Tutors of the Workers’ Educational Association. They lived for Fellowship in England and died for it in France.”
The Challenge, July 19th, 1918.
III
Now that we have come to acknowledge not only that Jack’s vote is as good as his master’s, but that Jill’s vote is as good as Jack’s, we have laid the train of a further change in the relations of men and women. For just as surely as the worker has discovered that political equality does not of necessity remove economic disability, and is now beginning to demand economic emancipation, so also women will pass on from the acquisition of political equality to a demand for economic equality. Indeed, the demand is already being made. The war has served to reveal the arbitrary and illusory character of the assumptions which closed certain occupations to women. We know that the number of occupations for which women are temperamentally or physically unfitted is comparatively small. There are obvious reasons for believing that some few trades will remain permanently undesirable for women; but the immediate fact that confronts us is that the traditional line of demarcation has been swept away under the stress of war needs; and that we shall have to work out in the school of experience a new classification of occupations more consonant with the new facts.
Some years ago there was much discussion in England concerning a high legal decision that a woman was not a “person” within the meaning of a certain Act of Parliament. This was symptomatic of a general survival of the view which assigned women to a slightly sub-human class; and the vitality of this view is still more considerable than many hopeful minds are willing to think. Yet it is only when we have educated ourselves into the conception of woman which attributes to her a distinct personality of her own, with an end in and for herself, and with all the rights and privileges, the freedom and the independence appertaining to it, that we shall approach the problem of the relations of men and women from a genuinely democratic standpoint. Woman is commonly regarded as having a function rather than an individual end. It is her part to preserve the race. Her peculiar vocation is child-bearing. It cannot, however, be affirmed with too much emphasis that the perpetuation of the race is no more the task of woman than of man. The heavier end of the physical burden of race-preservation certainly falls upon the woman; but this fact does not indicate that this is the purpose for which she exists. Her traditional assignment to this role, and the consequent limitation of her circle of experience and interest, the virtual incarceration of the great majority of women to the “home,” and the denial to them of any real participation in the larger concerns of the common life, must cease if social existence is to achieve the balance necessary to stable and healthy progress.
The preservation of the race can be left to look after itself. Race-suicide only becomes a peril when the relations of men and women become perverted and unnatural as they commonly do in our present social order. When at one end of society, the bringing up of families entails an economic burden too heavy to be borne, and at the other, the hedonism which accompanies excessive wealth tends to a sensuality which refuses to accept the natural risks and to pay the natural price of the sex-relation, a poisonous arrest is unavoidably laid upon the normal operation of the sex-instincts. The most easily perverted endowment of human nature is sex, and it cannot retain a balanced and healthy functioning under disordered conditions of life. The incessant discussion of marriage and divorce misses the point largely because it ignores the background of the problem. While we regard the physical distinction of sex as the primary fact to be considered in relation to woman, and still cling to the obsession so dear to bourgeois respectability that her business is motherhood and “her place is the home,” so long, that is, as we regard her life and its purpose as dependent upon man, so long will judgment be deflected from its true pole at its very source. Wholesome and free men and women will continue to fall in love with one another and will want to have children of each other, where to-day because their relations are unwholesome and unequal, they tend only to seek possession of one another, without any disposition (not to speak of eagerness) to welcome the fruit of their union; and too often with the deliberate intention of preventing the fruitage. For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.
The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. The freedom and spontaneity of the relation between men and women is made impossible by those calculations of position and wealth which the career theory of marriage requires. While it is nominally the case that no woman is compelled to marry, it is actually the fact that many women—in the bourgeois classes, most women—are so brought up that marriage becomes their only escape from indigence. The fact of woman’s independence should be made concrete and real by requiring that every woman shall be self-supporting, that is to say, that she shall share in the necessary industrial processes of the community or do some work of acknowledged social worth. Naturally the latter category includes the bearing and upbringing of children; for than this there is no work more fundamental or of greater social worth. This requires the economic independence of the mother; and since the social reconstruction postulated in these pages, involves in some form or other the establishment of an universal minimum standard, the mother will not only be economically independent but will also be released from the harassing task of bringing up a growing family upon a stationary income.
It will be argued against such proposals as these that they endanger the sanctity of the family. But this criticism possesses neither grace nor force in a generation which has permitted industrial conditions to prevail which have virtually destroyed the home-life of the working-classes. The only assumption on which it is safe to proceed in dealing with this question is that anything entitled to be called a “home life” is quite exceptional among large masses of the population. Both the physical setting of the home—the house—and the economic condition of its members rob the home of that quality of sanctuary and base which is of the essence of a genuine home. Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. The housing question has its own importance in the problem; but of infinitely more importance to the recovery of home life is the establishment of the economic independence of the woman. So long as custom and necessity place her in a position of dependence on the man, so long will she be denied the freedom which is essential to perfect comradeship. Her present status denies the equality which is necessary to fellowship; and much of the unhappiness of modern marriage is due to the intelligible chafing of women against the conditions which dependence and inferiority of status impose upon her. That many married people succeed in overcoming this initial handicap is true; but that is due to certain qualities in themselves and does not in the least alter the fact that where marital relations go awry the evil is largely in the conditions which govern those relations in our present social order.
The relaxing of marriage ties is no remedy; it is only a relief to persons of incompatible tempers. Both the advocates and the opponents of greater facilities for divorce seem to argue their case out of all relation to the existing social environment of marriage. The evils for which a remedy is sought in easier divorce are not to be found in the nature of the marriage relation but in the conventional and legal status of women.[[34]] While the social and economic sources of the trouble are left untouched, no amount of Catholic emphasis upon the sacramental character of marriage is going to stay the demand for the greater dissolubility of a tie which existing conditions do much to make difficult and frequently intolerable. Even under the best conditions, the mutual adjustments of the man and woman in married life are not easy; but when one party enters the relation in a position of more or less explicitly acknowledged dependence and inferiority, there are seeds of ineradicable trouble.
[34]. This does not imply that the present writer does not recognise the need of some extension of the grounds of divorce in Great Britain. It simply means that he thinks that the problem cannot be rightly approached until the economic independence of women has been established.