Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Sophie K. Bevan.

(Times, Dec. 24, 1909.)

It was of interest for the student of opinion and practice to compare this letter with another which appeared in the Times within a few days of it. This was an official letter from another Emigration Society and advocated the object, worthy in itself, of sending boys to Australasia. The letter ended with the following assertion regarding such boys: "They are the pioneers of Empire, they will be the founders of nations to come."

But the point exactly is that at present the nations to come in our Colonies are not coming: much more likely as nations to come in Australasia, as things go at present, are the Chinese and Japanese. Before nations can be founded, the co-operation of women is indispensable. We complain of the birth-rate in our Colonies, or at least those few persons do who know that parenthood is the key to national destiny. But we should complain of our own folly in so interfering with the natural balance of the sexes as to create pressing problems, wholly insoluble, alike at home and in our Colonies. At all times "England wants men," but wherever it wants men it wants women,—even in war we are now beginning to realize the importance of the trained nurse. There can be no future for our Colonies if they are to be inhabited by a bachelor generation, and the excess of women at home prejudices the stability of the heart of empire. Either we must cease exporting our boys and young manhood—which I certainly do not advocate—or our girlhood must go also—which I certainly do advocate. This is only one aspect of the question of vital imports and exports, upon which a book of vital importance for any nation, and above all, for England, might well be written.

Once again let us remind ourselves how cogently this question concerns the conditions of marriage. It means that the conditions are now such that in our Colonies a woman can exercise her rightful function of choosing the best man to be her husband and a father of the future, while at home this is possible only for the very few, and for vast numbers marriage is wholly impossible. I return, then, to the original proposition: are we to follow the advice of our gay, irresponsible sociologists so-called, who advise us to abolish monogamy in the circumstances, or are we to alter the alterable conditions which so disastrously prejudice and complicate that great institution in the heart of our empire to-day? Surely there can be but one answer to this question when we realize that all the causes of the present disproportion between the sexes at home—causes such as infant mortality, child mortality, war, and the exportation of one sex in great excess to the Colonies—are evil in themselves quite apart from their influence upon the practice of monogamy. Unfortunately, it is a modern custom in this age of transition for clever people to criticize on abstract, patriotic, sociological, quasi-ethical, and such like grounds, institutions and practices which irk them personally. Unfortunately, also, sociology is in the position, at present and yet for a little while inevitable, of shall we say medicine in its earliest stages, when anyone may be accepted as qualified who simply asserts that he is. Lastly, sociology is the most complicated of all the sciences because the chain of causation is longer; and very few of those who write or read about it have the patience to go back through psychology to biology and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though marriage is æons older even than the mammalian order. They take transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable injury to their own age notwithstanding.

After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in composition and in needs, and the institution of monogamy does not become easier of maintenance as human complexity increases. Amongst the lower animals or even amongst the lower races of mankind, the relations between the sexes are mostly confined to one sphere, but amongst ourselves the problem is to mate for life complex individuals whose needs are many, ranging from the purely physical to the purely psychical. Thus it is a matter of common experience that whilst one woman meets one part of a man's needs, another meets another, and this of course with grave prejudice to monogamy. Some of the modern writers to whom allusion has been made suggest that these different needs want sorting out; that one woman is to be the intellectual companion of a man, and another the mother of his children. But though men and women are multiple and complex, they are in the last resort unities. These absolute distinctions between one need and another do not work out in practice. Anything which tends toward splitting up the human personality must be a disservice to it. Nor do we desire that women of the higher type, best fitted to be the intellectual companions of men, shall be those who do not contribute to the future of the race. From the eugenic point of view the mother is every whit as important as the father. I do not believe for a moment that these more or less definite proposals of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are soundly based, and perhaps indeed it is not necessary to argue against them at greater length. Of more value is it to ask ourselves whether feminine nature may not prove itself quite equal to the task of meeting all the needs of masculine nature.

It seems to me that the right answer, in many cases at any rate, to the wife's question, how is she to retain the whole of her husband's interest, is hinted at in Mr. Somerset Maugham's recent play "Penelope"—she must be many women to him herself. And this the wise and happy woman is, though I do not think the phrase "many women" at all covers the variety of feeling to which the ideal woman can appeal.

The ideal love is that in which the whole nature is joined, in all its parts, upon one object which appeals alike to every fundamental instinct in our composition. The ideal woman does not require to be "many women" to a man of the right kind in the sense suggested in Mr. Maugham's play. She requires rather to be in herself at one and the same time or at different times, mother, wife and daughter. This condition satisfied, behold the ideal marriage.

It is probably fair to say that the three strongest and most important needs of a man's nature are those which are satisfied by mother, wife, and daughter. Primarily, perhaps, his wife must be to him his wife, his contemporary and partner, and there must be a physical bond between them. (Doubtless there are many happy marriages where this primary condition is not satisfied, this primitive form of affection being substantially absent, and its presence being proved non-essential: but such must be a state of unstable equilibrium at best, though the concession must be made.) Now the problem for the wife is to unite in her person and in her personality those other feelings which are part of normal human nature. Every man likes to be mothered at times, and it is for his wife to see that she performs that function better than any other; better even than his own mother. Where he finds merely physical satisfaction, he also finds, happy man, sympathy and comfort, protection and solace, balm for wounded self-esteem—everything that the hurt or slighted child knows he will find in his mother's arms.

Yet again, a man likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her husband's nature.