Concerning Women

by Suzanne La Follette

Nor will there be any reason to agree with the numerous adherents of the idea that women are naturally incapable of great creative work in any field until they shall have failed, after generations and even centuries of complete freedom, to produce great creative work. This notion represents the last stand of a priori judgment concerning female intelligence. It is based on the theory, at present much in fashion, that men are more variable than women, and that both idiocy and genius are thus much more frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence of women tends to keep to the safe ground of mediocrity. The implications of this theory manifestly are that genius of the highest order can not be expected to appear in a woman. Since all cats are grey in the dark, according to the proverb, nothing worth saying can be said against this theory or for it. The data which underly it are simply incompetent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way or the other. They represent only a projection of men and women as they now are, and therefore can not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning men and women as they may become. To say, for instance, that because there has never been, to our knowledge, any woman, with the possible exception of Sappho, who showed the highest order of genius in the arts it is probable that there never can or will be, is much the same as to say that because there has never been a woman President of the United States no woman ever can or will be President. Let it be freely admitted that women have had opportunities in the creative field, and have fallen short of supremacy. What of it? One must yet perceive that the woman who has had those opportunities has been the product of a civilization constitutionally inimical to her use of them, and one may not assume that she has entirely escaped the effects of the continuous repression and discouragement exercised upon her by her social, domestic and political environment. When the power and purchase of this influence are fully taken into account, one would say it is not half so remarkable that women have missed supreme greatness in the arts as that they have been able to achieve anything at all. For in the arts, more than anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great deal more than the mere absence of formal restraint upon the processes of writing books or painting pictures. It is this important distinction that writers like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have overlooked or ignored. They have simply failed to take into account the effect of a generally debilitating environment on the activities of the human spirit.

The environment of women has long been such as tends to make them, much more than men, the slaves of “was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine,” and therefore to win release from the commonplace was, and still is, proportionately harder for a woman than for a man. The prevailing notion that a woman must at all costs cultivate the approval of the world lest she fail, through lack of it, to manœuvre herself successfully into the only occupation that society showed any cordiality about opening to her—this put a heavy premium on dissimulation and artifice. Women have not dared freely to be themselves, even to themselves. It was the effect of this constraint that Stendhal noted when he remarked that “the reason why women, when they become authors, rarely attain the sublime, ... is that they never dare to be more than half candid.”

It can not be gainsaid that the east wind of indifference which has chilled the fire of many a masculine artist who found himself part of an age indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown its coldest upon the woman who essayed creative work. The woman who undertakes to achieve artistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated by men, finds herself opposed by many disabling influences. In an earlier day she had to endure being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked because she dared venture outside the limited sphere of sexuality that had been assigned to her. Now her presence in the field of spiritual endeavour is taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with the tacit assumption, which finds expression in a thousand subtle ways, that her work must be inferior on account of her sex.[7] Again, the idea that marriage and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling and are really the natural and proper calling for every woman, still has general currency; and the very fact that a vast majority of women tacitly acquiesce in this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the individual towards the orthodox and expected. Human beings are always powerfully drawn to be like their fellows; to be different requires a somewhat uncommon independence of spirit and toughness of fibre, and the fewer the individuals who attempt it, the more independence and tenacity it requires. “The fewer there be who follow the way to heaven,” says the author of the Imitation, “the harder that way is to find.”

The position of woman in creative work the world over is analogous to that of the man in America who ventures into the arts: he will be tolerated; he may even be respected; but he will not find in his environment the interest and encouragement that will help to develop his talents and spur him to his best efforts. He may get sympathy and encouragement from individuals; but his environment as a whole will not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well termed the “tolerant expectancy” which nourishes and develops genius. In American civilization the prevailing ideal for men is business—material success; and our people retain, as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and disregard which the pioneer community displays towards the individual whose governing ideals take a different line of development from those of his fellows. The artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as a queer being who loses something of his manhood by taking up purely cultural pursuits, unless and until, indeed, he happens to make money by it. Yet one never hears the intimation that because no Shakespeare or Raphael has ever yet appeared in this country, none ever will. Very well—imagine instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and you perceive at once the invidious position of the woman artist in an exclusively or dominantly masculine civilization.

But what if the emergence of genius does not depend so much on variability as upon the degree of spiritual freedom that the environment allows, and the amount and kind of culture that is current in it? “The number of geniuses produced in a nation,” says Stendhal, “is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture, and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.” The fact that prominent men of science accept the theory that genius is explained by variability, along with a number of conclusions which they have seen fit to draw from it, is no reason why their view should be considered final. Whole schools of scientists have before now gone wrong in the ticklish business of making speculative generalizations; they may go wrong again, for men of science are human, and may not be supposed to live wholly above the miasma arising from the stagnant mass of current prepossessions. So long as the apparent dearth of female genius may be satisfactorily accounted for on other grounds, one is under no compulsion to accept the theory that it is due to a natural and inescapable tendency toward mediocrity. When regarded fairly, indeed, this theory has something of an ad captandum character; it is not in itself disingenuous, perhaps, but it lends itself with great ease to an interested use. It offers strong support, for example, to an advocacy of an actual qualitative difference in the education of men and women. Women, being assumed to be fixed by nature at or below the line of mediocrity, shall be educated exclusively for marriage, motherhood, and the occupations which require no more than an average of reflective intelligence. This assumption underlies the educational plans of even such great libertarians as Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Hertzka; it represents a reversion, conscious or unconscious, to the primitive ideology which subordinates the individual to the group, taking for granted that the individual is to be educated not primarily for his or her own sake, but for an impersonal “good of society.” Thus, whether they are aware of it or not, those who subscribe to this theory would not only keep in woman’s way the discouraging postulate of inferiority that at present stands against her, but they would reinforce upon her those arbitrary limitations of opportunity to which her position of inferiority in the past may not unreasonably be ascribed.

IV

I have mentioned the repression of natural impulse inculcated upon women by their upbringing. This will probably not disappear entirely until the prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help them to become fully human beings, rather than to make them marriageable; for humanity and market-value have really little in common. For centuries the minds and bodies of women have been moulded to suit the more or less casual taste of men. This was the condition of their profession, which was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her living by her sex; her artificially-induced deformities and imbecilities had an economic value: they helped to get her married. It would be impossible to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence than the dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that has been held up before womankind. “We train them up,” says Montaigne, “from their infancy to the traffic of love.” Yet men would have them, he says, “in full health, vigorous, in good keeping, high-fed and chaste together;[8] that is to say, both hot and cold.” The utter levity of this traditional attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man’s worst failure. I know of no stronger argument for the social philosophy of the anarchist; for there is no more striking proof of the incapacity of human beings to be their brothers’ keepers than man’s failure, through sheer levity, over thousands of years to govern woman either for his good or her own.

With the growing disposition of women to take their interests into their own hands, this state of things is changing; but the curious superstitions to which its effect on the female character has given rise will long survive it. The world’s literature, from the Sanscrit proverbs to the comic magazine of the twentieth century, is full of disparaging references to the character of women; to their frailty, their cunning, their deceitfulness, their irresponsibility, their treachery—qualities, all of them, which in a fair view they seem bound to have extemporized as their only defence in a social order which was proof against more honourable weapons. “A woman,” says Amiel, “is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it.” This is no doubt true, and the purposes of the moralist perhaps demand no more than a mere statement of the fact. But the critic’s purposes demand that the fact should give an account of itself. Why does woman so regularly bear this character? Well, certainly the only life that European civilization offered to women in Amiel’s day—the only views of life that it accorded them, the only demands on life that it allowed them—was a specific for producing the kind of creature he describes; and there is no doubt that it must have produced them by the million. The inference is inescapable that an equivalent incidence of the same educational and environmental influences upon men would have produced the same kind of men. The matter, in short, is not one of the primary or even the secondary character of women qua women or of men qua men; it is one of the effect of education and environment upon human beings qua human beings.

The effort to escape this inference gives rise to extraordinary inconsistencies in the current estimate of female character, and even the estimate put upon it by men of scientific habit. Women are supposed, for instance, to be tenderer and gentler than men—“Tenderness,” says Ellen Key, “distinguishes her whole way of thinking and feeling, of wishing and working”—yet they are also supposed to be more vengeful—“Hell hath no fury....” They are supposed to be creatures of impulse and sentiment “la femme, dont l’impulsion sentimentale est le seul guide écouté”[9]—yet they are at the same time supposed to be calculating, particularly in their relations with men. Diluvial irruptions of sentimentalism are continually spewed over their nobility and self-sacrifice in the rôle of motherhood; yet men have taken care in the past to deny them guardianship of their own children. Schopenhauer, far on the right wing, again, appears to represent the legalistic point of view on this relation: he does not trust them in it beyond the first purely instinctive love for the child while it is physically helpless; he thinks they should “never be given free control of their children, wherever it can be avoided.” Man, now, is more likely, he thinks, to love his child with a lasting love, because “in the child he recognizes his own inner self; that is to say his love for it is metaphysical [or egotistical?] in its origin.” Occasionally, again, the world is treated to the diverting spectacle of some woman writer, like Dr. Gina Lombroso, trotting out all the poor old spavined superstitions and putting them through their paces in order to prove the strange contention that women are incapable of making the progress they have already made. Dr. Lombroso’s ideal woman, as I have already remarked elsewhere in a review of her recent book, is something of a cross between an imbecile and a saint; that is to say, she conforms closely to the ideal which has been held up before the women of the Christian world; an ideal towards which millions of them have striven with a faithfulness which does more credit to their devotion than to their intelligence.