I imagine that the idea that women do so control their lives must have had its origin in the fact that men and women usually turn their mental energy into entirely different channels. On subjects that are familiar to us we think quickly, and acquire a mental dexterity akin to the manual dexterity of a skilled artisan. But the subjects upon which women exercise this mental dexterity are not, as a rule, the same as those upon which men exercise theirs; the latter have usually left narrow social and domestic matters alone, and it is in narrow social and domestic matters that we are accustomed to think quickly. We are swifter than they are, of course, at drawing the small inferences from which we judge what a man will like or dislike; but then, for generations the business of our lives has been to find out what a man will like or dislike, and it would be rather extraordinary if we had not, in the course of ages, acquired in it a measure of that rapid skill which in any other business would be called mechanical, but in ours is called intuitive.
This theory of intuition or instinct, then, I take, as I have already said, to be in the nature of a subterfuge on the part of the male—a sop to his conscience, and a plausible excuse for assuming that we have not the intelligence which (if it were once admitted that we possessed it) we should have the right to cultivate by independent thinking. But to admit the right of a human being to independent thinking is also to admit something else far more important and unpleasant—his right to sit in judgment upon you. That right every despotism that ever existed has steadily denied to its subjects; therefore, there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that man has steadily denied it to woman. He has always preferred that she should be too ignorant to sit in judgment upon him, punishing her with ostracism if she was rash enough to attempt to dispel her own ignorance. One of her highest virtues, in his eyes, was a childish and undeveloped quality about which he threw a halo of romance when he called it by the name of innocence. So far has this insistence on ignorance or innocence in a wife been carried, that even in these days many women who marry young have but a very vague idea of what they are doing; while certain risks attaching to the estate of marriage are, in some ranks of life at any rate, sedulously concealed from them as things which it is unfit for them to know.
It is a subject that is both difficult and unpleasant to touch upon; but while it will always be unpleasant, it ought not to be difficult, and I should be false to my beliefs if I apologized for touching upon it. Women, like men, when they enter upon a calling, have a perfect right to know exactly what are the dangers and drawbacks attached to their calling; you do not, when you turn a man into a pottery or a dynamite factory, sedulously conceal from him the fact that there are such things as lead-poisoning or combustion. On the contrary, you warn him—as women are seldom warned. I have been astonished at the number of women I have met who seem to have hardly more than a vague inkling—and some not even that—of the tangible, physical consequence of loose living.
I have not the faintest intention of inditing a sermon on masculine morals. If the average man chooses to dispense with morals as we understand them, that is his affair and a matter for his own conscience; if he is so constituted physically that he cannot live as we do, and has practically no choice in the matter, that is his misfortune. But I do say this: that the average woman has a perfect right to know what are the results of loose living in so far as those results may affect her and her children. If marriage is a trade we ought to know its risks—concerning which there exists a conspiracy of silence. Is the cause to which I have alluded ever mentioned, except in technical publications, in connection with the infant death-rate?
Those of us who have discovered that there are risks attaching to the profession of marriage other than the natural ones of childbirth, have very often made the discovery by accident—which ought not to be. I made the discovery in that way myself while I was still very young—by the idle opening of a book which, because it was a book, was a thing to be opened and looked into. I was puzzled at first, and then the thing stared me in the face—a simple matter of bald statement and statistics. I remember the thought which flashed into my mind—we are told we have got to be married, but we are never told that! It was my first conscious revolt against the compulsory nature of the trade of marriage.
VI
This insistent and deliberate stunting of woman’s intellectual growth is, as I have already stated, the best proof of her essentially servile position in the household; and that being the case, it is not to be wondered at that her code of honour and morals is essentially a servile code. That is to say, its origin and guiding motive is the well-being, moral and material, of some one else. Like her stupidity woman’s morality has been imposed on her, and to a great extent is not morality at all, in the proper sense of the word, but a code of manners formulated in the interests of her master.
I wish to make it clear that when I speak of morality in this connection I am not using the word in the narrow sense in which it is sometimes employed. By a standard of morality I mean a rule of life which we adopt as a guide to our conduct, and endeavour, more or less successfully, to apply to every action—to our dealings with others as well as to our dealings with our own hearts.
I cannot better explain what I mean by the essential servility of woman’s code of morals than by quoting Milton’s well-known line—