Woman in Political Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

In the first place, this assumption that nations run through a life-curve like individuals needs serious qualification. There is no inner law that nations shall be born and die, like the men and women who compose them. To the student of science or history a law is but a description of the way in which things have invariably acted, and will presumably act again in the same circumstances. But the circumstances in this case are the same no longer. The conditions of national existence are radically different from what they were when the procession of great empires passed over the stage of the world. Then, almost invariably, the situation was that one virile race entrenched itself in a strong capital and flung out its frontiers on every side, while smaller races watched on the bracing hills all round for the softness of muscle that city-life and parasitic habits would bring. Nerve and brain mattered far less in those days of heavy arms and armour. When you shortened your spear and lightened your shield, the vigorous barbarian knew that his hour had come; the frontier-walls crumbled under his pressure, and he took over the heritage of civilisation. That situation has passed away for ever. There is not one world-power to-day, with a chafing surge of barbarians beating on its shores, but a dozen great nations, and a new thing in the world that we call the balance of power. Softness of muscle is of less account, as a regiment of city clerks can annihilate an army of barbarians. Victory goes to intelligence and nerve. A nation may die still, but assuredly there is no inner law demanding that it must. That impressive march across the stage of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, Greece, Rome, and Venice gives no precedent for our time.

Further, even if a modern nation die, the cry of its women will not perish with it, as in those older days. I do not for a moment forget that the balance may be disturbed, and the flood of war devastate a modern kingdom, at any time; or that, if the lips of our guns were sealed and the red rain stopped for ever, commercial rivalry might bring a flagging race to ruin. That is quite possible; but the truth is that every one of these rival nations has the same agitation in its midst. No nation whose women have not yet stirred at the cry of reform has the remotest chance of rising to power. The cry is strong in Japan to-day, and will be heard in China to-morrow. It has loud and eloquent utterance in Russia, Italy, and Spain, and it will assuredly pass on to a renovated Turkey and Persia. Whatever powers rise or fall, civilisation cannot die again, and it is civilisation that faces the demand for change to-day. The cry died away on the lips of the women of Greece and Rome and medieval Italy because their civilisation perished, and a power rose on its ruins that had not yet reached the same height of culture. That, assuredly, will never happen again.

If this is so—and, apart from a few yellow-peril fanatics, I know of no serious observer who doubts it—the comparison of the modern woman-movement with those of former times must lead to a very different conclusion from that of our superficial historical critics. England, or the greatness of England, may die, but this agitation is not a symptom, good or bad, of England’s life alone. It is not a special feature of the life of Germany, or the United States, or any nation. It is a general feature of civilisation, and civilisation will never again evade the settlement of its moral problems by dying. Culture will go on, and the demand grows with culture. We cannot possibly see a third act to the drama as it was played on the earlier stage of history. There will be no fall of the curtain now on an unsolved problem.

The fallacy of those, like Dr. Reich, who read the story otherwise is the familiar historical mistake of regarding things as connected because they chanced to occur at the same time. We may allow that men were stronger at the time when women were subject; but it is a poor fallacy to forget that the men then had a fresh heritage of strength from barbaric days, as yet untouched by luxury, and to assign their triumph in any measure to the silence of their women. We may grant that the rebellion of the women generally came when the nation was nearing decay; but, again, it is a poor fallacy to erect this coincidence into a principle. The truth is that the revolt of the women in earlier civilisations coincided with two things—with a high state of culture and with a beginning of decay; and an unprejudiced study of the agitation in any era will show plainly that it was due to the former, and merely coincided with the latter. It sprang from the culture, the social conscience, the strength—not the weakness—of a nation. It was an ironic feature of the older world that high and general culture and the triumph of justice over ancient conventions were only reached when death was approaching. The new order promises a totally different development, because all nations of power are at the same stage of culture. And in our own day the movement is due quite unmistakably to the renascence of culture and the advance of moral principle.

Civilisation has now to face the problem candidly, and settle it. The agitation is no bubble rising out of the effervescence of the time, to burst, like a score of others that shone in the sun for a moment, and give place to new. It is an essential element in the evolution of culture. No nation ever reached the point of culture that we have reached but its women rose with a moral challenge of the justice of their position. Every nation had inherited from its barbaric ancestry the practice of excluding women from the corporate life, and there was good ground to demand a reconsideration of the practice when the sense of social justice developed. To regard the demand of our women as due to a temporary fit of nerves is to ignore one of the most salient features of the course of human history. Wherever civilisation grew out of barbarism the demand arose; it died away only because a fresh barbarism broke the thread of civilisation. As that thread will never more be broken, the demand will increase with our culture, and it can afford to smile at these fallacious lessons or warnings from a widely different past. When, in addition, we consider the development of political life itself, when we see that it concerns itself increasingly with the affairs of women in a way that it never did before, we are forced to admit that the demand for a reconsideration of woman’s position has a solid base in the actual evolution of life.

I propose, therefore, to run rapidly over the known phases of human development, and show how the attitude of women has varied in proportion to the growth of enlightenment and moral feeling. We will catch what glimpse we can of the first human pair that wandered over a strange earth in the faintest dawn of humanity. We will learn, from races that have lingered in primitive ways for untold ages, how, as the family grew into the race (or the rough social group into the clan),^[1] the issues of the corporate life were naturally appropriated by the men. We will see how, as savagery rises to barbarism, as the social life grows larger and more varied, the warriors and their chief keep control of it, save where some exceptional circumstance disposes them to take account of the woman’s will. We shall find the woman still patient and laborious in the early years of civilisation, and will note how, as the corporate life begins to look to other things than the mere defence of the State, as social construction is studied, the woman, awakened by the light of culture that breaks through the narrow windows of her home, comes forth to claim her share in the control of that larger national life, with which she must prosper or suffer no less than the man. We shall see how the division of labour handed down from the barbaric ages breaks down, how the law comes to invade every corner of the little territory in which she had held sway, how she demands that her knowledge and feeling be consulted in the framing of such laws, and how she builds up a larger ideal of womanhood that will add dignity and worth to maternity by a recognition of her essential humanity.

CHAPTER II.
WOMAN BEFORE CIVILISATION

Feminist writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were often seduced by an interesting theory that all, or nearly all, nations in the simplest stage of political structure were ruled by their women. A learned Swiss jurist, Dr. Bachofen, thought he had discovered very generally among the tribes that linger at the threshold of civilisation a practice of tracing descent through the mother only, and concluded that this pointed to an earlier phase in which the mothers ruled the community. This theory of the matriarchate was, somewhat unfortunately, enlisted in the campaign for a revision of woman’s position. I say unfortunately because, if it were true that the rule of the women belonged almost wholly to a simpler and barbaric age, and was abandoned when tribes rose to civilisation, a demand for a return to the older order would not be free from ambiguity. A Nordau or a Carpenter may gird as he pleases at civilisation. Essentially it is a correction of the errors of infancy.

It is, therefore, not to be deplored that modern ethnographers emphatically reject the theory of the matriarchate. “No sociologist nowadays believes Bachofen’s theory,” says Professor Westermarck. An occasional feminist writer still builds on the theory, but I find Westermarck’s statement in regard to the authorities justified.^[2] It is quite true that in “a very considerable number of tribes” we find the habit of giving the mother’s name to the child, and tracing through her whatever inheritance there be of rank or property. But there are serious objections to seeing in these practices a lingering trace of a former matriarchal rule. In at least an equal number of cases more complete research has found the opposite practice of tracing kinship through the father. In many of the tribes, where the female line is observed, the man rules even the home. In all cases where the female line is followed it is just as natural, at least, to trace the practice to a primitive promiscuity and uncertainty of paternity as to feminine domination. That, indeed, is the inference of the great majority of modern ethnographers. Westermarck dissents from them on this point of promiscuity (and, within limits that I will indicate, I agree with him); but he just as firmly rejects the matriarchate. It is surely possible that in the childhood of the race the man’s share in the creation of children was unknown, and the child was the child of its mother.

The evolution of woman has run on different lines than those suggested by Bachofen, and it is by no means easy to retrace them. The earliest phase, indeed, we have no hope of restoring with confidence. No authority now doubts that there have been human or semi-human beings on this planet for some hundreds of thousands of years, and that for the greater part of the time—that is to say, until near the end of the Old Stone Age—they were below the level of the existing savage. For my present purpose it matters little that we can only dimly perceive the outline of these early men and women in the thick mist of a remote past. With what evidence there is I happen to be well acquainted, but I will not enlarge on it. Those primitive humans certainly had no social or political structure, and so do not concern us. How the first social groups arose it is not agreed; but from the scattering of the early traces of men and from the habits of the larger apes I conclude (as Westermarck does) that the primitive humans wandered along the broad river-banks in family groups, and that larger communities arose later by the fusion or expansion of families. Probably enough there was a great deal of promiscuity when these communities were formed, and monandry would need to be developed afresh. Where there was this community of wives the practice of tracing descent through the mother would be inevitable. In any case, the origin of children would be a profound mystery to such lowly beings, and for ages the man’s fatherhood would be unknown.