A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

That consciousness cannot become fully articulate until the war is over. For each belligerent nation the duty at this moment is clear—it must fight for what it holds to be right, must struggle for victory until the end. When that end comes I believe that the reign of the old ideas will end with it, and that all women will recognise the truth that is already clear as daylight to the minority.

Why is woman actually a war lover at heart? The question stings me. I am almost reluctant to answer. Yet though the fault is woman's, the responsibility is man's. Down to only a few years ago woman was no more than man's toy. She existed for his pleasure and convenience. If he covered her with pretty dresses and radiant jewels it was because she was his chattel. It seems only yesterday that a married woman's property became her husband's when he married her; that she could not bring an action at law. It needed the celebrated Jackson case, familiar to students of the feminist movement, to decide that a man might not lock his wife up in his house.

I believe that the law enabling a man to administer "moderate chastisement" to his wife has never been repealed. A woman cannot divorce her drunken, dissolute husband unless he ill-uses her physically; the law, unable to deny that woman has a body, will not grant her the possession of a soul. Trashy novels, trivial amusement, unending decoration, freedom from the development of mentality and personality—these are the things that have been held to suffice women, and though there have always been a few great women in the world, the vast majority has been compelled to accept the conditions offered.

I cannot help thinking that if there had not been a surplus of women over men in countries where monogamy rules, change would have been longer still in coming; but there have always been tens of thousands of women for whom there is neither mate, domestic inactivity nor child-bearing, and the educational progress, though leaden footed, has moved.

From the Garden of Eden to Ibsen's "Dolls' House" is a far cry, but it was left to the great Scandinavian dramatist to open woman's eyes. That is, I think, why he was greeted by male critics with such howls of execration—they saw the foundation of the old order being sapped. Man had appealed to woman's vanity, and had consequently developed it enormously; but the motive was little higher than that which inspires the male baboon when he goes courting. Ibsen showed woman the result of her submission.

Only the historian, looking at our social history when the youngest of us "has lain for a century dead," will realise the strength and progress of the feminist movement in the last decade or two; the barriers it has surmounted or swept away; the barbed wire entanglements of prejudice and convention against which it has flung itself. Yet I am bold enough to declare that had universal war been mooted in 1934 instead of 1914 woman throughout all the countries of potential combatants would have combined instantly to prevent it.

At present the ranks of the thinkers are too thin; woman is divided against herself. The worst foes of feminism are women; it is the anti-feminists who parade the streets in khaki, who band themselves into wholly unnecessary and sometimes disreputable anti-German leagues, who labour as though war were a glory rather than a curse. You will not find militarists or anti-feminists among the glorious sisterhood of the hospitals, for they almost alone among women know what war really is. If the propaganda of feminism could have spread, if it could have invaded Germany, where the Church, the nursery and the kitchen are expected to fill every woman's life, what a very different answer would have been given to the ambitions of rulers and the blundering of politicians! In how many million homes, where sadness reigns supreme, would there have been the simple, harmless happiness that is the birthright of us all?

Is it the irony of fate that man must pay the terrible price for having made woman what she is; for having stifled or sought to stifle her common sense; for robbing her of the rights that she possesses by reason of being a human being; for distracting her with gawds and frivolities, and seeking to keep her merely as a minister to his pleasures and a mother to his children? He has paid for the supreme folly of generations with the price of the lives of millions of his best and bravest, with the ruin of flourishing cities and fair country, with the poverty of the generation to come, and with many another bitter offering of which he is not yet fully aware.

Doubtless there are still in our midst countless women who accept all that is happening as inevitable; who look upon it without realising that had the sex responded to the ideals of feminism and become one sisterhood without boundaries and without a limited patriotism conditioned by the accident of birth, these things could not have been. I say, without hesitation, that the future of the world demands the elimination of some existing types of women, the education of others, and, in the end, the union of all.

Man was not born merely for glorious death, he was born for glorious life, and in the systematic and universally condoned slaughter of man by man there is neither honour nor glory. The world, properly administered, can produce enough food and clothing for all; it has work and a measure of happiness for all. Our enemies are not Englishmen or Germans, Frenchmen or Turks; they are ignorance and poverty, disease and vice. Woman recognises the truth—that is to say, thinking and emancipated woman recognises it—and she knows that all the strife that tears the older world asunder is fratricidal, that a million times Cain strikes down a million times Abel, and in so doing deliberately obscures the Divine Event toward which all creation moves.