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 Courtship, 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.
An essential difference between "Feminism" and "Suffragism" is that the Suffrage is but part of the greater propaganda; while Suffragism desires to remove an inequality, Feminism purports to alter radically the mental att.i.tudes of men and women. The s.e.xes are to be induced to recognize each other"s status, and to bring this recognition to such a point that equality will not even be challenged. Thus Feminists are interested rather in ideas than in facts; if, for instance, they wish to make accessible to women the profession of barrister, it is not because they wish women to practice as barristers, but because they want men to view without surprise the fact that women may be barristers. And they have no use for knightliness and chivalry.
Therein lies the mental revolution: while the Suffragists are content to attain immediate ends, the Feminists are aiming at ultimate ends. They contend that it is unhealthy for the race that man should not recognize woman as his equal; that this makes him intolerant, brutal, selfish, and sentimentally insincere. They believe likewise that the race suffers because women do not look upon men as their peers; that this makes them servile, untruthful, deceitful, narrow, and in every sense inferior.
More particularly concerned with women, it is naturally upon them and their problems that they are bringing their first attention to bear.
The word "inferior" at once arouses comment, for here the Feminist often distinguishes himself from the Suffragist. He frequently accepts woman"s present inferiority, but he believes this inferiority to be transient, not permanent. He considers that by removing the handicaps imposed upon women, they will be able to win an adequate proportion of races. His case against the treatment of women covers every form of human relation: the arts, the home, the trades, and marriage. In every one of these directions he proposes to make revolutionary changes.
The question of the arts need not long detain us. It is perfectly clear that woman has had in the past neither the necessary artistic training, nor the necessary atmosphere of encouragement; that families have been reluctant to spend money on their daughter"s music, her painting, her literary education, with the lavishness demanded of them by their son"s professional or business career. Feminists believe that when men and women have been leveled, this state of things will cease to prevail.
In the trades, English Feminists resent the fact that women are excluded from the law, generally speaking, the ministry, the higher ranks of business and of the Civil Service and so forth, and practically from hospital appointments; also that women are paid low wages for work similar to that of men.
They complain too that the home demands of woman too great an expenditure of energy, too much time, too much labor; that the concentration of her mind upon the continual purchasing and cooking of food, on cleaning, on the care of the child, is unnecessarily developed; they doubt if the home can be maintained as it is if woman is to develop as a free personality.
With marriage, lastly, they are perhaps most concerned. Though they are not in the main prepared to advocate free union, they are emphatically arrayed against modern marriage, which they look upon as slave union.
The somewhat ridiculous modifications of the marriage service introduced by a few couples in America and by one in England, in which the word "obey" was deleted from the bride"s pledge, can be taken as indicative of the Feminist att.i.tude. Their grievances against the home, against the treatment of women in the trades, are closely connected with the marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where the att.i.tudes of love do not exist. For them who favor absolute equality, partnership, sharing of responsibilities and privileges, modern marriage represents a condition of s.e.x-slavery into which woman is frequently compelled to enter because she needs to live, and in which she must often remain, however abominable the conditions under which the union is maintained, because man, master of the purse, is master of the woman.
Generally, then, the Feminists are in opposition to most of the world inst.i.tutions. For them the universe is based upon the subjection of woman: subjection by law, and subjection by convention. Before considering what modifications the Feminists wish to introduce into the social system, a few words must be said as to this distinction between convention and the law.
2
Convention, which is nothing but petrified habit, has lain upon woman perhaps more heavily than any law, for the law can be eluded with comparative ease, and she who eludes it may very well become a heroine, merely because we are mostly anarchists and dislike the law. Every man is in himself a minority, and is opposed to the law because the law is the expression of the will of the majority, that is to say, the will of the vulgar, of the norm. But convention is far more subtle: it is the result of the _common_ agreement of wills. Therefore, as it is a product of unanimity, the penalties which follow on the infractions of its behests are terrible; she who infringes it becomes, not a heroine, but an outcast. The law is, then, nothing by the side of etiquette.
Hence Feminist propaganda. While the Suffragists wish to alter the law, the Feminists wish to alter also the conventions. It may not be too much to say that they would almost be content with existing laws if they could change the point of view of man, make him take for granted that women may smoke, or ride astride, or fight; cease to be surprised because Madame Dieulafoy chooses to wear trousers; briefly, renounce the subjective fetich of s.e.x. Still, as they realize that states become more socialistic every day, they realize also that through the law only can they hope to change manners. The mental revolution which they intend to effect must therefore be prefaced by a legal revolution.
The first Feminist intention is economic,--proceeds on two lines:
1. They intend to open every occupation to women.
2. They intend to level the wages of women and men.
As regards the first point, they are not as a rule unreasonable. If they demand that women should practice the law as they do in France, preach the Gospel as they do in the United States of America, bear arms, as in Dahomey, it is not because they attach any great value to these occupations, but because they consider that any limitation put upon woman"s activities is intrinsically degrading; so keenly do they feel this, that some serious Feminists took part some years ago in the controversy on, "Are there female angels?"
The second point is more important. It is a well-established fact that women are paid less than men for the same work: for instance, in England, women begin at wages which are less than those of men as teachers, post-office and other civil servants. The Feminists are not prepared to agree that this condition is due to some inherent inferiority of woman: in their view her _inferiority_ is transitory, is due to her _inferior_ position. One Feminist, C. Gascoigne Hartley, in _The Truth About Women_, outlines a bold hypothesis: "What, then, is the real cause of the lowness of remuneration offered to women for work when compared with men? Thousands of women and girls receive wages that are insufficient to support life. They do not die, they live; but how?
The answer is plain. Woman possesses a marketable value attached to her personality which man has not got. The woman"s s.e.x is a saleable thing."
Briefly, if a woman works less well than a man, less fast, less continuously, it is because she is inadequately rewarded. They reverse the common position that woman is not well paid because woman is not competent, basing themselves on the parallel that liberty alone fits men for liberty. They argue that woman is not competent because she is not well paid; consequently, those Feminists who are inclined toward Radicalism in politics demand a minimum wage in all trades, which shall be the same for women and men.
The economic change will be brought about by revolutionary methods, by s.e.x strikes and s.e.x wars. The gaining of the vote is, in the Feminist"s view, nothing but an affair of outposts. Conscious propagandists do not intend to allow the female vote to be split as it might recently have been between Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft. They intend to use the vote to make women vote as women, and not as citizens; that is to say, they propose to sell the female vote _en bloc_ to the party that bids highest for it in the economic field. To the party that will, as a preliminary, pledge itself to level male and female wages in government employ, will be given the Feminist vote; and if no party will bid, then it is the Feminist intention to run special candidates for all offices, to split the male parties, and to involve them in consecutive disasters such as the one which befell the Republican party in the last presidential election in the United States.
Side by side with this purely political action, Feminists intend to use industrial strikes in exactly the same manner as do the Syndicalist railwaymen, miners, and postmen of Europe; well aware that they have captured a number of trades, such as millinery, domestic service, restaurant attendance, and so forth, and large portions of other trades, such as cotton-spinning in Lancashire, they propose to use as a basis the vote and the political education that follows thereon, to induce women to group themselves in women"s trade-unions, by means of which they will hold up trades, and when they are strong enough, hold up society itself.
I enunciate these views with full sympathy, which can hardly be refused when one realizes that the sweated trades are almost entirely in the hands of women,--laundry, box-making, toys, artificial flowers, and the like. The fact that the underpaid trades are women"s trades, and that the British Government has been compelled to inst.i.tute wage-boards to bring up women"s pay from four cents an hour to the imposing figure of six cents, and the recent white-slavery investigations in America, are evidence enough that public opinion should hesitate before blaming any industrial steps women may choose to take. For it should not be forgotten that woman risks more than comfort and health, and that the underpayment of her s.e.x often forces her to degradation.
Conscious of the temporary inferiority of woman, an inferiority traceable to centuries of neglect and belittling patronage, the Feminists propose to increase woman"s power by making her fitter for power. They are well aware that the enormous majority of women receive but an inferior education, that in their own homes, especially in the South of England, they are not encouraged to read the newspaper (which I believe to be a more powerful instrument of intellectual development than the average serious book), and that any attempt on their part to acquire more information, to attend lectures, to join debating clubs, tends to lower their "charm value" in the eyes of men. That point of view they are determined to alter in the male. They propose to kill the prejudice by the h.o.m.oeopathic method: that is to say, to educate woman more because man thinks she is already too educated. Briefly, to kill poison by more poison. For this purpose they intend to throw open education of all grades to women as well as to men, to remove such differences as exist in England, where a woman cannot obtain an Oxford or Cambridge degree. They propose to raise the school age of both s.e.xes, and to not less than sixteen. The object of this, so far as women are concerned, is to prevent the exploitation of little girls of fourteen, notably as domestic servants.
Some Feminists favor co-education, on the plea that it enables the s.e.xes to understand each other, and these build princ.i.p.ally on the success of American schools. A more violent section, however, desires to place the education of girls entirely in the hands of women, partly because they wish to enhance the s.e.x war, and partly because they consider that continual intercourse between the s.e.xes tends to deprive ultimate love of its mystery and its charm. But both sections fully agree that the broadest possible education must be given to every woman, so as to fit her for contest with every man.