L’école nouvelle des femmes libres oublie qu’on ne puisse pas à la fois combattre l’homme sur son propre terrain, et attendre de lui des politesses, des tendresses, et des galantéries. Il ne faut pas au même moment prendre de l’homme son chaire à l’Université et sa place dans l’omnibus; si on lui arrâche son gagne-pain on ne peut pas exiger qu’il offre aussi sa parapluie.
The whole kernel of the question lies in this. The supporters of the New Woman declare that she will not surrender her present privileges, i.e., though she may usurp his professorial seat, and seize his salary, she will still expect the man to stand that she may sit; the man to get wet through that she may use his umbrella. Yet surely if she retain these privileges she can only do so by an appeal to his chivalry, i.e., by a confession that she is weaker than he. But she does not want to do this; she wants to get the comforts and concessions due to feebleness, at the same time as she demands the lion’s share of power due to superior force alone. It is this overweening and unreasonable grasping at both positions which will end in making her odious to man and in her being probably kicked back roughly by him into the seclusion of a harem.
The New Woman declares that man cannot do without woman. It is a doubtful postulate. In the finest intellectual and artistic era of the world women were not necessary to either the pleasures or passions of men. It is possible that if women make themselves as unlovely and offensive as they appear likely to become, the preferences of the Platonic Age may become acknowledged and dominant, and women may be relegated entirely to the lowest plane as a mere drudge and child-bearer.
Before me at the moment lies an engraving from an illustrated journal of a woman’s meeting; whereat a woman is demanding, in the name of her sovereign sex, the right to vote at political elections. The speaker is middle-aged and plain of feature; she wears an inverted plate on her head, tied on with strings under her double-chin; she has balloon-sleeves, a bodice tight to bursting, a waist of ludicrous dimensions in proportion to her portly person; her whole attire is elaborately constructed so as to conceal any physical graces which she might possess; she is gesticulating with one hand, of which all the fingers are stuck out in ungraceful defiance of all artistic laws of gesture. Now, why cannot this orator learn to gesticulate properly and learn to dress gracefully, instead of clamouring for a franchise? She violates in her own person every law, alike of common-sense and artistic fitness, and yet comes forward as a fit and proper person to make laws for others. She is an exact representative of her sex as it exists at the dawn of the twentieth century.
There have been few periods in which woman’s attire has been so ugly, so disfiguring and so preposterous as it is in this year of grace (1894) at a period when, in newspaper and pamphlet, on platform and in dining-room, and in the various clubs she has consecrated to herself, woman is clamouring for her recognition as a being superior to man. She cannot clothe herself with common sense or common grace, she cannot resist the dictates of tailors and the example of princesses; she cannot resist the squaw-like preference for animals’ skins, and slaughtered birds, and tufts torn out of the living and bleeding creature; she cannot show to any advantage the natural lines of her form, but disguises them as grotesquely as mantua-makers bid her to do. She cannot go into the country without making herself a caricature of man, in coat and waistcoat and gaiters; she apes all his absurdities, she emulates all his cruelties and follies; she wears his ugly pot hats, his silly, stiff collars; she copies his inane club-life and then tells us that this parody, incapable of initiative, bare of taste and destitute of common sense, is worthy to be enthroned as the supreme teacher of the world!
Woman, whether new or old, leaves immense fields of culture untilled, immense areas of influence wholly neglected. She does almost nothing with the resources she possesses, because her whole energy is concentrated on desiring and demanding those she had not. She can write and print anything she chooses; and she scarcely ever takes the pains to acquire correct grammar or elegance of style before wasting ink and paper. She can paint and model any subjects she chooses, but she imprisons herself in men’s atéliers to endeavour to steal their technique and their methods, and thus loses any originality she might possess in art. Her influence on children might be so great that through them she would practically rule the future of the world; but she delegates her influence to the vile school boards if she be poor, and if she be rich to governesses and tutors; nor does she in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ever attempt to educate or control herself into fitness for the personal exercise of such influence. Her precept and example in the treatment of the animal creation might be of infinite use in mitigating the hideous tyranny of humanity over them, but she does little or nothing to this effect; she wears dead birds and the skins of dead creatures; she hunts the hare and shoots the pheasant, she drives and rides with more brutal recklessness than men; she watches with delight the struggles of the dying salmon, of the gralloched deer; she keeps her horses standing in snow and fog for hours, with the muscles of their heads and necks tied up in the torture of the bearing rein; when asked to do anything for a stray dog, a lame horse, a poor man’s donkey, she is very sorry, but she has so many claims on her already; she never attempts by orders to her household, to her fóurnisseurs, to her dependents, to obtain some degree of mercy in the treatment of sentient creatures and in the methods of their slaughter, and she continues to trim her court gowns with the aigrettes of ospreys.
The immense area for good influence which lies open to her in private life is almost entirely uncultivated, yet she wants to be admitted into public life. Public life is already overcrowded, verbose, incompetent, fussy and foolish enough without the addition of her in her sealskin coat with the dead humming bird on her hat. Women in public life would exaggerate the failings of men, and would not have even their few excellencies. Their legislation would be, as that of men is too often, the offspring of panic or prejudice; and women would not put on the drag of common-sense as men frequently do in public assemblies. There would be little to hope from their humanity, nothing from their liberality; for when they are frightened they are more ferocious than men, and, when they gain power, more merciless.
‘Men,’ says one of the New Women, ‘deprived us of all proper education and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge.’ How far is this based on facts? Could not Lady Jane Grey learn Greek and Latin as she chose? Could not Hypatia lecture? Was George Sand or Mrs Somerville withheld from study? Could not in every age every woman choose a Corinna or a Cordelia as her type? become either Helen or Penelope? If the vast majority have not the mental or physical gifts to become either, that is Nature’s fault, not man’s. Aspasia and Adelina Patti were born, not made. In all eras and all climes a woman of great genius or of great beauty has done very much what she chose; and if the majority of women have led obscure lives, so have the majority of men. The chief part of humanity is insignificant whether it be male or female. In most people there is very little character indeed, and as little mind. Those who have much of either never fail to make their mark, be they of which sex they may.
The unfortunate idea that there is no good education without a college curriculum is as injurious as it is erroneous. The college education may have excellencies for men in its friction, its preparation for the world, its rough destruction of personal conceit; but for women it can only be hardening and deforming. If study be delightful to a woman, she will find her way to it as the hart to water brooks. The author of Aurora Leigh was not only always at home, but she was also for many years a confirmed invalid; yet she became a fine classic, and found her path to fame. A college curriculum would have done nothing to improve her rich and beautiful mind; it might have done much to debase it.
It would be impossible to love and venerate literature of the highest kind more profoundly than did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, yet she was the most retiring of women and chained by weakness to her couch until her starry-eyed and fiery suitor descended on her and bore her away to Italy. It is difficult to see what the distinction of being called a wrangler can add to the solid advantage and the intellectual pleasure of studying mathematics; or what the gaining of a college degree in classics can add to the delightful culture of Greek and Latin literature as sought per se.