The Project Gutenberg eBook ofConcerning Women

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofConcerning WomenThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Concerning WomenAuthor: Suzanne La FolletteRelease date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68226]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONCERNING WOMEN ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Concerning WomenAuthor: Suzanne La FolletteRelease date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68226]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Title: Concerning Women

Author: Suzanne La Follette

Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68226]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926

Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONCERNING WOMEN ***

Transcriber’s Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

front

CONCERNINGWOMEN

SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

logo

ALBERT & CHARLES BONINEW YORK1926

Manufactured in the United States of America

ToEllen WinsorandRebecca Winsor Evans

CONCERNINGWOMEN

Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places.Mary Wollstonecraft.

Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

It will be foolish to assume that women are free, until books about them shall have ceased to have more than an antiquarian interest. All such books, including this one, imply by their existence that women may be regarded as a class in society; that they have in common certain characteristics, conditions or disabilities which, predominating over their individual variations, warrant grouping them on the basis of sex. No such assumption about men would be thinkable. Certain masculine qualities, so-called, may be singled out by amateur psychologists and opposed to certain feminine qualities, so-called; but from books about the sphere of man, the rights of man, the intelligence of man, the psychology of man, the soul of man, our shelves are mercifully free. Such books may one day appear, but when they do it will mean that society has passed from its present state through a state of sex-equalityand into a state of female domination. In that day, in place of the edifying spectacle of men proclaiming that woman is useful only as a bearer of children, society may behold the equally edifying spectacle of women proclaiming that man is useful only as a begetter of children; since it seems to be characteristic of the dominant sex to regard the other sex chiefly as a source of pleasure and as a means of reproduction. It seems also to be characteristic of the dominant sex—I judge from the world’s experience during the domination of men—to regard itself as humanity, and the other sex as a class of somewhat lower beings created by Providence for its convenience and enjoyment; just as it is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an aristocracy, to regard the lower classes as being created solely for the purpose of supporting its power and doing its will. When once a social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves, those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order, and imposing their belief, by force if necessary, on those whom circumstances have placed in their power. There is nothing more innately human than the tendency totransmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

Thus among the Hebrews the subordination of woman gave rise to the notion that she was fashioned out of man’s rib. She was the result of a divine afterthought, thesexus sequiorof the ancients and more recently of Schopenhauer, “inferior in every respect to the first.” Since the Divine Artist had had good practice in creating Adam, it might logically have been expected that His second sex would turn out even better than His first; we must therefore lay His failure to the somewhat sketchy nature of the materials He chose to work with. This Hebrew myth of the creation of woman has had considerable effect on her status in the era known as Christian. Being “only a supernumerary bone,” as Bossuet reminded her, she could naturally not aspire to a position of equality with man. She must remember her origin, and be humble and subservient as befitted a mere rib.

She was humble and subservient, as a matter of fact, for an incredibly long time; so long that there exists a general suspicion even at the present day that there is something in her nature which makes her want to be subject to man and to live as it wereat second hand. This thought would be even more alarming than it is, perhaps, if it were not true that men themselves have stood for a good deal of subjection during the world’s known history. Chattel slavery and serfdom were abolished from the civilized world only at about the time that the subjection of women began to be modified; and men still endure, not only with resignation but with positive cheerfulness, a high degree of industrial and political slavery. The man who is entirely dependent for his livelihood upon the will of an employer is an industrial slave, and the man who may be drafted into an army and made to fight and perhaps die for a cause in which he can have no possible interest is the slave of the State; yet one can not see that this proves Aristotle’s assumption that there are free natures and slave natures, any more than the subjection of women proves that they want to be subjected. What the slavery of men, as of women, implies is the existence of an economic and social order that is inimical to their interests as human beings; and it implies nothing more than this.

Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of women which still finds expression in this country and in Europe, prove anything more than thatsuperstitious addiction to custom of which I have already spoken. Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can exist only if its organization remains unchanged. The same conservatism has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by new ones. Yet when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of the social organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of arrested development as the civilization of India presents. Society, in so far as it has become organic, is governed by the same rules as any other organism: the condition of its health is growth, and growth is change.

Certainly the present tendency of woman to assume a position of equality with man involves, and will continue even more to involve, profound psychic and material readjustments. But to assume that such readjustments will injure or destroy Society is to adopt toward Society an attitude of philosophical realism, to attribute to it a personality, to suppose that it is equally capable of destruction with the individual, and that it may in some mystical wayderive benefit from the sacrifice of the individual’s best interests. But what is Society save an aggregation of individuals, half male, half female? Where you have a handful of people forming a community, there you have Society; and if the individuals are enlightened and humane it may be called a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal it will be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” may be promoted by the enslavement of one-half its members, is unreasonable. One may be permitted the doubtful assumption that this enslavement promotes the welfare of the other half of Society, but it is obvious that it can not promote the welfare of the whole, unless we assume that slavery is beneficial to the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the slaves have been women). When we consider the political organization known as the State, we have a different matter. The State always represents the organized interest of a dominant class; therefore the subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the State, and their emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the State.

It is evident from the very nature of the State[1]that its interests are opposed to those of Society; and while the complete emancipation of women, as I shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the destruction of the State, since it must accrue from the emancipation of other subject classes, their emancipation, far from destroying Society, must be of inestimable benefit to it. Those critics, and there are many, who argue that women must submit to restrictions upon their freedom for the good of the State, as well as those advocates of woman’s rights who argue that women must be emancipated for the good of the State, simply fail to make this vital distinction between the State and Society; and their failure to do so is one of the potent reasons why the nonsense that has been written about women is limited only by the literature of the subject.

Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from thisstandpoint centre in the function of childbearing; therefore it should be noted that the emphasis which is placed on this function by the interest of the State is quite different from the emphasis that would be placed upon it by the interest of Society; for the interest of the State is numerical, while the interest of Society is qualitative. The State requires as many subjects as possible, both as labour-motors and as fighters. The interest of Society, on the other hand, is the interest of civilization: if a community is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is necessary not that the individuals who compose it shall be as numerous as possible, but that they shall be as wholesome and intelligent as possible. In general, the interest of the State is promoted by the number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality of its members.

The interest of the State in this respect has been most concisely expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” said he, “shall be trained for war, and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly”, and if one accept his premises he is exactly right. But there have been many writers on women who have not accepted his premises—not at least without qualification—and who have yet failed toobserve the antithesis between the interest which the State has, and the interest which Society has, in the question of population. Hence, mingled with the voices of those critics who have demanded the subjection of woman for the sake of children, have been the voices of other critics demanding her emancipation for the sake of children: and both these schools of critics have overlooked her claim to freedom on her own behalf. It is for the sake of humanity, and not for the sake of children, that women ought to have equal status with men. That children will gain enormously by the change is true; but this is beside the issue, which is justice.

The argument that woman must be free for the sake of the race, is an argument of expediency; as nine-tenths of the arguments against her legal subjection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfortunately, humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the claims of justice, especially when they conflict with established abuses, unless these claims are backed by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made the social recognition of woman’s claims a necessity, and their political recognition a matter of expediency. Otherwise she would have to wait muchlonger for the establishment of her rights as man’s equal than now appears likely. In the Western world her battle is very largely won; full equality, social, industrial and legal, seems to be only a matter of time and tactics. This she owes to the great political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century.

The conscious movement towards freedom for women may be said to have originated in the great emancipatory movement which found expression in the American and French revolutions. The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured. But they did succeed in creating political forms which admitted, in theory at least, the principle of equality. Their chief contribution to progress was that they dramatically and powerfully impressed the idea of liberty upon the minds of men, and thus altered the whole course of human thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” revolutionary though it seemed in its day, was a perfectly natural and logical application of this idea of liberty to the situation of her sex. This remarkable book may be saidto have marked the beginning of the conscious movement towards the emancipation of women.

The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. Women had always been industrial workers, but their work, after the break-up of the gilds, was for the most part carried on at home. When the factory supplanted the family as the producing unit in society, the environment of women was altered; and the change affected not only those women who followed industry to the factories, but also those who remained housewives, for where these had before been required to perform, or at least to superintend, a large amount of productive work, they now found their function, as the family became a consuming unit, reduced to the superintendence of expenditures and the operation of the household machinery—a labour which was increasingly lightened by the progress of invention. With domestic conditions so changed, what was more natural than that the daughters should go into the factory; or, if the family were well-to-do, into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to open their doors to women? And what was more natural than that women, as their minds were developedthrough education, should perceive the injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend their right to recognition as human beings? “If we dared,” says Stendhal, “we would give girls the education of a slave.... Arm a man and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you as soon as he can.”

Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools—from this it was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a very long time until they would be invading every field that had been held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and unorganized woman’s movement which has aroused such fear and resentment among people who saw it without understanding it.

The organized movement may be regarded simply as an attempt to get this changing relation of women to their environment translated into the kind of law that the eighteenth century had taught the world to regard as just: law based on the theory of equal rights for all human beings. The opposition that the movement encountered offers ample testimony to the fact that “acceptance in principle” is more than a mere subterfuge of diplomats and politicians.The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resolutely clung to the theory of equality, and as resolutely opposed its logical application. This is not surprising; most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word “human.” Women had hardly been regarded as human in mediaeval Europe; they were considered something a little more from the chivalrous point of view, and something a little less from the more common, workaday standpoint. The shadow of this old superstition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it is hardly surprising that the egalitarians of the French Revolution excluded women from equal political and legal rights with men; and that the young American republic which had adopted the Declaration of Independence, continued to sanction the slavery of negroes and the subjection of women. How firmly rooted this superstition was, may be seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from the writings of that great American advocate of freedom, the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson.

Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberations (1) infants until arrived at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.

Thus does superstition cast out logic. Nor does superstition die easily. The masculine assumption, usually quite unconscious, that women are unfit for freedom, bids fair to persevere as stubbornly as the feminine assumption that marriage offers a legitimate and established mode of extortion.[2]

If the conscious feminists bore the brunt of the resentment aroused by woman’s changing relation to the world about her, it was because their opponents did them the honour of believing that they were responsible for the change. It was a strangelyincurious attitude that permitted such an assumption to be held; for it really takes a very feeble exercise of intelligence to perceive that a handful of feminist agitators could hardly coax millions of women into industry—under conditions often extremely disadvantageous—into business, the schools and the professions. I believe the cause of this incuriousness lay in the very fear aroused by these changes and the social revaluations which they implied; fear for a relation between the sexes which, having been established for so long, seemed the only reasonable, or indeed possible, relation. Filled as they were with this fear of change, which is one of the strongest human emotions, the opponents of woman’s emancipation were incapable of objectivity. Their intellectual curiosity was paralyzed. This accounts, perhaps, for the utterances of two such eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They came to the subject strongly prejudiced: the idea of any claims on behalf of women filled them with disgust; therefore, as one may take a certain malicious pleasure in observing, their thought on the subject was hampered by that “weakness of the reasoning faculty” which Schopenhauer found characteristic of women. If, whendiscussing woman, they had not been as “childish, frivolous and short-sighted” as they believed women to be, they might, along with lesser minds, have arrived at some understanding of a subject which has always been thought much more mysterious and baffling than it really is. The woman of their day may have been the poor creature they pronounced her to be, but if she was, the obvious question was, Why? Was she a poor creature by nature, or because of centuries of adaptation to a certain kind of life? This question neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche took the trouble to ask. They weighed her as she was—or as they thought she was—and arrived at the sage conclusion that the West had much to learn from the Orient concerning the proper attitude toward her.

It would be a very desirable thing [says Schopenhauer] if this Number Two of the human race were in Europe also relegated to their natural place [which he conceives to be the harem of a polygamous household] and an end put to this lady-nuisance, which not only moves all Asia to laughter but would have been ridiculed by Greece and Rome as well.

Nietzsche, in the same vein, remarks that

a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein.

Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves nothing about women, but it proves a good deal about the effect that their subjection has had on the minds of men. It is a significant fact that both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and that in their day the status of women was lower in Germany than in any other important country of the Western World, except Italy.

The corruption of both sexes that results from the subjection of one, has been too convincingly dealt with by other writers to need discussion here. What I should like to emphasize is the futility of approaching the so-called “woman question” with any sort of pre-conceived notion concerning the nature of woman, or her sphere, or her duty to the State or to Society; and above all, of approaching it with the idea—the idea that obsesses all reformers—that she is a more or less passive creature about whomsomething either ought or ought not to be done, or, for that matter, about whom something can be done. What she should and can do for herself is a different matter; and to that question I intend to address myself before I leave this subject.

[1]For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth, for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the owning class.

[2]I shall take up this question later; but I might remark that this point is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State of New York. The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced twenty years before, brought action against him for separation and maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent remarriage, her lawyer stated thatshe had never been in need of money before, but that she had been swindled out of the money settled upon her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The italics are mine; and no comment, I think, is needed.

Woman tends to assume a position of equality with man only where the idea of property in human beings has not yet arisen or where it has disappeared: that is to say, only in extremely primitive or highly civilized communities. In all the intermediate stages of civilization, woman is in some degree regarded as a purchasable commodity. Her status varies widely among different peoples: there are primitive tribes where she holds a position of comparative independence; and there are civilized peoples, on the other hand, among whom she is virtually a slave. But always there is present the idea of subordination to a male owner, husband, father or brother, even though it may survive only in ceremonial observances,e.g., in the ritual practice of “giving in marriage,” or in certain legal disabilities, such, for instance, as the law entitling a man to his wife’s services without remuneration.

The subjection of women, then, bears a closeintrinsic resemblance to both chattel slavery and industrial slavery, in that its basis is economic. As soon as civilization advances to the point of a rudimentary organization of agriculture and industry, woman becomes valuable as a labour-motor and a potential producer of children who will become labour-motors and fighters. Her economic value, or chattel-value, then, is a commodity for which her family may demand payment; and hence, apparently, arises the custom of exacting a bride-price from the man who wishes to marry her. Once established, this custom of barter in marriage strikes root so deeply that the woman who has brought no bride-price is often regarded with scorn and her children considered illegitimate; and the idea of male ownership that accompanies it becomes so pronounced that it persists even where, owing to an excess of women coupled with monogamy, the custom has been practically reversed, and the father buys a husband for his daughter. An instance of this survival is the system of dowry which exists in France. Unless it is otherwise stipulated by pre-nuptial agreement, the dowry is at the disposal of the husband, and the wife, under the law, owes him obedience.

When the bargain has been made and the bride delivered to her husband’s family, her services generally become, save in tribes where residence is matrilocal, the property of her purchasers, and she is subject to her husband, or, where the patriarchal system is highly developed, to the head of his tribe. It must be remarked, however, that although this is the usual arrangement, it is not invariable. Among some peoples, the husband’s rights are purely sexual, the services of the wife, and often even her children, belonging to her own tribe; and among others, the husband must pay for his bride in services which render him for a long period the virtual slave of his wife’s relatives. The point to be remarked in all this is that any conception of woman as an individual entity, as in any sense belonging to herself, and not to her own relatives or to her husband and his family, seems to be practically non-existent among primitive peoples, as it was until recently among civilized peoples. But it must be remarked, too, that in this respect her position is only less desirable than that of the man; for in primitive society the group so dominates the individual that in almost every phase of life he is hedged about with restrictions and taboos which leave little room forthe play of personality and the pursuit of individual desires. All social advancement has been in the direction of the individual’s escape from this group-tyranny.

So important is the part that the labour of women plays in the primitive world, that the wife or wives are often the sole support of husband and family; and a man’s wealth and social prestige may actually depend upon the number of his wives. “Manual labour among savages,” says Westermarck, “is undertaken chiefly by the women; and as there are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire, it becomes necessary for any one who requires many servants to have many wives.”There are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire.Women, then, are the first victims of that deep-rooted and instinctive preference for living by the labour of other people, which has played so momentous and sinister a rôle in the world’s history. Among tribes whose mode of life has made them exploitable by stronger and more highly organized hordes—as, for example, an agricultural people which is conquered by a more mobile and disciplined tribe of herders—there, among the expropriated class, are day-labourers and people who will workfor hire, for these have no choice or alternative; but among peoples where militant exploitation is impossible—as among the hunting-tribes—no man can be forced to work for another man, for the simple reason that there is no way of compelling him to share the product of his labour. But even here we see the economic phenomenon of the labour of women being exploited as the labour of man is exploited after conquest and the foundation of the exploiting State; and this is the case chiefly because certain natural disadvantages render them easily exploitable, as I shall show later.

It may be remarked in this connexion, that sexual division of labour appears to be quite arbitrary among primitive peoples; and that it often bears little resemblance to the division which has existed for so long among Europeans that it has apologists who regard it as being divinely ordained.[3]This suggests at least that the European division is arbitrary too. Indeed, it has undergone considerable change. Brewing, for example, was regarded as woman’s work in mediaeval England. It is even supposed that the monasteries, which excludedwomen from other service within their walls, employed women brewers. In general, it appears a fair conclusion that the occupations which are considered least desirable are given over to the subordinate sex. Thus men, according to the Vaertings, during the period when women dominated in Egypt, were forced to care for children and perform the drudgery of the household. Where military enterprise plays a part in tribal life, the division of labour appears to give validity to the contention of Spencer and others that man is militant and woman industrial; yet the exclusion of women from military activity is no doubt primarily due quite as much to the taboos against them as to their own lack of warlike spirit. Indeed, there are tribes where women take active part in fighting; and there are folk-tales in plenty which tell of their prowess—as, for example, in the epic lore of Greece and Russia. But because of a primitive awe of the function of menstruation, women are often considered unclean, and excluded on this account from many tribal activities, particularly from religious rites. Among such peoples, it would not be surprising to find that the same superstition excluded women from participation in any enterprise in which the tribal gods areso active and their aid so important as in war. In certain tribes of South Africa there is, according to Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, a direct connexion between militancy and a taboo against woman. “A man sleeping with his wife must be careful not to touch her with his right hand. Otherwise his strength as a warrior goes from him and he will surely be killed.”

Whatever be the basis of sexual division of labour among different tribes, and whatever minor differences there be in the relative position of the sexes, one thing is certain, and it is all we are at present concerned with, namely: in what Dr. Lowie has called “that planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches called civilization,” woman almost invariably occupies a more or less inferior position. Dr. Lowie himself is careful to warn his readers against the popular assumption that the position of primitive woman is always abject, and that the status of woman offers a sure index of cultural advancement; nevertheless he says that “It is true that in by far the majority of both primitive and more complex cultures woman enjoys, if we apply our most advanced ethical standards, a less desirable position than man.”

The obvious question is, Why? The answer is equally obvious, and has been so often stated and discussed that I need do no more than mention it here. Woman, however nearly her physical strength in the natural state may approximate that of man, is under a peculiar disadvantage in being the childbearing sex. During pregnancy, at least in its later stages, and during childbirth, she is powerless to defend herself against aggression. She is also at considerable disadvantage during the early infancy of her child. Man in the savage state, having none of that consideration which proceeds in a rough ratio with cultural development, takes advantage of her periodic weakness and her consequent need of protection, to force her into a subordinate position. Superstition, masculine jealousy and desire for domination, have of course been joined with the economic motive in bringing about this subjection to the male; but these motives could not have operated if her subjection had not been physically possible. If woman had had the natural advantage over man, she would have used it to subject him, precisely as he used his advantage to subject her; for the human being in the ruder stages exploits other human beings, when possible, as a matter ofcourse, without any of those pretexts and indirections that characterize communities where the sense of human rights has become sufficiently general to gain the doubtful tribute of disingenuousness. It is among these more enlightened communities that the subjection of woman—or of any class—becomes reprehensible: a society that exploits human beings through ignorant brutality is not open to the same criticism as a society which continues to exploit them when clearly aware that in doing so it is violating a natural right.

So much for the cause of woman’s subjection and exploitation. It has had powerful abetment in superstitious notions concerning sex, such as the primitive horror of menstruation. “Even educated Indians,” says Dr. Lowie, “have been known to remain under the sway of this sentiment, and its influence in moulding savage conceptions of the female sex as a whole should not be underrated. The monthly seclusion of women has been accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and that her exclusionfrom certain spheres of activity and consequently lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena of periodicity.”

It is evident that this superstition has operated powerfully to segregate women into a special class, excluded from full and equal participation in the life of the community. It is also reasonable to assume that it has stimulated the growth of many other superstitions that have hedged them about from time immemorial. It is probably, for example, closely connected with the Chinese association of evil with the female principle of the Universe, and with the Hebrew notion that sorrow entered the world through the sin of a woman. No doubt it may be connected with the mediaeval tendency to regard woman as a mysterious and supernatural being, either angelic or demoniac. The conception of sibyls and witches is derived from it; and likewise the notion which shows an interesting persistence even now, that a good woman is somewhat nearer the angels than a good man, and a bad woman much more satanic than a bad man.[4]Oncethe idea is established that woman is a being extra-human, minds prepossessed by this superstition may see her as either subhuman or superhuman; or these two notions may coexist, as in Christian society.

The notion that there is always a savour of sin in the indulgence of sexual appetite, even when exercised under due and formal regulation, has also had a profound effect on the status of women. This notion is to be found in both primitive and civilized communities; and since to each sex the other sex represents the means of gratifying sexual desire, the other sex naturally comes, where such a notion obtains, to represent temptation and sin. But where one sex is dominant and tends to regard itself as the sum of humanity, the other sex is forced to bear alone the burden of responsibility for the evil that sex represents; and it is therefore hedged about by the dominant sex with all sorts of restrictions intended to reduce its opportunities to be tempting, and thus to minimize its harmfulness.

It seems a fair assumption that the association of sin with sex-desire may have arisen from the antagonism between individual inclination and the domination of the group. Among peoples wherethe clan or the family is the final category, marriage is far from being exclusively a matter of individual interest and preference; indeed the individuals concerned may have little or nothing to say about it. The marriage is arranged by their elders, and the principals may not even see one another before their wedding day. Marriage under these conditions is a contract between families, an arrangement for founding a new economic unit and for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are purely dynastic arrangements in behalf of a political order. Sexual preference can have little place in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more inimical to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threatening the purely utilitarian basis upon which sex has been placed; and as such it must be discountenanced, and young men and women carefully segregated in order that this inconvenient sentiment may have no chance to spring up unauthorized between them.

In the Christian world this association of sin with the sexual appetite has prevailed since the days of St. Paul.[5]Sexual desire has been regarded as abase instinct, and its gratification under any circumstances as a kind of moral concession; therefore woman, as the instrument of sexual satisfaction in the dominant male, must be repressed and regulated accordingly, and to this end she was always to be under obedience to some man, either her husband or a male relative. “Nothing disgraceful,” says Clement of Alexandria, “is proper for man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.” Repression has combined with the proprietary idea to make chastity a woman’s principal if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to be punished with a severity that, in another view, seems irrational and disproportionate, by permanent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Europe, by violent death. An extraordinary inconsistency appears in the fact that since Christian thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, woman came to be regarded as the repository of morality, and as such to be considered on a higher moral plane than man. But it was really her economic and social inferiority that made her the repository of morality. She must embody the ideal ofsexual restraint that her husband often found it inconvenient or onerous to attain for himself; and any unfaithfulness to this ideal on her part inflicted upon him a mysterious injury called “dishonour.” He might indulge his own polygamous leanings with impunity, but his failure to make effective his sexual monopoly of his wife made him liable to contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this notion persist that one may find anthropologists, usually the most objective among our men of science, gauging the morality of a primitive people by the chastity of its women.

Of course the effect of the attempt to make the chastity of women a matter of morality and law, has been the precise opposite of the one aimed at. Society can never be made virtuous through arbitrary regulation; it can only be made unhappy and unamiable. The attempt to suppress all unauthorized expression of the sex-impulse in women tended to make them not only miserable and abject, but hypocritical and deceitful; and it tended also to make men predatory. This was its inevitable result in a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all; a result which has made the relations between thesexes in the Christian world about as bad as any that could be imagined. Theoretically, to be sure, Christianity exacted of men the same degree of chastity as of women; practically it did no such thing, as may be amply proved even now by a study of the marriage and divorce laws of Christian nations, not excepting our own.[6]The sexual license of the dominant male was limited only by the practicable correspondence between his own desires and his opportunities; and thanks to that convenient being, the prostitute, his opportunities were plentiful. Hence for him, women were divided into two classes: the chaste and respectable from whom he chose the wife who kept his home, bore his children, and embodied his virtue; and those outcasts from society who promoted the chastity of the first class by offering themselves, for a price, as sacrifices to illicit sexual desire. Neither class was he bound to respect; for the only thing that compels respect is independence, and in neither the first nor the second class were women independent. From the man’s point of view, such a socialarrangement was superficially satisfactory. It provided for what might be called the utilitarian ends of sex; that is to say, the man’s name was perpetuated and his natural appetites gratified. But beyond this it left a good deal to be desired. Its worst effect was by way of a complete evaporation of the spiritual quality of union between man and woman and the very considerable dehumanization that in consequence set in. Both the wife and the prostitute were man’s creaturesquoad hoc, to be used for different purposes but equally to be used. It is hardly to be wondered at that man came to regard women as “the sex,” and through his own management of their degradation came to feel and to express toward them a degree of contempt that cast considerable doubt on his own humanity. It is invariable that the person who is able to regard any class of human beings asper sehis natural inferiors, will by so doing sacrifice something of his own spiritual integrity. In his relation to woman, man occupied a position of privilege analogous to that occupied by the aristocracy in the State; and he paid the same penalty for his exercise of a usurped and irresponsible power: a coarsening of his spiritual fibre. One of the oddest of the manyodd superstitions that have grown out of male domination is the notion that men suffer less spiritual harm from sexual promiscuity than women; and this in spite of the biblical injunction, applied exclusively to their sex: “None who go unto her return again.” This superstition is accountable for abundant and incurable misery; and so slow is it to disappear that one is inclined to advocate a movement for the emancipation of men, a movement to free them from the prejudices and prepossessions concerning women that are inculcated by the traditional point of view.

We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked upon woman as man’s creature and his chief temptation, and that Christian society took good care to keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her the enemy of man’s better self in a way that apparently was not foreseen by St. Paul, whose concern with the temptations of the flesh seems to have been a matter of more passionate conviction than his concern with those of the spirit. Woman’s subordinate position; her enforced ignorance; the narrowness of the interests that were allowed her; the exaggerated regard for the opinion of other people that was bound to be developed in a creature whose wholelife depended on her reputation—these conditions were calculated to evolve the sort of being which is hardly able to give clear recognition either to her own spiritual interest or to that of other people. Such a being would be the enemy of man’s spiritual interest primarily through sheer inability to understand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own destiny; how could she be expected to conceive of any other or higher for man? Her whole life must be lived for appearances; how could she help man to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of appearances that such an ideal might entail? The only renunciation of the world that figured in her life was that which led to the convent; of that renunciation which involves being in the world but not of it—that steady repudiation of its standards which clears the way to spiritual freedom—of such a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable even to dream. The inevitable result of this enforced narrowness was well stated by John Stuart Mill in the essay which remains the classic of feminist literature; he pointed out that in a world where women are almost exclusively occupied with material interests, where their standard of appraisal is the opinion of other people, their ambition willnaturally connect itself with material things, with wealth and prestige, no matter how inimical such an ambition may be to the spiritual interests of the men upon whom they depend. That there have been distinguished exceptions to this rule does credit to the strength of character which has enabled an individual now and then to attain something like spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and retarding environment.

The effects of repression and seclusion on the character of woman have given rise, and an appearance of reason, to a host of other superstitions about her nature; notions which have been expressed in terms by many writers and have coloured the thought of many others. To offer a petty but interesting example, one of the most widely prevalent and most easily disproved of these is the belief that women are by nature more given to self-decoration than men. Certainly the practice in civilized society at present seems to bear out this notion. But when we turn to primitive communities we find, on the contrary, that the men are likely to be vainer offinery and more given to it than the women. The reason is simple: decoration of the person arises from the desire to enhance sex-attraction; and it is most industriously practised by that sex among whose members there is the keener competition for favour with members of the opposite sex. In European civilization marriage has been practically the only economic occupation open to women; but monogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of females and an increasing proportion of celibacy among males, has made it impossible for every woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry among them has been keen, and their interest in self-decoration has been largely professional. “If in countries with European civilization,” says Westermarck, “women nevertheless are more particular about their appearance and more addicted to self-decoration than the other sex, the reason for it may be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in getting married. But there is seldom any such difficulty in the savage world. Here it is, on the contrary, the man who runs the risk of being obliged to lead a single life.”

M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that “the inclination to bright and ornamental clothingis dependent not upon sex, but upon the power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or female, seeks ornament.” But it would seem, in view of the accepted theory that self-decoration originates in the desire to enhance sex-attraction, that Westermarck’s is the more reasonable explanation; moreover it covers certain cases in primitive life where the women, although their position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while the men are given to elaborate decoration of their persons.

In spite of all the evidence which anthropology arrays against it, however, the notion persists that woman is by nature more addicted to self-decoration than man; and there are not wanting advocates of her subjection, among them many women, who maintain that it shows the essential immaturity of her mind!

The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed, it has stood in theway of dispassionate scientific study of the relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his “Man and Woman,” says that “the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common; and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual differences may be easily summed up.” He then proceeds to show that those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example, depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of woman’s brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the female figure. An interestingindication of this is a recent dispatch from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger than the woman of a century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to enlarge with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.

Even Plato, who advocated the education of woman, held that while her capacities did not differ in kind from those of man, they differed in degree because of her inferiority in physical strength. It was a broad-minded view; for the most part women have simply been held to be by nature relatively weak-minded and therefore relatively ineducable. They have already passed one general test of educability, by entering schools on the same footing with men and showing themselves equally able to achieve a high scholastic standing; yet the Platonic notion persists that they are physically incapable of going as far as men can go in intellectual pursuits. This question can probably not be settled a priori to any one’s satisfaction. It must be conceded, after the fact, however, that considering the short time that women have been tolerated in the schools and in the practical prosecution of intellectual pursuits, theshowing they have made has really been quite as good as might reasonably be expected, and that it certainly has not been such as to warrant any arbitrary fixing of limits beyond which they can not or shall not go. Moreover, the physical weakness which is supposed to disable woman intellectually may be itself a result of her adaptation to her environment. There is no way that I know of to forecast with any kind of accuracy what a few generations of freedom will accomplish specifically in the way of spiritual development. Considering that human beings are “creatures of a large discourse,” the matter is probably determinable only by experiment—solvitur ambulando.

Nor will there be any reason to agree with the numerous adherents of the idea that women are naturally incapable of great creative work in any field until they shall have failed, after generations and even centuries of complete freedom, to produce great creative work. This notion represents the last stand of a priori judgment concerning female intelligence. It is based on the theory, at present much in fashion, that men are more variable than women, and that both idiocy and genius are thus much more frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence ofwomen tends to keep to the safe ground of mediocrity. The implications of this theory manifestly are that genius of the highest order can not be expected to appear in a woman. Since all cats are grey in the dark, according to the proverb, nothing worth saying can be said against this theory or for it. The data which underly it are simply incompetent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way or the other. They represent only a projection of men and women as they now are, and therefore can not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning men and women as they may become. To say, for instance, that because there has never been, to our knowledge, any woman, with the possible exception of Sappho, who showed the highest order of genius in the arts it is probable that there never can or will be, is much the same as to say that because there has never been a woman President of the United States no woman ever can or will be President. Let it be freely admitted that women have had opportunities in the creative field, and have fallen short of supremacy. What of it? One must yet perceive that the woman who has had those opportunities has been the product of a civilization constitutionally inimical to her use of them, and one may not assume thatshe has entirely escaped the effects of the continuous repression and discouragement exercised upon her by her social, domestic and political environment. When the power and purchase of this influence are fully taken into account, one would say it is not half so remarkable that women have missed supreme greatness in the arts as that they have been able to achieve anything at all. For in the arts, more than anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great deal more than the mere absence of formal restraint upon the processes of writing books or painting pictures. It is this important distinction that writers like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have overlooked or ignored. They have simply failed to take into account the effect of a generally debilitating environment on the activities of the human spirit.

The environment of women has long been such as tends to make them, much more than men, the slaves of “was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine,” and therefore to win release from the commonplace was, and still is, proportionately harder for a woman than for a man. The prevailing notion that a woman must at all costs cultivate the approval of the worldlest she fail, through lack of it, to manœuvre herself successfully into the only occupation that society showed any cordiality about opening to her—this put a heavy premium on dissimulation and artifice. Women have not dared freely to be themselves, even to themselves. It was the effect of this constraint that Stendhal noted when he remarked that “the reason why women, when they become authors, rarely attain the sublime, ... is that they never dare to be more than half candid.”

It can not be gainsaid that the east wind of indifference which has chilled the fire of many a masculine artist who found himself part of an age indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown its coldest upon the woman who essayed creative work. The woman who undertakes to achieve artistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated by men, finds herself opposed by many disabling influences. In an earlier day she had to endure being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked because she dared venture outside the limited sphere of sexuality that had been assigned to her. Now her presence in the field of spiritual endeavour is taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with thetacit assumption, which finds expression in a thousand subtle ways, that her work must be inferior on account of her sex.[7]Again, the idea that marriage and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling and are really the natural and proper calling for every woman, still has general currency; and the very fact that a vast majority of women tacitly acquiesce in this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the individual towards the orthodox and expected. Human beings are always powerfully drawn to be like their fellows; to be different requires a somewhat uncommon independence of spirit and toughness of fibre, and the fewer the individuals who attempt it, the more independence and tenacity it requires. “The fewer there be who follow the way to heaven,” says the author of the Imitation, “the harder that way is to find.”

The position of woman in creative work the world over is analogous to that of the man in America who ventures into the arts: he will be tolerated; he may even be respected; but he will not find in hisenvironment the interest and encouragement that will help to develop his talents and spur him to his best efforts. He may get sympathy and encouragement from individuals; but his environment as a whole will not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well termed the “tolerant expectancy” which nourishes and develops genius. In American civilization the prevailing ideal for men is business—material success; and our people retain, as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and disregard which the pioneer community displays towards the individual whose governing ideals take a different line of development from those of his fellows. The artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as a queer being who loses something of his manhood by taking up purely cultural pursuits, unless and until, indeed, he happens to make money by it. Yet one never hears the intimation that because no Shakespeare or Raphael has ever yet appeared in this country, none ever will. Very well—imagine instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and you perceive at once the invidious position of the woman artist in an exclusively or dominantly masculine civilization.

But what if the emergence of genius does notdepend so much on variability as upon the degree of spiritual freedom that the environment allows, and the amount and kind of culture that is current in it? “The number of geniuses produced in a nation,” says Stendhal, “is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture, and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.” The fact that prominent men of science accept the theory that genius is explained by variability, along with a number of conclusions which they have seen fit to draw from it, is no reason why their view should be considered final. Whole schools of scientists have before now gone wrong in the ticklish business of making speculative generalizations; they may go wrong again, for men of science are human, and may not be supposed to live wholly above the miasma arising from the stagnant mass of current prepossessions. So long as the apparent dearth of female genius may be satisfactorily accounted for on other grounds, one is under no compulsion to accept the theory that it is due to a natural and inescapable tendency toward mediocrity. When regarded fairly,indeed, this theory has something of anad captandumcharacter; it is not in itself disingenuous, perhaps, but it lends itself with great ease to an interested use. It offers strong support, for example, to an advocacy of an actual qualitative difference in the education of men and women. Women, being assumed to be fixed by nature at or below the line of mediocrity, shall be educated exclusively for marriage, motherhood, and the occupations which require no more than an average of reflective intelligence. This assumption underlies the educational plans of even such great libertarians as Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Hertzka; it represents a reversion, conscious or unconscious, to the primitive ideology which subordinates the individual to the group, taking for granted that the individual is to be educated not primarily for his or her own sake, but for an impersonal “good of society.” Thus, whether they are aware of it or not, those who subscribe to this theory would not only keep in woman’s way the discouraging postulate of inferiority that at present stands against her, but they would reinforce upon her those arbitrary limitations of opportunity to which her position of inferiority in the past may not unreasonably be ascribed.

I have mentioned the repression of natural impulse inculcated upon women by their upbringing. This will probably not disappear entirely until the prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help them to become fully human beings, rather than to make them marriageable; for humanity and market-value have really little in common. For centuries the minds and bodies of women have been moulded to suit the more or less casual taste of men. This was the condition of their profession, which was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her living by her sex; her artificially-induced deformities and imbecilities had an economic value: they helped to get her married. It would be impossible to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence than the dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that has been held up before womankind. “We train them up,” says Montaigne, “from their infancy to the traffic of love.” Yet men would have them, he says, “in full health, vigorous, in good keeping, high-fed and chaste together;[8]that is to say, bothhot and cold.” The utter levity of this traditional attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man’s worst failure. I know of no stronger argument for the social philosophy of the anarchist; for there is no more striking proof of the incapacity of human beings to be their brothers’ keepers than man’s failure, through sheer levity, over thousands of years to govern woman either for his good or her own.

With the growing disposition of women to take their interests into their own hands, this state of things is changing; but the curious superstitions to which its effect on the female character has given rise will long survive it. The world’s literature, from the Sanscrit proverbs to the comic magazine of the twentieth century, is full of disparaging references to the character of women; to their frailty, their cunning, their deceitfulness, their irresponsibility, their treachery—qualities, all of them, which in a fair view they seem bound to have extemporized as their only defence in a social order which was proof against more honourable weapons. “A woman,” says Amiel, “is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her,for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it.” This is no doubt true, and the purposes of the moralist perhaps demand no more than a mere statement of the fact. But the critic’s purposes demand that the fact should give an account of itself. Why does woman so regularly bear this character? Well, certainly the only life that European civilization offered to women in Amiel’s day—the only views of life that it accorded them, the only demands on life that it allowed them—was a specific for producing the kind of creature he describes; and there is no doubt that it must have produced them by the million. The inference is inescapable that an equivalent incidence of the same educational and environmental influences upon men would have produced the same kind of men. The matter, in short, is not one of the primary or even the secondary character of womenquawomen or of menquamen; it is one of the effect of education and environment upon human beingsquahuman beings.

The effort to escape this inference gives rise to extraordinary inconsistencies in the current estimate of female character, and even the estimate put upon it by men of scientific habit. Women are supposed, for instance, to be tenderer and gentler than men—“Tenderness,”says Ellen Key, “distinguishes her whole way of thinking and feeling, of wishing and working”—yet they are also supposed to be more vengeful—“Hell hath no fury....” They are supposed to be creatures of impulse and sentiment “la femme, dont l’impulsion sentimentale est le seul guide écouté”[9]—yet they are at the same time supposed to be calculating, particularly in their relations with men. Diluvial irruptions of sentimentalism are continually spewed over their nobility and self-sacrifice in the rôle of motherhood; yet men have taken care in the past to deny them guardianship of their own children. Schopenhauer, far on the right wing, again, appears to represent the legalistic point of view on this relation: he does not trust them in it beyond the first purely instinctive love for the child while it is physically helpless; he thinks they should “never be given free control of their children, wherever it can be avoided.” Man, now, is more likely, he thinks, to love his child with a lasting love, because “in the child he recognizes his own inner self; that is to say his love for it is metaphysical [or egotistical?] in its origin.” Occasionally, again, the world is treated to the diverting spectacleof some woman writer, like Dr. Gina Lombroso, trotting out all the poor old spavined superstitions and putting them through their paces in order to prove the strange contention that women are incapable of making the progress they have already made. Dr. Lombroso’s ideal woman, as I have already remarked elsewhere in a review of her recent book, is something of a cross between an imbecile and a saint; that is to say, she conforms closely to the ideal which has been held up before the women of the Christian world; an ideal towards which millions of them have striven with a faithfulness which does more credit to their devotion than to their intelligence.

Since any discussion of woman’s place in society must necessarily be to some extent a study in superstition, one can not really have done with superstition until one is done with the subject. It has seemed to warrant some special attention at the outset of this work not only because the past and present status of womankind can not be explained without reference to it, but because the future of womankind will in large measure depend upon the expeditiousness with which it and those prepossessions which spring from it, are laid aside. Thesum of these superstitions and prepossessions may be expressed in the generalization that woman is primarily a function; and wherever any remote approach to this generalization may be discerned in a discussion of her status or her rights—as it may at once be discerned, for instance, in the sentimental side of the work of feminists as staunch as Ellen Key and Olive Schreiner—at just that point the abdication of the scientific spirit in favour of superstition may be suspected.

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