The woman movement is the issue in great measure of pent-up forces of youth in the female sex of the upper classes. It is less the revolt of labour against poverty, injustice, and overtaxed strength, than a revolt from enforced idleness on the part of the victims of wealth. The position is graphically put before us by the late Charles Reade in his amusing tale The Woman Hater.
Fanny Dover, a common enough type of upper-class femininity, appears to the woman-hater a mere shallow-minded, selfish coquette, till suddenly at an unexpected emergency she assumes new and very different colours. “How is this?” he exclaims. “You were always a bright girl and no fool, but not exactly what humdrum people call good ... you are not offended?” “The idea,” says Fanny, “why I have publicly denounced goodness again and again.” “Yes, and yet you turn out as good as gold!... I have watched you; you are all over the house to serve two suffering women. You are cook, housemaid, nurse and friend to both of them. In an interval of your time so creditably employed you cheer me up with your bright little face and give me wise advice! Explain the phenomenon.” “My dear Harrington, if you cannot read so shallow a character as I am, how will you get on with those ladies upstairs ... but there, I will have pity on you. You shall understand one woman before you die ... give me a cigarette.... What women love and can’t do without if they are young and spirited, is excitement. I am one who pines for it. Society is so constructed that to get excitement you must be naughty. Waltzing ... flirting, etc., are excitement, ... dining en famille, going to bed at ten, etc., are stagnation; good girls mean stagnant girls; I hate and despise these tame little wretches; I never was one and never will be. But look here, we have two ladies in love with one villain—that is exciting. One gets nearly killed in the house—that is gloriously exciting; the other is broken-hearted. If I were to be a bad girl and say: ‘It is not my business; I will leave them to themselves and go my little mill-round of selfishness as before, why what a fool I must be! I should lose excitement. Instead of that I run and get things for the Klosking—excitement. I cook for her and nurse her and sit up half the night—excitement. Then I run to Zoe and do my best for her or get snubbed—excitement. Then I sit at the head of your table and order you—excitement. Oh! it is lovely.’ ‘Shall you be sorry when they both get well and routine re-commences?’ Of course I shall; that is the sort of good girl I am.”
This youthful exuberance or restlessness is favourable to social advance, and the woman movement has accomplished good service in claiming and turning it to useful account. But here, as in all partial reforms, new evils dog the footsteps of the new good effected. To-day we have numerous city workers of the female as well as the male sex, compelled by the exigencies of their labour to live far apart from their nearest and dearest, in solitary lodgings like Anthony Trollope, or at best in the make-believe homes limited to inmates of one sex. I do not infer that these girls fall under any special temptations to licence, but, deprived as they are of the immediate influences of early associations and the subtle tendernesses of home-life, I hold it impossible that their emotional human nature should not suffer loss. Their need for the happy and useful exercise of activities which were running into mischievous courses, is satisfactorily met, but at the expense of domestic traits, and these are precisely what lie at the root of human fellowship—that union of heart and soul which is indispensable to true progress.
Some social reformers regard the higher education of women movement as a potent factor in uniting men and women through the mutual interests of cultured thought. A knowledge, however, of Greek, Latin, the classics, etc., accomplishes little so long as the sexes are not educated together, and this form of culture has no direct bearing on elevation of character and development of the emotional side of human nature. Cricket, golf, and all our fashionable out-door sports have done more, in creating mutual interests and furthering progress by securing for girls greater social freedom than was previously theirs, and Mr. H. W. Massingham spoke truly when he said: “No special complications have followed in any marked degree the vast extension that has taken place in the field of girls’ free companionship with men. Yet what would our fathers have thought of it?”[[10]] But sports are for the hours of leisure, and ample leisure belongs only to the idle or to a minor section of female workers. Meanwhile we have thousands of young women, of different calibre to Fanny Dover, whose noblest attribute, viz. their innate capacity for all the finer vibrations of social feeling, is never called into play.
[10]. Ethical World, June, 1900.
Amid all the kaleidoscopic scenes of our transition period, a new figure of womanhood has undoubtedly appeared—a type not characterized by frivolity or love of excitement, but by strenuousness, sincerity, refinement, moral courage, a will-force in short, that breaking through selfish limitations seeks nobler spheres of action. This will-force is subject to constant recoil. It is thrown back on itself by adverse conditions of society, of industry, of private individual life.
In Jude the Obscure this new type of woman is skilfully sketched. Susan Bridehead is a creature of high aspiration, rich inward resources and manifold imperfections. She has foibles and feminine vanities, but the human nature is essentially large-minded, generous, truthful. “I did not flirt,” she says to Jude, “but a craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it might do, was in me ... my liking for you is not as some women’s perhaps, but it is a delight in being with you of a supremely delicate kind ... I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims.” Here we have love transferred from the lower reaches of pure sensation to a higher level of tender sentiment, and energized from the intellectual plane. This denotes a slow evolution of ages during which all the grossness, i.e. the coarser vibrations of primitive love, are transmuted into the finer vibrations of sympathetic, altruistic feeling.
It is important to see clearly the distinction between primitive and modern love, in order that no confusion may arise in contemplating the ideal social life that scientific meliorism forecasts. The intrinsic quality of primitive love is illustrated in Mrs. Bishop’s description of her favourite horse’s attachment. “I am to him an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits and sugar, with a good deal of petting and ear-rubbing thrown in!” Human attachments based on these pleasurable sensations or simple animal appetites and passions, form the main soldering ingredients in humanity’s mass; but love’s development has marched concurrently with true civilization, and to men and women in the van of civilization one chief cause of misery to-day is repression of the normal, healthy impulse to pure and unselfish love.
Unselfishness is the distinguishing feature of higher forms of love, and an unselfishness that had its origin not in conjugal union but in motherhood. Mr. Finck, in his study of love’s evolution, puts it thus: “The helpless infant could not survive without a mother’s self-sacrificing care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow while man immersed in wars and struggles remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.... Selfishness in a man is perhaps less offensive because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it.” (Henry Finck’s Primitive Love, pp. 160–161.) The social need for a specialized unselfishness has tended to differentiate the sexes emotionally, and in process of building up the entire structure of social life the pressure of outward forces has carried this differentiation further. I am not then traversing the natural laws of evolution when I assume that all questions relating to women are at this date pre-eminently important.
The population problem, as I have shown, can only be solved through a diminution of the birth-rate, and throughout the British nation the family group is breaking up. It is disintegrating especially in the upper and middle classes.