Perhaps the deficiency in maternal instinct would seem the most serious imputation. But then, who knows (as we have said) what evolution is preparing? Sometimes it seems possible that a new sex is on the make—like the feminine neuters of Ants and Bees—not adapted for child-bearing, but with a marvelous and perfect instinct of social service, indispensable for the maintenance of the common life. Certainly most of those who are freeing themselves—often with serious struggles—from the “lady” chrysalis are fired with an ardent social enthusiasm; and if they may personally differ in some respects from the average of their sex, it is certain that their efforts will result in a tremendous improvement in the general position of their more commonplace sisters.
If it should turn out that a certain fraction of the feminine sex should for one reason or another not devote itself to the work of maternity, still the influence of this section would react on the others to render their notion of motherhood far more dignified than before. There is not much doubt that in the future this most important of human labors will be carried on with a degree of conscious intelligence hitherto unknown, and which will raise it from the fulfilment of a mere instinct to the completion of a splendid social purpose. To save the souls of children as well as their bodies, to raise heroic as well as prosperous citizens, will surely be the desire and the work of the mothers of our race.[[12]]
It will perhaps be said that after going about to show (as in the previous chapter) the deficiency of women hitherto in the matter of the generalizing faculty, it is somewhat inconsistent to express any great hope that they will ever take much active interest in the general social life to which they belong; but indeed the answer to this is that they are already beginning to do so. The social enthusiasm and activity shown by women in Britain, Russia, and the United States is so great and well-rooted that it is impossible to believe it a mere ephemeral event; and though in the older of these countries it is at present confined to the more wealthy classes, we can augur from that—according to a well-known principle—that it will in time spread downwards to the women of the nation.
Important as is the tendency of women in the countries mentioned to higher education and brain development, I think it is evident that the widening and socialization of their interests is not taking place so much through mere study of books and the passing of examinations in political economy and other sciences, as through the extended actual experience which the life of the day is bringing to them. Certainly the book-studies are important and must not be neglected; but above all is it imperative (and men, if they are to have any direct sway in the future destinies of the other sex, must look to it) that women, so long confined to the narrowest mere routine and limited circle of domestic life, should see and get experience, all they can, of the actual world. The theory, happily now exploding, of keeping them “innocent” through sheer ignorance partakes too much of the “angel and idiot” view. To see the life of slum and palace and workshop, to enter into the trades and professions, to become doctors, nurses, and so forth, to have to look after themselves and to hold their own as against men, to travel, to meet with sexual experience, to work together in trade-unions, to join in social and political uprisings and rebellions, etc., is what women want just now. And it is evident enough that at any rate among the more prosperous sections in this country such a movement is going on apace. If the existence of the enormous hordes of unattached females that we find living on interest and dividends to-day is a blemish from a Socialistic point of view; if we find them on the prowl all over the country, filling the theaters and concert-rooms and public entertainments in the proportion of three to one male, besetting the trains, swarming onto the tops of the ’buses, dodging on bicycles under the horses’ heads, making speeches at street corners, blocking the very pavements in the front of fashionable shops, we must not forget that for the objects we have just sketched, even this class is going the most direct way to work, and laying in stores of experience, which will make it impossible for it ever to return to the petty life of times gone by.
At the last, and after centuries of misunderstanding and association of triviality and superficiality with the female sex, it will perhaps dawn upon the world that the truth really lies in an opposite direction—that, in a sense, there is something more deep-lying fundamental and primitive in the woman nature than in that of the man; that instead of being the over-sensitive hysterical creature that civilization has too often made her, she is essentially of calm large and acceptive even though emotional temperament. “Her shape arises,” says Walt Whitman,
“She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,
The gross and soil’d she moves among do not make her gross and soil’d,
She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is concealed from her,
She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,
She is the best belov’d, it is without exception; she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear.”