‘Let us be unconventional, or we die!’ is the unspoken, yet very evident, aspiration of the Modern Woman; and, really, the efforts made in the direction of the unconventional are so uniformly extravagant that we almost, from sheer weariness and disgust, begin to wish she had gone some way toward adopting the alternative.
The New Woman will know naught of convention, nor submission. Her advocates do not hail from Altruria; they are aggressive, and devoured with a zeal for domination, in revolt from the ‘centuries of slavery’ to which, according to themselves, they have been compelled by Man. ‘Man,’ shrieks one, ‘is always in mischief or in bed.’ But she will have this changed; not, indeed, in the present generation of vipers, which is stubborn and stiff-necked in its wicked ways; but she will see, and urges her fellow-women to see also, that proper principles are spanked into the coming generations. Considering, however, that the nursery has ever been the woman’s peculiar province, surely the blame, if blame there be, must rest with her for the past and present faulty upbringing of the race. If ‘proper principles’ have not already had their part in the education of man, surely that must be owing solely to woman’s flagrant dereliction of duty.
Instances, neither few nor far between, may be urged of wives and mothers, possibly also sisters and maiden aunts, who have raised men to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable industry. True, indeed, it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to deny their influence and its beneficent effects; but to use it as an argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a non sequitur of the most absurd description. The influence wielded by those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to themselves and their sex; because they were, in a word, so womanly. The influence of the New Woman upon the man is, and shall be, nil, because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man fight for supremacy.
Women’s advocates come and go like summer flies, provoking to wrath by their insistent buzzing, but, when caught and examined, proving to be insignificant enough. They have their little day, and cease to be. Who, for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person who floated into publicity on the ‘Marriage a Failure’ correspondence of the Daily Telegraph, some few years ago, and, in the heyday of her notoriety, wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel, The Wing of Azrael? Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of greater licence.
And so the game proceeds: each woman daring a little further than her fellow-adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection; of freedom in contracting marriages and licence in dissolving them; each newcomer shocking the sensibilities of women readers with delightful thrills from the impropriety, expressed or implied, that runs through her pages as inevitably as the watermark runs through ‘laid’ paper.
It is amusing to note that, following the lead of the late lamented George Eliot, the greater number of these women writers of sexual novels scribble under manly pseudonyms. What, then! doth divinity after all hedge a man so nearly that to masquerade as a ‘John Oliver Hobbes,’ or a ‘George Egerton,’ is to draw an admiring crowd of women worshippers where, as plain Miss or Mrs., your immortal writings would fall flat? What a deplorable cacoëthes imprimendi this is, to be sure, that seizes upon the palpitating authoresses of Yellow Asters, Dancing Fawns, or Heavenly Twins; and how depraved the taste for indelicate innuendo and theories of licence that renders these books popular!
This manner of thing destroys all the respect for home life upon which English society was, until late years, so broadly based, and domesticity in consequence is become an old-fashioned virtue among women. They are only the older generation of matrons who practise it now, and when their race is run, and the New Woman shall have become sole mistress, the sweet domesticity of the Englishman’s home will have vanished.
For the New Woman is not womanly, except in the physiological sense, and there she cannot help herself. She will inevitably be the mother of the coming generation, but beyond that function imposed upon her by Nature, she is not feminine. She is rather what Mr. Frederic Harrison describes as the ‘advanced woman who wants to be abortive man,’ and she holds the fallacy that what man may do woman may do also—and more!
Directly a woman marries, she considers that she has full licence; although, goodness knows! the unmarried girls of to-day are latitudinarian enough, and do, unreproved, things that thirty years ago would have branded them with an ineffaceable mark of shame.
The pretty girl of to-day, who has earned her right to wear a wedding-ring, has no sooner returned from her honeymoon than she sets out upon a campaign of conquests. Smart men, who hate to be bored with the unmarried girl, before whom they must be either silent or discreet, hang around the young matron at garden parties and dances, or flirt shamefully in the semi-rusticity of the country house or shooting-box, and discuss with her the latest veiled obscenity of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s, or enlarge upon the ethics of a second Mrs. Tanqueray with an unblushing frankness that argues long acquaintance with and study of these putrescent topics. The young matron has full licence at this day, and the divorce courts afford some faint inkling of how she uses it. She aspires to be the boon companion of the men; she plays billiards with the manly cue, and not infrequently she can give the average male billiard-player points, and then beat him.