THE NEW WOMAN

It can scarcely be disputed, I think, that in the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores: The Workingman and the Woman. The Workingman and the Woman, the New Woman, be it remembered, meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue; and each is convinced that on its own special W hangs the future of the world. Both he and she want to have their values artificially raised and rated, and a status given to them by favour in lieu of desert. In an age in which persistent clamour is generally crowned by success they have both obtained considerable attention; is it offensive to say much more of it than either deserves?

A writer, signing the name of Sarah Grand, has of late written on this theme; and she avers that the Cow-Woman and the Scum-Woman, man understands; but that the New Woman is above him. The elegance of these choice appellatives is not calculated to recommend them to educated readers of either sex; and as a specimen of style forces one to hint that the NewWoman who, we are told, ‘has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years’ might in all these years have studied better models of literary composition.

We are farther on told ‘that the dimmest perception that you may be mistaken, will save you from making an ass of yourself.’ It appears that even this dimmest perception has never dawned upon the New Woman.

We are farther told that ‘thinking and thinking,’ in her solitary, sphinx-like contemplation, she solved the problem and prescribed the remedy (the remedy to a problem!); but what this remedy was we are not told, nor did the New Woman apparently disclose it to the rest of womankind, since she still hears them in ‘sudden and violent upheaval’ like ‘children unable to articulate whimpering for they know not what.’ It is sad to reflect that they might have been ‘easily satisfied at that time’ (at what time?), ‘but society stormed at them until what was a little wail became convulsive shrieks;’ and we are not told why the New Woman who had ‘the remedy for the problem,’ did not immediately produce this remedy. We are not told either in what country or at what epoch this startling upheaval of volcanic womanhood took place in which ‘man merely made himself a nuisance with his opinions and advice,’ but apparently did quell this wailing and gnashing of teeth since it would seem that he has managed still to remain more masterful than he ought to be.

We are further informed that women ‘have allowed him to arrange the whole social system, and manage, or mismanage, it all these ages without ever seriouslyexamining his work with a view to considering whether his abilities and his methods were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task.’

There is something comical in the idea thus suggested, that man has only been allowed to ‘manage or mismanage’ the world because woman has graciously refrained from preventing his doing so. But the comic side of this pompous and solemn assertion does not for a moment offer itself to the New Woman sitting aloof and aloft in her solitary meditation on the superiority of her sex. For the New Woman there is no such thing as a joke. She has listened without a smile to her enemy’s ‘preachments’; she has ‘endured poignant misery for his sins;’ she has ‘meekly bowed her head’ when he called her bad names; and she has never asked for ‘any proof of the superiority’ which could alone have given him a right to use such naughty expressions. The truth about everything has all along been in the possession of woman; but strange and sad perversity of taste! she has ‘cared more for man than for truth, and so the whole human race has suffered!’

‘All that is over, however,’ we are told, and ‘while on the one hand man has shrunk to his true proportions’ she has, during the time of this shrinkage, been herself expanding, and has in a word come to ‘fancy herself’ extremely, so that he has no longer the slightest chance of imposing upon her by his game-cock airs.

Man, ‘having no conception of himself as imperfect’ (what would Hamlet say to this accusation?) will find this difficult to understand at first; but the New Woman ‘knows his weakness,’ and will ‘helphim with his lesson.’ ‘Man morally is in his infancy.’ There have been times when there was a doubt as to whether he was to be raised to her level, or woman to be lowered to his, but we ‘have turned that corner at last and now woman holds out a strong hand to the child-man and insists upon helping him up.’ The child-man (Bismarck? Herbert Spencer? Edison? Gladstone? Alexander III.? Lord Dufferin? the Duc d’Aumale?)—the child-man must have his tottering baby steps guided by the New Woman, and he must be taught to live up to his ideals. To live up to an ideal, whether our own or somebody else’s, is a painful process; but man must be made to do it. For, oddly enough, we are assured that despite ‘all his assumption he does not make the best of himself,’ which is not wonderful if he be still only in his infancy; and he has the incredible stupidity to be blind to the fact that ‘woman has self-respect and good sense,’ whilst he has neither, and that ‘she does not in the least intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys on the chance of obtaining others.’

I have written amongst otherpensées éparseswhich will some day see the light, the following reflection:—

L’école nouvelle des femmes libres oublie qu’on ne puisse pas à la fois combattre l’homme sur son propre terrain, et attendre de lui des politesses, des tendresses, et des galantéries. Il ne faut pas au même moment prendre de l’homme son chaire à l’Université et sa place dans l’omnibus; si on lui arrâche son gagne-pain on ne peut pas exiger qu’il offre aussi sa parapluie.

The whole kernel of the question lies in this. The supporters of the New Woman declare that she will not surrender her present privileges,i.e., though she may usurp his professorial seat, and seize his salary,she will still expect the man to stand that she may sit; the man to get wet through that she may use his umbrella. Yet surely if she retain these privileges she can only do so by an appeal to his chivalry,i.e., by a confession that she is weaker than he. But she does not want to do this; she wants to get the comforts and concessions due to feebleness, at the same time as she demands the lion’s share of power due to superior force alone. It is this overweening and unreasonable grasping at both positions which will end in making her odious to man and in her being probably kicked back roughly by him into the seclusion of a harem.

The New Woman declares that man cannot do without woman. It is a doubtful postulate. In the finest intellectual and artistic era of the world women were not necessary to either the pleasures or passions of men. It is possible that if women make themselves as unlovely and offensive as they appear likely to become, the preferences of the Platonic Age may become acknowledged and dominant, and women may be relegated entirely to the lowest plane as a mere drudge and child-bearer.

Before me at the moment lies an engraving from an illustrated journal of a woman’s meeting; whereat a woman is demanding, in the name of her sovereign sex, the right to vote at political elections. The speaker is middle-aged and plain of feature; she wears an inverted plate on her head, tied on with strings under her double-chin; she has balloon-sleeves, a bodice tight to bursting, a waist of ludicrous dimensions in proportion to her portly person; her whole attire is elaborately constructed so as toconceal any physical graces which she might possess; she is gesticulating with one hand, of which all the fingers are stuck out in ungraceful defiance of all artistic laws of gesture. Now, why cannot this orator learn to gesticulate properly and learn to dress gracefully, instead of clamouring for a franchise? She violates in her own person every law, alike of common-sense and artistic fitness, and yet comes forward as a fit and proper person to make laws for others. She is an exact representative of her sex as it exists at the dawn of the twentieth century.

There have been few periods in which woman’s attire has been so ugly, so disfiguring and so preposterous as it is in this year of grace (1894) at a period when, in newspaper and pamphlet, on platform and in dining-room, and in the various clubs she has consecrated to herself, woman is clamouring for her recognition as a being superior to man. She cannot clothe herself with common sense or common grace, she cannot resist the dictates of tailors and the example of princesses; she cannot resist the squaw-like preference for animals’ skins, and slaughtered birds, and tufts torn out of the living and bleeding creature; she cannot show to any advantage the natural lines of her form, but disguises them as grotesquely as mantua-makers bid her to do. She cannot go into the country without making herself a caricature of man, in coat and waistcoat and gaiters; she apes all his absurdities, she emulates all his cruelties and follies; she wears his ugly pot hats, his silly, stiff collars; she copies his inane club-life and then tells us that this parody, incapable of initiative, bare oftaste and destitute of common sense, is worthy to be enthroned as the supreme teacher of the world!

Woman, whether new or old, leaves immense fields of culture untilled, immense areas of influence wholly neglected. She does almost nothing with the resources she possesses, because her whole energy is concentrated on desiring and demanding those she had not. She can write and print anything she chooses; and she scarcely ever takes the pains to acquire correct grammar or elegance of style before wasting ink and paper. She can paint and model any subjects she chooses, but she imprisons herself in men’satéliersto endeavour to steal their technique and their methods, and thus loses any originality she might possess in art. Her influence on children might be so great that through them she would practically rule the future of the world; but she delegates her influence to the vile school boards if she be poor, and if she be rich to governesses and tutors; nor does she in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ever attempt to educate or control herself into fitness for the personal exercise of such influence. Her precept and example in the treatment of the animal creation might be of infinite use in mitigating the hideous tyranny of humanity over them, but she does little or nothing to this effect; she wears dead birds and the skins of dead creatures; she hunts the hare and shoots the pheasant, she drives and rides with more brutal recklessness than men; she watches with delight the struggles of the dying salmon, of the gralloched deer; she keeps her horses standing in snow and fog for hours, with the muscles of their heads and necks tied up in the torture of the bearingrein; when asked to do anything for a stray dog, a lame horse, a poor man’s donkey, she is very sorry, but she has so many claims on her already; she never attempts by orders to her household, to herfóurnisseurs, to her dependents, to obtain some degree of mercy in the treatment of sentient creatures and in the methods of their slaughter, and she continues to trim her court gowns with the aigrettes of ospreys.

The immense area for good influence which lies open to her in private life is almost entirely uncultivated, yet she wants to be admitted into public life. Public life is already overcrowded, verbose, incompetent, fussy and foolish enough without the addition of her in her sealskin coat with the dead humming bird on her hat. Women in public life would exaggerate the failings of men, and would not have even their few excellencies. Their legislation would be, as that of men is too often, the offspring of panic or prejudice; and women would not put on the drag of common-sense as men frequently do in public assemblies. There would be little to hope from their humanity, nothing from their liberality; for when they are frightened they are more ferocious than men, and, when they gain power, more merciless.

‘Men,’ says one of the New Women, ‘deprived us of all proper education and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge.’ How far is this based on facts? Could not Lady Jane Grey learn Greek and Latin as she chose? Could not Hypatia lecture? Was George Sand or Mrs Somerville withheld from study? Could not in every age every woman choose a Corinna or a Cordelia as her type?become either Helen or Penelope? If the vast majority have not the mental or physical gifts to become either, that is Nature’s fault, not man’s. Aspasia and Adelina Patti were born, not made. In all eras and all climes a woman of great genius or of great beauty has done very much what she chose; and if the majority of women have led obscure lives, so have the majority of men. The chief part of humanity is insignificant whether it be male or female. In most people there is very little character indeed, and as little mind. Those who have much of either never fail to make their mark, be they of which sex they may.

The unfortunate idea that there is no good education without a college curriculum is as injurious as it is erroneous. The college education may have excellencies for men in its friction, its preparation for the world, its rough destruction of personal conceit; but for women it can only be hardening and deforming. If study be delightful to a woman, she will find her way to it as the hart to water brooks. The author ofAurora Leighwas not only always at home, but she was also for many years a confirmed invalid; yet she became a fine classic, and found her path to fame. A college curriculum would have done nothing to improve her rich and beautiful mind; it might have done much to debase it.

It would be impossible to love and venerate literature of the highest kind more profoundly than did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, yet she was the most retiring of women and chained by weakness to her couch until her starry-eyed and fiery suitor descended on her and bore her away to Italy. It is difficultto see what the distinction of being called a wrangler can add to the solid advantage and the intellectual pleasure of studying mathematics; or what the gaining of a college degree in classics can add to the delightful culture of Greek and Latin literature as soughtper se.

The perpetual contact of men with other men may be good for them, but the perpetual contact of women with other women is very far from good. The publicity of a college must be injurious to a young girl of refined and delicate feeling, whilst the adoration of other women (as in the late chairing of a wrangler by other girl graduates) is unutterably pernicious. Nor can I think the present mania for exploration and incessant adventure beneficial either to the woman or the world.

When a young and good-looking girl chooses to ride or walk all alone through a wild and unexplored country, it must be admitted that, if the narrative of her adventures be not sheer fable, she must have perpetually run the risk of losing what women have hitherto been taught to consider dearer than life. It is nothing short of courting abuse of her maiden person to explore all alone mountainous regions and desert plains inhabited by wild and fierce races of men. One such young traveller describes, amongst other risky exploits, how she came one night in the Carpathians upon a deep and lonely pool, made black as the mouth of Avernus by its contrast with the moonlit rocks around, and of how, tempted by this blackness, she got down from her saddle, stripped, plunged and bathed! The stars alone, she says, looked down on this exploit, but how could this Susannah be sure therewere no Elders? And common sense timidly whispers, how, oh how, did she manage to dry herself?

Personally, I do not in the least believe in these stories any more than in those of the noted Munchausen; but they are put into print as sober facts, and as such we are requested and expected to receive them.

The ‘Scum-Woman’ and the ‘Cow-Woman,’ to quote the elegant phraseology of the defenders of their sex, are both of them less of a menace to humankind than the New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her overweening estimate of her own value, and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous.

When scum comes to the surface it renders a great service to the substance which it leaves behind it; when the cow yields pure nourishment to the young and the suffering, her place is blessed in the realm of nature; but when the New Woman splutters blistering wrath on mankind she is merely odious and baneful.

The error of the New Woman (as of many an old one) lies in speaking of women as the victims of men, and entirely ignoring the frequency with which men are the victims of women. In nine cases out of ten the first to corrupt the youth is the woman. In nine cases out of ten also she becomes corrupt herself because she likes it.

When Leonide Leblanc, scorning to adopt the career of a school teacher, for which her humble family had educated her, walked down the hill from Montmartre to seek her fortunes in the streets of Paris, she did so because she liked to do so, whichwas indeed quite natural in her. Neither Mephistopheles nor Faust led her down from Montmartre, and its close little kitchen and common little bedchamber; neither Mephistopheles nor Faust was wanted, Paris and the boulevards were attraction enough, and her own beauty and ambition were spurs sufficiently sharp to make her leave the unlovely past and seek the dazzling future. The accusation of seduction is very popular with women, and they excuse everything faulty in their lives with it; but the accusation is rarely based on actual facts. The youth and the maiden incline towards each other as naturally as the male and female blossoms of trees are blown together by the fertilising breeze of spring. An attraction of a less poetic, of a wholly physical kind, brings together the boy and girl in the garrets, in the cellars, in the mines, on the farm lands, in the promiscuous intercourse of the streets. It is nature which draws the one to the other; and the blame lies less on them than with the hypocritical morality of a modern world which sees what it calls sin in Nature.

It is all very well to say that prostitutes were at the beginning of their career victims of seduction; but it is not probable and it is not provable. Love of drink and of finery, and a dislike to work, are the more likely motives and origin of their degradation. It never seems to occur to the accusers of man that women are just as vicious and as lazy as he is in nine cases out of ten, and need no invitation from him to become so.

A worse prostitution than that of the streets,i.e., that of loveless marriages of convenience, are broughtabout by women, not by men. In such unions the man always gives much more than he gains, and the woman in almost every instance is persuaded or driven into it by women: her mother, her sisters, her acquaintances. It is rarely that the father interferes to bring about such a marriage.

A rich marriage represents to the woman of culture and position what the streets represent to the woman of the people. But it is none the less a loveless sale of self, because its sale is ratified at St Paul’s Knightsbridge or at S. Philippe du Roule.

In even what is called a well-assorted marriage, the man is frequently sacrificed to the woman. As I wrote long ago, Andrea del Sarte’s wife has many sisters; Correggio, dying of the burden of the family, has many brothers. Men of genius are often pinned to earth by their wives. They are continually dwarfed and dulled by their female relations, and rendered absurd by their sons and daughters. In our own day a famous statesman is made very ridiculous by his wife. Frequently the female influences brought to bear on him render a man of great and original powers and disinterested character, a time-server, a conventionalist, a mere seeker of place. Woman may help man sometimes, but she certainly more often hinders him. Her self-esteem is immense and her self-knowledge very small. I view with dread for the future of the world the power which modern inventions place in the hands of woman. Hitherto her physical weakness has restrained her in a great measure from violent action; but a woman can make a bomb and throw it, can fling vitriol, and fire a repeating revolver as well as any man can.These are precisely the deadly, secret, easily handled modes of warfare and revenge, which will commend themselves to her ferocious feebleness.

Jules Rochard has written:

‘J’ai professé de l’anatomie pendant des longues années, j’ai passé une bonne partie de mavie dans les amphithéâtres, mais je n’en ai pas moins éprouvé un sentiment pénible en trouvant dans toutes les maisons d’education des squelettes d’animaux et des mannequins anatomiques entre les mains des fillettes.’

I suppose this passage will be considered as an effort ‘to withhold knowledge from women,’ but it is one which is full of true wisdom and honourable feeling. When you have taken her into the physiological and chemical laboratories, when you have extinguished pity in her, and given weapons to her dormant cruelty, which she can use in secret, you will be hoist with your own petard—your pupil will be your tyrant, and then she will meet with the ultimate fate of all tyrants.

In the pages of an eminent review a physician has recently lamented the continually increasing unwillingness of women of the world in the United States to bear children, and the consequent increase of ill-health; whilst to avoid child-bearing is being continually preached to the working classes by those who call themselves their friends.

The elegant epithet of Cow-Woman implies the contempt with which maternity is viewed by the New Woman, who thinks it something fine to vote at vestries, and shout at meetings, and lay bare the spine of living animals, and haul the gasping salmon from the river pool, and hustle male students off the benches of amphitheatres.

Modesty is no doubt a thing of education or prejudice, a conventionality artificially stimulated; but it is an exquisite grace, and womanhood without it loses its most subtle charm. Nothing tends so to destroy modesty as the publicity and promiscuity of schools, of hotels, of railway trains and sea voyages. True modesty shrinks from the curious gaze of other women as from the coarser gaze of man. When a girl has a common bedchamber and a common bathroom with other girls, she loses the delicate bloom of her modesty. Exposure to a crowd of women is just as nasty as exposure to a crowd of men.

Men, moreover, are in all, except the very lowest classes, more careful of their talk before young girls than women are, or at least were so until the young women of fashion insisted on their discarding such scruples. It is very rarely that a man does not respect real innocence; but women frequently do not. The jest, the allusion, the story which sullies her mind and awakes her inquisitiveness, will much oftener be spoken by women than men. It is not from her brothers, nor her brother’s friends, but from her female companions that she will understand what the grosser laugh of those around her suggests. The biological and pathological curricula complete the loveless disflowering of her maiden soul.

Everything which tends to obliterate the contrast of the sexes, like the mixture of boys and girls in American common schools, tends also to destroy the charm of intercourse, the savour and sweetness of life. Seclusion lends an infinite seduction to the girl, whilst the rude and bustling publicity of modern liferobs woman of her grace. Packedlikelikeherrings in a railway carriage, sleeping in odious vicinity to strangers on a shelf, going days and nights without a bath, exchanging decency and privacy for publicity and observation, the women who travel, save those rich enough to still purchase seclusion, are forced to cast aside all refinement and delicacy.

It is said that travel enlarges the mind. There are many minds which can no more be enlarged, by any means whatever, than a nut or a stone. What have their journeys round the world and their incessant gyrations done for the innumerable princes of Europe? The fool remains a fool, though you carry him or her about over the whole surface of the globe, and it is certain that the promiscuous contact and incessant publicity of travel, which may not hurt the man, do injure the woman.

Neither men nor women of genius are, I repeat, any criterion for the rest of their sex; nay, they belong, as Plato placed them, to a third sex which is above the laws of the multitude. But even whilst they do so they are always the foremost to recognise that it is the difference, not the likeness, of sex which makes the charm of human life. Barry Cornwall wrote long ago,—

As the man beholds the woman,As the woman sees the man;Curiously they note each other,As each other only can.Never can the man divest herOf that mystic charm of sex;Ever must she, gazing on him,That same mystic charm annex.

As the man beholds the woman,As the woman sees the man;Curiously they note each other,As each other only can.

As the man beholds the woman,

As the woman sees the man;

Curiously they note each other,

As each other only can.

Never can the man divest herOf that mystic charm of sex;Ever must she, gazing on him,That same mystic charm annex.

Never can the man divest her

Of that mystic charm of sex;

Ever must she, gazing on him,

That same mystic charm annex.

That mystic charm will long endure, despite the efforts to destroy it of orators, in tight stays and balloon sleeves, who scream from platforms, and the beings so justly abhorred of Mrs Lynn Lynton who smoke in public carriages and from the waist upward are indistinguishable from the men they profess to despise.

But every word, whether written or spoken, which urges the woman to antagonism against the man, every word which is written or spoken to try and make of her ahybridhybrid, self-contained opponent of men, makes a rift in the lute to which the world looks for its sweetest music.

The New Woman reminds me of an agriculturist who, discarding a fine farm of his own, and leaving it to nettles, stones, thistles and wire-worms, should spend his whole time in demanding neighbouring fields which are not his. The New Woman will not even look at the extent of ground indisputably her own, which she leaves unweeded and untilled.

Not to speak of the entire guidance of childhood, which is certainly already chiefly in the hands of woman (and of which her use does not do her much honour), so long as she goes to see one of her own sex dancing in a lion’s den, the lions being meanwhile terrorised by a male brute; so long as she wears dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats, so long as she goes to races, steeplechases, coursing and pigeon matches; so long as she ‘walks with the guns’; so long as she goes to see an American lashing horses to death in idiotic contest with velocipedes, so long as she curtsies before princes and emperors whoreward the winners of distance-rides; so long as she receives physiologists in her drawing-rooms, and trusts to them in her maladies; so long as she invades literature without culture, and art without talent; so long as she orders her court-dress in a hurry, regardless of the strain thus placed on the poor seamstresses; so long as she makes no attempt to interest herself in her servants, in her animals, in the poor slaves of her tradespeople; so long as she shows herself, as she does at present, without scruple at every brutal and debasing spectacle which is considered fashionable; so long as she understands nothing of the beauty of meditation, of solitude, of Nature; so long as she is utterly incapable of keeping her sons out of the shambles of modern sport, and lifting her daughters above the pestilent miasma of modern society; so long as she is what she is in the worlds subject to her, she has no possible title or capacity to demand the place or the privilege of man, for she shows herself incapable of turning to profit her own place and her own privilege.

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