IV
Marriage being to them not only a trade, but a necessity, it must follow as the night the day that the acquirement of certain characteristics—the characteristics required by an average man in an average wife—has been rendered inevitable for women in general. There have, of course, always been certain exceptional men who have admired and desired certain exceptional and eccentric qualities in their wives; but in estimating a girl’s chances of pleasing—on which depended her chances of success or a comfortable livelihood—these exceptions naturally, were taken into but small account, and no specialization in their tastes and desires was allowed for in her training. The aim and object of that training was to make her approximate to the standard of womanhood set up by the largest number of men; since the more widely she was admired the better were her chances of striking a satisfactory bargain. The taste and requirements of the average man of her class having been definitely ascertained, her training and education was carried on on the principle of cultivating those qualities which he was likely to admire, and repressing with an iron hand those qualities to which he was likely to take objection; in short, she was fitted for her trade by the discouragement of individuality and eccentricity and the persistent moulding of her whole nature into the form which the ordinary husband would desire it to take. Her education, unlike her brothers’, was not directed towards self-development and the bringing out of natural capabilities, but towards pleasing some one else—was not for her own benefit, but for that of another person.
No one has better expressed the essential difference between the education of men and women than Mr. John Burns in a speech delivered to the “Children of the State” at the North Surrey District School on February 13, 1909. Addressing the boys the President of the Local Government Board said, “I want you to be happy craftsmen, because you are trained to be healthy men.” Addressing the girls he is reported to have used the following words—
“To keep house, cook, nurse and delight in making others happy is your mission, duty and livelihood.”
The boys are to be happy themselves; the girls are to make others happy. No doubt Mr. Burns spoke sincerely; but is he not one of the “others”? And it is well to note that the “making of others happy” is not put before the girls as an ideal, but as a duty and means of livelihood. They are to be self-sacrificing as a matter of business—a commercial necessity. It is because man realizes that self-sacrifice in woman is not a matter of free-will, but of necessity, that he gives her so little thanks for it. Her duty and means of livelihood is to make others happy—in other words, to please him.
Whether she was trained to be useful or useless that was the object of her up-bringing. Men in one class of society would be likely to require wives able to do rough house or field work; so to do rough house or field work she was trained. Men in another class of society would be likely to require of their wives an appearance of helpless fragility; and girls in that particular class were educated to be incapable of sustained bodily effort.
It is this fact—that their training was a training not in their own, but in some one else’s requirements—which, to my thinking, makes women so infinitely more interesting to watch and to analyze than men. Interesting, I mean, in the sense of exciting. Practically every woman I know has two distinct natures: a real and an acquired; that which she has by right of birth and heritage, and that which she has been taught she ought to have—and often thinks that she has attained to. And it is quite impossible even for another woman, conscious of the same division of forces in herself, to forecast which of these two conflicting temperaments will come uppermost at a given moment.
The average man is a straightforward and simple-minded creature compared to the average woman, merely because he has been allowed to develop much more on his own natural lines. He has only one centre of gravity; the woman has two. To put it in plain English, he usually knows what he wants; she, much more often than not, does not know anything of the kind. She is under the impression that she wants certain things which she has been told from her earliest childhood, and is being told all the time, are the things she ought to want. That is as far as she can go with certainty. This also can be said with certainty: that her first requirement, whether she knows it or not, is the liberty to discover what she really does require.
Once a man’s character is known and understood it can usually be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy how he will act in any particular crisis or emergency—say, under stress of strong emotion or temptation. With his sister on the other hand you can never foresee at what point artificiality will break down and nature take command; which makes it infinitely more difficult, however well you know her, to predict her course of action under the same circumstances. The woman whose whole existence, from early dawn to dewy eve, is regulated by a standard of manners imposed upon her from without, by a standard of morals imposed upon her from without, whose ideals are purely artificial and equally reflected, will suddenly, and at an unexpected moment, reveal another and fundamental side of her nature of which she herself has probably lived in entire ignorance. And on the other hand—so ingrained in us all has artificiality become—a woman of the independent type, with a moral standard and ideals of her own setting up, may, when the current of her life is swept out of its ordinary course by emergency or strong emotion, take refuge, just as suddenly and unexpectedly, in words and actions that are palpably unnatural to her and inspired by an instilled idea of what, under the circumstances, a properly constituted woman ought to say or do. Faced with a difficulty through which her own experience does not serve to guide her, she falls back on convention and expresses the thoughts of others in the stilted language that convention has put into her mouth. I have known this happen more than once, and seen a real human being of flesh and blood suddenly and unconsciously transformed into one of those curious creatures, invented by male writers and called women for lack of any other name, whose sins and whose virtues alike are the sins and virtues considered by male writers to be suitable and becoming to the opposite sex.
For generation after generation the lives of women of even the slightest intelligence and individuality must have been one long and constant struggle between the forces of nature endeavouring to induce in them that variety which is another word for progress and their own enforced strivings to approximate to a single monotonous type—the type of the standard and ideal set up for them by man, which was the standard and ideal of his own comfort and enjoyment. However squarely uncompromising the characteristics of any given woman, the only vacant space for her occupation was round, and into the round hole she had to go. Were her soul the soul of a pirate, it had to be encased in a body which pursued the peaceful avocation of a cook. Even when she kicked over the traces and gave respectability the go-by, she could only do so after one particular and foregone fashion—a fashion encouraged if not openly approved by man. The male sinner might go to the devil in any way he chose; for her there was only one road to the nethermost hell, and, dependent even in this, she needed a man to set her feet upon the path. Her vices, like her virtues, were forced and stereotyped. They sprang from the same root; vice, with her, was simply an excess of virtue. Vicious or virtuous, matron or outcast, she was made and not born.