Revolted Woman: Past, present, and to come

by Charles G. Harper

Those who so blithely advocate the throwing open of the professions to woman, and invite her to work with them, side by side, in works of practical philanthropy, base their arguments on false premises. They assume, at starting, that womankind has been throughout the centuries in an arrested condition. Her mental and bodily growth has, they say, been retarded by cunningly-devised restrictions; she has not been permitted to develop or to reach maturity—she is, in short, according to these views, undeveloped man, rather than a separate and fully developed sex. Those views are, of course, merely fallacies of the most unstable kind. Woman’s place and functions have been definitely fixed for her by nature, and those functions and that place are to be the handmaid of man (or the handmatron if you like it better), and to be the mother of his children; and her place is the home. Her physical and mental limitations are subtly contrived by nature to keep woman in the home and engrossed in domestic matters; and, really, if abuse is needed at all, man does not deserve it, but to nature belongs the epithet of tyrant, if an owner must be found for the unenviable distinction.

Woman is essentially narrow-minded and individualistic. Her time has ever been fleeted in working for the individual, and the community would be badly off at this day had not the State been thoroughly masculine for a time that goes back beyond the historians into the regions of myths and fairy tales. Small brains cannot engender great thoughts; which is but another way of saying that woman’s brain is less than man’s. It is only recently that woman has organized her forces at all, and she would not have done so, even now, had she not a plentiful lack of anything to occupy her thoughts withal in these days of the subdivision of labour and of extended luxury. And so, with plenty of time to spare, she begins to ask if there is nothing that becomes her better than the ‘suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer.’ But although Carlyle said in his wrath that men and women were mostly fools, yet there be children nourished with nature’s food who have developed a certain force of intellect; and as for the chronicles of small beer, gossip and scandal-mongering have never been compulsory in women, but only unwelcome features of their nature. Idleness, luxury, and the supreme consideration with which even the most foolish feminine manifestations have been received, have always been fruitful sources of mischief, and this by-past consideration has favoured the development of vanity and the growth of the feminine Ego to its present proportions.

Woman never becomes more than an ineffectual amateur in all the careers she enters. Her practice in art and literature inevitably debases art and letters, for she is a copyist at most. In literature she never originates, but appropriates and assimilates men’s thoughts, and in the transcription of those thoughts seldom rises above the use of clichés. But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons; but she does not stop to consider that those distinguished women succeeded not because, but in spite of, their sex, and that few of the women who have made what the world terms successful careers had any of the more gracious feminine characteristics beyond their merely physiological attributes. Many of them were unsexed creatures whose womanhood was an accident of their birth.

The rush of women into the artistic and literary professions has always had a singularly ill effect upon technique, for the woman’s mind is normally incapable of rising to an appreciation of the possibilities of any medium. They have not even a glimmering perception of style, and would as cheerfully (if not, indeed, with greater readiness) acclaim Dagonet a poet as they would the Swan of Avon, although the gulf that divides Shakespeare from Mr. G. R. Sims is not only one formed by lapse of the centuries: to them the works of Miss Braddon appear as the ultimate expression of the passions, and they would as readily label a painting by Velasquez ‘nice’ as they would call the productions of Mr. Dudley Hardy ‘awfully jolly.’ Subject rather than execution wins their admiration, and the nerveless handling of a painting whose subject appeals to their imagination wins their praise while the highest attainments of technique are disregarded. For them does Mr. W. P. Frith paint the Derby Day and So Clean; for their delight are the ‘dog and dolly’ pictures of Mr. Burton Barber, the Can ’oo Talk? the ‘peep-bo’ and ‘pussy-cat’ stories in paint contrived; and for their ultimate satisfaction are they reproduced as coloured supplements in the summer and Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers.

You may count distinguished women artists upon the fingers of your hands, with some fingers to spare, and some of these achieved their fame by reason of their womanhood, rather than the excellence of their art. Angelica Kauffmann is a notable example. She attained the unique position of a female Royal Academician through Reynolds’s infatuation: she painted portraits and classical compositions innumerable, but the portraits are poor and her classicism the most futile and emasculate. Literature, too—although more women have made reputations with the pen than the brush—can show but a very small proportion of feminine genius; and (although the ultimate verdict of the critics may yet depose these) Charlotte Brontë, Fanny Burney, and George Eliot are the most outstanding names in this department. These few names compare with an intolerable deal of mediocrity, cosseted and sheltered from the adverse winds of criticism in its little day; but yet so constitutionally weak that it has withered and died out of all knowledge. The women who, like George Eliot, and her modern successor, Mrs. Humphry Ward, adventure into ethical novels, are too excruciatingly serious and possessed with too solemn a conviction of their infallibility for much patient endurance; and really, when one remembers the spectacle of G. H. Lewis truckling to the critics, intriguing for favourable reviews, and endeavouring to stultify editors for the sake of his George Eliot, in order that no breath of adverse criticism and no wholesome wind from the outer world should come to dispel her colossal conceit, we obtain a curious peep into the methods by which the feminine Ego is nourished. But the spectacle is no less pitiful than strange.

It is not often, however, that women writers present us with philosophical treatises in the guise of novels. Their high-water mark of workmanship is the Family Herald type of story-telling, even as crystoleum-painting and macramé-work exhaust the energies and imagination of the majority of women ‘art’ workers. What, also, is to say of the lady-novelists’ heroes, of god-like grace and the mental attributes of the complete prig? What but that if we collate the masculine characters of even the better-known, and presumably less foolish, feminine novels, we shall find woman’s ideal in man to be the sybaritic Guardsman, the loathly, languorous Apollos who recline on ‘divans,’ smoke impossibly fragrant cigarettes, gossip about their affaires du c[oe]ur, and wave ‘jewelled fingers’—repellent combinations of braggart, prig, and knight-errant, with the thews and sinews of a Samson and the morals of a mudlark.

Philanthropy is a field upon which the modern woman enters with an enthusiasm that, unfortunately, is very much greater than her sense. Her care is for the individual, and she it is who encourages indiscriminate almsgiving, but cannot understand the practical philanthropy which compels men to work for a wage, or organizes vast schemes of relief works. Her whole nature is individualistic, and we would not have it otherwise, for it has, in many instances of womanly women, made homes happy and comfortable, and nerved men in the larger philanthropy which succours without pauperising thousands. But she has no business outside the home.

Philanthropy, of sorts, we have always with us, and the undeserving need never lack shelter and support in a disgraceful idleness while the tender-hearted or the hysterical amateur relieving-officers are permitted to make fools of themselves, and rogues and vagabonds of the lazy wastrels who will never do an honest day’s work so long as a subsistence is to be got by begging. The fashionable occupation of ‘slumming’ made many more paupers than it relieved, and the ‘Darkest England’ cry of Mr. William Booth, whom foolish folk call by the title of ‘General’ he arrogates, is the most notorious exhibition of sentimentalism in recent years. That appeal to the charitable and pitiful folks of England was, like the Salvation Army itself, engineered by the late Mrs. Catherine Booth, and it captured many thousands of pounds wherewith to succour the unfit, the criminal, the unwashed; the very scum and dregs of the race whom merciless Nature, cruel to be kind, had doomed to early extinction. But mouthing and tearful sentimentality has interfered with beneficent natural processes, and the depraved and ineffectual are helped to a longer term of existence, that they may transmit their bodily and mental diseases to another generation, and so foul the blood and stunt the growth of the nation in years to come.

Science, anthropology, and economics have no meaning for the femininely-influenced founders of Salvation Army doss-houses: the body politic—society, in the larger sense—national life, are phrases that convey no meaning to the sobbing philanthropists to whom the welfare of the dosser is a creed and Darwinian theories rank blasphemy.

The tendency of sentimental philanthropy is to relieve all alike from the consequences of their misdeeds, and to preserve the worst and the unfittest, and to enable the worst to compete at an advantage with the best, and to freely propagate its rickety kind. Philanthropy of this pernicious sort is essentially sentimental and feminine.