It has been truly said[6] that "man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment." By her position of economic dependence in the sex relation, sex distinction has become with her "not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures, but a means of gaining her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven." Can we wonder that the differences between the sexes assume such great and, in certain directions, such unnatural importance? Woman to a far greater extent than man is in process of evolution; her powers dormant for want of liberating Nurture stimuli. We know that Alpine plants brought from their natural soil change their character and become hardly recognisable, and these marked modifications will reappear in many generations of plants, but as soon as the plants are taken back to grow in their natural environment they are transformed to their original Alpine forms. May we not then entertain as a possibility that woman's modern character, with all its acknowledged faults—all its separation from the human qualities of man—is a veneer imposed by an unnatural environment on succeeding generations of women? If the larger social virtues are wanting in her, may it not be because they have not been called for in a parasitic life? How splendid a hope for women rests here! There is a biological truth, not usually suspected by those who quote it, in the popular saying: "Man is the creature of circumstance." And this is even more true of women, who are less emancipated from their surroundings than are men—more saturated with the influences and prejudices of their narrowed environment.

It would seem, then, that Nurture is more important than Nature in seeking to explain the character of woman to-day. Yet, let me not be mistaken, nor let it be thought for one moment that I do not realise the importance of Nature. The first right of every human being is the right of being well-born. This is the goal of all our struggles for progress—it is the sole end worthy of them.

Let me try to make this clearer.

Reproduction carries life beyond the individual. Haeckel has said that the process is nothing more than the growth of the organism beyond its individual mass. But this process in the higher forms of life has become exceedingly complex. All living beings are individual in one respect and composite in another, for the inheritance of each individual is a mosaic of ancestral contributions. Galton's Law of Inheritance makes this abundantly clear. Briefly stated, the law is as follows: The two parents of each living being contribute on the average one-half of each inherited quality, each of them contributing one-quarter of it. The four grand-parents furnish between them one-quarter, or each of them one-sixteenth; and so on backwards through past generations of ancestors. Now, though, of course, these numbers are purely arbitrary, applying only to averages, and rarely true exactly of individual cases, where the prepotency of any one ancestor may, and often does, upset the balance of the contributions made by the other ancestors, it may certainly be accepted as the most probable theory that biology has given us to explain the difficult problem of Nature—that is the inheritance we receive from our ancestors.

We see that the heredity relation is an extremely complex affair. It is not merely dual from the parents; but it is multiple, through them reaching back to the grand-parents, great-grand-parents, great-great-grand-parents, and so on backwards indefinitely. It is, indeed, a mosaic of many, yes, of uncountable, contributions. The Life Force gathering within itself these multiple sets of heredity contributions is like capital ever growing at compound interest. The importance of this is abundantly clear. For as we come to understand the continuity of our inheritance from generation to generation we realise more vividly how the past has a living hand on and in the present, and how that present will be carried on to the future. We are all links in the one mighty Chain of Life, and on us, and upon women especially, rests a high responsibility. We must hand on our past inheritance unimpaired, so that the new link forged by us may strengthen and not weaken the chain. It is the duty of every woman as a potential mother of men to choose a fitting father for her children, having first educated herself for a freer and more capable maternity. In the past she has done this blindly, following the Life Force without understanding, or hindered from her purpose by the artificial conditions of society. In the future such blindness and such failure of her powers will alike be regarded as sin. With full knowledge, woman will fulfil her great central purpose of breeding the race—ay, breeding it to heights now deemed impossible, not dreamt of even by those of us who look forward through the darkness to the clear sunlight of that time when the sex relation shall be freed from economic pressure and from all coercion of a false morality, and the universal creative energy, no longer finding gratification alone in personal ends, shall at last reach its goal and give birth to a race of new women and new men.

But to come back from this dream of the future.

Certain facts now become evident. In the inheritance of each individual are many latent qualities that do not find expression. It is as if in every life the separate heredity qualities, or groups of qualities, wait in competition, and those that succeed and find an expression in each life owe their success to an incalculable number of small and mostly unknown circumstances. One is tempted to speculate as to a possible direction in the future of women that may arise from the liberating of these unknown forces; but as yet we have not a sufficient basis of facts. But one truth must not be lost sight of; the unsuccessful qualities that do not find their expression in an individual life may remain to be handed on for new competition to a new generation. No one of the forces of our inheritance, be it for good or for evil, is dead; rather it sleeps till that time when the liberating powers of Nurture call it into active expression. There is real biological truth in the saying, "Every man is a potential criminal"; but it is equally true that every one is a possible saint. And there is one point further; we know that those qualities which do succeed in the competition of the inheritance, and which form at birth the character of the individual, are very different from their actual expression in the development of life, where perforce such qualities are modified to the environment. What we are is no certain criterion of what we are capable of becoming. For every item of our inheritance requires an appropriate growth-soil if it is actively to live. Each life is an adjustment of internal character to external conditions. A garden that has been choked with weeds may remain flowerless for many succeeding years, but dig that garden, and sleeping flowers, not known to live within the memory of man, may spring to life. May it not be that in the garden of woman's inheritance there are buried seeds, lying dormant, which at the liberating touch of opportunity may reawaken and assert themselves as forgotten flowers? Yes, to-day this seems a practical fact that already is being accomplished, and not a futile speculation. The re-birth of woman is no dream. At last she is realising the arrest in her development that has followed the acceptance of a position which forces her to be a parasite and a prostitute.

Every one admits the differences of function that separate the female from the male half of humankind. But to assume that the physical, mental, and moral disabilities of women, of which we hear so much, are a necessary part of their inheritance—the debt they pay for being the mothers of the race—is an absurdity it would be difficult to explain except for that strange sex bias, which seems always to colour all opinions as to women, their character and their place in society. Havelock Ellis, who in his admirable work Man and Woman has made an exhaustive examination of all the known facts with regard to the real and supposed secondary sexual differences between women and men, comes to this conclusion in his final summary—