[3] Sir Arbuthnot Lane, for whom I have hitherto entertained an entirely unqualified admiration, in a recent article. Vide The Weekly Dispatch, December 28, 1924.
II
Artemis
The Early Struggles of Feminism
When the feminist struggle began during the last century, ignorance and beauty were the two qualities most admired in women. It is necessary to remind our masculine critics what was the soil from which the feminist movement sprang and what the current morality which influenced its direction. It was customary in those days to make fun of old or ugly women and to scorn those who showed any signs of intelligence. A man chose a young, beautiful, and blushing creature for his bride, and transformed her by one year of marriage and one childbirth into a gentle and submissive matron. Ugly or intelligent women, for the most part, paid a heavy price. Not only were they rejected in youth, and starved of all their natural joys, but as “old maids” they were the object of general scorn and derision. Small wonder that women adopted artificial aids to beauty and artificial hindrances to their native intelligence. Strongest of all the taboos laid by masculine custom and religion on feminine minds was that regarding sex-knowledge. Their purity was to be preserved only by ignorance, and even as matrons and mothers it was scarcely decent for them to refer to any of the physical changes of their bodies. It is impossible to over-estimate the strength of this tradition, or the harm which has been worked by it to the cause of women.
The feminists were, and are still, howled down by men on the pretence that they invented chastity and scorn of bodily values. History disproves such a ridiculous assertion. The early feminists were what history and tradition made them, and could not at the time of their rebellion have been otherwise. The origin of the stupid ideal of womanhood against which men as well as women to-day are still fighting was the asceticism of the Christian religion; and, unless St. Paul was a woman in disguise, I fail to see how woman is to be blamed for a conception of her place and duty from which she has suffered more than anybody else. Before the conversion of the West to Christianity, barbarian women of the North enjoyed a certain rough equality with their husbands. They stride through the sagas, these fierce women, brides of heroes, glad to reward the warrior with their favours, quick to avenge an insult or a wrong. They had no need to stoop to cajolery. Savage and untamed, they were the fit and equal mates of savage men.
Then came the monks, and the white wimples and courtly dresses and chivalry, chants and cathedrals, and meek and reverent casting up and casting down of eyes. The savage breast that had swelled and throbbed untrammelled in love or anger learnt to flutter and to sigh. Quenched were the fires of Brunhilde, her sunlit rock deserted. Agnes and Mary, tamed and pious, sat cooing in the shade. But for meekness and maternity, the early days of asceticism might have seen a crusade to destroy that temptress—woman. Barely allowed a soul, she slipped through a life of oblivion, praying that it might be a pretty crown with which Heaven would reward her patience and submission at the last. Then came the Puritans and denied her even that, substituting ugliness in this life as well as the negation of body, and a heaven of people in starched nightshirts, rendered oblivious to the horrid spectacle of their figures by the still more horrid chanting of their nasal psalms.
A breath of rationalism—brief, soon choked, a breath of “nature”—and so to crinolines, pantalettes, and a life still lived in terror of hell-fire, terror of parents, dread of husband, horror of the least breath of adverse public opinion. Anyone who reads the Fairchild Family must marvel that from such nerve-destroying parental tyranny and the intolerable weight of prejudice and religious superstition the nineteenth-century woman ever found the courage to rebel.
Was it astonishing that the revolt had in it something frenzied and ascetic—that it seemed to express the anger of the spinster thwarted and despised in the current schemes of values? I do not think the pioneers were so much Puritan as votaries, hanging the tablet of each achievement in the temple of Athene or of Artemis, pressing on, breathless, swift of foot, sure of aim, in dread of the fate of Atalanta whom the Golden Apples lured to destruction and the marital embrace. “Chaste as the icicle, that hangs on Dian’s temple.” They had need to be, perhaps, who, in an atmosphere of swoons and ringlets, won for us schools and colleges, free limbs, health and the open air; unlocked for us the classics, science, medicine, the history of our world; drew us from our paltry, ladylike accomplishments; wrote upon our school-books: “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed,” and flung wide the gate into the world.
They, these pioneers, childless, unwed, created and bore thousands of women, made them anew, body and soul, for lives of mental and physical activity unknown in the past to any but the very exceptional few. Just like the new learning of the Renaissance to men’s minds in Europe was the opening of high school and university to the feminine mind of to-day. Thousands of women of the last generation and this, who would otherwise have passed their existence in genteel poverty and vacancy of mind, have found their happiness in teaching, in medicine, or in some other profession. Thousands of mothers have watched with delight the unfolding of their children’s minds, and enjoyed co-operating over “lessons” and arguing politics with the adolescent.
We, who in a sense are the children of the feminist pioneers, whose thoughts embrace the universe, whose lives are one long round of mental and physical delight, at times intense to ecstasy—we at least will pay our tribute to those who lit the sacred fires, before we take up pen and paper to criticize.