In the past the main function of woman outside of the rearing of children has been to satisfy the carnal appetite of man, to prepare his food, to minister to his physical comfort; she was barred from participation in the intellectual. In order to hold her to these bonds a Divine Sanction was sought. The Mohammedan found it in the Koran; the Christian, in the Bible—just as slavery was justified repeatedly from the story of Ham, just as the Stuarts and the Bourbons believed firmly that they were the special favourites of God.
Strangely enough, men who are so sensitive about the moral welfare of women will visit a dance hall where women are degraded nightly, and will allow their daughters to marry "reformed" rakes. Men will not permit any mention of sexual matters in their homes, and will let their children get their information on the street; and all for the very simple reason that they are afraid the truth will hurt, will make people think. Men have been remarkably sensitive about having women speak in public for their rights; but they watch with zest a woman screaming nonsense on the stage.
It is quite possible that many women are swayed too easily by their emotions. We must recollect, however, that for some thousands of years woman has been carefully drilled to believe that she is an emotional creature. If a dozen people conspire to tell a man that he is looking badly, it is not unlikely that he will feel ill. Certainly Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton exhibited no lack of firmness on the shambles of battlefields; and there are few men living who cannot recall instances of women who have, in the face of disaster and evil fortune, shown a steady perseverance and will-power in earning a living for themselves and their children that men have not surpassed.
Having in the preceding pages considered the five capital objections to the concession of equal suffrage, I shall now, in accordance with my plan, say something of the much-mooted question of the superiority or inferiority of one sex to the other. It might be concluded from the foregoing account that I see little difference in the aptitudes and powers of the sexes physically, morally, or intellectually. That does not necessarily follow. It is possible to conceive of each sex as the complement of the other; and between complements there can be no question either of superiority or of inferiority. The great historian of European Morals has analysed the constitutional differences of the sexes as he conceived them; and I may quote his remarks as pertinent to my theme. Lecky writes as follows[[422]]:
"Physically, men have the indisputable superiority in strength, and women in beauty. Intellectually, a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied when we remember how almost exclusively the foremost places in every department of science, literature, and art have been occupied by men, how infinitesimally small is the number of women who have shown in any form the very highest order of genius, how many of the greatest men have achieved their greatness in defiance of the most adverse circumstances, and how completely women have failed in obtaining the first position, even in music or painting, for the cultivation of which their circumstances would appear most propitious. It is as impossible to find a female Raphael, or a female Handel, as a female Shakespeare or Newton. Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with particular instances than with general principles; they judge rather by intuitive perceptions than by deliberate reasoning or past experience. They are, however, usually superior to men in nimbleness and rapidity of thought, and in the gift of tact or the power of seizing speedily and faithfully the finer inflections of feeling, and they have therefore often attained very great eminence as conversationalists, as letter-writers, as actresses, and as novelists.
"Morally, the general superiority of women over men is, I think, unquestionable. If we take the somewhat coarse and inadequate criterion of police statistics, we find that, while the male and female populations are nearly the same in number, the crimes committed by men are usually rather more than five times as numerous as those committed by women; and although it may be justly observed that men, as the stronger sex, and the sex upon whom the burden of supporting the family is thrown, have more temptations than women, it must be remembered, on the other hand, that extreme poverty which verges upon starvation is most common among women, whose means of livelihood are most restricted, and whose earnings are smallest and most precarious. Self-sacrifice is the most conspicuous element of a virtuous and religious character, and it is certainly far less common among men than among women, whose whole lives are usually spent in yielding to the will and consulting the pleasures of another. There are two great departments of virtue: the impulsive, or that which springs spontaneously from the emotions, and the deliberative, or that which is performed in obedience to the sense of duty; and in both of these I imagine women are superior to men. Their sensibility is greater, they are more chaste both in thought and act, more tender to the erring, more compassionate to the suffering, more affectionate to all about them.... In active courage women are inferior to men. In the courage of endurance they are commonly their superiors.... In the ethic of intellect they are decidedly inferior. To repeat an expression I have already employed, women very rarely love truth, though they love passionately what they call 'the truth' or opinions they have received from others, and hate vehemently those who differ from them. They are little capable of impartiality or doubt; their thinking is chiefly a mode of feeling; though very generous in their acts, they are rarely generous in their opinions.... They are less capable than men of perceiving qualifying circumstances, of admitting the existence of elements of good in systems to which they are opposed, of distinguishing the personal character of an opponent from the opinions he maintains. Men lean most to justice, and women to mercy. Men are most addicted to intemperance and brutality, women to frivolity and jealousy. Men excel in energy, self-reliance, perseverance, and magnanimity, women in humility, gentleness, modesty, and endurance.... Their religious or devotional realisations are incontestably more vivid.... But though more intense, the sympathies of women are commonly less wide than those of men. Their imaginations individualise more, their affections are, in consequence, concentrated rather on leaders than on causes.... In politics, their enthusiasm is more naturally loyalty than patriotism. In history, they are even more inclined than men to dwell exclusively upon biographical incidents or characteristics as distinguished from the march of general causes."
Experience, by which alone mankind has ever learned or can learn, will show how far the characteristics enumerated by Lecky are innate and how far they have been acquired in the course of ages by certain habits of belief and education.
The securing of citizens' rights for woman will of necessity depend on the attitude of society. There may be numerous laws for her relief on the statute books; but if society frowns on her appearance in court, it will be only in exceptional cases that she will appeal to the courts. To one who is familiar with the records of daily life a hundred years ago there is little doubt that conjugal infidelity on the part of the husband was more flagrant then than it is to-day; but there were infinitely fewer divorces. The reason for this is simply that public sentiment on the subject has changed. A century ago, a divorced woman could do nothing; the wife was exhorted to bear her husband's faults with meekness; and the expansion of industry had not yet opened to her that opportunity of making her own living which she now possesses in a hundred ways. Women were entirely dependent on men; and the men knew it. To-day they are not so sure.
The old conception of woman's position was subjection, based on mental and physical inferiority and supported by Biblical arguments. The newer conception is that of a complement, in which neither inferiority nor superiority finds place. The old conception was based, like every institution of the times, on fear. Men were warned against heresy by being reminded of the tortures of hell fire; against crime by appealing to their dread of the gallows. Between the death of Anne and the reign of George III one hundred and eighty-eight capital offences were added to the penal code; and crime at once increased to an amazing degree. In a system that is founded on fear, when once that fear is removed—as it inevitably will be with the growth of enlightenment—there remains no basis of action, no incentive to good. It has been tried for centuries and has yielded only Star Chambers and Spanish Inquisitions. It is time that we try a new method. An appeal to the sense of fair play, an appeal to the sense of duty and of natural affection may yield immeasurably superior results. It has been my experience and personal observation that the standard of honour in our non-sectarian schools, where the fair play spirit is most insisted on, is vastly greater than it was in the old sectarian institutions where boys were told morning, noon, and night that they would go to hell if they did not behave.
The new spirit is not going to be accepted at once by society. There must first be some wailing and much gnashing of teeth; and the monster, custom, which all sense doth eat, will still for a time be antagonistic as it has been in the past. "In no society has life ever been completely controlled by the reason," remarks Professor Thomas, "but mainly by the instincts and the habits and the customs growing out of these. Speaking in a general way, it may be said that all conduct both of men and animals tends to be right rather than wrong. They do not know why they behave in such and such ways, but their ancestors behaved in those ways and survival is the guaranty that the behaviour was good. We must admit that within the scope of their lives the animals behave with almost unerring propriety. Their behaviour is simple and unvarying, but they make fewer mistakes than ourselves. The difficulty in their condition is, that having little power of changing their behaviour they have little chance of improvement. Now, in human societies, and already among gregarious animals, one of the main conditions of survival was common sentiment and behaviour. So long as defence of life and preying on outsiders were main concerns of society, unanimity and conformity had the same value which still attaches to military discipline in warfare and to team work in our sports. Morality therefore became identified with uniformity. It was actually better to work upon some system, however bad, than to work on none at all, and early society had no place for the dissenter. Changes did take place, for man had the power of communicating his experiences through speech and the same power of imitation which we show in the adoption of fashions, but these changes took place with almost imperceptible slowness, or if they did not, those who proposed them were considered sinners and punished with death or obloquy.