Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

One may well suggest that insistence is necessary, for never, it may be supposed, in the history of civilization was there so widespread or so effective a tendency to declare that, in point of fact, there are no differences between men and women except that, as Plato declared, woman is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those women—themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for this view—who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is twofold.

In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we shall afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological tendencies—notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the lower type of man looks upon fatherhood. It requires closer and more intimate study of this type than we can spare space for—more, even, than the state of our knowledge yet permits—in order to demonstrate how absurd is the claim of women thus peculiarly constituted to speak for their sex as a whole.

But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized woman—but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the time is towards accepting it—the recent biological proof of the fundamental and absolute difference between the sexes being unknown as yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.

The one party seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial.

The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact, men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those peculiar to one shall be ignored.

It is my most solemn conviction that the cause of woman, which is the cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this doctrine of sex-identity. It might serve some turn for a time, as many another error has done, were it not so palpably and egregiously false. Advocated as it is mainly by either masculine women or unmanly men, its advocates, though in their own persons offering some sort of evidence for it, are of a kind which is highly repugnant to less abnormal individuals of both sexes. Hosts of women of the highest type, who are doing the silent work of the world, which is nothing less than the creation of the life of the world to come, are not merely dissuaded from any support of the women's cause by the spectacle of these palpably aberrant and unfeminine women, but are further dissuaded by the profound conviction arising out of their woman's nature, that the doctrine of sex-identity is absurd. Many of them would rather accept their existing status of social inferiority, with its thousand disabilities and injustices, than have anything to do with women who preach "Rouse yourselves, women, and be men!" and who themselves illustrate only too fearsomely the consequences of this doctrine.

Certainly not less disastrous, as a consequence of this most unfortunate error of fact and of logic, is the alienation from the woman's cause of not a few men whose support is exceptionally worth having. There are men who desire nothing in the world so much as the exaltation of womanhood, and who would devote their lives to this cause, but would vastly rather have things as they are than aid the movement of "Woman in Transition"—if it be transition from womanhood to something which is certainly not womanhood and at best a very poor parody of manhood except in cases almost infinitely rare. I have in my mind a case of a well-known writer, a man of the highest type in every respect, well worth enlisting in the army that fights for womanhood to-day, whose organic repugnance to the defeminized woman is so intense, and whose perception of the distinctive characters of real womanhood and of their supreme excellence is so acute that, so far from aiding the cause of, for instance, woman's suffrage, he is one of its most bitter and unremitting enemies. There must be many such—to whom the doctrine of sex-identity, involving the repudiation of the excellences, distinctive and precious, of women, is an offence which they can never forgive.

One may be permitted a little longer to delay the discussion of the distinctive purpose and character of womanhood, because the foregoing has already stated in outline the teaching which biology and physiology so abundantly warrant. For here we must briefly refer to the work of a very remarkable woman, scarcely known at all to the reading public, either in Great Britain or in America, and never alluded to by the feminist leaders in those countries, though her works are very widely known on the Continent of Europe, and, with the whole weight of biological fact behind them, are bound to become more widely known and more effective as the years go on. I refer to the Swedish writer, Ellen Key, one of whose works, though by no means her best, has at last been translated into English. All her books are translated into German from the Swedish, and are very widely read and deeply influential in determining the course of the woman's movement in Germany. At this early stage in our argument I earnestly commend the reader of any age or sex to study Ellen Key's "Century of the Child." It is necessary and right to draw particular attention to the teaching of this woman since it is urgently needed in Anglo-Saxon countries at this very time, and almost wholly unknown, but for this minor work of hers and an occasional allusion—as in an article contributed by Dr. Havelock Ellis to the Fortnightly Review some few years ago. Especial importance attaches to such teaching as hers when it proceeds from a woman whose fidelity to the highest interests, even to the unchallenged autonomy, of her sex cannot be questioned, attested as it is by a lifetime of splendid work. The present controversy in Great Britain would be profoundly modified in its course and in its character if either party were aware of Ellen Key's work. The most questionable doctrines of the English feminists would be already abandoned by themselves if either the wisest among them, or their opponents, were able to cite the evidence of this great Swedish feminist, who is certainly at this moment the most powerful and the wisest living protagonist of her sex. From a single chapter of the book, to which it may be hoped that the reader will refer, there may be quoted a few sentences which will suffice to indicate the reasons why Ellen Key dissociated herself some ten years ago from the general feminist movement, and will also serve as an introduction from the practical and instinctive point of view to the scientific argument regarding the nature and purpose of womanhood, which must next concern us. Hear Ellen Key:—

"Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman, turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed—these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities, nature and environment.

"The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had become a butcher, 'Go thou and do likewise,' and an American young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic phenomena.