All that may have seemed like clear gain is now again called into question. Self-observation was found lacking in women, and yet there certainly are women who observe very closely all that happens to them. They were denied the love of truth, and yet one knows many women who would not tell a lie for anything. It has been said that they are lacking in consciousness of guilt; but there are many women who reproach themselves bitterly for most trifling matters, besides “penitents” who mortify their flesh. Modesty was left to man, but what is to be said of the womanly modesty, that bashfulness, which, according to Hamerling, only women have? Is there no foundation for the way in which the idea has grown and found such acceptance? And then again: Can religion be absent, in spite of so many “professing” women? Are we to exclude all women from the moral purity, all the womanly virtues, which poets and historians have ascribed to her? Are we to say that woman is merely sexual, that sexuality only receives its proper due from her when it is so well known that women are shocked at the slightest allusion to sexual matters, that instead of giving way to it they are often irritated and disgusted at the idea of impurity, and quite often detest sexual union for themselves and regard it just as many men do?
It is, of course, manifest that one and the same point is bound up in all these antitheses, and on the answer given to them depends the final and decisive judgment on woman. And it is clear that if only one single female creature were really asexual, or could be shown to have a real relationship to the idea of personal moral worth, everything that I have said about woman, its general value as psychically characteristic of the sex, would be irretrievably demolished, and the whole position which this book has taken up would be shattered at one blow.
These apparently contradictory phenomena must be satisfactorily explained, and it must be shown that what is at the bottom of it all and makes it seem so equivocal arises from the very nature of woman which I have been trying to explain all along.
In order to understand these fallacious contradictions one must first of all remember the tremendous “accessibility,” to use another word, the “impressionability,” of women. Their extraordinary aptitude for anything new, and their easy acceptance of other people’s views have not yet been sufficiently emphasised in this book.
As a rule, the woman adapts herself to the man, his views become hers, his likes and dislikes are shared by her, every word he says is an incentive to her, and the stronger his sexual influence on her the more this is so. Woman does not perceive that this influence which man has on her causes her to deviate from the line of her own development; she does not look upon it as a sort of unwarrantable intrusion; she does not try to shake off what is really an invasion of her private life; she is not ashamed of being receptive; on the contrary, she is really pleased when she can be so, and prefers man to mould her mentally. She rejoices in being dependent, and her expectations from man resolve themselves into the moment when she may be perfectly passive.
But it is not only from her lover (although she would like that best), but also from her father and mother, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, near relations and distant acquaintances, that a woman takes what she thinks and believes, being only too glad to get her opinions “ready made.”
It is not only inexperienced girls but even elderly and married women who copy each other in everything, from the nice new dress or pretty coiffure down to the places where they get their things, and the very recipes by which they cook.
And it never seems to occur to them that they are doing something derogatory on their part, as it ought to do if they possessed an individuality of their own and strove to work out their own salvation. A woman’s thoughts and actions have no definite, independent relations to things in themselves; they are not the result of the reaction of her individuality to the world. They accept what is imposed on them gladly, and adhere to it with the greatest firmness. That is why woman is so intolerant when there has been a breach of conventional laws. I must quote an amusing instance, bearing on this side of woman’s character, from Herbert Spencer. It is the custom in various tribes of Indians in North and South America for the men to hunt and fight and leave all the laborious and menial tasks to their wives. The Dakotan women are so imbued with the idea of the reasonableness and fitness of this arrangement that, instead of feeling injured by it, the greatest insult that one of these women can offer to another would be implied in some such words as follows: “You disgraceful creature.... I saw your husband carrying home wood for the fires. What was his wife doing that he had to demean himself by doing woman’s work?”
The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced by external agencies is similar in its nature to her suggestibility, which is far greater and more general than man’s; they are both in accordance with woman’s desire to play the passive and never the active part in the sexual act and all that leads to it.[19]
[19] The quiescent, inactive, large egg-cells are sought out by the mobile, active, and slender spermatozoa.