Woman has developed so far that generally she thinks she is (and sometimes she really is!) a reasonable and balanced creature, with strong individuality—and personal tastes and likes and dislikes. She is now ill-fitted to keep them all in subservience to man, unless he is her intellectual master. She may have wedded only because the emotion of sex (not understood as such, and called by a number of other names such as “love,” “devotion,” “attraction”) forced her at one of its powerful moments to take a physical mate—totally unsuited to her moral calibre. But she has knelt at the altar and sworn vows before God—and perhaps has fulfilled woman’s original mission in the world, and become the mother of children—so what is to be done to rectify her mistake and its unhappy consequences?
She must look the whole circumstances of it in the face and ask herself whether she herself threw dust in her own eyes as regards the character of her husband, whether he deceived her in this, or whether they just drifted together, each to blame as much as the other, through the attraction of sex and the cruelty of ignorance. She may regret it a thousandfold—but she has done the thing of her own free will, no one forced her to wed the man; she may have done so unwillingly in some cases—and for ulterior motives, but at all events she was consenting and not dragged to church resisting, and so if she is sensible she will use the whole of her intelligence to make the best of it. She will look to the end of her every action and her every thought. Will brooding over her “rights,” and the wrongs he has inflicted, mend them? Will it do anything but give her vanity—the satisfaction of self-pity? Certainly not.
If she has really evolved enough to wish to impose her opinions and individuality upon her household or the community, she will have realised that the welfare of the home for which she is responsible, and the community to which she belongs, are, or ought to be, of far more consequence to her than her own personal emotions. Therefore she must ask herself whether she has any right to upset the happiness of the one, and the conception of good of the other, by indulging in personal quarrels and bickerings, or open scandal with her mate. A really noble and unselfish woman would never consider her personal emotion before her duty to God and to her neighbour. It is because the outlook of woman is as a rule so pitifully narrow and self-centred that she often makes a useless and unhappy wife, and shipwrecks her own and others’ futures.
Man has gone on with his brute force, and his physical and mental attraction, and his tastes and beliefs and aspirations very much the same for thousands of years. Numbers of them were brutes then, and numbers are brutes still and will remain so. It is only woman who has so incredibly changed, and after staying immeasurably behind in importance and in intellectuality for countless centuries, now seeks to equal if not outstep man in all things. It would be well for man to wake up to the fact that he is now wedding a woman with every sense and nerve and conception of life far in advance of what his mother believed herself to be capable of—and so his methods towards her in return must not be as his father’s were. If man wishes to have the good, domestic, obedient wife his father—perhaps one should go farther back and say grandfather!—expected—and got—he must either choose a timid weakling who becomes just his echo, or he must learn to treat the modern woman as a comrade, a being who mentally can understand and follow his aspirations and even assist him in his desires, a creature to respect and consult, and whom he cannot rule just because he is a man and she is a woman—but can only do so, and bring her to obedience, when he has shown her his intellectual superiority and his wisdom.
Woman is as willing to be ruled as ever she was—she always adores a master; but she has grown too intelligent to bow her head just because a man is a man—he must be the man. Man is naturally fighting for his old omnipotence, which he possessed regardless of his personal endowment, simply because he was a male creature—and the foolish section of woman is fighting man, with bombs and tricks and frantic words, instead of convincing him by her wisdom and attainments, by her demonstrations of knowledge of life and its duties and responsibilities, that she has grown at last indeed fitted to be treated as an equal and a comrade, not as a plaything and a slave.
Who does not respect a woman who fulfils all her obligations with grace and charm, whose house is well ordered, whose friends are well entertained by her fine mind, and whose children are well brought up and full of understanding? She is indeed more precious than rubies and far more full of influence for the good of her community than she who shouts of rights and wrongs and votes and such-like. The first woman could control a hundred votes, and help a government, but the second can only clog the wheels of the sex’s advancement.
Now we get back to marriage!
And the first and foremost thing to be understood is that it is a frightful responsibility to undertake, and that all those who enter into this bond lightly and for frivolous motives, or from just drifting, will be made by fate to pay the price.
Think of it! Two people stand up and swear before God to continue to love one another until death do them part. They solemnly stand there and make vows about an emotion over which they have no more control than they have over the keeping of the wind in the south. They have only control, if they have strong wills, over its demonstration. And then in nine cases out of ten neither thinks for a moment afterwards, of his or her responsibility of trying to make possible the observance of these vows, by keeping alight the flame of love in the other’s heart. A man utterly disillusions a woman and then blames her, not himself, for her ceasing to care for him, and being eventually attracted by some one else! A woman disgusts or bores a man, and then bewails her sad lot, and calls the man a brute for being indifferent, and a shameful creature for looking elsewhere for consolation! In all marriages there is no one to blame or praise for unhappiness or happiness but the two individuals themselves. It is his fault—or misfortune—if she no longer cares, and likewise hers in the parallel case—and it is owing to the weakness of either if outside circumstances have been able to interfere. Thus to ensure happiness there must be a tremendous sense of personal responsibility, and there should be understanding of life and understanding of nature instincts and understanding of sex instincts; and a ruthless tearing away of the false values which a Victorian age grafted upon religion, narrowing the mind of woman as to man’s needs—and narrowing man’s conception of woman’s mental capacity.
No woman must ever forget in her relation to man that “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” and in this I am not only speaking literally of shekels of gold and silver, but of the power incorporated in certain personalities; and man, if he chose to exert it, has always force majeure at his command in the last extremity, although in these days of Herculean young women he may lose even this in time!