Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

There is, for instance, a noble Madonna of Botticelli which is supremely great, not because of the skill of the painter's hand, nor yet the delicacy of his eye, but because of the spirit which they express. Botticelli speaks across the centuries, and is none other than an earlier voice uttering the words of Coleridge, teaching that a mother is the holiest thing alive. The master may or may not have perceived that the Madonna was a symbol; that what he believed of one holy mother was worth believing just in so far as it serves to make all motherhood holy and all men servants thereof. The painter can scarcely have looked at his model and appreciated her fitness for his purpose without realizing that he was concerned with depicting a truth not local and unique, but universal and commonplace. Whether or not the painter saw this, we have no excuse for not seeing it. Copies of such a painting as this should be found in every girls' school throughout the world.

Girls learn drawing and painting at school, and these are amongst the numerous subjects on which the present writer is entitled to no technical or critical opinion. But he sometimes supposes that a painting is not necessarily the worse because it represents a noble thing, and that it may even be a worthier human occupation to portray the visage of a living man or woman than the play of light upon a dead wall or a dead partridge. It might even be argued by the wholly inexpert that if the business of art is with beauty, the art is higher, other things being equal, in proportion as the beauty it portrays is of a higher order. Thus in the painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood which directly serve human life, present and to come—attributes of vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray; and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator.

It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art; it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.

A note upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied the work of such writers as Westermarck, and who cannot but agree that on the whole he is right in the contention that each sex desires to accentuate the features of its sex, will be prepared to accept Dr. Havelock Ellis's interpretation of the corset. By constricting the waist it accentuates the salience of the bosom and hips. This may simply be an expression of the desire to emphasize sex, but it may with still more insight be looked upon, as the latter writer has suggested, as the insertion of a claim to capacity for motherhood. This claim is of course unconscious, but Nature does not always make us aware of the purposes which she exercises through us. Now, though the corset serves to draw attention to certain factors of motherhood, in point of fact it is injurious to that end, and is on that highest of all grounds to be condemned. I return to the point that possibly the direct and formal condemnation of the corset may be in some cases less effective than the method, which must have some value for every girl, of placing before her eyes representations of the female figure, showing beauty and capacity for motherhood as completely fused because they are indeed one. Constrain the girl to admit that that is as beautiful as can be, and then ask her what she thinks the corset applied to such a figure could possibly accomplish.

Surely the same principle applies to what the girl reads. Some of us become more and more convinced that youth, being naturally more intelligent than maturity, prefers and requires more subtlety in its teaching. In addressing a meeting of men, say upon politics, a speaker's first business is to be crude. He has no chance whatever unless he is direct, unqualified, allowing nothing at all for any kind of intelligence or self-constructive faculty in the minds of his hearers. Let any one recall the catchwords, styled watchwords, of politics during the last ten or twenty years, and he will see how men are to be convinced.

But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not say so—the case is different with young people, and certainly not less with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments and policies.

There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of forming the girl's mind for her future destiny. Suggestion is one of the most powerful things in the world, but we must not forget that inverted form of it which has been called contra-suggestion. We all know how the first shoots of religion are destroyed on all sides in young minds by contra-suggestion. Crude, ill-timed, unsympathetic, excessive, religious teaching and religious exercises achieve, as scarcely anything else could, exactly the opposite of that which they seek to attain. Thus it is not here proposed that we should take any course at home or at school which should have the result of making motherhood as nauseous to the girl's mind through contra-suggestion, as it easily could be made if we did not set to work upon judicious lines.

If we are in any measure to gain, by means of books, our end of forming right ideals in the girl's mind, I am certain that we must not expect to accomplish much with the help of any but very great writers. We may very well doubt the substantial value for the purpose of anything written for the purpose. Such books may be of value for the teacher; they may possibly be of value in disposing of curiosity that has become overweening or even morbid, but their value as preachments I much question. The kind of writing upon which the young girl's mind will be nourished in years to come is best represented by the lecture on "Queens' Gardens" in Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies," though in that magnificent and immortal piece of literature there is nowhere any direct allusion to motherhood as the natural ideal for girlhood. Yet if only one girl in a hundred who read that lecture can be persuaded, in the beautiful phrase to be found there, that she was "born to be love visible," how excellent is the work that we shall have accomplished! A chapter might well be devoted entirely to the teaching of Wordsworth regarding womanhood. We need scarcely remind ourselves that this great poet owed an immeasurable debt to his sister, and in lesser, though very substantial, degree to his wife and daughters. He has left an abundance of poetry which testifies directly and indirectly to these influences. This poetry is not only utterly lovely as poetry; at once sane and passionate, steadying and thrilling, but it is also not to be surpassed, I cannot but believe, as a means for rightly forming the ideals of girlhood. Every year sees an inundation of new collections of poetry. The anthologist might do worse than collect from Wordsworth a small, but precious and quintessential volume under some such title as "Wordsworth and Womanhood." One would do it oneself but that literary people of a certain school regard it as an impertinence that any one who believes in knowledge should intrude into their sphere. Wordsworth, it is true, said that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." But most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read, and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for that great purpose.

But we cannot expect the adolescent girl to be content even with Ruskin and Wordsworth. She must, of course, have fiction, and under this heading there is more or less accessible to her every possibility in the gamut of morality, from the teaching of such a book as "Richard Feverel" down to the excrement and sewage that defile the railway book-stalls to-day under the guise of "bold, reverent, and fearless handling of the great sex problems." The present writer is one of those old-fashioned enough to believe that it matters a great deal what young people read. We are all hygienists nowadays, and very particular as to what enters our children's mouths. But what is the value of these precautions if we relax our care as to what enters their minds?

It is my misfortune to be scarcely acquainted at all with fiction, and I can presume to offer no detailed guidance in this matter. The name of Mr. Eden Phillpotts must certainly be mentioned as foremost among those living writers who care for these things. In the Eugenics Education Society it was at one time hoped to see the formation of a branch of fiction in the library which might form the nucleus of a catalogue, well worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction, including those which ignore the facts of human nature, and, above all, those which decry instead of seeking to deify the natural, would find no place in this catalogue. It is possible, though I much doubt it, that there may be many books unknown to me of the order and quality of "Richard Feverel." At any rate, that represents in its perfection—save, perhaps, for the unnecessary tragedy of its close, which the illustrious author himself in conversation did not find it quite possible to defend—the type of novel whose teaching the Eugenist and the Maternalist must recommend for the nourishment of youth of both sexes.