There is in women—no one can doubt it who has studied their works—a peculiar combination of idealism and practicality. The one without the other is either vapid or dry: the two together can move mountains. What distinguished the work of Elizabeth Fry, of Florence Nightingale, of Octavia Hill, of Lady Henry Somerset is just this combination. What makes the reports of the women factory inspectors so much more interesting than those of the men is again the same combination. When men in the House of Commons discuss the Housing Question, or what they call Education, the dulness of the debate is enough to send one to sleep. Why is it so dull? Because it lacks both actuality and ideality. Once the speakers have lost sight altogether of the child, and can begin to fight each other on the so-called religious question, they are at home, and the House fills; once they can leave off talking about the houses which are the homes of the people and the workshops of the mothers, and get to quarrelling about some party cry, they begin to revive. The fact is, that anyone worth his or her salt is keen about his or her job. The more you separate your legislative and executive powers from your intelligence department the more you weaken those powers, and men’s legislation and administration is largely divorced from women’s intelligence.
When the fight has been made and has been justified by its success, we are all ready to acclaim the fighter, but we seem unable to grasp the principle which the fight ought to have established. Florence Nightingale was invited to go to Scutari by a broad-minded man who had faith in what she could do; but when she got out there, she found the usual reactionaries, and unless she had insisted upon having a position of undisputed authority, she would have accomplished only a small fraction of her great work. She braved the authorities, and broke open the cases of stores which were sealed with red tape. We are all ready now—probably even Mr. Austen Chamberlain—to acclaim Florence Nightingale as a womanly woman. But where was her “dependence,” her “willingness to yield her opinions”? And another point is most deserving of note. This is, that when men do get a real live woman, born “to warn, to comfort and command” among them, and have had time to get over the first little shock to their prejudices, they find what an admirable colleague or chief they have gotten, and are generous in their service and co-operation. Men are, in fact, almost always better far than their apologists will allow them to be.
In private life men must have always experienced the value of the strong-natured woman. Only some are still faithless about the value of such women in public life. They are afraid, afraid for their masculine prerogative, afraid (as I have heard it expressed) that women “will legislate men out of existence.” Well, the antidote to that is surely more co-operation between men and women, not less; more knowledge and understanding of each other’s point of view, not less. So many men are at present greatly concerned to keep women to their duty; perhaps many women are also too much concerned to keep men to their duty. There is all to be gained by putting together these aspirations for the improvement of—other people!
In an earlier chapter I have shown the danger that there lies in the low status of women in their not having pride in themselves and confidence in their work. The clinging dependence, the softness, the approachableness, the complaisance which men find so attractive in women also have their very great dangers. Women who have devoted themselves to the salving of the wrecks of womanhood know that often it has been this very softness of fibre which has been the cause of a girl’s undoing. “Be weak!” men cry; “we love you for it. It makes us feel superior!” And when they have “loved” after their fashion, they leave the human wreckage their “love” has made and pass on to “love” again elsewhere. It is as you love duckling, and cry, “Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed!” Now women are increasingly feeling that it is not womanly to be weak, it is womanly to be strong, strong for work and love and understanding.
The individual man may want individual woman to be weak for him only, but the laws which men together make require women to be strong, not even as women, but as superwomen. Because men have experienced the use of women as individuals, because they still have relics of the old barbaric ownership feeling, they desire still to keep women individual, isolated, unorganised. Now even if a woman, by her mother wit, influence and powers of cajoling and tormenting, may be supposed capable of dealing with her individual man, the situation becomes very different when man begins to band himself together with man in guilds, unions, corporations, parties and armies. He can then proceed to crush women by his organisations. The individual appeal of love and family is powerless against the impersonality of law, the combination of millions of persons all of one sex. It is curious to note that, though men have been organising themselves for centuries, and for the most part rigidly excluding women from their organisations, yet women have not complained, nor suggested that this was “anti-woman”; on the contrary, they have universally done what they could to help the men’s organisations. But now that women are beginning to organise themselves, there is raised here and there and everywhere the alarm cry of “Anti-man!” and sentimental appeals are made to women which are totally inappropriate in this connection.
Mr. Harold Owen falls into this mistake when he says (Woman Adrift, p. 234): “The relations between man and woman are not political or even social, they are personal in the highest degree, and in a kind that exists in no other relation of life whatever.” Such a mistake, like another of which mention has already been made, is only possible by the use of the rhetorical singular, and even then it does not follow that, because a man and a woman may have personal relations, there are not social and political matters of the greatest moment involved in those relations. That there are, man has acknowledged ages back, by making laws to regulate the relations of men and women. We know that a woman has no personal relations at all with the millions of men who govern the world she has to live in, and we resent the misplaced appeal to sentiment of a personal kind in such a connection. Social, political, racial sentiment there may be, but personal sentiment can only exist between individuals, and all sentiment is not good either,—the sentiment of power and ownership, for instance, when they are held over human beings.
The reactionary man is very fond of asserting that women don’t want this, that or the other. He generally can give no reason for this statement; enough that he knows it. When it is pointed out to him that all articulate and organised women do want it and say so, he declares contemptuously that these women don’t count. It is not womanly to organise. Everyone knows that the traditional woman, the womanly woman, can’t organise. Therefore these hundreds of thousands of organised women are unsexed, negligible, not to be listened to. The only woman to be listened to is “the quiet woman in the home,” and man will go forth into the world and proclaim what that quiet woman wants, and will give it to her. It does not seem to dawn upon him that it is more than a little suspicious that he should pronounce all those to be negligible who can speak for themselves.