Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Or again: "You like his talk; he strikes you as well versed in human affairs; his knowledge of men and things impresses you; he has travelled and can talk easily of what he has seen, and his voice is elegant and can be heard in many tongues. But if he is going to say bitter things to you, will the facility of his diction make them less bitter? If he is a fool in his heart—and indeed the heart alone is the residence of folly or wisdom—do you think that he will be a fool the less for venting his folly in seven languages rather than in one? I quite understand your admiring his cleverness; people who study the subject tell us, you know, that a woman admires in a man things which are more characteristic of men than of women, and that men's admiration of women is based upon the same good principle. But in this bargain men have the best of it because the most characteristic thing in woman is tenderness, and the most characteristic thing in man is cleverness; and which do you think is the better to live with? What is the virtue in cleverness coupled with, for instance, a malicious tongue? What is the virtue in clever things if he says them at your expense? The vital thing for you is, what are the uses to which he puts his knowledge and capacities? That he knows the ways of the world may impress you, but does he know them to admire them? And if so, where does he stand compared with another, who is less versed and versatile, but who, as your heart tells you, would hate the ways of the world if he did know them?" ...

Indeed, I seem to see that one cannot adequately write a book on Womanhood without including in it somewhere a statement of what manhood is and ought to be. Surely one of our duties to girlhood is to teach it the elemental truths of manhood. Such teaching must recognize the facts which modern psychology perceives more clearly every day, and it must combine that knowledge with the eternal truths of morality, which are so intensely real and practical in the great issues of life, such as this. The great fact which modern psychology has discovered is that intellect is less important, and emotion more important than we used to suppose; that knowledge, as we lately observed, is non-moral, and may be for good or for evil; that cleverness is merely cleverness, and may serve God or mammon; that it is the nature of the man or the woman which determines the influence and the uses of education. A girl should know something of what I have elsewhere called the transmutation of sex as it shows itself in the higher as distinguished from the lower types of manhood: she should know that it is good for a youth to spend his energy in visible ways and in the light of day; there is the less likelihood that it is being spent otherwise. She should prefer the man who is visibly active and who keeps his mind and body moving; she should know, as the school boy should know, that the capacity to smoke and drink really proves nothing as regards manhood. Doubtless there is some courage required in learning to smoke, and so much, but it is not much, is to the smoker's credit; but for the rest, smoking and drinking are simply forms of self-indulgence, and though they are doubtless very excusable and are often practised by splendid men, they are of no virtue in themselves. Further, they are open to the fundamental objection that they lessen the measure of a man's self-mastery. Women should set a high standard in such matters as these.

To take the case of smoking, very few smokers realize, in the first place, how much money they expend. It is money which, if not spent, would appreciably contribute to the cost of house-keeping in not a few cases. Many a man who says he cannot afford to marry spends on tobacco and alcohol a sum quite sufficient to turn the scale. It will be argued that the smoking brings rest and peace, that it soothes, aids digestion, and so forth. But the non-smoker is not in need of these assistances: it is only the smoker who requires to smoke for these purposes. On this point I have said, in the volume of personal hygiene which this present work is meant to succeed, all that really requires to be said. It was there pointed out that nicotine doubtless produces secondary products in the blood which require a further dose of the nicotine as an antidote to them. Thus there is initiated a vicious circle, the details of which have been fully worked out in the case of opium, or rather, morphia. All the good results which are obtained from smoking are essentially of the nature of neutralizing the secondary effects of previous smoking. Here, then, is the scientific argument for the girl's hand if she proposes to deal with her lover on this point.

It may be added that the writer can now quote personal experience in favour of his advice. He smoked incessantly for fourteen years—from seventeen to thirty-one—his quantum being five ounces in all per week—of the strongest Egyptian cigarettes and the strongest pipe tobacco procurable. The practice did him no observable harm whatever. When he wrote the paragraph on "How to control one's smoking," in the book referred to, he was only wishing that he could control his own. At last he got disgusted with himself and stopped altogether. Personally he is neither better nor worse, but he is buying books in proportion to the money formerly wasted on tobacco, and perhaps the change is worth while. The girl who reads this book may tell her lover with confidence that it is quite possible to stop smoking, and that after a little while the craving wholly disappears. If he has been a really confirmed, systematic smoker, he may have a very uncomfortable three weeks after he stops, but soon after that the time will come when he can stay in a room where others are smoking and not even desire to join them, which he could never have done before. He will have the advantage that he is definitely less likely to die of cancer of the mouth, more especially cancer of the tongue. That is a point which will affect his wife as well as himself. He will save a quite remarkable sum of money, and since object lessons are very valuable, he may follow the suggestion to lay it out in the form of books, as time goes on, though perhaps my reader can give him better advice from the point of view of the future housekeeper.

Of course there is the point of view expressed in a poem of Mr. Kipling's:

"A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke."

If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ... and thank God she is rid of a—— fool.

Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears, but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her lover's smoking; a thousandfold more strongly would I counsel her to stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the individual, a girl may be counselled to stop her lover's drinking. An excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine."

There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell her most solemnly that from her point of view she cannot afford to laugh at the teetotaler; and if she can stop her lover's drinking, whether he drinks much or little, she will do well for him and herself. She should know what the effect of alcohol is upon a man, and she should have imagination enough to realize that his hot breath, coming unwelcome, will not be more palatable in the future for its flavouring of whisky. It may be admitted that in saying all this the interests of the future are perhaps paramount in my mind. I am trying to do a service to the principle, "Protect parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a husband—alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one!—is warranted and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary manhood, by taking up this attitude towards alcohol. Would that this great missionary enterprise were now unanimously undertaken by these most effective and cogent of missionaries, whose own happiness so largely depends upon its success!

Of course it should not be necessary for any man to set forth, for the instruction of girlhood, the qualities which it should value in men. All who train and teach girlhood and form its ideals should devote themselves scarcely less to this than to the inculcation of high ideals for girlhood itself; yet it is not done. We do not yet recognize the supreme importance of the marriage choice for the present and for the future.