The darkest side of coëducational life has been that women could demonstrate their equal capability with men in no other way than by the same courses and examinations as those of the men. The eagerness of women to prove their like proficiency with men in study and in sport has often had disastrous physical results. These are continually becoming more infrequent, thanks to the decreasing prudery in regard to the sexual functions and to the increasing hygienic conscience. The intellectual results, however, continue to exist and are disastrous alike for both sexes; but because of the ambition and conscientiousness of girls, perhaps still more disastrous for them. The examinations which they pass are often dearly bought. This was not noticed in the beginning, when a woman doctor was still looked at with wonder as a noteworthy product of culture, and regarded herself also with wonder. Truly she had sacrificed to grinding and cramming for examinations a multitude of youthful joys, but she had, as was thought, won in this way much greater values. This, however, is not always really the case. Ethically, the conscientious girl is certainly above the boy who, not infrequently in the unconscious instinct of self-preservation, idles away his time. But the mental strength of the latter may frequently be better preserved in any determined direction. Girls, conscientious and zealous in their work, have filled their heads full of lessons to which the coming examination and not their own choice has urged them. What is thus crammed in is not assimilated and consequently has not promoted spiritual or mental growth. But it has taken up room and has thereby impaired the intellectual freedom of motion and compelled the natural individuality to compress itself so that it is long before the space conditions in the brain permit it to extend again—in case it is not simply choked by all the chaotic mass that has been absorbed. How many young girls have come to the university or to the art academy full of thirst for knowledge and energy for work! But after a few years they feel the disgust of surfeit, unless they have found a teacher who has been to them a leader to the essentials in science or in art. Then their joy in study could really be as rich as they had once dreamed it—yes, as perhaps even their grandmothers had dreamed it when they had to content themselves with their little text-books written for “girls.” Many young girls maintain to-day, through some teacher or some masculine comrade, that spiritual development which only an exceptional relationship between a father and daughter, a brother and sister, could give in earlier times.
When men and women can study together, then the relationship later between masculine and feminine fellow-workmen will, as a rule, be better than when the sexes work independently in the student days. It is true masculine competitors still have recourse to the weapon of spreading reports of the incapacity of their feminine competitors—at times honestly convinced of it themselves. The same weapon is of course turned also against masculine competitors. Yet there it is a question of the individual, while in regard to women, the sex is often the only proof the man thinks he need assign for the inferiority of their work. It can be said, however, upon the whole, that the relationship between men and women professional colleagues exhibits the same good side as the common student life, although naturally to a lesser degree. The joint work does not often leave much time for significant interchange of ideas, and after working hours each usually longs for new faces. The influence of joint labour is often limited to the refining effect that the presence of one sex exercises upon the other. Small services are mutually rendered and each worker learns also to respect the achievements of the other; or one is provoked because the work which should have been dispatched by the other now falls to his share!
If the woman performs the same work as the man, then she is often indignant because she must do it for smaller compensation than he. All too easily, the feminists forget that this injustice is equalised if a man who wishes to establish a family cannot obtain a post which he seeks because a woman retains it who can be satisfied with a smaller wage since she remains in her parents’ home. For this disparity, raising bitterness on both sides, there is no remedy under the present economic system. Feminists can demand the same compensation, but working women will not obtain it so long as the supply of workers is to the demand as one hundred to one in the professional occupations to which women flock. In vain underpaid women will call to the agitators of the woman movement, “Help us to obtain endurable conditions of life.” The only honest answer is, “Help one another, just as the working men have helped one another, by union and solidarity!”
The competition of the sexes in the labour field is only indirectly connected with the woman movement; it is a part of the social question and will therefore only be touched upon here.
The hostility which the competition between the sexes has evoked is a factor in the social war; and if—by reason of this competition—marriage decreases, then such competition is a form of social danger. If the cause is sought in the woman movement, then the question is begged completely, because the women with sufficient income to be able to live at home without industrial work, after the loss of a husband or a father, are constantly becoming more rare. There is the additional fact that in many positions where man and woman have equal salary, the woman is preferred because of her greater honesty and faithfulness to duty. Further it must be emphasised that, even in middle-class vocations, women with increasing frequency earn their whole livelihood, not merely a supplementary remuneration, when if they did not thus work they would be a burden to some man and so perhaps prevent him from marrying. Many of these women would wish nothing better than to enjoy the warmth of “the domestic hearth” to which men in theory relegate them; but since no man offers this warmth, they must at least be allowed to procure fuel for their lonely hearth fire.
When men declare that “the only duty which has life value for a woman is to be man’s helpmeet,” then they ought not to forget that this task is more and more rarely assigned to a woman, because men prefer to do without her aid, and even find a richer life in bachelorhood than in marriage. They should not dare to forget also that a great number of men disinclined or disqualified for work compel their sisters, daughters, wives, to undertake the task of family provider, and these women also must forego being, “in the quiet of the home, man’s helpmeet.”
However weak the feminist logic often may be, it is not so weak as the anti-feminist logic of man. Masculine vacuity has found there an arena where it performs the most incredible gymnastics. The hysteria of literary fanatics, the crude lordly instincts of the mediocre man, the irritation of the masculine good-for-nothing at the increasing ability of women, the rage, confounding cause and effect, over the competition of women—these are some of the reasons for the present antagonism between men and women. The deepest reason is this: the more woman is compelled to maintain the struggle for existence under the same social conditions as those under which men have been thus far compelled to struggle, the more she loses that character by which she gives happiness to man and receives it from him. A diminished erotic attraction is frequently the result, not of the work of women, but of their work under such conditions that the drudging, worn-out women comrades finally appear to their masculine colleagues only as “sexless ants.” Sometimes they really exhibit that obliteration of all characteristic marks of sex which Meunier has indicated to us in his Woman Miner, a great thought-inspiring work of art.
Many a woman of the present time, deeply feminine, suffers under this compulsory neutralising of her womanly being. Others again consider this a path to complete humanity.