“It is a pity. Every woman ought to get married. Your life isn’t complete without it. It is an experience....”
Those, as far as I remember, were the exact words she used. (There is no danger that she will ever read them.) They left me dumb; their unconscious irony was so pathetic and so dreadful. Marriage an experience—it had been one for her! And “your life isn’t complete without it.” This from a woman whose husband had threatened to knock pieces out of her with a poker! The situation seemed to me beyond tears and beyond laughter—the poor, insulted, bullied thing, finding her one source of pride in the fact that she had experienced sexual intercourse. If there had been a child I could have understood; but there had, I think, never been a child—at any rate, there was not one living. If there had been, I believe I should have said to her what was in my mind—for the child’s sake; I should have hated to think of it growing up in that atmosphere, in its mother’s squalid faith in the essential glory of animalism. But as there was no child, and as she was so dulled, so broken, I said nothing. It was all she had—the consciousness that she, from her vantage-ground of completeness and experience, had the right to look down on me—on one of the unmarried, a woman who “could not understand.” It was her one ewe-lamb of petty consolation; and I had not the heart to try and take it from her.
XX
My intention in writing this book has not been to inveigh against the institution of marriage, the life companionship of man and woman; all that I have inveighed against has been the largely compulsory character of that institution—as far as one-half of humanity is concerned—the sweated trade element in it, and the glorification of certain qualities and certain episodes and experiences of life at the expense of all the others. I believe—because I have seen it in the working—that the companionship in marriage of self-respecting man and self-respecting woman is a very perfect thing; but I also believe that, under present conditions, it is not easy for self-respecting woman to find a mate with whom she can live on the terms demanded by her self-respect. Hence a distinct tendency on her part to avoid marriage. Those women who look at the matter in this light are those who, while not denying that matrimony may be an excellent thing in itself, realize that there are some excellent things which may be bought too dear. That is the position of a good many of us in these latter days. If we are more or less politely incredulous when we are informed that we are leading an unnatural existence, it is not because we have no passions, but because life to us means a great deal more than one of its possible episodes. If we decline to listen with becoming reverence to disquisitions on the broadening effect of motherhood upon our lives, the deep and miraculous understanding that it brings into our hearts, it is not because we are contemptuous of maternity, but because we have met so many silly persons who brought babies into the world and remained just as silly as they were before. We are quite aware, too, that it is, for the most part, women of our own unmated class, and, likely enough, of our own way of thinking, who spend their days in teaching bungling mothers how to rear the children who would otherwise only come into the world in order to afford employment to the undertaker by going out of it. (A considerable proportion of the infant population of this country would be in a parlous state if the “superfluous women” thereof were suddenly caught up into the air and dumped en bloc in the Sahara.)
And in this connection I feel it necessary to state that I have hitherto sought in vain in real life for that familiar figure in fiction—the unmarried woman whose withered existence is passed in ceaseless and embittered craving for the possession of a child of her own. The sufferings of this unfortunate creature, as depicted by masculine writers, have several times brought me to the verge of tears; it is difficult to believe that they are entirely the result of vivid masculine imagination; but honesty compels me to admit that I have never discovered their counterpart in life, in spite of the fact that my way has led me amongst spinsters of all ages. Young unmarried women have told me frankly that they would like to bear a child; a very few elderly unmarried women have told me that they would have preferred to marry; and quite a number of married women have told me that they should have done better for themselves by remaining single. I have known wives who desired maternity as anxiously as others desired to avoid it; but the spinster whose days are passed in gloomy contemplation of her lack of olive-branches I have not yet met. I started by believing in her, just as I started by believing that the world held nothing for me but marriage and reproduction of my kind. Later on I discovered that there were more things in heaven and earth than marriage and reproduction of my kind, and I have no reason to suppose that I am the only woman who has made that discovery.
The women I have known who lamented their single state as a real evil have been actuated in their dislike of it by mixed motives. A desire to bear children has, perhaps, been one; but it has always been interwoven with the desire to improve their position socially or commercially, and the corresponding fear of failure or poverty implied by spinsterhood. So far as my experience goes, the only women who fret passionately at the lack of children of their own are married women whose husbands are desirous of children.
I should be the last to deny that many unmarried women have the sense of maternity strongly developed; but the sense of maternity, as I see it, is not completely dependent on the accidents of marriage and child-birth. As I have already said, I believe it is not the physical side of maternity—the side which appeals so strongly to men—which appeals most strongly to women; and from the other, and, to me, infinitely more beautiful side, no unmarried woman is necessarily debarred. The spinster who devotes herself to permanent lamentation over her lack of descendants must (if she exists) be a person who has never risen above the male conception of motherhood as a physical and instinctive process. Some of the best mothers I have met have never borne a child; but one does not imagine that it will be counted to them for unrighteousness that the children who rise up and call them blessed are not their own. Nor is it childhood alone which enkindles the sense of maternity in women; the truest mother I know is one who enwraps with her love a “child” who came into the world before she was thought of.
After all, there is a kinship that is not that of the flesh, and some of us are very little the children of our parents. The people who have framed and influenced the conditions under which we live, whose thoughts have moulded our lives, have also had a share in our making. It is possible that descendants of Homer walk the earth to-day—very worthy persons whose existence is of no particular moment to any but themselves. Shakespeare was married I know, and I believe he was the father of a family; but of how many that family consisted, what were their names and what became of them all, I have never even troubled to inquire. Did Goethe leave descendants, or did he not? I frankly confess that I don’t know, simply because I have never had the slightest curiosity on the subject. But Faust has been part of my life. It matters very little to the world at large what became of the children whom Jean Jacques Rousseau handed over to the tender mercies of a foundling hospital; but there are very few people alive to-day to whom it does not matter that the current of the world’s striving was turned into a new channel by the spiritual sons of Rousseau—the men who made the French Revolution. Reproduction is not everything; the men and women who have striven to shorten the hours of child-labour have often been possessed of a keener sense of responsibility and tenderness, a keener sense of fatherhood and motherhood, than the parents whose children they sought to protect. If I were one of those who have so striven, I should consider that the help I had given to the world was no less worthy of honour and commendation than that of the paterfamilias who marches a family of fourteen to church on Sundays. If humanity had only been created in order to reproduce its kind, we might still be dodging cave-bears in the intervals of grubbing up roots with our nails. It is not only the children who matter: there is the world into which they are born. Every human being who influences for the better, however slightly, the conditions under which he lives is doing something for those who come after; and thus, it seems to me, that those women who are proving by their lives that marriage is not a necessity for them, that maternity is not a necessity for them, are preparing a heritage of fuller humanity for the daughters of others—who will be daughters of their own in the spirit, if not in the flesh. The home of the future will be more of an abiding-place and less of a prison because they have made it obvious that, so far as many women are concerned, the home can be done without; and if the marriage of the future is what it ought to be—a voluntary contract on both sides—it will be because they have proved the right of every woman to refuse it if she will, by demonstrating that there are other means of earning a livelihood than bearing children and keeping house. It is the woman without a husband to support her, the woman who has no home but such as she makes for herself by her own efforts, who is forcing a reluctant masculine generation to realize that she is something more than the breeding factor of the race. By her very existence she is altering the male conception of her sex.
According to latter-day notions, to speak in praise of celibacy in man or in woman is tantamount to committing the crime of high treason against the race. Other centuries—some of them with social systems quite as scientific as our own—have not been of that way of thinking; and one is half inclined to suspect that the modern dislike of the celibate has its root in the natural annoyance of an over-sexed and mentally lax generation at receiving ocular demonstration of the fact that the animal passions can be kept under control. It saves such a lot of trouble to assume at once that they cannot be kept under control; so, in place of the priest, we have the medicine man, whose business it is to make pathological excuses for original sin. Myself I have a good deal of respect for the celibate; not because he has no children, but because he is capable of self-control—which is a thing respectable in itself.