Part 3 (1/2)

Beecher Stowe, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Mrs. Sidney Webb, Miss Clementina Black, Josephine Butler, Mrs. Pankhurst, Elizabeth Fry. Observe the curious case of Mrs. Hetty Green, financier.

This list could be enormously increased, and, as it is, it is a random list, omitting women of distinction and including women of lesser distinction. But still it contains no unknown names, and, though I do not pretend that it compares with a similar list of men, it is an indication. I am anxious that the reader should not think that I want to compare Angelica Kauffmann with Leonardo, or Jane Austen with Shakespeare. In every walk of life since history began there have been a score of men of talent for every woman of talent, and there has never been a female genius. That should not impress us: genius is an accident; it may be a disease. It may be that mankind has produced only two or three geniuses, and that one or two women in days to come may redress the balance, and it may be that several women have been mute inglorious Miltons. We do not know. But in the matter of talent, notably in the arts, I submit that woman can be hopeful, particularly because most of the names I give are those of women of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was better for woman than the eighteenth, the eighteenth better than the seventeenth: what could be more significant?

In the arts I feel that woman has never had her opportunity. She has been hailed as an executive artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly discounted,--told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. She has persistently been told that certain subjects were ”not fit for nice young ladies”; she has been shut away from the expression of life.

Here is a typical masculine att.i.tude, that of Mr. George Moore, in _A Modern Lover_. Mr. George Moore, who seems to know a great deal about females but less about women, causes in this book Harding, the novelist, who generally expresses him, to criticize George Sand, George Eliot, and Rosa Bonheur: ”If they have created anything new, how is it that their art is exactly like our own? I defy any one to say that George Eliot's novels are a woman's writing, or that The Horse Fair was not painted by a man. I defy you to show me a trace of feminality in anything they ever did; that is the point I raise. I say that women as yet have not been able to transfuse into art a trace of their s.e.x; in other words, unable to a.s.sume a point of view of their own, they have adopted ours.”

This is cool! I have read a great deal of Mr. George Moore's art criticism: when it deals with the work of a man he never seeks the _masculine_ touch. He judges a man's work as art; he will not judge a woman's work as art. He starts from the a.s.sumption that man's art is art, while woman's art is--well, woman's art. That is the sort of thing which has discouraged woman; that is the atmosphere of tolerance and good-conduct prizes which she has breathed, and that is the stifling stupidity through which she is breaking. She will break through, for I believe that she loves the arts better than does man. She is better ground for the development of a great artist, for she approaches art with sympathy, while the great bulk of men approach it with fear and dislike, shrinking from the idea that it may disturb their self-complacency. The prejudice goes so far that, while women are attracted to artists as lovers, men are generally afraid of women who practice the arts, or they dislike them. It is not a question of s.e.x; it is a question of art. All that is part of s.e.xual heredity, of which I must say a few words.

But, before doing so, let me waste a few lines on the male conception of love, which has influenced woman because love is still her chief business. To this day, though it dies slowly, the male att.i.tude is still the att.i.tude to a toy. It is the att.i.tude of Nietzsche when saying, ”Man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior.” This idea is so prevalent that Great Britain, in its alleged struggle against Nietzschean ideas, is making abundant use of the Nietzschean point of view. No wonder, for the idea runs not only through men but through Englishmen: ”woman is the reward of war,”--that is a prevalent idea, notably among men who make war in the neighborhood of waste-paper baskets. It has been exemplified by the British war propaganda in every newspaper and in every music hall, begging women to refuse to be seen with a man unless he is in khaki. It has had government recognition in the shape of recruiting posters, asking women ”whether their best boy is in khaki.” It has been popularly formulated on picture postcards touchingly inscribed, ”No gun, no girl.”

All that--woman as the prize (a theory repudiated in the case of Belgian atrocities)--is an idea deeply rooted in man. In the eighteen-sixties the customary proposal was, ”Will you be mine?” Very faintly signs are showing that men will yet say, ”May I be yours?” It will take time, for the possessive, the dominating instinct in man, is still strong; and long may it live, for that is the vigor of the race. Only we do not want that instinct to carry man away, any more than we want a well-bred horse to clench its teeth upon the bit and bolt.

We want to do everything we can to get rid of what may be called the creed of the man of the world, which is suggested as repulsively as anywhere in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's _Departmental Ditties_:

”My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er, Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward--get out! She has been there before.

They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking in lore.

”Pleasant the snaffle of Courts.h.i.+p, improving the manners and carriage; But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of Marriage.

Blister we not for _bursati_? So when the heart is vext, The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next.”

There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Moliere, in Thackeray, in Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized if she has ”been there before”, while man may brag of having ”been there before” as often as possible; of man lovelacing for his credit's sake and woman adventuring at her peril.

8

I submit that each man and woman has two heredities: one the ordinary heredity from two parents and their forbears, the other more complex and purely mental--the tradition of s.e.x. Heredity through s.e.x may be defined as the resultant of consecutive environments. I mean that a woman, for instance, is considerably influenced by the ideas and att.i.tudes of her mother, grandmothers, and all female ascendants. They had a tradition, and it is the basis of her outlook. Any boy born in a slum can, as he grows educated, realize that the world lies before him; literature and history soon show him that many as lowly as he have risen to fame, as artists, scientists, statesmen; he may even dream of becoming a king, like Bonaparte. To the boy nothing is impossible; if he is brave, there is nothing he may not tear from the world. He knows it, and it strengthens him; it gives him confidence. What his fathers did, he may do; the male s.e.xual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a man said to me, ”Thank G.o.d, I am a man.” Contrast with this the corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence, instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most cases she hardly has energy to struggle.

A little while ago, when Britain was floating a large war loan, one woman told me that she could not understand its terms. We went into them together, and she found that she understood perfectly. _She was surprised._ She had always a.s.sumed that she did not understand finance, and the a.s.sumption had kept her down, prevented her from understanding it. Likewise, and until they try, many women think they cannot read maps and time-tables.

With that heredity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found out one's elders, it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the old slavery that was in her forbears' blood. To me this seems foolish, and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent in s.e.x. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I suspect that they are mainly due to s.e.xual heredity, to environment, to suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only s.e.xual majorities.

The evolution of woman toward mental a.s.similation with man, though particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned n.o.bleman; Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled the mediaeval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such as _The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore_. She was growing significant in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about 1850 she turned into the ”perfect lady” who kept an alb.u.m bound in morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already the Brontes and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to the House of Commons.

To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service.

She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless, more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman than by man, simply because that as a s.e.x he is in power, and the people who are in power never want to alter anything.

Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings, her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and woman in her emanc.i.p.ation campaign is still too busy to think of the art of charming. I suspect that as time pa.s.ses and she suffers less intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there were so many things woman might not do. Almost any movement would bring her up against a barrier; that is why it seems that she does nothing in the world except break barriers. How genuine woman's rebellion is, no man can say. It may be that woman's impulse toward male occupations and rights is only a reaction against the growing difficulty of gaining a mate, children, and a home. But I very much more believe that woman is straining toward a new order, that the swift evolution of her mind is leading her to contest more and more violently the a.s.sumption that there are ineradicable differences between the male and the female mind. As she grows more capable of grasping at education, she will become more worthy of it; her intellect will harden, tend to resemble that of man; and so, having escaped from the emptiness of the past into the special fields which have been conceded her, she will make for broader fields, fields so vast that they will embrace the world.

II

FEMINIST INTENTIONS

1

The Feminist propaganda--which should not be confounded with the Suffrage agitation--rests upon a revolutionary biological principle.

Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there are no women; there are only s.e.xual majorities. To put the matter less obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or feminine ”_spheres_”, and that they propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the s.e.xes.

Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with having ”let the cat out of the bag” in my little book, _Woman and To-morrow_. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of a s.e.x war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter everything while leaving everything unaltered.