And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance, a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goes about in flocks, 13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex. And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists) are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly “manly” occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a nation lies mainly—nay, entirely—in eugenics, in sinking every other consideration for that great and central one—the perfecting of the conditions of maternity.
But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman’s whistling was not when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not have been troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper. Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a mother—less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid it down that there are certain things which women can’t do; and so, when the exceptional woman does it, she is—or she was the day before yesterday—labelled “unwomanly.”
I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly accomplishment—something attained—which has not been so generally attained hitherto.
Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact, so impossible to maintain. For you can have no code or standard of manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence, anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a false code of womanliness.
Take, for example, that matter of duelling already referred to, in relation to the male code of honour, and the manliness which it is supposed to encourage and develop. You might be inclined to think that it lies so much outside the woman’s sphere and her power of control, as to affect very little either her womanliness or her own sense of honour. But I hope to show by a concrete example how very closely womanliness and woman’s code of honour are concerned and adversely affected by that “manly” institution of duelling—how, in fact, it has tended to deprive women of a sense of honour, by taking it from their own keeping and not leaving to them the right of free and final judgment.
Here is what happened in Germany about seven years ago. A young married officer undertook to escort home from a dance the fiancée of another officer; and on the way, having drunk rather more than was good for him, he tried to kiss her. She resented the liberty, and apparently made him sufficiently ashamed of himself to come next day and beg her pardon. Whether she would grant it was surely a matter for herself to decide; she accepted his apology, and there, one would have thought, the matter might have ended. But unfortunately, several months later, word of this very ordinary bit of male misdemeanour reached the ears of the lady’s betrothed. It at once became “an affair of honour”—his affair, not the lady’s affair—his to settle in his own way, not hers to settle in her way. Accordingly he calls out his brother officer, and, probably without intending it, shoots him dead. The murdered man, as I have said, was married, and at that very time his wife was in expectation of having a child. The child was prematurely born to a poor mother gone crazed with grief. There, then, we get a beautiful economic product of the male code of honour and its criminal effects on Society; and if traced to its source we shall see that such a code of honour is based mainly on man’s claim to possession and proprietorship in woman—for, had the woman not been one whom he looked upon as his own property, that officer would have regarded the offence very lightly indeed. But because she was his betrothed the woman’s honour was not her own, it was his; she was not to defend it in her own way—though her own way had proved sufficient for the occasion—he must interfere and defend it in his. And we get for result, a man killed for a petty offence—the offence itself a direct product of the way in which militarism has trained men to look on women—a woman widowed and driven to the untimely fulfilment of her most important social function in anguish of mind, and a child born into the world under conditions which probably handicapped it disastrously for the struggle of life.[1]
Now, obviously, if women could be taught to regard such invasions of their right to pardon offence in others as a direct attack upon their own honour and liberty—a far worse attack than the act of folly which gave occasion for this tragedy—and if they would teach these possessive lovers of theirs that any such intrusion on their womanly prerogative of mercy was in itself an unforgivable sin against womanhood—then such invasions of the woman’s sphere would quickly come to an end. They might even put an end to duelling altogether.
See, on the other hand, how acceptance of such an institution trains women to give up their own right of judgment, to think even that honour, at first hand, hardly concerns them. Is it not natural that, as the outcome of such a system from which we are only gradually emerging, we should hear it said of these conventionally womanly women that they have “a very low sense of honour.”
Low it must naturally be. For that attitude of complaisant passivity on the part of the woman while two male rivals fight to possess her is the normal attitude of the female in the lower animal world; but it is an attitude from which, as the human race evolves into more perfect self-government, you see the woman gradually drawing away. While it pleases something in her animal instincts, it offends something in her human instincts; and while to be fought over is the highest compliment to the female animal, it is coming to be something like an insult to the really civilized woman—the woman who has the spirit of citizenship awake within her. One remembers how Candida, when her two lovers are debating which of them is to possess her—brings them at once to their senses by reminding them that it is not in the least necessary that she should be possessed by either of them; but she does in the end give herself to the one who needs her most. That may be the truest womanliness under present conditions; as it may once have been the truest womanliness for the woman to give herself to the strongest. But it may be the truest womanliness, at times, for the woman to bring men to their senses by reminding them that it is not necessary for her to give herself at all. To be quite sure of attaining to full womanliness, let her first make sure that she possesses herself. In the past men have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action, her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic independence. So long as convention lays upon women any special and fundamental claim of control—a claim altogether different in kind and extent from the claim it lays upon men—so long may it be the essentially womanly duty of every woman to have quick and alive within her the spirit of criticism, and latent within her blood the spirit of revolt.