Thus the position of woman promotes the tendency to inordinate and morbid consumption in man and child.
But it has also a direct influence on her. She is born and reared in this same atmosphere; she inherits from father as well as mother; the habits of many generations have a gradual effect upon her, and all old civilisations show one monstrous sight, the bottomless greed of the artificially bred women.
As Cleopatra outdid Antony in “conspicuous consumption”—swallowing a dissolved pearl worth more than all his gobbled delicacies; as Nana destroyed expensive furnishings just to amuse herself; so have these horse-leech’s daughters outdone any sons that estimable sucker may have had, in the cry of Give! Give!
Burne-Jones’ picture of “The Vampire” typifies well man’s opinion of this horror which he has so carefully made. Our instinctive dislike of greed in a woman is based on its unnaturalness, it is essentially foreign to her sex. But the fact remains that women, in their false position, have become greedy beyond description. The bountiful producer, aborted, has become a destructive parasite.
The boundless pouring love, compressed to primitive limits, becomes morbid and works evil; and the habit of always taking, and never doing, has produced its unavoidable result, and given us the woman we all know, who takes, greedily, from a childhood of wheedling, through a youth of coquetry, and a lifetime of hired matrimony. When it is not matrimony, language fails to express our horror; but when it is, the commercial basis discolours the relation; and the plump and beautiful creature in the costly surroundings she never thought of giving a return for, is in the same category as a consumer with her less respectable but no less plump and expensively surrounded sister.
To find the pleasure of life in getting and having, to feel no honourable impulse to do, to give, to work, to return to labouring humanity your quota of service,—this is the degraded position into which we have forced our women, and which expresses itself not only in them, but in their children, who are all the world.
Such women play the game we call “Society,” whose trivial performances are celebrated so respectfully in our newspapers in their record of dinners and dresses and dances, as if where these people ate, or what they wore, or how they hopped about, was of any earthly importance. The seriousness with which this class of people who have cut themselves off from human life by refusing to take part in its active processes, who neither produce nor distribute, but consume in ever-increasing ratio, take upon themselves the distinctive name of “Society” is one of the most paralysing jokes of history. They even designate their pitiful amusements as “social functions,” a misnomer as consummately absurd as “Christian Science.”
For a lot of richly caparisoned human animals to get together and eat, or embrace one another and caper about to the sound of music, has no more relation to a social function than St. Vitus’s dance has to chopping wood. A disease is not a function. This fatty degeneration of the social tissues is a sad and important fact, deserving careful study; but its importance lies in its danger to the rest of the body politic, not in any inherent dignity.
If we take our “Society Columns” as medical bulletins, they have some value perhaps; but vulgarly to enlarge on our forms of disease is at least bad taste. What we commonly call “Society” is a morbid growth in the real social structure, developed to meet the artificial needs of these misplaced women; and such a society, influencing as it does, through widening ranks of imitators, the markets of the world, has a most evil effect on our habits of consumption.
If we saw clearly on these lines, recognising production as a law of Human, i. e., Social Nature, then our women, as our men, would take part in the healthy processes of real social life. If we saw that this constantly increasing expression of a constantly increasing fund of social energy was limitless happiness, we should turn our competition another way, cease this painful effort to show who can get the most, and begin to run races to show who shall do the most, with the result that there will be more for everyone to have.