The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

It is no part of my purpose, even if it were possible for me within the limits at my command, to enter into an examination of all the numerous statements and theories with regard to the real or supposed secondary sexual characters of woman. For though the practical utility of such detailed knowledge is obvious, while there is no certainty of opinion even among experts to fix the distinctions between the sexes, it is wiser in one who, like myself, can claim no scientific knowledge to avoid the hazard of any conclusion. I confess that a most careful study of the many differing opinions has left me in a state of mental confusion. One is tempted to adopt those views that fit in with one's own observations and to neglect others probably equally right that do not do this. What is wanted is a much larger number of careful experiments and scientific observations. Some of these have been made already, and their value is great, but the basis is still too narrow for any safe generalisations. All kinds of error are clearly very likely to arise. I may, perhaps, be allowed to state my surprise, not to say amusement, at the conviction evidenced by some male writers in their estimate of the character of my sex. I find myself given many qualities that I am sure I have not got, and deprived of others that I am equally certain I possess. Thus, I have found myself wondering, as I sought sincerely to find truth, whether I am indeed woman or man? or, to be more exact, whether the female qualities in me do not include many others regarded as masculine? This has forced the thought—is the difference between the sexes, after all, so complete?

I am aware that what I am now saying appears to be in contradiction with my other statements. I cannot help it. The fact is, that truth is always more diverse than we suspect. This is a question that reaches so deeply that apparent contradiction is sometimes inevitable. We find we are rooted into outside things, and we melt away, as it were, into them, and no woman or man can say, "I consist absolutely of this or that"; nor define herself or himself so certainly as to be sure where the differences between the sexes end and the points of contact begin. Many qualities of the personality appear no more female than male; no more belonging to the woman than the man. And yet, underlying these common qualities there is a deep under-current in which all our nature finds expression in our sex.

Science has of late years advanced far in this matter, yet it has not much more than begun. There is, as yet, no approximation to unanimity of decision, though the way has been cleared of many errors. This is all that has really been done by the ablest observers, who seem, however, unwilling, if one may say so without presumption, to accept the conclusions to which their own experiments and observations would seem to point. Take an illustration. The early certitude on the sex-differences in the weight of the brain and in the proportion of the cerebral lobes has been completely turned upside down. The long believed opinion of the inferiority of the woman in this direction has been proved to be founded on prejudice, fallacies, and over-hasty generalisations, so that now it is allowed that the sexual differences in the brain are at most very small. An even more instructive example arises from the ancient theory that there was a natural difference in the respiratory movements of the sexes. Hutchinson even argued that this costal breathing was an adaptation to the child-bearing function in woman. Further investigations, however, with a wider basis and more accurate methods—and one may surely add more common-sense—have changed the whole aspect of the matter. This difference has been proved to be due, not to Nature at all, but wholly to the effect of corset-wearing and woman's conventional dress. There is, it would seem, no limit to the quagmire of superstition and error into which sex-difference have drawn even the most careful inquirers if once they fail to cut themselves adrift from that superficial view of Nature's scheme, by which the woman is considered as being handicapped in every direction by her maternal function.

Enough has now been said to indicate the complication of the facts, to say nothing of their practical application. I must refer my readers for further details to convenient summaries of the sexual differences, in Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman; Geddes and Thomson's Sex and Evolution; Thomas's Sex and Society; and H. Campbell's Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Men and Women: the first of these is a treasure store of facts, and may be regarded as the foundation of all later research; the last is, perhaps, the most generally interesting, certainly it is the most favourable in its estimate of women. Dr. Campbell urges with much force the fallacy of many popular views. He does not seem to believe in the fundamental origin of maleness and femaleness, holding them rather to be secondary and derived, the result, in fact, of selection.

I have already sufficiently guarded against being supposed to have any desire to establish identity between woman and man. I do, however, object to any general conclusion of an arbitrary and excessive sex-separation, without the essential preliminary inquiry being made as to the effects of conditions and training; that is, whether the opportunities of development have been at all equal. But here, to save falling into a misconception, it is necessary to point out that I do not say the same opportunities, but equal. This difference is so important that, risking the fear of being tedious, I must restate my belief in the unlikeness of the sexes. As Havelock Ellis says, "A man is a man to his very thumbs, and a woman is a woman down to her little toes." What I do mean, then, is this: Have the opportunities of the woman to develop as woman been equal to the opportunities of the man to develop as man? It is on this question, it seems to me, that our attention should be fixed.

Leaving for a little any attempt to find out in what directions this development of woman can be most fully carried out, let us now clear our way by glancing very briefly at certain plain facts of the actual position of women as they present themselves in our society to-day.

In 1901 there were 1,070,000 more women than men in this country; this surplus of women has increased slowly but steadily in every census since 1841! Thus, those who hold (as all who look straight at this matter must) that the essential need for the normal woman are conditions that make possible the fulfilment of her sex-functions, are placed in an awkward dilemma when they wish to restrict her activities to marriage and the home. By such narrowing of the sexual sphere they are not taking into consideration the facts as they exist to-day. In a society where the women outnumber the men by more than a million, it is sufficiently evident that justice can be done to these primary needs of woman only by adopting one of two courses, the placing of women in a position which secures to them the possession of property, or, if their dependence on the labours of men is maintained, the recognition of some form of polygamy. Here is no advocacy of any sexual licence or of free-love, but I do set up a claim for free motherhood, and however great the objections that may, and, as I think, must be raised against polygamy, I am unhesitating in stating my belief that any open and brave facing of the facts of the sex relationship is better than our present ignorance or hypocritical indifference, which is spread like a shroud over our national conditions of concealed polygamy for men, side by side with enforced celibacy and unconcealed prostitution for a great number of women. The most hopeful sign of the woman's movement is a new solidarity that is surely killing the fatalism of a past acquiescing in wrongs, and is slowly giving birth to a fine spiritual apprehension of the great truth that what concerns any woman concerns all women, and, I would add, also all men. This last—that there can be no woman's question that is not also a man's question—is so essentially a part of any fruitful change in our domestic and social relationship that women must not permit themselves for a moment to forget it. It is the very plain things that so often we do overlook.

So it becomes clear that the parrot cries "Woman's Place!" "Woman's Sphere!" "Her place is the home!" have lost much, even if not all, their significance. For, in the first place, it is obvious that under present conditions there are not enough homes to go round; and second, even if we neglect this essential fact, women may well answer such demands by saying "much depends on the character and conditions of the home we are to stay in." It was a many-sided home of free and full activity in which woman evolved and wherein for long ages she worked; a home, in fact, which gave free opportunities for the exercise of those qualities of constructive energy that women, broadly speaking, may be said to possess. The woman's so-called natural position in the home is not now natural at all. The conditions of life have changed. Everything is drifting towards separation from worn-out conditions. We are increasingly conscious of a growing discontent at waste. The home with its old full activities has passed from women's hands. But woman's work is not less needed. To-day the State claims her; the Nation's housekeeping needs the vitalising mother-force more than anything else.

The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and, in any case, it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man. It is very needful to impress this factor of constant change on our attention, and to fix it there. To ignore it, and it is too commonly ignored, is to falsify every issue. "The Hithertos," as Mr. Zangwill has aptly termed them, are helpless. Things are so, and we are carried on; and as yet we know not whither, and we are floundering not a little as we seek for a way. The women of one class have been forced into labour by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause; the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women's energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship—the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood.

Let us consider for a moment the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life. There are, according to the estimate of labour experts, 5,000,000 women industrially employed in England. The important point to consider is that during the last sixty years the women who work are gaining numerically at a greater rate than men are. The average weekly wage paid is seven shillings. Nine-tenths of the sweated work of this country is done by women. I have no wish to give statistics of the wages in particular trades; these are readily accessible to all. Unfortunately the facts do not allow any exaggeration; they are saddening and horrible enough in themselves. The life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; is washed and ironed into our linen; wrought into the laces and embroideries, the feathers and flowers, the sham furs with which we other women bedeck ourselves; it is poured into our adulterated foods; it is pasted on our matches and pin-boxes; stuffed into our furniture and mattresses; and spent on the toys we buy for our children. The china that we use for our foods and the tins in which we cook them are damned with the lead-poison that we offer to women as the reward of labour.