“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I have said that the women who are in the movement are craving two things, knowledge and scope. Many of those who are obstructing the movement are loud in their professions that they, too, want women to know more—about “womanly” matters; that they, too, desire that women should be allowed to do—what they are “fit” for. And when the inquirer asks what is womanly, and who is to be the arbiter, the reactionary replies, with a pitying smile, that it is surely not necessary at this period in the world’s history to ask what is womanly, and that the inquirer is rather perverse than honest; that human nature is the same all the world over, and much more particularly female human nature; that wise men down all the ages have written books showing that women are instinctive rather than logical, governed by the emotions, devoted to the individual andregardless of the whole, incapable of concerted action; and that these properties of woman, at any rate of normal woman, are specially devised by Nature for the making of good mothers and for nothing else, and that, moreover, the burden of motherhood which Nature has imposed upon women is so great that they have, or should have, no time or capacity for anything outside the exercise of that function.
I wish to declare at the outset that in my opinion any speculations about women, any schemes for their education and their life-conditions which do not take into account the fact that they alone can be the mothers of the race, are thereby rendered worthless and foolish. We have not to consider one generation only; even if some philosophers desire to do so, and if individuals here and there, as they do and always will, achieve it, the greatest of all impulses will drive to reproduction, and the strongest of all desires, after those for self-preservation and self-fulfilment (and frequently even before these), will be the desire of re-living in the children and re-living better than now. I use the word re-living not to mean that there is any survival of the conscious personality of the individual in successive generations, but to suggest the imaginative and purely altruistic contemplation of future generations which shall reap where we have sown; this, I believe, is one of the deepest and purest of those motive forces which lie beyond explanation orjustification. And when I have said this is my opinion, I wish to add that in a large and varied experience of the so-called feminist movement, in England and abroad, I have found the importance of motherhood more fully understood and more religiously proclaimed by the women in the movement than by any other women. That they are in revolt against much that law and custom have laid upon motherhood is undoubted; also that they understand motherhood in a far wider sense than the vulgar one, and that they do not regard it as a specialised or vocational affair. It has been customary to divide female humans into women and mothers; this is altogether false. Women should not be trained to be mothers; to do so at once introduces all sorts of arbitrary limitations and restrictions and hampers the very mission it is designed to serve. Women should be trained to be whole human beings; the measure of a woman’s motherhood, like the measure of her love, is the measure of her whole nature. Cramp her nature, limit her activities, and you cramp and limit her love and her motherhood.
Of course the reactionary replies that we are demanding for women more than men have. That, if women have this great burden of motherhood, which men have not, the rest of the load must be lightened in proportion. We may all heartily agree that the load should be lightened, but who is to decide upon that portion of it from which women are to be exempt? Men only? Do wenot find that reactionaries describe as a burden and a care what progressives regard as a tool or a weapon? There are people now, who, knowing that men have thought the franchise of such supreme importance that they have rioted and fought and died during centuries of the world’s history for the right to choose who should be their rulers, yet assert that to give women an equal share in that choice would be to impose a fresh burden upon them! In effect these people claim that women do their work better when it is left to men to decide what that work shall be and under what conditions it shall be performed; that, although woman is the guardian of the race, and bears the burden of motherhood, it is still to be left to man to dictate the terms of motherhood.
To us, on the other hand, it seems that no distinction of race or class is so fundamental and ineradicable as the distinction of sex. Breeds may be mixed, a rich man may become poor, or a poor man rich; a man may begin life as an employed person, and end it as an employer, orvice versa; alone from the cradle to the grave, man is man and woman is woman. When I insist on this I do not overlook all the interesting and as yet unproven speculations that are made as to the varying degrees of maleness and femaleness that there may be in different individuals, nor do I subscribe to the endless cocksure generalisings upon sexual variation (for until we can separate acquiredfrom inherited characteristics, we shall never get very far); I am content to base the essential differences between men and women upon the known fact that their share in reproduction is different and produces difference of life, needs and temperament. How is it possible then, more peculiarly in sex-relations, for men alone wisely to prescribe to women?
For example. Because willingness to sacrifice is one of the attributes of motherhood, it is too often assumed that the sacrifice of the woman must be for the good of the race. Nature gives to each child two parents; man in his wisdom makes the laws which assign one only, mother or father, as may be most expedient for him,—never both,—and when he discusses racial problems, he is very apt to attribute any shortcomings to the woman, who “has only one task to perform and performs that badly.” He forgets that the child may inherit not only personal qualities but racial poisons from the father as from the mother, and that the liberty he denies the woman in sexual relations (giving as his reason the sacredness of the home and the family) has too often been used by him to the great damage of the race. He forgets, too, that whereas fatherhood is voluntary, motherhood by far too often is not. He adds laws to laws, dealing with factories and workshops, and leaves the mother’s factory—the home—to take its chance in thesauve-qui-peutof industrialism. In Great Britain he contrives a National Health InsuranceAct and leaves out altogether from its compulsory provisions the health of the mother in the home, except for maternity benefit. In this same Insurance Act he arranges that the maidens shall pay for the widows, and the women shall pay for the unmarried mothers. And when death has removed the one parent whom the law allows, public provision and private charity alike have seldom any consolation to offer the widow who has lost her dearest, but to remove from her motherly care all or some of the children left to her (now undisputed) ownership. All these cruelties and absurdities are possible because of the subjection of women.
Reactionaries on the women’s question may be divided into sentimental and brutal reactionaries. The sentimentalists declare (very often in the same breath) that women are not in subjection, and that they like being in subjection, that progress lies along the lines of specialisation, and that women should not “interfere” with men’s work. Women, they aver, are not inferior to men, but true economy is shown by increased division of labour: man’s to command, woman’s to obey. There is to be a specialisation in the virtues, too. “Can we ever have,” asks Mr. Frederic Harrison pathetically, “too much sympathy, generosity, tenderness and purity? Can self-devotion, long-suffering and affection ever be a drug in the market? Can our homes ever be too cheerful, too refined, too sweet and affectionate? And is it degrading the sex ofwoman to dedicate her specially to this task?”[2](To me it seems “degrading the sex” of man to suggest that he has no need to practise all these fine qualities, but that he will practise them vicariously through woman, who is to be dedicated specially to them.) The sentimentalists suggest that this willing service women have for centuries rendered to men, and been happy and good. The bold bad feminists have wantonly stirred up revolt, and peace and happiness will only return when they have been routed and the “awful rule and right supremacy” of man re-established.
I think we may dismiss without much argument the assertion that women are not in subjection, and indeed, sooner or later, the reactionary always gets tripped up on this ground. It is not possible to study our social institutions without coming to the conclusion that they are the result of the subjection of women and that many of them tend to perpetuate that subjection. It is inconceivable that women, of their free and enlightened will, would have chosen this position. That some women are found to maintain that it is not subjection and they like it, is only a proof of the mental and moral effects of subjection upon them. There is a brave spirit which declares that “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage,” and much of women’s work has been done in that spirit. Exceptional women have triumphed over their prison(at what cost the life of the Brontës may show), but the world is not composed of exceptional women, and the mass of women have been degraded by the narrowness and irresponsibility of their lives. One is familiar with the idealistic assertion that no one can injure you except you yourself. It is a fine thing to hold to your sovereign will and force it to command your life, but who can look round on the world as it is and not see everywhere signs of how men and women degrade their fellows by cruelty, carelessness and greed? It sounds like cant to tell the girl and boy who have been reared in a slum and have never known decency that they need not have allowed themselves to be degraded. It sounds like cant to tell a woman she is not in subjection to men’s law when this law does not allow that she is the parent of the child she has borne, and when men can at any time, and do, deprive her of the inviolability of her own body and of the right to earn an honest livelihood. No, it is not arguable whether women nearly all over the world (and certainly in England) are in subjection, and I do not intend to argue it. The only questions are, How came they so? Are the causes eternal and irremovable? Would it be well if they were removed?
I confess to a much higher regard for the honest brutalitarian than for the sentimentalist; for the man or woman who says candidly that women are subject to men because they are inferior to men, either physically, or intellectually, or both. Even among these there is a tendency to allow, with ashrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly conducted entirely by the light of one’s predispositions, and which leads nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly the faults encouraged by subjection. Men’s standards have been applied to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while. It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be that women’s lack of genius in the arts is due to someinferiority of mind, or it may be due to an essential incapacity for or an artificial prohibition of the passionate, concentrated egoism, which alone can produce the greatest works of imagination. The special pleader against women will declare that if they had any capacity at all, it would have shown itself in music and painting, for young ladies have always been encouraged to sing and to play and to sketch. And as for poetry, it is only necessary to have pencil and paper and—genius. As if the kind of parlour tricks that used to be expected of marriageable young ladies had any relation at all to creative art! The eighteenth century or early Victorian parent had a short way with any daughter who wished to take any art seriously. We know how Maria Edgworth humbly submitted to have her work blue-pencilled by her affectionate but inferior father, how Harriet Martineau suffered from the endless task of shirt-making, how Jane Austen hid her compositions under fancy work, lest visitors should suspect she was that unsexed thing, an artist.
But the whole discussion whether women are mentally inferior to men is indeed impertinent to the practical issue whether or no women should have their lives and work controlled by men. Only by liberty of action and scope for our powers can we develop healthily and harmoniously, and the fact that so much of a woman’s life and experience lies altogether outside what a man can experience should surely make men a little diffident aboutdictating conditions. The opportunity to develop is not a reward of virtue nor a prize for genius. Women, as well as men, should have the fullest possible opportunities for development, not because they are “equal” to men (a most unfortunate phrase), but because it is good business, socially speaking, to develop all your human as well as your material resources. The developed person will be more useful, more companionable, more reasonable, more happy and more amusing than the undeveloped. And if man be really the intellectual superior of woman, why should he fear her competition?
“He will not read her good,Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;Through that old devil of the thousand lures,Through that dense hood:Through terror, through distrust;The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:Through all that makes of him a sensitiveAbhorring dust.”George Meredith.
“He will not read her good,Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;Through that old devil of the thousand lures,Through that dense hood:Through terror, through distrust;The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:Through all that makes of him a sensitiveAbhorring dust.”George Meredith.
“He will not read her good,Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;Through that old devil of the thousand lures,Through that dense hood:
“He will not read her good,
Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
Through that dense hood:
Through terror, through distrust;The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:Through all that makes of him a sensitiveAbhorring dust.”
Through terror, through distrust;
The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:
Through all that makes of him a sensitive
Abhorring dust.”
George Meredith.
George Meredith.
In the last chapter the question was put whether women are intellectually and morally inferior to men, and the conclusion was that this was a question incapable of solution, certainly now, and probably always; furthermore, that, even if it were answered in the affirmative, this would be no reason for denying to women opportunities for their fullest development. We now come to another sort of superiority, which is capable of proof, which has been proved to demonstration and which of itself accounts perfectly for the subjection of women during the ages of human development in the past. This is, of course, the superiority of men as a whole, over women as a whole, in size, weight and muscle.It seems doubtful whether, among races where women have the same physical discipline as men, they are any less enduring of fatigue, and there are some hardships, such as shortage of food, broken nights and severe pain, which women seem better adapted to bear than men. Again, of men and women engaged in the same employment, such as the teaching profession—in which no one can say that women have the lighter task, for which women are much less highly paid, and which very rarely represents the whole of the work the woman teacher is expected to get through in the day—the women live longer than the men. The superiority of the male over the female in size, weight and muscle seems the only one established beyond doubt, and as this superiority is seen in most of the animals, there is a strong presumption that it is not entirely due to artificial conditions of feeding, exercise and so forth. The extraordinary increase in the average size of British girls during the last hundred or even fifty years shows, however, that semi-starvation, lack of exercise and of the nervous energy which comes from hope and a purpose in life, were the purely artificial causes of the extreme weakness of the weaker sex during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments that have been made in the reaction-time and relative sensibility of boys and girls, suffer from the circumstance that the subjects experimented upon could not be scientifically treated, and all that the experiments prove is that boys, often fed and always reareddifferently from girls, showed slightly quicker reaction-time, and, in a few cases, slightly more developed sensibility. Anyone who has begun to realise the extremely complex causes of good and bad nutrition and its close dependence on mental states will put himself the question whether the confined, thwarted, and monotonous lives of girls have not counted for very much in the imperfect nutrition of their nerves and therefore in their lack of initiative and response.
But now, of this undoubted muscular superiority of men. What has it led to? In early stages of civilisation, Might was Right. A man took what he could and kept it if he could. Nations and governments were founded on the same principle of self-protection and self-aggrandisement, and empires followed. Women did not escape this law of the strongest. In addition to what seems a congenital muscular inferiority, women had the enormous handicap (for fighting purposes) of motherhood. The nine months of gestation and the succeeding period of nourishing and cherishing the infant were, and are, and always will be sufficient reason why women cannot successfully resist men by force. Not infrequently have I heard women, and much more frequently men, say on public platforms that it is not true that women cannot fight; that some women are stronger than some men, and that women are only prevented by men from enrolling in the army and defending their country. This always seems to me the silliest stuff. How could men preventwomen from fighting if women wanted to fight and were as strong as men? If women were as strong as men and as fond of using their strength in fight, and if they desired their enfranchisement, how is it that they have not fought for it and won it long ago? But the women’s battle is a far harder one: it is to induce men to give up the primary impulses of animal nature at the command of reason and knowledge; to refrain from taking what theycantake, from commanding where they can enforce obedience. And this is a battle which was begun ages ago, and in every age has had its victories,—victories due, not to the pitting of physical force against physical force, but, first, to man’s deep need of woman, which prevented him from destroying her, as he destroyed all other weaker creatures when he had no use for them, and, second, to the mutual love of man and woman and their common bond in the child. Physical force is a great and vastly important part of the forces wielded by man, but it never has been the only one, and it is increasingly being brought under the dominion and guidance of other forces. Women, too, have their physical force, without which the race would be extinguished; and, in the last resort, if we could imagine the brutality of man contemplating a warà outranceagainst women, their strength would be found to lie, not in the fact that they could conquer men in a physical conflict, but that they could die. For those who can only read what is explicit, I hasten to add that I do not believe such a stateof things could ever arise, although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of exterminating the enemy’s women.
If we find some of the women’s champions a little hazy on this matter, their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance of physical force as a “regrettable fact,” do lip-service to the gospel of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and heartfelt declaration that it was “only just and right that men, who alone can enforce the law, should make the law.” Now, if it is right and just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist does not deny that nations can wage wars;what he says is that war, at the present time, and between civilised countries, is “bad business.” I do not deny that most men could knock most women down; I say it would be bad business to use this power, and I believe that most civilised men would agree that it would be bad business, that they have no desire to rule women in this way, and that society will be much healthier and happier when men as a whole abandon the practice altogether. And the anti-suffragists who make such statements about men have so low an opinion of them that I am ashamed for them.
Another frequent absurdity of anti-suffrage argument is the assertion that we wish to destroy physical force, and that if we succeed, we shall become the easy prey of other less foolish nations. Now, to wish that physical force shall be controlled by knowledge, intelligence and right is not to desire its destruction; on the contrary. There is no enemy of health and vigour so subtle and so strong as ignorance and incontinence. It is not love and kindness, temperance, soberness and chastity which sap a nation’s strength and make its young men to fail when tested; it is ignorance, or disregard of nature’s laws, the sweating and overcrowding of millions, the slackness and self-indulgence of those whom their more fortunate conditions should have made leaders of men. It is to the interest of men that women should do their work well, and under the dominion of physical force, of fear and compulsion, women can never do their best work.
Women are making great claims: they are not only claiming that the men of their own land shall not govern them by physical force alone, but they are making what, to some quite honest people, seems an outrageous claim,—that they should have a right to an equal share with men in deciding foreign policy and the question of war. They claim this right, because they believe that it would be for the good of the State, and because they think the State owes it to them because they are citizens and not parasites; because they are doing an absolutely indispensable work and making sacrifices which are at least equal to the sacrifices men make for the safety, honour and welfare of the State. Let us examine into the grounds of this plea.
At an open-air meeting a man approached the speaker with what he evidently regarded as a poser: “If you get a man’s rights, will you women fulfil a man’s responsibilities?” It was a good question to ask at an open-air meeting, where close reasoning is almost impossible, and the answer, “No,” brought a sneering, “Ah, Ithoughtnot!” and a round of applause from the youths round the cart, who didn’t look as if they had thought much about even a lad’s responsibilities. The heckler was, of course, begging the question. By talking of “a man’s rights” he did not merely mean the rights which a man can now by law exercise; he implied that a man held these rights by virtue of certain services rendered by him, and that, if women claimed these same rights, they must be prepared to render thesesame services. I will deal in a subsequent chapter with the question whether, as a matter of fact, voting rights are, in modern England, dependent upon the military service or upon the physical force of the men who exercise them. For the moment I wish to discuss the ethical and social consequences of asserting that only one kind of service entitles a person to liberty, and that service being the taking of life, women, whose service consists in the giving of life, are not entitled to liberty. “A man’s responsibilities!” Let us take them at their very hardest. Let us contemplate the ideal world of the anti-suffragist, where man goes out daily to his toil in the cruel world—
“commits his bodyTo painful labour, both by sea and land,To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
“commits his bodyTo painful labour, both by sea and land,To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
“commits his bodyTo painful labour, both by sea and land,To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
“commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
while woman lies “warm at home, secure and safe.” He, if fighting is to be done, fights for home and country; she has no more arduous part than to weep, while he is away, and welcome home the victor. But stay! This version of affairs always assumes that the man is the victor. Have not the vanquished wives, too? Study the picture of any war, even the most modern and the most “civilised.” Are the women of the vanquished, the invaded country, “secure and safe”? From the tale of the Trojan women to the latest reports of Bulgarian or Servian atrocities, we find all truthful records give the lie to this rosy picture. Men who go to war have the honour and the glory, thebands and the banners, the stars and medals and monuments and maybe the glorious death. Women die, and see their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are killed, are their “responsibilities” killed with them? When the flower of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and beget the men of the future?
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,
The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,
Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
These are only some few of the questions that surge up in a woman’s mind when men talk as if war concerned men only. But after all, in a modern civilised state, is war the only thing that counts? Is soldiering the only national service? Mr. Kipling’s grandiloquent phrase about woman’s hindering hand on the warrior’s bridle rein makes men and women who are mentally alive smile at its ludicrous inappropriateness to the greater part of life as we live it. And if we admit that, fighting being a man’s business, the details of how best to fight are properly left to men to determine, can werefuse to admit that, child-bearing and rearing being a woman’s business, the details of how to bear and rear children are properly left to women to determine? And if the amount of freedom persons possess depends on the amount of service they render to the State (a principle which, as I have shown in Chapter II., I do not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life. Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they shifted man’s claim to superiority from his military to his economic qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.
In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption that one frequently finds implicitin much of the feminist talk of the present day—the assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising. There are no signs of this in literature or history. If men have enjoyed fighting, and gloried in bloodshed, as many still do, that is because their blood was hot within them, and the women of their age and race loved them for it. The experiences of men and women have each made for civilisation, and women have not the man’s obvious temptation with fists to try conclusions, since they are for the most part foregone conclusions. If motherhood has been for much in the education of the race, so have science and the love of the arts and beauty. Agriculture, manufacture, commerce, even finance have engaged men’s hearts, and more often than not turned them from war. War is waste and the women’s movement may be taken as the type of all the great conflicts there have been between coercion and development, bullying and understanding, love and hate. What has been good in war has been the life-forces, the energy, the joy that men have put into it. They are finding other conflicts than those with their fellow-men, into which they can put these forces, and the women’s movement, in part the cause, is also in great measure the effect of the disappearance of barbarism.
“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—Walt Whitman,Democratic Vistas.
“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—Walt Whitman,Democratic Vistas.
Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best. They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that of women. Ihave already touched upon the lack of foundation for this assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying, spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments “untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very like this in the course of the Dreyfuscase, when it became a reproach to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women, according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “The women’s vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side.” (Italics mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterousviews and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man (save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used by men of each other in political controversy.
We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,” he writes,[3]“any considerable body of persons who are not represented in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through selfishness than through the stupidityor preoccupation of the voters and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that, even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.
How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man! Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be advised by them,” say the reactionaries. “Yes. And also you may not,” is the reply. Professor Dicey makes much of the distinction between civil, as distinct from political, rights. He speaks of reconciling his “enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in sovereign power.” But the male electorate is not all so enlightened as Professor Dicey, andcivil rights depend upon political rights. Men less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education (and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women’s side), and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married Women’s Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for evermore men will feel like women?
Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we do not. The very existence of customs and laws and governmentsproves that men believe humanity needs these motives in addition to moral ones, and, unless you are an anarchist, you must agree that they do. When men get altogether away from women they forget women. It is natural. Therefore women, who suffer from being forgotten when their lives are at stake, require that men shall not in future be able to get altogether away from them when they are employed in governing them, as they do now in Parliament. Mr. Harrison gives us an interesting and touching little bit of information when he says, “To speak the truth, I only know one woman whom I would always trust to come to a right decision”; but this fact has really no general interest or value, and even if women did not, on the whole, represent the views of Mr. Harrison, this would not prevent them from representing their own, which is what matters in representative government. Mr. Harrison becomes appealing when he says, “Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman to decide these complex issues”; because that is just howwefeel!Wedo not trust the average man to decide these complex issues. A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and perhaps when Mr. Harrison has grasped this feeling of ours, he will see that the proper thing is for neither man nor woman to attempt to decide these complex issues alone.
We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible it isfor a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite; women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about. We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who make money and take life. “Things arein the saddle,” says Emerson, “and ride mankind.”
Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England “the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is, of course, entirely without foundation. The vote isnotgiven to the family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote isnotrefused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the English women at home.
The possession, by the people, of the parliamentary vote does not make a democracy. Manyother things are necessary for that. But the vote is a piece of the machinery of democracy without which it cannot work, and it is lamentable to hear men who call themselves Liberals, and who use all the old catchwords of the democratic party, refusing to apply their Liberalism to women and bringing against the enfranchisement of women all the ragged old arguments which used to be brought against men’s enfranchisement and which are ragged from the shot wherewith the old reformers riddled them. “Men know better than women what is good for women!” Yes, and the slave-owner knew what was good for his slaves; and the employer knew what was good for his employees; and the landlord knew what was good for his tenants! But the slave and the employee and the tenant did not think so then, and no one dares say so now. The women’s day is coming too, and the people of the future will deride those Liberals of the early twentieth century who talked of the Will of the People and forgot the mothers; who boasted of their intention to enfranchise every person “of full age and competent understanding” and left out half the people; who declared that “citizenship” should be the basis of voting rights and denied these rights to all women, thereby admitting (what the women had been rebuked for asserting) that Britons, when they happened to be female Britons,wereslaves. No external defeats could have so sapped the prestige of the political Liberal party as the fact that it failed altogether,as a party, to recognise the force and the progressive idealism of the women’s movement. There is now in England no movement that can compare in vigour, intelligence and devotion with the women’s movement. When the Liberal party acknowledges this and identifies itself with the movement, it will once more step into the line of progress; until then it is true to say that the progressive women and the Labour party which supports them are the only democrats. Moreover, the penalty of supporting reaction in one direction is that the logic of events drives men into the logic of thought. Many a Liberal who hoped he could restrict his illiberalism to women, is finding himself forced into general principles of reaction which will sooner or later—horrible to contemplate!—overwhelm men too.
On the other hand, the effect upon women of the agitation for the vote has been enlarging beyond even the most sanguine expectations. I myself have seen women of the middle class, who began by desiring the vote from a personal and quite legitimate sense of their own worth and claims, led, from a sense of justice, to entertain the claims of other less fortunate women, and by degrees find their desire redoubled on behalf of these women, whose needs, experience and sympathy gradually demonstrated as far exceeding their own. No less remarkable is the enlargement of the lives of these less fortunate women, by the growth of sympathy and understanding between the different classesand by the linking up of public and private duties and aims. “Since she’s been a suffragist,” I have heard a man say, “my wife has seemed to take more interest in the home. It hasn’t taken her thoughts off; it has only made her think more.” And I have heard a middle-aged woman use the pathetic phrase, “Since I began to think,” meaning, “Since I joined the suffrage movement.”
Is it all unmixed good, then? Is the women’s movement singular in this, that it is perfect? Will women make no mistakes? By no means. Who could be so foolish as to think so? But by mistakes we learn. If you wish to learn a new language you must blunder in it first. One of the reasons of women’s slow development is that men are so afraid women will make fools of themselves. We all have a divine right to make fools of ourselves, because the force that created us decreed that only so could we learn, and the convention by which a woman is never allowed to be a fool all to herself, as an individual, but is made to sin for her whole sex, is an anti-progressive convention which must go. A woman fires a building and we are told “Woman” has disgraced herself, “She” is unfit for the vote. But men sack empires and burn cities to the ground and no one says “Man” has disgraced himself, “He” is unfit for the vote.
I think I hear the horror-stricken Anti declare, “A right to make a fool of yourself? But it isourEmpire that you are asking for,—to play with! Our Empire which we made ourselves and which isso complex, so delicate, so nicely poised, that one push from a foolish woman’s little finger will send it reeling to destruction.” The Anti wants to make our flesh creep; but it refuses. We don’t for a moment admit that the Empire, with its millions of men and women, belongs to men any more than it belongs to women. We can’t believe, either, that the Empire is in so shockingly delicate a condition as the Antis make out. The cry is for safety. Only Death is safe.