Views and Opinions

by Ouida

Women will not find happiness in hostility to men even if they obtain a victory in it, which is very doubtful. Women of genius have never hated men: they have perhaps liked them too well. To the woman of genius love may not be the sole thing on earth, as it is to Gretchen; it is only one amongst the many emotions, charms and delights of life; but she never denies its attractions, its consolation, its supreme ecstasy, its exquisite sympathies. Heloise and Aspasia can love better than Penelope.

Who, then, will become those enemies of men to whom Dumas looks for the emancipation of the weaker sex? All the délaissées, all the déclassées, all the discontented, jaded, unloved, embittered women in the world, all those, and their number is legion, who have not genius or loveliness, fortune or power, the wisdom to be mute or the sorcery to charm; women restless, feverish, envious, irritable, embittered, whose time hangs heavy on their hands and whose brains seethe under the froth of ill-assorted and ill-assimilated knowledge.

‘Quarry the granite rock with razors,’ wrote John Newman, ‘or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope, with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human understanding, to contend against these giants, the passions and the pride of man;’—or against the difference and the influence of sex.

I know not why women should wish or clamour at once to resemble and to quarrel with man. The attitude is an unnatural one; it is sterile, not only physically but mentally. It is true that the prejudices and conventionalities of society, and the fictions of monogamy have stranded a vast number of women, undistinguished and unhappy, with no career and no interests, who would imagine themselves disgraced if they enjoyed the natural affections of life outside that pale of propriety which the conventions of society have created. These are the women who would care for political power and would be allowed to exercise it. What could the world gain from such as these? What would it not lose of the small modicum of freedom, of contentment, and of wisdom which it already possesses?

To most women success is measured by the balance at the bank, by the applause of the hour, and nothing is esteemed which has not received the hall-mark of the world’s approval. There are exceptions, no doubt; but they have been and are, I think, fewer than the advocates of female suffrage would have us believe. Men too often are mere moutons de Panurge, but women are so almost invariably. The Arab who weeps when a female child is born to him is perhaps more correct in his measurement of the sex than the American who is prepared to make her the spoiled and wayward sovereign of his household.

I have previously used the words ‘mental and moral inferiority’; it is perhaps necessary to explain them. By mental inferiority I do not mean that the average women might not, if educated to it, learn as much mathematics or as much metaphysics as the ordinary man. I do not deny that Girton may produce senior wranglers or physiologists in time to come; it may do so. But the female mind has a radical weakness which is often also its peculiar charm; it is intensely subjective, it is only reluctantly forced to be impersonal, and it has the strongest possible tendency to tyranny, as I have said before. In public morality, also, the female mind is unconsciously unscrupulous; it is seldom very frank or honest, and it would burn down a temple to warm its own pannikin. Women of perfect honesty of intentions and antecedents will adopt a dishonest course, if they think it will serve an aim or a person they care for, with a headlong and cynical completeness which leaves men far behind it. In intrigue a man will often have scruples which the woman brushes aside as carelessly as if they were cobwebs, if once her passions or her jealousies are ardently involved. There is not much veracity anywhere in human nature, but it may always be roughly calculated that the man will be more truthful than the woman, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; his judgments will be less coloured by personal wishes and emotions, and his instincts towards justice will be straighter and less mobile than hers. Were women admitted into public life, bribery would become a still greater factor in that life than it now is, which is needless. All the world over, what is wanted for the health of the nations is the moral purification of politics, the elimination of venal and personal views, the disinterested advocacy and adoption of broad, just and magnanimous principles of action. Can it be said that the entry of women into politics would have this effect? He must be a sanguine man who can think that it would, and he must have but little knowledge of women.

On a les défauts de ses qualités. This is one of the most profound axioms ever evolved out of a study of human nature. And all which constitutes the charm of women, mutability, caprice, impressionability, power of headlong self-abandonment, mingled with intense subjectiveness and self-engrossment, would all make of women an inferior but of a most dangerous political force. Where Mr Gladstone has sent out troops and recalled them a dozen times, she, with similar but still greater oscillations of purpose, would send them out and recall them five hundred times. The Souvent femme varie of Francois the First is true to all time. But in all her variations it is the Sejanus, the Orloff, the Biron, the Bothwell of the moment, whom she would wade through seas of blood to please. This makes at once her dangerousness and her charm.

As scientists look forward to the time when every man will be bald from boyhood, thus having outgrown the last likeness to the beasts that perish, so enthusiasts for female suffrage look forward to a time when woman will have shed all her fair follies and rectified all her amusing inconsistencies. What will she be like then? Very unlovely it may safely be predicted, as unlovely as the men without hair; very mischievous for evil, it may also be deemed certain.

A French physiologist, who lectured in Russia not very long ago, was amazed at the howls of impatience and disdain which was aroused in the female students amongst his audience in Moscow by his simple statement that the claims of the arts must not be wholly lost sight of in the demands and inquiries of science. They would not tolerate even the mention of the arts; in their fanaticism they would only worship one God. The youths were willing to award a place to art; the maidens would hear of nothing but science. ‘Une grande sécheresse de cœur domine la femme qui se donne à la Science;’ and with this dryness of the soul comes an unmerciful and intolerant disposition to tyranny over the minds of others.

It cannot be denied that the quality which in women bestows most happiness on those around them, is that which is called in French and has no exact descriptive word in English, gaîte de cœur. Not frivolous unusefulness, or passion for diversion and excitement, but a sweet and happy spirit, finding pleasure in small things and great, and shedding a light like that of Moore’s wild freshness of morning on the beaten tracks of life. Where will this pleasant gaiety and smiling radiance go when, harassed, heated, and blown by the bitter winds of strife, the woman seeks to outshriek the man on political platforms, or when with blood-stained hands she bends over the torture-trough of the physiological laboratory?