Part 25 (1/2)
Such a prohibition, by lessening the compet.i.tion of the labour-market, and by thus increasing the value of labour (which the flood of female industry inevitably cheapens) would automatically so increase the wage of men as to make of these true living wage, sufficient for the maintenance of home and family. Such a prohibition would, moreover, so diminish the compet.i.tive pressure among women as to make it possible for unmarried women, the future wives and mothers, as well as for the older spinsters and widows, to select in every fitting trade and industry, work suited to the lesser strength and endurance of the female brain and body.
VII
Nothing has characterised the Feminist Movement throughout so much as lack of knowledge of human nature (both masculine and feminine), lack of prevision to foresee the trend of new developments, lack of intuitive apprehension to gauge the issues of such trend. Its leaders have never suspected, accordingly, that, in propaganda and in practice, they have been tampering with a great biological ordinance; and that, in obliterating women's s.e.x-characteristics, they have been destroying that counterpoise of human powers and faculties whereon progress and permanence rest, and that morale which is the inspiration of advance.
Regarding their own masculine Rationalism as the ideal and standard for all women, they have believed it possible to shape all women successfully thereto. Nature is not to be thwarted, however. And when we destroy the balance of the Normal, abnormal developments--gravely mischievous and singularly difficult to deal with--crop up and require to be dealt with. One may raise the familiar cry that some modern developments are due to our being in ”a transition stage.” But from that remote day when Nature first evolved us as a race of _amoebae_, further to evolve into the human species, we have been always in ”transition stages.” Normal transition upwards is so slow an impulse as to be well-nigh imperceptible, however. Rapid change invariably betokens regression--descent being vastly easier and swifter in movement than ascent is.
Deplorably mistaken has been a doctrine of Emanc.i.p.ation which, by disparaging the arts domestic, has sent out young girls and women, indiscriminately, from the sphere domestic, to de-s.e.xing and demoralising work in factories and businesses; and has engendered the race of stunted, precocious, bold-eyed, cigarette-smoking, free-living working-girls who fill our streets; many tricked out like cocottes, eyes roving after men, impudence upon their tongues, their poor brains vitiated by vulgar rag-times and cinema-scenes of vice and suggestiveness.
Some of our working-girls are charming-looking, pretty-mannered, pure of thought and life, of course. A small minority--alas, how small!--are normal of development and sound of const.i.tution. But these are not the average. And it is the average with which a nation has to reckon.
Emphatically, men are not as women. In body and in mind they are by nature rougher, tougher, and vastly less impressionable. A regime that _makes_ a boy will wreck a girl. Of more sensitive calibre, she requires more kindly, protective conditions, moral and industrial, than does he.
Notwithstanding which, little girls now run the streets and take their chances as they may--in capacities of over-burdened errand-girl, telegraph-messenger, and otherwise--at ages when their developing womanhood requires due care of nurture, moral supervision, and freedom from physical strain. Sedentary occupations are a natural need of their s.e.x, moreover, as is indicated by the breadth and weight of the female pelvis and hips, as too by the delicate adjustments of those important reproductive organs, the future products whereof are of inestimably higher national values than are the industrial a.s.sets of these poor children's labour. As Girl-guides and so forth, young girls parade our towns in meretricious (albeit hideous) uniform; developing thereby that love of publicity and of unwholesome excitement to which the s.e.x is p.r.o.ne. Small girls just fresh from school are even now employed in barbers' shops to shave men; destroying thus in them, at the outset of life, that natural diffidence and reserve toward the other s.e.x which are the first defences of womanly honour.
In demanding absolute emanc.i.p.ation, industrial and personal, Feminists had no other thought but that such new liberty would have widened woman's scope for usefulness, for happiness, for self-development. Yet what has been the outcome of it all? For one who has used her new freedom for the ends designed, very many more have used it to their serious injury; only too many to their moral downfall.
Already everywhere such liberty has fast degenerated into licence. Our girls were no sooner emanc.i.p.ated by their mothers from the usually wholesome--if sometimes too severe--control of their fathers, than straightway they have emanc.i.p.ated themselves from the indispensable maternal rule. Strict supervision and guidance in a world they are ignorant of--or if sophisticated are in far worse case--are essential to the well-being, physical and moral, of the young and immature.
Young girls, on first discovering their attraction for the other s.e.x, become intoxicated by the sense of their new dangerously-alluring power, and lose their heads. Beyond all things, they require at this phase a mother's strict and careful supervision, with sympathy and firm control; to tide them over their perilous phase, and thus to preserve them from consequences of their ignorance or folly, or from those of a pernicious bent. Nevertheless, young girls of every cla.s.s are granted now disastrous lat.i.tudes of thought and action. The vigilant chaperonage indispensable to protect them from the biological impulses--which they mistake for ”love”--of the careless or vicious young men to whom (equally with the chivalrous and honourable) modern mothers abandon their daughters, has become a dead-letter. The girl only just in her teens is free to play fast-and-loose with boys and men--as too with life, before she has learned the merest rudiments of living.
All too soon she learns her lesson. And becoming precociously sophisticated--only too often precociously vicious--her nature and future are wrecked at the outset. Because nothing wrecks a woman's disposition so effectually as s.e.x-precocity does. s.e.x is the very pivot of her nature. On this she swings up--or down. And early habit decides her bent.
That many of these cigarette-smoking, decadent young creatures are no worse than impudent, feather-brained and misguided, does not save the licence allowed them from being as harmful to physical as it is perilous to moral health; nor from the experiences resulting from such licence wholly unfitting the majority for later wholesome restraint, and for purer and fairer ideals of womanly conduct and living.
For much of this Feminism is gravely to blame. Not only because it has led to the absorption of the mothers in outside pursuits, as being of greater importance than the fulfilment of their maternal duties and responsibilities to their young daughters, but because, too, the partial sterilisation of girls, by masculine training and habits, in robbing them of womanly qualities, robs them of natural reserve and modesty, and of the other more delicate instincts and aspirations of their s.e.x.
Significant, truly, of latter-day maternal neglect of young daughters was the disclosure by a doctor, in a recent _British Medical Journal_, that of a hundred men infected with venereal diseases, more than _seventy had contracted disease_ from ”_amateur flappers_.” Yet as with a child badly burned by playing with fire, we blame the mother or guardian who exposed it to danger of thus injuring itself for life, so the mothers of these unfortunate girls were to blame for gross neglect of their duty to safeguard these young lives.
Nature avenges her betrayed girls, however. For medical authority shows that these youthful unfortunates transmit disease in its most virulent and destructive forms. It is as though all the vital potential of their developing womanhood is perverted to a malign poison, charged with the forces of their blasted youth.
The Victorian, who brought up her daughters to marry in ignorance of biological fact, went to the other extreme. But it was a far less harmful one than that in vogue to-day.
Like that of the child, the immature, susceptible mind of a girl, incapable of apprehending the s.e.x-factor in its true perspective with the other factors of life, becomes unduly dominated by consideration thereof when too early instructed. She is far better left, for so long as is practicable, ignorant or hazy concerning this vital phenomenon, in place of being fully informed, as girls are now-a-days. So that they know all that there is to be known about s.e.x--except its seriousness and sacredness. And divorced from the seriousness and sacredness of Love and Birth--which mere knowledge of biological fact is wholly inadequate to impart--such knowledge of fact presents a crude and bald distortion of the truth; only too often imparting an ugly and demoralising warp to mind and conduct. Ignorance is not Innocence, 'tis true, but it serves the same purpose in safeguarding innocence that clothes do in safeguarding modesty. And for one girl who falls in consequence of innocence, twenty fall from sophistication.
Unless masculine traits have been over-developed in her by abnormal training, in which case (as occurs sometimes in the quasi-masculine woman of middle-age) s.e.x-instinct may acquire an unnatural and quasi-masculine insistence, this instinct is, in the normal girl, _responsive_ rather than _initiative_. (Wherein she differs diametrically from the male.) And such natural dormancy may be advantageously preserved by haziness of knowledge, and by the careful surveillance required for protection of immature minds and powers. The bald, matter-of-course view-point of many modern girls with regard to s.e.x, their knowledge of vice, and their cynical acceptance and discussion thereof, as too of the vulgar intrigues of notorious dancers and peeresses, to say nothing of the ugly and debasing personal experiences only too many of them have incurred, are among the evils of the injurious licence at present accorded to young persons.
Feminism, having thrust such disastrous liberty on creatures as eager to grasp as they are unfitted to cope with the dangers thereof, is striving now, by way of women-patrols and police-women, to stem the evil with one hand--while with the other, it continues to open the flood-gates still wider. The only way to stem the evil is to stem it at its source. The home, with the vigilant supervision and guidance of a mother whose duty is publicly recognised and her authority strengthened thereby, whose time and faculties are devoted mainly to the making of home and to the safeguarding and disciplining of the young creatures she has brought into existence, is environment and shelter as indispensable to the impressionable youth of both s.e.xes--but more particularly to the impressionable youth of one--as it is for the rearing of infancy and childhood. Such home-influences, reinforced by the strong hand of a father who likewise recognises his parental responsibilities, are the first of all the rights that matter for young womanhood.
Later, should come a term of domestic service. Mistresses of households should realise not only their human but likewise their national responsibility to these young humbler members thereof. No other public service possible to them would equally conduce to national progress.
As fathers are legally responsible for debts of sons under age, mothers should be responsible to the State for the virtue of daughters under sixteen.
In the _personal_, vastly more than in any other field of operation, woman's chiefest value lies. When she exchanges it for public functions, and seeks to further progress by officialdom and politics, by inst.i.tution of women-patrols, police-women, Mayoresses, and so forth, the supreme importance of the personal factor becomes impressed by the discovery of the utter inadequacy of any subst.i.tute to take its place.
”If mothers did their duty, there would be no need for us,” a woman-patrol stated recently.
By the time young women have reached such phases of demoralisation that their conduct in public demands the intervention of police-women, it is too late to reform them, moreover. They will have lost the best promise and hope of their womanhood.