Apart from this mere brute strength which has been given to men mainly for her advantage, she says they are nuisances and for the most part shams; and she wonders with less surprise than disdain at those of her sisters who have kept trust in them; who still honestly profess to both love and respect them; and who are not ashamed to own that they rely on men's better judgment in all important matters of life, and look to them for counsel and protection generally. The modern man-hater does none of these things. If she has a husband she holds him as her enemy ex officio, and undertakes home-life as a state of declared warfare where she must be in antagonism if she would not be in slavery. Has she money? It must be tied up safe from his control; not as a joint precaution against future misfortune, but as a personal protection against his malice; for the modern theory is that a husband will, if he can get it, squander his wife's money simply for cruelty and to spite her, though in so doing he may ruin himself as well. It is a new reading of the old saying about being revenged on one's face. Has she friends whom he, in his quality of man of the world, knows to be unsuitable companions for her, and such as he conscientiously objects to receive into his house? His advice to her to drop them is an unwarrantable interference with her most sacred affections, and she stands by her undesirable acquaintances, for whom she has never particularly cared until now, with the constancy of a martyr defending her faith. If it would please her to rush into public life as the noisy advocate of any nasty subject that may be on hand—his refusal to have his name dragged through the mire at the instance of her folly is coercion in its worst form—the coercion of her conscience, of her mental liberty; and she complains bitterly to her friends among the shrieking sisterhood of the harsh restrictions he places on her freedom of action. Her heart is with them, she says; and perhaps she gives them pecuniary and other aid in private; but she cannot follow them on to the platform, nor sign her name to passionate manifestoes as ignorant as they are unseemly; nor tout for signatures to petitions on things of which she knows nothing, and the true bearing of which she cannot understand; nor dabble in dirt till she has lost the sense of its being dirt at all. And, not being able to disgrace her husband that she may swell the ranks of the unsexed, she is quoted by the shriekers as one among many examples of the subjection of women and the odious tyranny under which they live.
As for the man, no hard words are too hard for him. It is only enmity which animates him, only tyranny and oppression which govern him. There is no intention of friendly guidance in his determination to prevent his wife from making a gigantic blunder—feeling of kindly protection in the authority which he uses to keep her from offering herself as a mark for public ridicule and damaging discussion, wherein the bloom of her name and nature would be swept away for ever. It is all the base exercise of an unrighteous power; and the first crusade to be undertaken in these latter days is the woman's crusade against masculine supremacy.
Warm partizan however, as she is of her own sex, the modern man-hater cannot forgive the woman we spoke of who still believes in old-fashioned distinctions; who thinks that nature framed men for power and women for tenderness, and that the fitting, because the natural, division of things is protection on the one side and a reasonable measure of—we will not mince the word—obedience on the other. For indeed the one involves the other. Women of this kind, whose sentiment of sex is natural and healthy, the modern man-hater regards as traitors in the camp; or as slaves content with their slavery, and therefore in more pitiable case than those who, like herself, jangle their chains noisily and seek to break them by loud uproar.
But even worse than the women who honestly love and respect the men to whom they belong, and who find their highest happiness in pleasing them and their truest wisdom in self-surrender, are those who frankly confess the shortcomings of their own sex, and think the best chance of mending a fault is first to understand that it is a fault. With these worse than traitors no terms are to be kept; and the man-haters rise in a body and ostracize the offenders. To be known to have said that women are weak; that their best place is at home; that filthy matters are not for their handling; that the instinct of feminine modesty is not a thing to be disregarded in the education of girls nor the action of matrons; are sins for which these self-accusers are accounted 'creatures' not fit for the recognition of the nobler-souled man-hater. The gynecian war between these two sections of womanhood is one of the oddest things belonging to this odd condition of affairs.
This sect of modern man-haters is recruited from three classes mainly—those who have been cruelly treated by men, and whose faith in one half of the human race cannot survive their own one sad experience; those restless and ambitious persons who are less than women, greedy of notoriety, indifferent to home life, holding home duties in disdain, with strong passions rather than warm affections, with perverted instincts in one direction and none worthy of the name in another; and those who are the born vestals of nature, whose organization fails in the sweeter sympathies of womanhood, and who are unsexed by the atrophy of their instincts as the other class are by the perversion and coarsening of theirs. By all these men are held to be enemies and oppressors; and even love is ranked as a mere matter of the senses, whereby women are first subjugated and then betrayed.
The crimes of which these modern man-haters accuse their hereditary enemies are worthy of Munchausen. A great part of the sorry success gained by the opposers of the famous Acts has been due to the monstrous fictions which have been told of men's dealings with the women under consideration. No brutality has been too gross to be related as an absolute truth, of which the name, address, and all possible verification could be given, if desired. And the women who have taken the lead in this matter have not been afraid to ascribe to some of the most honourable names in the opposite ranks words and deeds which would have befouled a savage. Details of every apocryphal crime have been passed from one credulous or malicious matron to the other, over the five o'clock tea; and tender-natured women, horror-stricken at what they heard, have accepted as proofs of the ineradicable enmity of man to woman these unfounded fables which the unsexed so positively asserted among themselves as facts.
The ease of conscience with which the man-hating propagandists have accepted and propagated slanderous inventions in this matter has been remarkable, to say the least of it; and were it not for the gravity of the principles at stake, and the nastiness of the subject, the stories of men's vileness in connexion with this matter, would make one of the absurdest jest-books possible, illustrative of the credulity, the falsehood, and the ingenious imagination of women. We do not say that women have no just causes of complaint against men. They have; and many. And so long as human nature is what it is, strength will at times be brutal rather than protective, and weakness will avenge itself with more craft than patience. But that is a very different thing from the sectional enmity which the modern man-haters assert, and the revolt which they make it their religion to preach. No good will come of such a movement, which is in point of fact creating the ill-feeling it has assumed. On the contrary, if women will but believe that on the whole men wish to be their friends and to treat them with fairness and generosity, they will find the work of self-protection much easier and the reconcilement of opposing interests greatly simplified.