But these are for the most part the unmarried women, very many of whom marry and “lapse with their marriage into the old parasitism,” in the agreeable phrase of Edna Kenton. One remedy for this that has been proposed is that men shall pay wages to their wives. This, however, besides commercializing the union of men and women, is open to the further objection that if a man hires a woman to be his wife, he must have the right to discharge her when he finds some one else that would suit him better, for a time. This is admittedly a makeshift. A more “thorough” remedy offered is “paid motherhood,” the men supporting the state and the state supporting the women and children. In such a case the state would naturally decide what mothers to pay, and what men to mate them with. Nothing that is now recognized as a home could survive such an arrangement, and the Feminists don’t wish it to survive.
And even so, the house work has got to be done by somebody. If it is done by a hired charwoman she would be economically justifying her existence, while if it is done by a wife and mother, she would be a parasite, in the language of Olive Schreiner, and would be earning her living by the exercise of her sex functions, in the chaste words of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics, and Edna Kenton. And in any case the men must go on with their drudgery, which comprises overwhelmingly the greater part of all the work that is done in the world.
II
On the one hand, we are assured by Feminists that women do not differ from men, and therefore should not be confined to a “sphere.” On the other hand, we are no less confidently assured by them that politics and industry are in pressing need of qualities which men do not possess, and cannot acquire, because they are distinctively feminine. Olive Schreiner has carefully studied the male and female dog, and reaches the conclusion that there is no difference between them to justify different treatment and different occupations. She does not expect woman suffrage to effect any political changes, except in one or two matters where she believes women have interests which men have not, or do not recognize. For example, war. Woman in politics will put an end to war because she knows how much it costs to produce each human life. This is mere rhetoric. What are the facts? The Teutonic women, whose status she would re-establish, went to the wars with their husbands, and fought by their sides. From the Spartan mother who charged her son to return with his shield or on it, to Mlle. Juliette Habay, of Brussels, who wrote: “We are learning to shoot with rifles. Here in Brussels great numbers of young girls have joined rifle corps, and a professor of arms is teaching us to shoot,” when has woman ever failed to gird the sword upon her man? Socially there is assuredly no discrimination against the red coat in England, or the blue coat in the United States.
Very recently Femina, the woman’s newspaper in Paris, addressed to its readers the question, “If not a woman, what man would you have wished to be?” We are told in a news despatch that “Napoleon won easily.”
But Mrs. Schreiner is substantially correct. Biology may know something of male and female temperaments, but in their general characters and habits and adaptability to employments, there is no great difference between her male and female dog, or the male and female of other animals. If the path of progress leads downward by all means let us learn our sociology and domestic economy from the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. If human progress has been retrogression, let us get back by way of primitive man and the missing link, to the animals and birds whose social economy commends itself strongly to Feminist and socialist.
The differentiation of men and women is the most valuable product of ages of gradually developing civilization. The world does not need twice as many diggers in the earth, and workers in metals, as it has now, but it does need homes. If the beasts merely have dens from which they go forth at night for their prey, and in which they produce their young, which they care for only till the young can catch their own game, Mrs. Gilman sees no reason why men and women should have homes, except as places for sleeping, from which they go out every morning to secure subsistence for themselves and for their young. But the latter, in her system, would soon be removed to training institutions conducted by the state, and managed by experts in child-culture; for Mrs. Gilman does not credit women with ability to rear their own offspring (however well she thinks they can rear those of other women), though the world is perishing for lack of their greater participation in industries and politics.
The prolonged association of parents with children, the protraction of mother-love beyond the infancy of offspring, the association of men and women intimately, but not entirely for the perpetuation of the race; the instinct of exclusiveness in the relations of man and woman, and their refinement by sentiments of romance; the development of chivalry and accountability for others in man, and of modesty in woman; the separation of one part of the race from much that the other part must often be in close contact with; the creation of a domestic atmosphere which is not like that of the shop or the field—the essential features of the home and the family—these are the best results of civilization, and against them the Feminist storms. Yet they are more important, if possible, to woman than to man.
Women are different from men as the result of ages of segregation, and that is above all things else the object of Feminist attack. The whole purpose of Feminism is to make the conditions of life the same for men and women. Women are more chaste than men, and the Feminists may be right when they say that this has been forced upon woman by man, but they are mistaken when they treat this not as a gain, but as a grievance. It need not be disputed that men ought to be as pure as women, but it is at least a great gain to hold one sex to a high standard of purity. In the course of time something may be achieved by the other—much has been already, or mixed society would be impossible—but it will not be effected by the Feminists who complain of servitude to man-made standards of morals, and demand for women the freedom practiced surreptitiously by some men.
The common notion of the innate moral superiority of woman is due to fond recollections of happy childhood, to the warm language of poets, to the romance of the male when in the springtime of life his fancies lightly turn to thoughts of love, and to actual differences which are the result of the segregation of women. Feminism is breaking that down, and we are already getting some of the results. In The Vanishing Lady, The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1911, Mrs. Comer finds that the contrast between the people in the novels of Howells and in those of David Graham Phillips suggests something like a submergence of Christian civilization under a wave of materialism and paganism. The interval between these two writers is the period during which Feminism has been spreading like an epidemic. Women have not saved society from the change. The advanced women have not tried to. Like their clothes, they have been entirely up-to-date, and the materialism and paganism of the day are quite as apparent among women as among men.