FOOTNOTES:
[6] With equal need, if what Lord Russell says is true:—‘As it is at present, there is no doubt that women of the higher ranks have much more knowledge and information when their education is finished than men have. But I cannot see any reason why our young men should not, while they have the advantage of public schools, at the same time be able to do a sum in the rule of three, and make themselves masters of the fact that James I. was not the son of Queen Elizabeth.’
In another place he says:—‘It is to a dogged application to the Latin grammar perhaps that the precision of men, when compared to women, in this country is in great part to be attributed.’—Earl Russell on the English Government and Constitution, pp. 210, 208.
CHAPTER VII.
CONCLUSION.
To guard against misconception on so obscure and so complex a subject as that of the present inquiry is a somewhat hopeless endeavour. But it may, perhaps, be worth while to say once more, what has so often been said already, that those who ask for a fuller and freer life for women have no desire to interfere with distinctions of sex. The question under debate is not whether, as a matter of fact, there is such a thing as distinctive manhood and womanhood; for that no one denies. The dispute is rather as to the degree in which certain qualities, commonly regarded as respectively masculine and feminine characteristics, are such intrinsically, or only conventionally; and further, as to the degree of prominence which it is desirable to give to the specific differences in determining social arrangements. It is not against the recognition of real distinctions, but against arbitrary judgments, not based upon reason, that the protest is raised. If, in the exigencies of controversy, expressions may sometimes be used which seem to involve a denial of differences in the respective natures of women and of men, it must be regarded as a misfortune for which the advocates of restriction and suppression are responsible. When broad assertions are made as to natural fitness and unfitness, and a course of action is founded upon them, it becomes necessary, at least, to ask for proof. When proof is wanting, it is not unnatural to fall back upon feeling; and prejudices, dignified by the name of instincts, are appealed to as decisive when rational argument fails. The whole question is clouded over by this confusing procedure. The instincts, to which so much importance is attached, differ in the most bewildering manner. What one person’s instinct pronounces lawful and becoming, another finds revolting. Assumptions are made, and a fabric of argument is built up upon data which are unverified, and which it is at present impossible either to verify or absolutely to contradict. For, until artificial appliances are removed, we cannot know anything certainly about the native distinctions. As to the future, who can say? It may be that,
‘In the long years liker must they grow,
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
More as the double-natured poet each:’
or it may be that, when ‘full-summed in all their powers,’ new shades of unlikeness—refinements of diversity hitherto unimagined—may appear. It is neither necessary nor expedient to prejudge the question; and those whose faith in the reality and permanence of the native distinctions is the strongest are the least tempted to make rash assertions on either side. The excessive apprehensiveness shown by some people on this point seems to indicate a deeprooted distrust in the strength of their position. The fear betrays a doubt. No one urges that girls should be denied the use of cold water, or fresh air, or light, or animal food, lest they should grow into boys. Yet that these conditions tend to produce masculine vigour cannot be denied. Those who are afraid that a free range of thought and action would injure the delicacy of the female mind, ought, in consistency, to carry their precautions a little farther. The atmosphere of a hothouse, judiciously darkened, abstinence from exercise, and a vegetarian diet would have an evident tendency to produce a sickly delicacy of complexion, to give languor to the limbs, and feebleness to the voice, and in every way to make girls much more unlike their brothers than they were by nature. And if this is the object of education, the appropriate means ought to be used.
In the meantime, a great part of the difficulties which beset every question concerning women would be at once removed by a frank recognition of the fact, that there is between the sexes a deep and broad basis of likeness. The hypothesis that men and women are essentially and radically different, embarrasses every discussion. When facts are proved and admitted, scarcely any progress has been made, because it is assumed that their action is modified by their application to the feminine nature. Conditions which would certainly make a man happy or miserable, as the case might be, are supposed to have a different, if not an exactly opposite, effect upon a woman. The theory has been asserted and reasserted so incessantly, that even women themselves have been partly persuaded to believe it. And it is, no doubt, so far true, that while the education and the circumstances of women are widely different from those of men, every agency brought to bear upon either must act somewhat differently. But to create facts, and then to argue from them as if they were the result of an unalterable destiny, is a method which convinces only so long as it is enforced by prejudice. ‘Chacun selon sa capacité’—‘à chaque producteur l’ouvrage auquel il est propre’—these are maxims of unquestioned validity. But who shall say for another—much more, who shall say for half the human race—this, or this, is the measure of your capacity; this, and no other, is the work you are qualified to perform? ‘Women’s work,’ it is said, ‘is helping work.’ Certainly it is. And is it men’s work to hinder? The vague information that women are to be ministering angels is no answer to the practical questions, Whom are they to help, and how? The easy solution, that it is their nature to do what men cannot do, or cannot do so well, has never been adopted in practice, inasmuch as everything in the world that there is to do, the care of infants alone excepted, men are doing; and there is nothing that a trained man cannot do better than an untrained woman. Literature and art, teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing—these are the recognised feminine occupations, and they are all shared by men. The pursuit of them does not turn men into women, or women into men. Miss Yonge and Mrs Oliphant ‘help’ Mr Trollope in supplying the world with novels; and it is not thought necessary to guard either party from writing masculine or feminine novels respectively. Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses do not come into unseemly rivalry, although women teach boys and men teach girls. By and by it will be found equally superfluous to prescribe limitations in any department of thought or industry.