The perpetual contact of men with other men may be good for them, but the perpetual contact of women with other women is very far from good. The publicity of a college must be injurious to a young girl of refined and delicate feeling, whilst the adoration of other women (as in the late chairing of a wrangler by other girl graduates) is unutterably pernicious. Nor can I think the present mania for exploration and incessant adventure beneficial either to the woman or the world.
When a young and good-looking girl chooses to ride or walk all alone through a wild and unexplored country, it must be admitted that, if the narrative of her adventures be not sheer fable, she must have perpetually run the risk of losing what women have hitherto been taught to consider dearer than life. It is nothing short of courting abuse of her maiden person to explore all alone mountainous regions and desert plains inhabited by wild and fierce races of men. One such young traveller describes, amongst other risky exploits, how she came one night in the Carpathians upon a deep and lonely pool, made black as the mouth of Avernus by its contrast with the moonlit rocks around, and of how, tempted by this blackness, she got down from her saddle, stripped, plunged and bathed! The stars alone, she says, looked down on this exploit, but how could this Susannah be sure there were no Elders? And common sense timidly whispers, how, oh how, did she manage to dry herself?
Personally, I do not in the least believe in these stories any more than in those of the noted Munchausen; but they are put into print as sober facts, and as such we are requested and expected to receive them.
The ‘Scum-Woman’ and the ‘Cow-Woman,’ to quote the elegant phraseology of the defenders of their sex, are both of them less of a menace to humankind than the New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her overweening estimate of her own value, and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous.
When scum comes to the surface it renders a great service to the substance which it leaves behind it; when the cow yields pure nourishment to the young and the suffering, her place is blessed in the realm of nature; but when the New Woman splutters blistering wrath on mankind she is merely odious and baneful.
The error of the New Woman (as of many an old one) lies in speaking of women as the victims of men, and entirely ignoring the frequency with which men are the victims of women. In nine cases out of ten the first to corrupt the youth is the woman. In nine cases out of ten also she becomes corrupt herself because she likes it.
When Leonide Leblanc, scorning to adopt the career of a school teacher, for which her humble family had educated her, walked down the hill from Montmartre to seek her fortunes in the streets of Paris, she did so because she liked to do so, which was indeed quite natural in her. Neither Mephistopheles nor Faust led her down from Montmartre, and its close little kitchen and common little bedchamber; neither Mephistopheles nor Faust was wanted, Paris and the boulevards were attraction enough, and her own beauty and ambition were spurs sufficiently sharp to make her leave the unlovely past and seek the dazzling future. The accusation of seduction is very popular with women, and they excuse everything faulty in their lives with it; but the accusation is rarely based on actual facts. The youth and the maiden incline towards each other as naturally as the male and female blossoms of trees are blown together by the fertilising breeze of spring. An attraction of a less poetic, of a wholly physical kind, brings together the boy and girl in the garrets, in the cellars, in the mines, on the farm lands, in the promiscuous intercourse of the streets. It is nature which draws the one to the other; and the blame lies less on them than with the hypocritical morality of a modern world which sees what it calls sin in Nature.
It is all very well to say that prostitutes were at the beginning of their career victims of seduction; but it is not probable and it is not provable. Love of drink and of finery, and a dislike to work, are the more likely motives and origin of their degradation. It never seems to occur to the accusers of man that women are just as vicious and as lazy as he is in nine cases out of ten, and need no invitation from him to become so.
A worse prostitution than that of the streets, i.e., that of loveless marriages of convenience, are brought about by women, not by men. In such unions the man always gives much more than he gains, and the woman in almost every instance is persuaded or driven into it by women: her mother, her sisters, her acquaintances. It is rarely that the father interferes to bring about such a marriage.
A rich marriage represents to the woman of culture and position what the streets represent to the woman of the people. But it is none the less a loveless sale of self, because its sale is ratified at St Paul’s Knightsbridge or at S. Philippe du Roule.