In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish and weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in the long months and years of rearing that follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter of death, in all civilised societies, the probability that the average woman will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than the probability that the average male will die in battle.
There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers" sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there!
So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so many baby mouths drawing life at woman"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s;--all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeb.a.l.l.s, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year"s gra.s.s or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause, this should not be!" No woman who is a woman says of a human body, "It is nothing!"
On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in the governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the wilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one. And this will be, not because with the s.e.xual function of maternity necessarily goes in the human creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of social instinct than that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all ages led as n.o.bly as women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward the higher social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widely cultured, they have led further and better. The fact that woman has no inherent all-round moral superiority over her male companion, or naturally on all points any higher social instinct, is perhaps most clearly exemplified by one curious very small fact: the two terms signifying intimate human relationships which in almost all human languages bear the most sinister and antisocial significance are both terms which have as their root the term "mother," and denote feminine relationships--the words "mother-in-law" and "step-mother."
In general humanity, in the sense of social solidarity, and in magnanimity, the male has continually proved himself at least the equal of the female.
Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth"s women of every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity that no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpa.s.sed and few have equalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom, unparasitised and labouring women have in all ages known how to bear an active part, and die.
Nor will woman"s influence militate against war because in the future woman will not be able physically to bear her part in it. The smaller size of her muscle, which would severely have disadvantaged her when war was conducted with a battle-axe or sword and hand to hand, would now little or at all affect her. If intent on training for war, she might acquire the skill for guiding a Maxim or shooting down a foe with a Lee-Metford at four thousand yards as ably as any male; and undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant girl of France, who has carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general. If our European nations should continue in their present semi-civilised condition, which makes war possible, for a few generations longer, it is highly probable that as financiers, as managers of the commissariat department, as inspectors of provisions and clothing for the army, women will play a very leading part; and that the nation which is the first to employ its women so may be placed at a vast advantage over its fellows in time of war. It is not because of woman"s cowardice, incapacity, nor, above all, because of her general superior virtue, that she will end war when her voice is fully, finally, and clearly heard in the governance of states--it is because, on this one point, and on this point almost alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not. (It is noteworthy that even Catharine of Russia, a ruler and statesman of a virile and uncompromising type, and not usually troubled with moral scruples, yet refused with indignation the offer of Frederick of Prussia to pay her heavily for a small number of Russian recruits in an age when the hiring out of soldiers was common among the sovereigns of Europe.)
In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streets might seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings and galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts by the enemy, unconsideringly and merely because they came first to hand, not valuing them more than had they been paving-stones. But one man could not do this--the sculptor! He, who, though there might be no work of his own chisel among them, yet knew what each of these works of art had cost, knew by experience the long years of struggle and study and the infinitude of toil which had gone to the shaping of even one limb, to the carving of even one perfected outline, he could never so use them without thought or care. Instinctively he would seek to throw in household goods, even gold and silver, all the city held, before he sacrificed its works of art!
Men"s bodies are our woman"s works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds. The thought would never come to us as woman, "Cast in men"s bodies; settle the thing so!" Arbitration and compensation would as naturally occur to her as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationships, as to the sculptor it would occur to throw in anything rather than statuary, though he might be driven to that at last!
This is one of those phases of human life, not very numerous, but very important, towards which the man as man, and the woman as woman, on the mere ground of their different s.e.xual function with regard to reproduction, stand, and must stand, at a somewhat differing angle.
The physical creation of human life, which, in as far as the male is concerned, consists in a few moments of physical pleasure; to the female must always signify months of pressure and physical endurance, crowned with danger to life. To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the female, blood, anguish, and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the few yet important differences between man and woman as such.
The twenty thousand men prematurely slain on a field of battle, mean, to the women of their race, twenty thousand human creatures to be borne within them for months, given birth to in anguish, fed from their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and reared with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and the strength of the nation are to be maintained. In nations continually at war, incessant and unbroken child-bearing is by war imposed on all women if the state is to survive; and whenever war occurs, if numbers are to be maintained, there must be an increased child-bearing and rearing.
This throws upon woman as woman a war tax, compared with which all that the male expends in military preparations is comparatively light.
The relations of the female towards the production of human life influences undoubtedly even her relation towards animal and all life.
"It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something!" cries the typical male of certain races, instinctively. "There is a living thing, it will die if it is not cared for," says the average woman, almost equally instinctively. It is true, that the woman will sacrifice as mercilessly, as cruelly, the life of a hated rival or an enemy, as any male; but she always knows what she is doing, and the value of the life she takes!
There is no light-hearted, careless enjoyment in the sacrifice of life to the normal woman; her instinct, instructed by practical experience, steps in to prevent it. She always knows what life costs; and that it is more easy to destroy than create it.
It is also true, that, from the loftiest standpoint, the condemnation of war which has arisen in the advancing human spirit, is in no sense related to any particular form of s.e.x function. The man and the woman alike, who with Isaiah on the hills of Palestine, or the Indian Buddha under his bo-tree, have seen the essential unity of all sentient life; and who therefore see in war but a symptom of that crude disco-ordination of life on earth, not yet at one with itself, which affects humanity in these early stages of its growth: and who are compelled to regard as the ultimate goal of the race, though yet perhaps far distant across the ridges of innumerable coming ages, that harmony between all forms of conscious life, metaphorically prefigured by the ancient Hebrew, when he cried, "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb; and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them!"--to that individual, whether man or woman, who has reached this standpoint, there is no need for enlightenment from the instincts of the child-bearers of society as such; their condemnation of war, rising not so much from the fact that it is a wasteful destruction of human flesh, as that it is an indication of the non-existence of that co-ordination, the harmony which is summed up in the cry, "My little children, love one another."
But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably for generations to come, the instinctive antagonism of the human child-bearer to reckless destruction of that which she has at so much cost produced, will be necessary to educate the race to any clear conception of the b.e.s.t.i.a.lity and insanity of war.
War will pa.s.s when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the control and governance of modern national life; it will probably not pa.s.s away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer.
It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men"s bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamour and ardour of battle, but singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-morning courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may have its food, a food more precious to us than our heart"s blood; it is we especially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war and to labour there till in the course of generations we have extinguished it.
If today we claim all labour for our province, yet more especially do we claim those fields in which the difference in the reproductive function between man and woman may place male and female at a slightly different angle with regard to certain phases of human life.
Chapter V. s.e.x Differences.
If we examine the physical phenomenon of s.e.x as it manifests itself in the human creature, we find, in the first stages of the individual"s existence, no difference discernible, by any means we have at present at our command, between those germs which are ultimately to become male or female. Later, in the foetal life, at birth, and through infancy though the organs of s.e.x serve to distinguish the male from the female, there is in the general structure and working of the organism little or nothing to divide the s.e.xes.
Even when p.u.b.erty is reached, with its enormous development of s.e.xual and reproductive activity modifying those parts of the organism with which it is concerned, and producing certain secondary s.e.xual characteristics, there yet remains the major extent of the human body and of physical function little, or not at all, affected by s.e.x modification. The eye, the ear, the sense of touch, the general organs of nutrition and respiration and volition are in the main identical, and often differ far more in persons of the same s.e.x than in those of opposite s.e.xes; and even on the dissecting-table the tissues of the male and female are often wholly indistinguishable.
It is when we consider the reproductive organs themselves and their forms of activity, and such parts of the organism modified directly in relation to them, that a real and important difference is found to exist, radical though absolutely complemental. It is exactly as we approach the reproductive functions that the male and female bodies differ; exactly as we recede from them that they become more and more similar, and even absolutely identical. Taking the eye, perhaps the most highly developed, complex organ in the body, and, if of an organ the term may be allowed, the most intellectual organ of sense, we find it remains the same in male and female in structure, in appearance, and in function throughout life; while the breast, closely connected with reproduction, though absolutely identical in both forms in infancy, a.s.sumes a widely different organisation when reproductive activity is actually concerned.
When we turn to the psychic phase of human life an exactly a.n.a.logous phenomenon presents itself. The intelligence, emotions, and desires of the human infant at birth differ not at all perceptibly, as its s.e.x may be male or female; and such psychic differences as appear to exist in later childhood are undoubtedly very largely the result of artificial training, forcing on the appearance of psychic s.e.xual divergencies long before they would tend spontaneously to appear; as where sports and occupations are interdicted to young children on the ground of their supposed s.e.xual unfitness; as when an infant female is forcibly prevented from climbing or shouting, and the infant male from amusing himself with needle and thread or dolls. Even in the fully adult human, and in spite of differences of training, the psychic activities over a large extent of life appear to be absolutely identical. The male and female brains acquire languages, solve mathematical problems, and master scientific detail in a manner wholly indistinguishable: as ill.u.s.trated by the fact that in modern universities the papers sent in by male and female candidates are as a rule absolutely identical in type. Placed in like external conditions, their tastes and emotions, over a vast part of the surface of life, are identical; and, in an immense number of those cases where psychic s.e.x differences appear to exist, subject to rigid a.n.a.lysis they are found to be purely artificial creations, for, when other races or cla.s.ses are studied, they are found non-existent as s.e.xual characteristics; as when the female is supposed by ignorant persons in modern European societies to have an inherent love for bright colours and ornaments, not shared by the male; while experience of other societies and past social conditions prove that it is as often the male who has been even more desirous of attiring himself in bright raiment and adorning himself with brilliant jewels; or as when, among certain tribes of savages, the use of tobacco is supposed to be a peculiarly female prerogative, while, in some modern societies, it is supposed to have some relation to masculinity. (The savage male of today when attired in his paint, feathers, cats" tails and necklaces is an immeasurably more ornamented and imposing figure than his female, even when fully attired for a dance in beads and bangles: the Oriental male has sometimes scarcely been able to walk under the weight of his ornaments; and the males of Europe a couple of centuries ago, with their powdered wigs, lace ruffles and cuffs, paste buckles, feathered c.o.c.ked hats, and patches were quite as ridiculous in their excess of adornment as the complementary females of their own day, or the most parasitic females of this. Both in the cla.s.s and the individual, whether male or female, an intense love of dress and meretricious external adornment is almost invariably the concomitant and outcome of parasitism. Were the parasite female cla.s.s in our own societies today to pa.s.s away, French fashions with their easeless and grotesque variations (shaped not for use or beauty, but the attracting of attention) would die out. And the extent to which any woman today, not herself belonging to the parasite cla.s.s and still labouring, attempts to follow afar off the fashions of the parasite, may be taken generally as an almost certain indication of the ease with which she would accept parasitism were its conditions offered her. The tendency of the cultured and intellectually labouring woman of today to adopt a more rational type of attire, less shaped to attract attention to the individual than to confer comfort and abstain from impeding activity, is often spoken of as an attempt on the part of woman slavishly to imitate man. What is really taking place is, that like causes are producing like effects on human creatures with common characteristics.)
But there remain certain psychic differences in att.i.tude, on the part of male and female as such, which are inherent and not artificial: and, in the psychic human world, it is exactly as we approach the sphere of s.e.xual and reproductive activity, with those emotions and instincts connected directly with s.e.x and the reproduction of the race, that a difference does appear.
In the animal world all forms of psychic variations are found allying themselves now with the male s.e.x form, and then with the female. In the insect and fish worlds, where the female forms are generally larger and stronger than the male, the female is generally more pugnacious and predatory than the male. Among birds-of-prey, where also the female form is larger and stronger than the male, the psychic differences seem very small. Among eagles and other allied forms, which are strictly monogamous, the affection of the female for the male is so great that she is said never to mate again if the male dies, and both watch over and care for the young with extreme solicitude. The ostrich male form, though perhaps larger than the female, shares with her the labour of hatching the eggs, relieving the hen of her duty at a fixed hour daily: and his care for the young when hatched is as tender as hers. Among song-birds, in which the male and female forms are so alike as sometimes to be indistinguishable, and which are also monogamous, the male and female forms not only exhibit the same pa.s.sionate affection for each other (in the case of the South African c.o.c.k-o-veet, they have one answering love-song between them; the male sounding two or three notes and the female completing it with two or three more), but they build the nest together and rear the young with an equal devotion. In the case of the little kapok bird of the Cape, a beautiful, white, fluffy round nest is made by both out of the white down of a certain plant, and immediately below the entrance to the cavity in which the little female sits on the eggs is a small shelf or basket, in which the tiny male sits to watch over and guard them. It is among certain orders of birds that s.e.x manifestations appear to a.s.sume their most harmonious and poetical forms on earth. Among gallinaceous birds, on the other hand, where the c.o.c.k is much larger and more pugnacious than the female, and which are polygamous, the c.o.c.k does not court the female by song, but seizes her by force, and shows little or no interest in his offspring, neither sharing in the brooding nor feeding the young; and even at times seizing any tempting morsel which the young or the hen may have discovered.
Among mammals the male form tends to be slightly larger than the female, though not always (the female whale, for instance, being larger than the male); the male also tends to be more pugnacious and less careful of the young; though to this rule also there are exceptions. In the case of the South African mierkat, for instance, the female is generally more combative and more difficult to tame than the male; and it is the males who from the moment of birth watch over the young with the most pa.s.sionate and tender solicitude, keeping them warm under their persons, carrying them to places of safety in their mouths, and feeding them till full grown; and this they do not only for their own young, but to any young who may be brought in contact with them. We have known a male mierkat so a.s.siduous in feeding young that were quite unrelated to himself, taking to them every morsel of food given him, that we have been compelled to shut him up in a room alone when feeding him, to prevent his starving himself to death: the male mierkat thus exhibiting exactly those psychic qualities which are generally regarded as peculiarly feminine; the females, on the other hand, being far more pugnacious towards each other than are the males.
Among mammals generally, except the tendency to greater pugnacity shown by the male towards other males, and the greater solicitude for the young shown generally by the female form, but not always; the psychic differences between the two s.e.x forms are not great. Between the male and female pointer as puppies, there is as little difference in mental activity as in physical; and even when adult, on the hunting ground, that great non-s.e.xual field in which their highest mental and physical activities are displayed, there is little or nothing which distinguishes materially between the male and female; in method, manner, and quickness they are alike; in devotion to man, they are psychically identical. (It is often said the female dog is more intelligent than the male; but I am almost inclined to doubt this, after long and close study of both forms.) It is at the moment when the reproductive element comes fully into play that similarity and ident.i.ty cease. In the intensity of initial s.e.x instinct they are alike; the female will leap from windows, climb walls, and almost endanger her life to reach the male who waits for her, as readily as he will to gain her. It is when the b.i.t.c.h lies with her six young drawing life from her breast, and gazing with wistful and anguished solicitude at every hand stretched out to touch them, a world of emotion concentrated on the sightless creatures, and a whole body of new mental apt.i.tudes brought into play in caring for them, it is then that between her and the male who begot them, but cares nothing for them, there does rise a psychic difference that is real and wide. Alike in the sports of puppydom and the non-s.e.xual activities of adult age; alike in the possession of the initial s.e.xual instinct which draws the s.e.x to the s.e.x, the moment active s.e.xual reproduction is concerned, there is opened to the female a certain world of sensations and experiences, from which her male companion is for ever excluded.
So also is our human world: alike in the sports, and joys, and sorrows of infancy; alike in the non-s.e.xual labours of life; alike even in the possession of that initial instinct which draws s.e.x to s.e.x, and which, differing slightly in its forms of manifestation is of corresponding intensity in both; the moment actual reproduction begins to take place, the man and the woman enter spheres of sensation, perception, emotion, desire, and knowledge which are not, and cannot be, absolutely identical. Between the man who, in an instant of light-hearted enjoyment, begets the infant (who may even beget it in a state of half-drunken unconsciousness, and may easily know nothing of its existence for months or years after it is born, or never at all; and who under no circ.u.mstances can have any direct sensational knowledge of its relation to himself) and the woman who bears it continuously for months within her body, and who gives birth to it in pain, and who, if it is to live, is compelled, or was in primitive times, to nourish it for months from the blood of her own being--between these, there exists of necessity, towards a limited but all-important body of human interests and phenomena, a certain distinct psychic att.i.tude. At this one point, the two great halves of humanity stand confronting certain great elements in human existence, from angles that are not identical. From the moment the universal initial attraction of s.e.x to s.e.x becomes incarnate in the first concrete s.e.xual act till the developed offspring attains maturity, no step in the reproductive journey, or in their relation to their offspring, has been quite identical for the man and the woman. And this divergence of experiences in human relations must react on their att.i.tude towards that particular body of human concerns which directly is connected with the s.e.xual reproduction of the race; and, it is exactly in these fields of human activity, where s.e.x as s.e.x is concerned, that woman as woman has a part to play which she cannot resign into the hands of others.
It may be truly said that in the laboratory, the designing-room, the factory, the mart, the mathematician"s study, and in all fields of purely abstract or impersonal labour, while the entrance of woman would add to the net result of human labour in those fields, and though a grave injustice is done to the individual woman excluded from perhaps the only field she is fitted to excel in, that yet woman as woman has probably little or nothing to contribute in those fields that is radically distinct from that which man might supply; there would be a difference in quant.i.ty but probably none in kind, in the work done for the race.
But in those spheres of social activity, dealing especially with certain relations between human creatures because of their diverse if complementary relation to the production of human life, the s.e.xes as s.e.xes have often each a part to play which the other cannot play for them; have each a knowledge gained from phases of human experience, which the other cannot supply; here woman as woman has something radically distinct to contribute to the sum-total of human knowledge, and her activity is of importance, not merely individually, but collectively, and as a cla.s.s.
That demand, which today in all democratic self-governing countries is being made by women, to be accorded their share in the electoral, and ultimately in the legislative and executive duties of government, is based on two grounds: the wider, and more important, that they find nothing in the nature of their s.e.x-function which exonerates them, as human beings, from their obligation to take part in the labours of guidance and government in their state: the narrower, but yet important ground, that, in as far as in one direction, i.e., in the special form of their s.e.x function takes, they do differ from the male, they, in so far, form a cla.s.s and are bound to represent the interests of, and to give the state the benefit of, the insight of their cla.s.s, in certain directions.
Those persons who imagine that the balance of great political parties in almost any society would be seriously changed by the admission of its women in public functions are undoubtedly wholly wrong. The fundamental division of humans into those inclined to hold by the past and defend whatever is, and those hopeful of the future and inclined to introduce change, would probably be found to exist in much the same proportion were the males or the females of any given society compared: and the males and females of each cla.s.s will in the main share the faults, the virtues, and the prejudices of their cla.s.s. The individuals may lose by being excluded on the ground of s.e.x from a share of public labour, and by being robbed of a portion of their lawful individual weight in their own society; and the society as a whole may lose by having a smaller number to select its chosen labourers from; yet, undoubtedly, on the ma.s.s of social, political, and international questions, the conclusions arrived at by one s.e.x would be exactly those arrived at by the other.
Were a body of humans elected to adjudicate upon Greek accents, or to pa.s.s a decision on the relative fineness of woollens and linens, the form of s.e.x of the persons composing it would probably have no bearing on the result; there is no rational ground for supposing that, on a question of Greek accents or the thickness of cloths, equally instructed males and females would differ. Here s.e.x plays no part. The experience and instructedness of the individuals would tell: their s.e.xual attributes would be indifferent.
But there are points, comparatively small, even very small, in number, yet of vital importance to human life, in which s.e.x does play a part.
It is not a matter of indifference whether the body called to adjudicate upon the questions, whether the temporary sale of the female body for s.e.xual purposes shall or shall not be a form of traffic encouraged and recognised by the state; or whether one law shall exist for the licentious human female and another for the licentious human male; whether the claim of the female to the offspring she bears shall or shall not equal that of the male who begets it; whether an act of infidelity on the part of the male shall or shall not terminate the contract which binds his female companion to him, as completely as an act of infidelity on her part would terminate her claim on him; it is not a matter of indifference whether a body elected to adjudicate on such points as these consists of males solely, or females solely, or of both combined. As it consists of one, or the other, or of both, so not only will the answers vary, but, in some cases, will they be completely diverse. Here we come into that very narrow, but important, region, where s.e.x as s.e.x manifestly plays its part; where the male as male and the female as female have each their body of perceptions and experiences, which they do not hold in common; here one s.e.x cannot adequately represent the other. It is here that each s.e.xual part has something radically distinct to contribute to the wisdom of the race.
We, today, take all labour for our province! We seek to enter the non-s.e.xual fields of intellectual or physical toil, because we are unable to see today, with regard to them, any dividing wall raised by s.e.x which excludes us from them. We are yet equally determined to enter those in which s.e.x difference does play its part, because it is here that woman, the bearer of the race, must stand side by side with man, the begetter; if a completed human wisdom, an insight that misses no aspect of human life, and an activity that is in harmony with the entire knowledge and the entire instinct of the entire human race, is to exist.
It is here that the man cannot act for the woman nor the woman for the man; but both must interact. It is here that each s.e.xual half of the race, so closely and indistinguishably blended elsewhere, has its own distinct contribution to make to the sum total of human knowledge and human wisdom. Neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, the completed human intelligence.
Therefore;--We claim, today, all labour for our province! Those large fields in which it would appear s.e.x plays no part, and equally those smaller in which it plays a part.
Chapter VI. Certain Objections.
It has been stated sometimes, though more often implicitly than in any direct or logical form, (this statement being one it is not easy to make definitely without its reducing itself to nullity!) that woman should seek no fields of labour in the new world of social conditions that is arising about us, as she has still her function as child-bearer: a labour which, by her own showing, is arduous and dangerous, though she may love it as a soldier loves his battlefield; and that woman should perform her s.e.x functions only, allowing man or the state to support her, even when she is only potentially a child-bearer and bears no children. (Such a scheme, as has before been stated, was actually put forward by a literary man in England some years ago: but he had the sense to state that it should apply only to women of the upper cla.s.ses, the ma.s.s of labouring women, who form the vast bulk of the English women of the present day, being left to their ill-paid drudgery and their child-bearing as well!)
There is some difficulty in replying to a theorist so wholly delusive.
Not only is he to be met by all the arguments against parasitism of cla.s.s or race; but, at the present day, when probably much more than half the world"s most laborious and ill-paid labour is still performed by women, from tea pickers and cocoa tenders in India and the islands, to the washerwomen, cooks, and drudging labouring men"s wives, who in addition to the sternest and most unending toil, throw in their child-bearing as a little addition; and when, in some civilised countries women exceed the males in numbers by one million, so that there would still be one million females for whom there was no legitimate s.e.xual outlet, though each male in the nation supported a female, it is somewhat difficult to reply with gravity to the a.s.sertion, "Let Woman be content to be the "Divine Child-bearer," and ask no more."
Were it worth replying gravely to so idle a theorist, we might answer:--Through all the ages of the past, when, with heavy womb and hard labour-worn hands, we physically toiled beside man, bearing up by the labour of our bodies the world about us, it was never suggested to us, "You, the child-bearers of the race, have in that one function a labour that equals all others combined; therefore, toil no more in other directions, we pray of you; neither plant, nor build, nor bend over the grindstone; nor far into the night, while we sleep, sit weaving the clothing we and our children are to wear! Leave it to us, to plant, to reap, to weave, to work, to toil for you, O sacred child-bearer! Work no more; every man of the race will work for you!" This cry in all the grim ages of our past toil we never heard.
And today, when the lofty theorist, who tonight stands before the drawing-room fire in spotless shirtfront and perfectly fitting clothes, and declaims upon the amplitude of woman"s work in life as child-bearer, and the mighty value of that labour which exceeds all other, making it unnecessary for her to share man"s grosser and lower toils: is it certain he always in practical life remembers his theory? When waking tomorrow morning, he finds that the elderly house drudge, who rises at dawn while he yet sleeps to make his tea and clean his boots, has brought his tea late, and polished his boots ill; may he not even sharply condemn her, and a.s.sure her she will have to leave unless she works harder and rises earlier? Does he exclaim to her, "Divine child-bearer! Potential mother of the race! Why should you clean my boots or bring up my tea, while I lie warm in bed? Is it not enough you should have the holy and mysterious power of bringing the race to life?
Let that content you. Henceforth I shall get up at dawn and make my own tea and clean my own boots, and pay you just the same!" Or, should his landlady, now about to give birth to her ninth child, send him up a poorly-cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scuttle of coals, does he send for her and thus apostrophise the astonished matron: "Child-bearer of the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so n.o.ble and lofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry up heavy coal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out nerve and brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We, we, the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding toil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life, not to support it by labour. The Mother, the Mother! How wonderful it sounds! Toil no more! Rest is for you; labour and drudgery for us!" Would he not rather a.s.sure her that, unless she laboured more a.s.siduously and sternly, she would lose his custom and so be unable to pay her month"s rent; and perhaps so, with children and an invalid or drunken husband whom she supports, be turned out into the streets? For, it is remarkable, that, with theorists of this cla.s.s, it is not toil, or the amount of toil, crushing alike to brain and body, which the female undertakes that is objected to; it is the form and the amount of the reward. It is not the hand-labouring woman, even in his own society, worn out and prematurely aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that has no beginning and knows no end--
"Man"s work is from sun to sun, But the woman"s work is never done"--
it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his shirts, or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in the sweater"s den where she sews the garments in which he appears so radiantly in the drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thought of the woman-doctor with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives round in her carriage to see her patients, or receives them in her consulting-rooms, and who spends the evening smoking and reading before her study fire or receiving her guests; it is the thought of the woman who, as legislator, may loll for perhaps six hours of the day on the padded seat of legislative bench, relieving the tedium now and then by a turn in the billiard- or refreshment-room, when she is not needed to vote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, with three or four hundred a year, who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and has leisure to enjoy the society of her husband and children, and to devote to her own study and life of thought; it is she who wrings his heart. It is not the woman, who, on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of the public buildings, or private dwellings, that fills him with anguish for womanhood: that somewhat quadrupedal posture is for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of the mother and child-bearer; and that, in some other man"s house, or perhaps his own, while he and the wife he keeps for his pleasures are visiting concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces till far into the night bearing with aching back and tired head the fretful, teething child he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty or thirty pounds a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by work in an office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure, distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour, so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the eternal womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of the race should labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, or toilers for the children he brings into the world, provided the reward they receive is not large, nor in such fields as he might himself at any time desire to enter.
When master and a.s.s, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbed a steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and across sliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when they were come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad, green lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse of trees waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, the master should say to his a.s.s, "Good beast of mine, lie down! I can push the whole burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; you have toiled enough; I will go on alone!" then it might be even the beast would whisper (with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the green fields beyond)--"Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountain together, and the stones have cut my hoofs as they cut your feet.
Perhaps, if when we were at the foot you had found out that the burden was two heavy for me, and had then said to me, "Lie down, my beastie; I will carry on the burden alone; lie down and rest!" I might then have listened. But now, just here, where I see the gates swinging open, a smooth road, and green fields before us, I think I shall go on a little farther. We two have climbed together; maybe we shall go on yet, side by side."
For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man who would suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearing is enough for her share in life"s labour, "Do you dare say to us now, that we are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that is performed our powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the ages of the past, when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regarded it hardly as a toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our right hand lost its cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when human labour is easier and humanity"s work grows fairer, you say to us, "You can do nothing now but child-bear"? Do you dare to say this, to us, when the upward path of the race has been watered by the sweat of our brow, and the sides of the road by which humanity has climbed are whitened on either hand by the bones of the womanhood that has fallen there, toiling beside man? Do you dare say this, to us, when even today the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the comfort you enjoy, is largely given you by the unending muscular toil of woman?"