But if the Marias show an uncanny quickness in judging the points of contact between the social layers, it is not the Marias who make the layers in the first place. These are the work of all women equally, as naturally made as birds’ nests, but for the protection of themselves rather than of their young. Two men may meet at the office or the club, day in day out, for years without in the least becoming involved in one another’s domestic circumstances or becoming aware of one another’s native layers. But it is impossible for women to meet casually for long without a degree of mutual implication which can never be undone. One visit by a woman to another woman’s home forms a link which the return of that visit closes irrevocably; it can thereafter neither be ignored nor broken without pain: whereas a man, especially a bachelor, may flit for ever like a butterfly, sipping in all freedom the honey where he finds it. At the bottom of this difference is the instinct of the home, which is so peculiarly strong in Englishwomen. A home must have stability and a definite position with regard to other homes, it cannot vaguely exist in an indeterminate social latitude and longitude. As map-readers would say, its coordinates must be settled and cannot be changed without an upheaval. Stability, moreover, is not the only quality of a home to women: they cherish its explanatory quality also. Away from their homes they feel vague and unattached, like travellers without passports, presenting rather a questionable appearance, dependent for recognition rather on the goodwill of others than on their own indubitable claims. In their homes they are solid and substantial, answering every question before it is asked, proof against all error, in a settled place and status with all circumstances and attachments stretching obviously away to the limits of vision. It is to the Englishwoman, far more than to the English man, that home is a castle.
The consequence is that Englishwomen, no less than women of other nations, are strongly individualistic, and stand like boulders in the stream of modern democracy which is running towards collectivism. It is impossible for the majority of women to sympathise with the collective ideal, since all their instincts run counter to it. In England, particularly, where for centuries the stratification of society has gone quietly on without catastrophic changes, it is hard to believe that, with political power now in their hands, women will easily permit a profound revolution in their modes of life. So long as wages and standards of life are in question, they may well vote with the most progressive, even the most aggressive, party: but the old social landmarks will not be entirely swept away unless the women, too, are swept off their feet by a wave of circumstance or emotion. It will be curious to see how the good Englishwoman modifies the course of history in the near future, as she is bound to do if she in a way succeeds in forcing a compromise between the oncoming of collectivist democracy and her own instinctive conservatism. So far as women are concerned, every layer of society is bound to offer resistance to eruption from below simply for its own safety. In this matter the stationmaster’s wife will not be behind the doctor’s or the works-foreman’s sister behind the vicar’s. If eruption comes at all, instead of the steady but almost imperceptible percolation which is the usual process of social change in this country, it can only come from the lowest layers whose Marias have nothing to lose and everything to gain by a more than usually abrupt effort to rise. If only wise statesmanship can discount the need for any abruptness, this eruption will never occur: the essential changes, in my belief, can be wrought without so ruinous a disturbance as to rend our English homespun into rags, or to snap the threads of that womanly warp which gives it its strength and durability.
The married women, at all events, will resist to the last: the weak threads in the womanly warp—and I mean weak in the sense of not withstanding disruptive influences—are the bachelor women. Nowadays it is foolish to talk of “old maids” and “coiffer Sainte Cathérine,” or to use any other patronising phrase for unmarried women which implies that they have missed the only vocation of their sex. Already before the war this attitude was becoming passé in England, and the war has definitely bundled it into the lumber room. The enormous activity of women, young and old, during the war cannot subside leaving no effect at all, and one of its most permanent effects is that large numbers of women have learned to live as self-sufficing lives as men, working independently for an adequate return, dwelling in camps or colonies or bachelor companionships or even in solitude, and using their leisure as the spirit moved them. Young girls who ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving the home where they were doing nothing in particular, and older women who dabbled more or less aimlessly in existence because they could not catch a proper hold of it, both learned the happiness which comes from doing something in particular. They found in regular work an emancipation of which they had never dreamed: it solved their riddles and blew away their fantasies, besides removing them from those hundred and one insidious little distractions which waste more than half the time of unoccupied women. If this emancipation led to some follies, it led also to much wisdom. The value of regularity became patent to many for the first time: the settling effect of a definite aim for each day, the fact that, in the long run, work passes the time much more quickly than amusement, were revelations; and the realisation of holding a career, albeit a temporary one, in her own two hands gave to many a woman a new assurance and a new pride which were precious as jewels. Thereafter they could never regard with equanimity the possibility of a return to the older more dependent or less purposeful life. The cessation of wartime employment obscured their immediate prospect but did not cloud their new ideals, for they had learnt a new and healthy discontent. It was not that the other ideal of women, marriage and a home, lost its attraction—far from it: but, it had become clear that women need not wait, like wares in a market place, till the arrival of a purchaser, doing odd jobs and maintaining as long as possible the freshness of their looks. They had realised the real virtues of the bachelor state, which are not its opportunities for disorder, laxity and idleness, but, in youth, its freedom, its mobility and its sense of hammering out life with a will on the anvil of ambition, and, in maturer age, the full interests, the easy and untrammelled relations, the opportunities for many sided intercourse without responsibility and the power of unhampered concentration on a purpose which are its compensations for the inevitable loneliness.
In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity, instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about indefinitely in other people’s houses. Mothers and fathers it is true, will be left forlorn a little earlier, but they will have to put up with it, and it will teach them to preserve the charm of one another’s society with more care against the day when, after the crowded cares of parenthood have vanished, nothing else is left to them.
But, to return to my original point, will the bachelor woman be a stabiliser or will she be disruptive? She will have the feminine instinct for stability and definite surroundings: she will never become so fluid a being socially as a man. Nevertheless, for the time of her bachelorhood she will not so easily indulge those instincts and will be likely, in the first flush of freedom, to hold them of small importance. She is, moreover, apt in these days to be carried away by her head farther than her heart would naturally take her, and her head, like a newly hoisted sail, will belly in the wind of any ready theorist. Girls are poor critics of ideas, and are apt to grasp at them with a touch of flighty passion which is more dangerous than the intellectual trifling of young men, who can play with them as keenly yet as unemotionally as they play with tennis balls. The one foe always lying in wait for bachelor women is hysteria, which takes the form of flightiness in the young and of a sour wilfulness in the older who succumb to it. Disruptive tendencies in the state will always find fruitful ground among hysterical females, who will push a theory to unpractical limits, not out of honest conviction, but from pure passion. But the danger of any permanent damage, provided always that the nation as a whole maintains its sanity, from this source need not be too seriously considered. A career or a profession is in itself a stabilising influence, and, now that women in England have few specific grounds for discontents on the score of sex-inequalities, the sparks of hysteria can fly harmlessly upwards without being gathered into a blaze. However, we shall see. The good Englishwoman, married or single, is riding forward at a round pace into the future. She is not likely to lose her bearings, but we shall all suffer if she does. It rests with her teachers to endow her richly with the faculty of finding her way, even in the dark.
[CHAPTER X]
THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT WORK
So much has been written lately about women’s work in England that most of the obvious generalisations on the subject have been exhausted. Much has yet to be done before all the vexed questions raised by the increase of woman workers during the war are settled, but that is a matter for the trades themselves. The only principle of primary validity is that women have as much right as men to enter the labour market, but they must win their places legitimately by their performances and not at the price of being sweated. Women, of course, have always worked in England. A book recently published by a woman on woman workers in the seventeenth century has reminded us of this, if we have forgotten Hood’s Song of the Shirt. So that the entry of women into the more technical and highly organised employments, hitherto mainly reserved for men, is nothing more than an inevitable process of development. The one thing, in this connection, which strikes an ordinary observer is that women are still a long way from having acquired men’s capacity for self-organisation, and this is the road on which the Englishwoman who works must progress in the future. Women can learn esprit de corps, but they do not seem to imbibe it naturally. This, I think, is partly due to their more sequestered education, with fewer games in which combined effort is all important, and partly to their intensely personal outlook on the whole of life. To them life is a clash of individual atoms rather than of corporate bodies to whose progress the fate of individual members is of comparatively little interest. History for them, whether past or contemporary, is a drama in which living persons, not ideas and processes, are the protagonists. For the large majority of them the notion of solidarity begins and ends with the home, within which it is absolute, only to be nebulous outside it. Yet the talent is not absent, only dormant. When it awakes the results are striking and often put men to shame. Florence Nightingale teaches us this lesson, and we have learnt it again more recently from the women’s ambulances and the women’s organisations which have helped us to win the war.
The opportunities for corporate action on the part of women are unlimited, and it is a fact which women of all classes are coming to realise in a greater measure. It was made plain, even to the more gently born among them who worked in factories and offices during the war, that without corporate action it was almost impossible to get justice. The rightness of ideas, unfortunately, does not conquer by its own momentum, especially in England where both men and women are apt to await its embodiment in concrete facts. They saw that ameliorations and advantages, the justice of which was admitted as soon as it was urged by common action, did not come to those who did not press for them, and that such action on the part of isolated individuals was triumphantly met by the retort that nobody else had asked for any change, a sufficient proof that it was not necessary. With their gain of political franchise and the removal by law of sex-disqualifications women in this country have every incentive to put into practice lessons of this kind. There is no reason, moreover, why they should restrict their corporate action to their own sex. They work with men domestically, forming combinations of immense strength: there is no reason why they should not do so generally. In the middle classes this truth is at last recognised, but in the working classes it is still regarded with suspicion. The Trades Unions, whether they like it or no, will have to admit women of like trades to full membership.
Another thing, as I have already remarked, which women have learnt more fully during the war, is the healthiness of regular work for its own sake, apart from its merely material rewards. Few that have had this salutary experience will reconcile themselves to a return to an existence of semi-idleness, nor will they bring up their daughters to regard such an existence, even where it is economically possible, as a natural one. The doctrine that no citizen has a right to live unless he or she makes his contribution to the work of the community is no longer a musty relic of simpler ages, but is forcing itself more and more upon universal recognition as an undeniable principle. Some of its most fervent devotees, it is true, would restrict the meaning of “work” to manual labour, but this is a pure delusion which cannot last in any fully organised and orderly community. It is almost impossible to set the limits of utility, and men have often condemned as useless the very activities which were to be the means of abundant progress to future generations. Utility and selfishness, moreover, can easily go together, so that the eradication of the latter can only be accomplished at the price of restricting the former. The one certain negation of utility is self-indulgence, which can only be allowed in small doses when utility has earned its keep. Women have learnt the wider limits of utility: they will no longer, in the more leisured classes, limit their idea of it to domestic utility, and women of the future will be no worse prepared for this important sphere of it if they are trained to enter the world at the age of discretion able to render definite service to the community in a form which it considers valuable.