CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN QUESTION UPON SINGLE WOMEN
The following comparisons between the life of women, especially their spiritual life of about fifty years ago and their life as it has shaped itself under the influence of the woman movement, have been arranged in descending scale. They begin with that phase of women’s life in which this influence was most favourable from the point of view of life enhancement, namely with the life of unmarried women.
You will find to-day, among women seventy or eighty years of age, one or another type of that fine culture which the gifted single woman, in comfortable circumstances, could attain in the previous century. Her home, especially if it was an estate in the country, became a cultural fireside which radiated light and heat for relatives and friends. The lesser gifted disseminated, each according to her nature, comfort or discomfort, yet could in extremity at least be sure of the homage of their future heirs. Toward those dependent upon them, these women were sometimes kind, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hard: the feeling of social responsibility was an unknown idea to them. The penniless single women, on the contrary, were found either in one of the “respectable” positions which, however, brought with them a multitude of humiliations: as governess, companion, housekeeper—in Germany also as maid of honour at one of the numerous small courts—or in some charitable institution for gentle folks, an asylum for pauvres honteuses; but most frequently in the corner of the home of a relative. This corner was at times the warmest and most confidential in the whole house, that corner which the children sought for stories and sweetmeats; the youth, to find an embrace in which he could pour forth his grief, an ear which listened to his most beautiful dreams. But it happened more frequently that the “aunt” looked upon as a “necessary evil” was in reality that very thing. Humiliated and embittered, she became ingenious in making those about her suffer for her afflictions. Before they became hopelessly old, the “aunts” were the laughing stock of the young through their efforts, in the eleventh hour, to reach the “peaceful haven of matrimony”; and they themselves looked with envious eyes upon the good fortune of the young. We meet the unmarried woman of that time at her best as trusty servant who shared the cares, the joys, and the sorrows of the family and, in her garret chamber, of which she could be certain to the day of her death, she looked back upon a rich life lived vicariously. Not infrequently, she rejected a marriage proposal in order to stay with her beloved master and mistress to whom she knew she was indispensable. The superfluous women previously mentioned would have thrown themselves into the arms of Beelzebub had he come as suitor. When the years passed, when neither their desire for activity nor the thirst of the heart nor of the senses was quenched, then not infrequently insanity conjured up for these lonely women a life-content for which they had longed in vain. To-day, however, we have for the position which the expression, “a forsaken old maid,” betokens an entirely new type: “the glorified spinster,” as the joyous, active, independent unmarried woman is called by the people among whom she first became a reality. Among these women, independent through their work, useful to society, that older type is still occasionally found perhaps, a survival of the time when emancipation was rather generally interpreted as freedom for masculinity. The “man-woman” in masculine attire, with weapons of defence against man in one hand and a cigarette in the other, her soul filled with mad ambition for her own sex and, as representative of her entire sex, with hatred toward the other, was however always rare. Now, she has almost entirely vanished, except alas, the cigarette. But she smokes it now often with—masculine friends! She follows in her mode of life, as in her dress, the law of good taste—not to offend; she endeavours, if only with a flower or two, to give a glimmer of cosy comfort to her place of work. This comfort, which often comes into the public life with woman is perhaps the reason why many men, who first looked with indignation upon feminine fellow-workmen, would now miss them. The more personal the culture of these women becomes, the more they endeavour, according to their time and means, to express their personality in the lines and colours of their dress and in the arrangement of their room. Those best situated often succeed, toward the end of their working days, in winning their own little home which they perhaps share with a friend, or they join a co-operative enterprise and can thus raise their standard of living. The same women who, at twenty-five, scornfully declared that they “would never bury their head in a sauce-pan,” are now, at fifty, consciously aware of the significance of the table for the activity of the brain; indeed they are now quite as proud if they have prepared a good dish as they were in their youth when they passed a fine examination!
It is not to be wondered at that the emancipated women, exactly as all recently emancipated masculine classes and races, at first groped insecurely after a new form. The astonishing thing, on the contrary, is that women adapted themselves so quickly to the new circumstances; that the transition period furnished so few grotesque types; that the present shows so many harmonious types, each in her own way. This harmony of single women is no mere form. It has its inner counterpart in the satisfaction with their existence, an existence in accord with their desires. The psychology was not exhaustive which saw in feminism only a “spinster question,” a question of the unmarried woman, springing from the surplus of women and the increasing difficulty or disinclination of men to contract marriage—a question therefore for the ugly, not for the beautiful; for the unmarried, not for the married; for the poor, not for the rich. For a great number of beautiful women prefer to remain unmarried; a great number of rich desire to work; a great number of married women are zealous suffragists. Fifty years ago, we saw the most clever women idealise an ape into a god; now, the modern, intelligent working girl, when she looks about her for her ideal, exercises a lively criticism. She often flirts with one who exhibits some phase of the ideal, but she has too clear an understanding and too much to do to imagine a great feeling for one who is unworthy. So it often happens that youth has passed without such a feeling having stirred her. And she enters without deep regret the age when ambition and desire for power become her life stimulants. From these women of predominating mind and will is formed more and more what Ferrero calls “The third sex,” Maudsley, “The sexless ant”: energetic, clever, happy in their work, cool, but sound; in private life, in the zeal of everyday work, often egoistic but willing to make sacrifices in face of social exigencies.
So a great part of the fifty-year-old women form an exception since they with true instinct have remained unmarried. For in the same degree that their metallic being is well adapted to the machinery of society, it is little qualified to make a home for husband and children. They do not depreciate however the value of this task, unless they be fanatic feminists. In that event they reproach the women who wish to marry with “betraying the woman cause”; they demand at times, as imperative loyalty toward this cause, that their friends shall protest against the present marriage laws at least by the form of their marriage alliance if not even by not marrying at all. Their theory of equality has at times been carried so far that—as recently happened in France—they advocate women’s performing also masculine military service.
But in spite of their aridity and inflexibility of principle how much more human are even these feminists than the “ill-natured” aunts of earlier times who became ill-natured exactly because their temperament was of the kind mentioned above, but who could find no sphere of operation for their passionate longing for activity. One or another was perhaps burning with ambition. For there are women as well as men who can live only as pagan gods, in the blaze and perfume of sacrificial fires. In their youth these ambitious natures could be satisfied by triumphs in social life. But later the passion became a fire in a powder cask and occasioned incessant explosions. Now it is the electric motive power for an activity of general utility. The “aunts” of the earlier time who felt themselves always overlooked and injured are most easily recognised again in the literary and artistic field to which daily bread or ambition now urges many women, who endeavour to compensate by energetic work for the talent which nature denied them. Since these women are ordinarily not people of understanding but of feeling, they must in a double sense be dissatisfied with a life which in addition is, in most cases, still filled with economic cares and the humiliations arising therefrom. And yet in spite of all, how much richer is their life to-day than it would have been fifty years ago when they would have been obliged to sit and draw their needles through interminable pieces of handwork, after ugly patterns and for unnecessary uses, or to compose sentimental birthday verses for persons whom they abominated.
Yet there are always those women natures who, in the past, had the qualifications for a real “dear aunt,” who gently calmed the conflicts and filled the gaps in the home of which they had become members. The most tender and sensitive of these modern women, who, rain or shine, year in year out, hasten to and from a work indifferent to them at heart, not infrequently breathe a sigh of longing for those times when, as “aunts,” they could have received and imparted warmth in a home. But then again there come moments when they know how to value the independence which puts them in a position to give help where otherwise there would be none; when for example they can send a nephew to college, or a friend to a sanatarium, or provide their mother with a nurse, which they themselves can not be.
This kind of single woman fulfills more or less the office of family provider just as she also is always ready with word and deed in circles of friends and comrades. These women are so engrossed that the time of love, sometimes love itself, passes them by without their observing it. Their youth flees and they feel with sadness that their woman’s life is unlived. But they persuade themselves that they have had enough in their work, that many little joys can take the place of great happiness. And they believe this as truly as the infant believes he is satisfied when he sucks his own thumb. But some of these women acknowledge perhaps, when they have passed the fifties, that they were often tempted to call out to the first best man, “Give me a child.” Sometimes it happens that in their last youth they appease their mother longing by adopting a foster child; sometimes they still this longing by a child of their own, from a love relation or a marriage. This late and uncertain happiness is often made possible exactly through their work. And then, if not earlier, they bless this work which gives them the economic possibility, and thereby also the courage, for this hazardous adventure.
More frequent than these are the cases however where single women, who have passed their first youth, find in friendship for another woman a valve for their, in great part, unused feelings. In some natures this friendship will be jealous and exacting, in others true and devoted. I wish to emphasise that I speak here of entirely natural spiritual conditions. There is to-day much talk about “Sapphic” women; and it is even possible that they exist in that impure form which men imagine. I have never met them, presumably because we rarely meet in life those with whom no fibre of our being has any affinity. But I have often observed that the spiritually refined women of our time, just as formerly the spiritually refined men of Hellas, find most easily in their own sex the qualities which set their spiritual life in the finest vibration of admiration, inspiration, sympathy and adoration.