Part 36 (2/2)
Further, in the external decoration of our bodies, what is the influence here of masculine dominance.
We have before spoken of the peculiar position of our race in that the woman is the only female creature who carries the burden of s.e.x ornament. This amazing reversal of the order of nature results at its mildest in a perversion of the natural feminine instincts of love and service, and an appearance of the masculine instincts of self-expression and display. Alone among all female things do women decorate and preen themselves and exhibit their borrowed plumage (literally!) to attract the favor of the male. This ignominy is forced upon them by their position of economic dependence; and their general helplessness. As all broader life is made to depend, for them, on whom they marry, indeed as even the necessities of life so often depend on their marrying someone, they have been driven into this form of compet.i.tion, so alien to the true female att.i.tude.
The result is enough to make angels weep--and laugh. Perhaps no step in the evolution of beauty went farther than our human power of making a continuous fabric; soft and mobile, showing any color and texture desired. The beauty of the human body is supreme, and when we add to it the flow of color, the ripple of fluent motion, that comes of a soft, light garment over free limbs--it is a new field of loveliness and delight. Naturally this should have filled the whole world with a new pleasure. Our garments, first under right natural selection developing perfect use, under right s.e.x selection developing beauty; and further, as our human aesthetic sense progresses, showing a n.o.ble symbolism, would have been an added strength and glory, a ceaseless joy.
What is the case?
Men, under a too strictly inter-masculine environment, have evolved the mainly useful but beautiless costume common to-day; and women--?
Women wear beautiful garments when they happen to be the fas.h.i.+on; and ugly garments when they are the fas.h.i.+on, and show no signs of knowing the difference. They show no added pride in the beautiful, no hint of mortification in the hideous, and are not even sensitive under criticism, or open to any persuasion or argument. Why should they be?
Their condition, physical and mental, is largely abnormal, their whole pa.s.sionate absorption in dress and decoration is abnormal, and they have never looked, from a frankly human standpoint, at their position and its peculiarities, until the present age.
In the effect of our wrong relation on the world's health, we have spoken of the check to vigor and growth due to the housebound state of women and their burdensome clothes. There follow other influences, similar in origin, even more evil in result. To roughly and briefly cla.s.sify we may distinguish the diseases due to bad air, to bad food, and that field of cruel mischief we are only now beginning to discuss--the diseases directly due to the erroneous relation between men and women.
We are the only race where the female depends on the male for a livelihood. We are the only race that practices prost.i.tution. From the first harmless-looking but abnormal general relation follows the well recognized evil of the second, so long called ”a social necessity,” and from it, in deadly sequence, comes the ”wages of sin;” death not only of the guilty, but of the innocent. It is no light part of our criticism of the Androcentric Culture that a society based on masculine desires alone, has willingly sacrificed such an army of women; and has repaid the sacrifice by the heaviest punishments.
That the unfortunate woman should sicken and die was held to be her just punishment; that man too should bear part penalty was found unavoidable, though much legislation and medical effort has been spent to s.h.i.+eld him; but to the further consequences society is but now waking up.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
Mr. H. G. Wells is an author whose work I have followed with delight, interest and respect for years--since first I read that sinister vision of dead worlds, ”The Time Machine.” He is a successful craftsman, an artist of power; and has that requisite so often missing in our literary craftsmen and artists--something to say. In his mighty work of electrifying the world's slow mind to the splendid possibilities of life as it might be, may be, will be, as soon as we wake up, he has my admiring sympathy.
But alas! and alas! Like many another great man, Mr. Wells loses his perspective and clear vision when he considers women. He sees women as females--and does not see that they are human; the universal mistake of the world behind us; but one unworthy of a mind that sees the world before us so vividly.
He has knowledge, the scientific habit of mind, an enormous imagination and the courage to use it; he is not, usually, afraid of facts, even when an admission carries reproach. But in this field he shows simply the old race-mind, that att.i.tude which considers women as mothers, potential, active, and in retrospect; and as nothing else. He likes them as mothers. He honors them as mothers. He wants to have them salaried, as mothers. But he thinks it quite beyond reason that they should appear as regular members of the working world; their motherhood, to his mind, would prevent it.
In this att.i.tude he has produced a vivid novel called Ann Veronica; a book of keen a.n.a.lysis and delicate observation, full of amusing darts and flashes; seeing and showing much that is absurd in our modern uneasiness and wavering discussion; and thus explained by himself in The Spectator (which had denounced the work as ”poisonous”).
”My book was written primarily to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays at their unavoidable practical dependence upon some individual man not of their deliberate choice”; and he further says he sympathizes with the woman who lives with a man she does not love; and respects her natural desire to prefer some one man as her husband and father of her children--a harmless position surely.
To carry out these feelings he has described a girl, vigorous and handsome, a nice, normal girl, who is crushed and stultified in her home life and wants to get out of it; as is the case with so many girls today. She wants freedom--room to grow--more knowledge and power--again as is so common nowadays. We read with sympathy, admiring his keen sure touch, hoping much for this brave woman in her dash for freedom.
Then he makes this girl, so strong and intelligent, deliberately refuse various kinds of work she might have done because they did not please her; and borrow money from a man in preference to earning her living.
She exposes herself to insult and even danger with an idiocy that even a novel-reared child of sixteen would have scorned. She falls in love, healthfully enough, with a fine strong man; and sees no reason for avoiding him when she learns he is married. She cheerfully elopes with him--quite forgetting the money she had borrowed, and when she remembers about that abhorrent debt, expects her companion to pay it, without a qualm apparently.
The ex-wife must have conveniently died after a while; and the man develops a sudden new talent as a playwright; for they wind up very respectably in a nice flat, having Ann Veronica's father and aunt to dinner, and regarding them as a pair of walking mummies. Nothing more is said of any desire on the part of the heroine for freedom, knowledge, independence; having attained her man she has attained all; indeed Mr.
Wells goes to the pains to fully express his idea of the case, by describing her early struggle and outburst as like ”the nuptial flight of an ant.”
It is hard to see why Mr. Wells, in seeking ”to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays” at their dependence; and in showing sympathy with their natural right of choice, should have burdened himself with all this unnecessary complication of special foolishness on the part of his heroine which alienates our sympathy; and special illegality on the man's position. Perhaps this is to add heroism to her effort to secure the right mate, to indicate how small are any other considerations in comparison to this primary demand of life.
Waiving all objections to this framework of the story, there remains the painful exhibition of Mr. Wells's misapprehension of the larger causes of the present unrest among women. What later historians will point out as the most distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of our time, its importance shared only by the movement towards economic democracy, is the sudden and irresistible outburst of human powers, human feeling, human activities, and in that half the world hitherto denied such experiences.
Ann Veronica, as at first portrayed, shared in this world impulse. She wanted to be human, and tried to be. Her masculine interpreter, seeing no possible interests in the woman's life except those of s.e.x, dismisses all that pa.s.sionate outgoing as comparable to the mating impulse of insects. He overestimates the weight of this department of life, a mistake common to most men and some women.
When opposed, the protagonists of this position cry that their opponent wishes to uns.e.x women; to repudiate motherhood; and see in all the natural development of the modern woman only a threat of decreased population.
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