“with submission,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.
Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure of this—that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone else—whether it be her children or her husband—may over-indulge. It is womanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits to the starving of herself or of her children by a drunken or a lazy husband is not in any positive sense womanly—for she is then proving herself ineffective for her social task. And she would be more effective, and therefore more womanly, if she could, by any means you like to name, drive that lazy husband into work, or abstract from that drunken husband a right share of his wages. And if by making his home a purgatory to him she succeeded, she would be more womanly in the valuable sense of the word than if (by submission to injustice) she failed, and let her children go starved.
Then, again, a woman may see that the children she and her husband are producing ought never to have been born. And if that is so, is it womanly for her to go on bearing children at the dictates of the man, even though St. Paul says, “Wives, obey your husbands”? Is she any more womanly, if she knowingly brings diseased offspring into the world, than he is manly in the fathering of them?
But now, come out of the home into Society—not into any of those departments of unsolved problems where humanity is seen at its worst—pass all those by for the moment—and come to the seat of administration—into that great regulator of Society, the law-courts (in the superintendence and constitution of which woman is conspicuous by her absence). There, as in matters connected with the male code of honour, any duty of initiative on the part of women may seem, at first sight, to be far removed. But let us see! In the law-courts you meet with a doctrine—a sort of unwritten law—that there are certain cases to which women must not listen. And occasionally “all decent women” are requested to leave the court, when “decent” men are allowed to stay. Now, in the face of that request it must be a very painful thing indeed for a woman to hold her ground—but it may be womanly for her to do so. It may be that in that case there are women witnesses; and I do not think our judges sufficiently realise what mental agony it may be to a woman to give evidence in a court where there are only men. I am quite sure that in such cases, if the judge orders women generally out of court, he ought to provide one woman to stand by the woman in the witness-box. How would any man feel, if he were called before a court composed only of women, women judges, a woman jury, women reporters, and saw all men turned out of the court before he began his evidence? Would he feel sure that it meant justice for him? I think not.
Now these cases to which women are not to listen almost always specially concern women; yet here you have men claiming to deal with them as much as possible behind the woman’s back, and to keep her in ignorance of the lines on which they arrive at a conclusion. Surely, then, it would be well for women of expert knowledge and training to insist that these things shall not be decided without women assessors, and to be so “womanly” as to incur the charge of brazenness and immodesty in defending the woman’s interest, which in such matters is also the interest of the race.
But it is only very gradually—and in the face of immemorial discouragement—that this communal or social spirit, when it began to draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced the reproach raised against it, of “unwomanliness,” of an intrusion by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had to throw over at each stage of its advance—things to which beautiful names have been given, things which were assumed all through the Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in the woman’s nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish. The ideal of woman’s life was that she should live unobserved except when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, “Happy the woman who has no history.” Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of struggle, the history of woman’s social development; and every fresh effort of that social spirit to find itself and to become effective has always had to face, at the beginning of each new phase in its activity, the charge of unwomanliness.
Compare that attack, fundamental in its nature, all-embracing in its condemnation, with the kind of attack levelled against the corresponding manifestations of the social or reforming spirit in man. In a man, new and unfamiliar indications of a stirring-up of the social conscience may earn such epithets of opprobrium as “rash,” “hot-headed,” “ill-considered,” “impracticable,” “utopian”—but we do not label them as “unmanly.” Initiative, fresh adventure of thought or action in man have always been regarded as the natural concomitant of his nature. In a woman they have very generally been regarded as unnatural, unwomanly. The accusation is fundamental: it does not concern itself with any unsoundness in the doctrines put forward; but only with the fact that a woman has dared to become their mouthpiece or their instrument. Go back to any period in the last 200 years, where a definitely new attempt was made by woman toward civic thought and action, and you will find that, at the time, the charge of “unwomanliness” was levelled against her; you find also that in the succeeding generation that disputed territory has always become a centre of recognised womanly activity. Take, for instance, the establishment of higher training for girls; there are towns in this country where the women, who first embarked on such a design, were jeered and laughed at, and even mobbed. And the same thing happened in an even greater degree to the women who sought to recover for their own sex admission to the medical profession: and while the charge levelled against them was “unwomanliness,” it was yet through their instincts of reserve and sex-modesty that their enemies tried to defeat them. Even when they gained the right of admission to medical colleges there were lecturers who tried, by the way they expressed themselves in their lectures, to drive them out again.
Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the opposition to a woman’s invasion of a department where men had shown a hopeless incompetence at once based itself on the plea that such a task was “unwomanly.” Though in their own homes from time immemorial, women had been nursing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, servants, masters, through all the refined and modestly-conducted diseases to which these lords of creation are domestically subject, directly one woman proposed to carry her expert knowledge into a public department and nurse men who were strangers to her, she was told that she was exposing herself to an experience which was incompatible with womanly modesty. Well, she was prepared to let her womanly modesty take its risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember, for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home, their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so, breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home, the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women which we have in our hospitals to-day.