WHAT IS WOMANLY?
(1911)
The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here—the women of my audience, I mean—in a very bristling and combative frame of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to what is or what is not “womanly.” I hope, that is to say, that you are not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a man—or, for that matter, by a woman either.
For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman’s social effectiveness until she has secured full right of way—a right of way equal to man’s—in all directions of mental and physical activity, or, to put it in one word, the right to experiment?
There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in the world’s moral progress the really effective results have generally come by shock of attack upon, or of resistance to, some cherished conventions of the day.
Take, for example, a thing which has seemed to concern only the male sex, but which has really concerned women just as intimately—the history of our male code of honour in relation to the institution of duelling. There was a time in our history when it would have been very difficult to regard as manly the refusal to fight a duel. But it is not difficult to-day to see in such a refusal a very true manliness. We in this country have got rid of the superstition that honour can in any way be mended by two men standing up to take snap-shots at each other; and now that we are free from the superstition ourselves, we can understand, looking at other countries—Germany, for instance—that it must often require more courage to refuse to fight than to consent. But we have arrived at that stage of enlightenment only because in our own history there have been men courageous enough and manly enough to dare to be thought unmanly and cowardly. And as with our manhood so with our womanhood; you cannot judge of what is womanly merely on the lines of past conventions, produced under circumstances very different from those of our own days. You must give to women as you give to men the right to experiment, the right to make their own successes and their own failures. You cannot with good results lay upon men and women, as they work side by side in the world (very often under hard competitive conditions) the incompatible rules which govern respectively a living language and a dead language. A living language is constantly in flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives. In a dead language the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is fixed; but the use and the meaning often remain doubtful. And so, if you attempt to determine the woman’s capabilities merely by her past record, and to fix the meaning of “womanliness” in any way that forbids flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of the word very doubtful.
Now, obviously, if to be “womanly” means merely to “strike an average,” and be as like the majority of women as possible—womanliness as a quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord, and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific. To be what Henry James calls “intensely ordinary” is, from the evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running.
We see this directly we start applying the word “manly” to men. For we do not take that to mean merely average quality—if it did, over-eating, over-drinking, and that form of speech which I will call over-emphasis—would all be manly qualities—and the evolution of the race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts of over-indulgence. But when we say “manly,” we mean the pick and polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes an insistence on freedom—freedom for development, so that all that is in him may be brought out for social use.
Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens. And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites—of the energies which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are many people who (viewing this problem of woman’s subjection where the savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is “womanly” to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the woman’s nature to be so more than it is the man’s; for, like Milton, in his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word “subjection” first and foremost. That condition, which, according to Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was, you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential even to the paradisal state; and when in Paradise Lost he laid down this law of “subjection” as the right condition for unfallen womanhood, he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to operate. The woman was to subject herself to man—