Such, or something like it, has been the fate of woman through the centuries. And if, like man, she had been light-armed for her own defense, it might have been possible to say it was her own fault that she allowed all this to take place; but when we remember that she all the while has had to bear the great and speechless burden of Sex—to be herself the ark and cradle of the Race down the ages—then we may perhaps understand what a tragedy it has all been. For the fulfilment of sex is a relief and a condensation to the Man. He goes his way, and, so to speak, thinks no more about it. But to the Woman it is the culmination of her life, her profound and secret mission to humanity, of incomparable import and delicacy.
It is difficult, of course, for men to understand the depth and sacredness of the mother-feeling in woman—its joys and hope, its leaden weight of cares and anxieties. The burden of pregnancy and gestation, the deep inner solicitude and despondency, the fears that all may not be well, the indrawing and absorption of her life into the life of the child, the increasing effort to attend to anything else, to care for anything else; her willingness even to die if only the child may be born safe: these are things which man—except it be occasionally in his role as artist or inventor—does but faintly imagine. Then, later on, the dedication to the young life or lives, the years of daylong and nightlong labor and forethought, in which the very thought of self is effaced, of tender service for which there is no recognition, nor ever will or can be—except in the far future; the sacrifice of personal interests and expansions in the ever-narrowing round of domestic duty; and in the end the sad wonderment and grievous unfulfilled yearning as one by one the growing boy and girl push their way into the world and disavow their home-ties and dependence; the sundering of heart-strings even as the navel-cord had to be sundered before: for these things, too, Woman can hope but little sympathy and understanding from the other sex.
But this fact, of man’s non-perception of it, does not make the tragedy less. Far back out of the brows of Greek goddess, and Sibyll, and Norse and German seeress and prophetess, over all this petty civilization look the grand untamed eyes of a primal woman the equal and the mate of man; and in sad plight should we be if we might not already, lighting up the horizon from East and West and South and North, discern the answering looks of those new comers who, as the period of women’s enslavement is passing away, send glances of recognition across the ages to their elder sisters.
After all, and underneath all the falsities of this period, may we not say that there is a deep and permanent relation between the sexes, which must inevitably assert itself again?
To this relation the physiological differences perhaps afford the key. In woman—modern science has shown—the more fundamental and primitive nervous centers, and the great sympathetic and vaso-motor system of nerves generally, are developed to a greater extent than in man; in woman the whole structure and life rallies more closely and obviously round the sexual function than in man; and, as a general rule, in the evolution of the human race, as well as of the lower races, the female is less subject to variation and is more constant to and conservative of the type of the race than the male.[[6]] With these physiological differences are naturally allied the facts that, of the two, Woman is the more primitive, the more intuitive, the more emotional. If not so large and cosmic in her scope, the great unconscious processes of Nature lie somehow nearer to her; to her, sex is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural purity; nor does she often experience that divorce between the sentiment of Love and the physical passion which is so common with men, and which causes them to be aware of a grossness and a conflict in their own natures; she is, or should be, the interpreter of Love to man, and in some degree his guide in sexual matters. More, since she keeps to the great lines of evolution and is less biased and influenced by the momentary currents of the day; since her life is bound up with the life of the child; since in a way she is nearer the child herself, and nearer to the savage; it is to her that Man, after his excursions and wanderings, mental and physical, continually tends to return as to his primitive home and resting-place, to restore his balance, to find his center of life, and to draw stores of energy and inspiration for fresh conquests of the outer world. “In women men find beings who have not wandered so far as they have from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature. To every man, as Michelet has put it, the woman whom he loves is as the Earth was to her legendary son; he has but to fall down and kiss her breast and he is strong again.”[[7]]
If it be true that by natural and physiological right Woman stands in some such primitive relationship to Man, then we may expect this relationship to emerge again into clear and reasonable light in course of time; though it does not of course follow that a relationship founded on physiological distinctions is absolutely permanent—since these latter may themselves vary to some degree. That a more natural and sensible relation of some kind between the sexes is actually coming to birth, few who care to read the signs of the times can well doubt. For the moment, however, and by way of parenthesis before looking to the future, we have to consider a little more in detail the present position of women under civilization. Not that the consideration will be altogether gracious and satisfactory, but that it may—we are fain to hope—afford us some hints for the future.
It was perhaps not altogether unnatural that Man’s craze for property and individual ownership should have culminated in the enslavement of woman—his most precious and beloved object. But the consequence of this absurdity was a whole series of other absurdities. What between insincere flattery and rosewater adorations on the one hand, and serfdom and neglect on the other, woman was, as Havelock Ellis says, treated as “a cross between an angel and an idiot.” And after a time, adapting herself to the treatment, she really became something between an angel and an idiot—a bundle of weak and flabby sentiments, combined with a wholly undeveloped brain. Moreover by being continually specialized and specialized in the sexual and domestic direction, she lost touch with the actual world, and grew, one may say, into a separate species from man—so that in the later civilizations the males and females, except when the sex-attraction has compelled them as it were to come together, have been wont to congregate in separate herds, and talk languages each unintelligible to the other. Says the author of the Woman’s Question: “I admit there is no room for pharisaical self-laudation here. The bawling mass of mankind on a racecourse or the stock-exchange is degrading enough in all conscience. Yet this even is hardly so painful as the sight which meets our eyes between three and four in the afternoon in any fashionable London street. Hundreds of women—mere dolls—gazing intently into shop-windows at various bits of colored ribbon. * * * Perhaps nothing is more disheartening than this, except the mob of women in these very same streets between twelve and one at night.”
The “lady,” the household drudge, and the prostitute, are the three main types of women resulting in our modern civilization from the process of the past—and it is hard to know which is the most wretched, which is the most wronged, and which is the most unlike that which in her own heart every true woman would desire to be.
In some sense the “lady” of the period which is just beginning to pass away is the most characteristic product of Commercialism. The sense of Private Property, arising and joining with the “angel and idiot” theory, turned Woman more and more—especially of course among the possessing classes—into an emblem of possession—a mere doll, an empty idol, a brag of the man’s exclusive right in the sex—till at last, as her vain splendors increased and her real usefulness diminished, she ultimated into the “perfect lady.” But let every woman who piques and preens herself to the fulfilment of this ideal in her own person, remember what is the cost and what is the meaning of her quest: the covert enslavement to, and the covert contempt of Man.
The instinct of helpful personal service is so strong in women, and such a deep-rooted part of their natures, that to be treated as a mere target for other people’s worship and services—especially when this is tainted with insincerity—must be most obnoxious to them. To think that women still exist by hundreds and hundreds of thousands, women with hearts and hands formed for love and helpfulness, who are brought up as “ladies” and have to spend their lives listening to the idiotic platitudes of the Middle-class Man, and “waited upon” by wage-bought domestics, is enough to make one shudder. The modern “gentleman” is bad enough, but the “lady” of bourgeois-dom, literally “crucified twixt a smile and whimper,” prostituted to a life which in her heart she hates—with its petty ideals, its narrow horizon, and its empty honors—is indeed a pitiful spectacle.