While observation teaches me that every woman worker may gain by adopting to a certain degree the methods of men, the feminist promise of an eventual equal productiveness is to me a promise barren, if true. So far as I can see, individual men and women have, alike, just so much vitality. If women devote this vitality to doing what men do, they will have just so much less to devote to being what women are. As a writer I aspire to write a book; as a woman I shall forever prefer to be a person rather than a book.
In an examination into the psychology and methods of the woman writer, two things should be clearly kept in mind. The first is that of all professions open to both sexes, writing should furnish the most reliable conclusions in regard to the relative accomplishment of men and women; for from Sappho’s day to ours a woman has been as free to write as a man. Life is the only university in which a writer can be trained, and that university has always been strictly coeducational. Neither have there ever been any restrictions, commercial or social, to bar a woman’s way to the literary career. It follows that any restrictions that exist must be imposed, not from without, but from within, must be due to the nature of the creature, physical, mental, and spiritual.
The second fact not to be forgotten is that of all the professions practiced by women writing is the one most intimately affected by a woman’s personal life and philosophy. It is far easier to detach yourself from your own dailyness for the purposes of music, painting, or science, than to separate yourself from the book you are writing, which is necessarily self-expressive. Consequently a woman’s literary productiveness is far more precariously dependent upon her peace of mind than any other form of professional activity. There are too many mute Miltons, too easily silenced, among my sex; but on the other hand—a fact equally due to the feminine fusion of living and writing—history has shown, perhaps will always show, that woman’s most valid intellectual achievement is in literature.
As a writer-worker, I have found no way of getting even with my limitations except by frankly shouldering them. The body my soul bears upon its back is a heavier burden to carry than a man’s, and I find I cannot accomplish the pilgrimage if I give up my own little jog-trot for a man’s stride. All that happens is that I lose my breath, and break my back, and have to lie down by the roadside to be mended. But when I do keep my own small pace, I have time and strength to pick a few fence-row flowers, too fine and frail and joyous for any striding man to notice.
I turn sharply from my own figures of speech to Mr. W. L. George’s airier fancies, to the most vital facts of feminine existence brushed so lightly by the masculine intelligence that it can say, “in passing, that we do not attach undue importance to woman’s physical disabilities.... I suspect that this is largely remediable, for I am not convinced that it is woman’s peculiar physical conditions that occasionally warp her intellect: it is equally possible that a warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions. Therefore if, as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this intellect, profound changes may with time appear in these physical conditions.”
My own warped intellect, belonging to a woman who must write stories for a living, points out that, if it has taken æons of differentiation under the guidance of Dame Nature to accomplish my own personal physical disabilities, I can hardly afford to wait for æons of differentiation under the guidance of Mr. George to accomplish my own personal physical freedom.
Looking at things as they are, I find my body constantly pushing upon my work; but it is possible to treat a body with a certain humorous detachment. It is possible to say to yourself, this is a headache that you have, don’t do it the honor of letting it become a heartache, your own or—far more fateful peril—your heroine’s. It is quite practicable for a woman to live apart from her body even when it hurts, quite practicable to give it sane and necessary attention, while keeping the soul separate from it, exactly as if she were ministering to some tired baby; this course is one of the only two solutions I have ever discovered of the problem of preserving a worker’s spirit in a woman’s body. The other solution lies in the frank concession to certain physical incapacities as the price one pays for certain psychological capacities.
A woman’s talent both for being a woman and for being a writer is measured by the force and the accuracy of her intuitions. My intuitions in regard to the people about me, when duly transformed into story-stuff, have a definite market value. If I did not possess them, I could not conceive, make, or sell a single manuscript. Supersensitive impressions necessitate the supersensitive channels by which a woman’s outer world connects with her inner one. If I will have woman’s intuitions, I must have my woman’s nervous system. So long as I think telepathy the best of sport, I must consent to give house-room to its delicate machinery, even to the extent of keeping cool when that machinery gets out of order and buzzes with neuritis or neuralgia or insomnia. The additional fact is only superficially paradoxical, that when the woman worker takes the disorder of her nervous machinery thus philosophically, it is much less likely to have any disorder.
The fallibility of a woman’s body seems beyond disputing. If a man does dispute it, it is because he never had one; if a woman disputes it, well, personally, if I can’t be as strong as a man I should like to be as honest as one! The fallibility of a woman’s intellect is a little more open to argument, but only a little. I keep to my primary assumption that I am not trying to see further than my nose, or to voice any observations but my own. Among the men and women of history and among those of my vicinity, I cannot see that woman’s brain is the equal of man’s in originality, in concentration, or in power of sustained effort. As a worker, I find that I can write for only a few hours and no more: beyond that limit stands disaster for the woman, and, far more perilous, disaster for the writing. In regard to my brain as in regard to my body, the primary condition of doing my work at all lies in recognizing the truth that I can’t do so much work, or do it so well, as a man.
In all matters that can be weighed or measured, a man’s endowment is superior to a woman’s; but, on the other hand, a woman’s endowment consists in the quality and the quantity of an imponderable something that cannot be weighed or measured. The chief difficulty about analyzing a woman’s brain is that it is so hard to separate her brain from the rest of the woman, whereas men are put together in plainly discernible pieces—body, mind, and soul.