Ploughshare and Pruning-hook/Lecture 7
WHAT IS WOMANLY?
(1911)
The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here—the women of my audience, I mean—in a very bristling and combative frame of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to what is or what is not "womanly." I hope, that is to say, that you are not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a man—or, for that matter, by a woman either.
For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman's social effectiveness until she has secured full right of way—a right of way equal to man's—in all directions of mental and physical activity, or, to put it in one word, the right to experiment?
There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in the world's moral progress the really effective results have generally come by shock of attack upon, or of resistance to, some cherished conventions of the day.
Take, for example, a thing which has seemed to concern only the male sex, but which has really concerned women just as intimately—the history of our male code of honour in relation to the institution of duelling. There was a time in our history when it would have been very difficult to regard as manly the refusal to fight a duel. But it is not difficult to-day to see in such a refusal a very true manliness. We in this country have got rid of the superstition that honour can in any way be mended by two men standing up to take snap-shots at each other; and now that we are free from the superstition ourselves, we can understand, looking at other countries—Germany, for instance—that it must often require more courage to refuse to fight than to consent. But we have arrived at that stage of enlightenment only because in our own history there have been men courageous enough and manly enough to dare to be thought unmanly and cowardly. And as with our manhood so with our womanhood; you cannot judge of what is womanly merely on the lines of past conventions, produced under circumstances very different from those of our own days. You must give to women as you give to men the right to experiment, the right to make their own successes and their own failures. You cannot with good results lay upon men and women, as they work side by side in the world (very often under hard competitive conditions) the incompatible rules which govern respectively a living language and a dead language. A living language is constantly in flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives In a dead language the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is fixed; but the use and the meaning often remain doubtful. And so, if you attempt to determine the woman's capabilities merely by her past record, and to fix the meaning of "womanliness" in any way that forbids flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of the word very doubtful.
Now, obviously, if to be "womanly" means merely to "strike an average," and be as like the majority of women as possible—womanliness as a quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord, and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific. To be what Henry James calls "intensely ordinary" is, from the evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running.
We see this directly we start applying the word "manly" to men. For we do not take that to mean merely average quality—if it did, over-eating, over-drinking, and that form of speech which I will call over-emphasis—would all be manly qualities—and the evolution of the race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts of over-indulgence. But when we say "manly," we mean the pick and polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes an insistence on freedom—freedom for development, so that all that is in him may be brought out for social use.
Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens. And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites—of the energies which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are many people who (viewing this problem of woman's subjection where the savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is "womanly" to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the woman's nature to be so more than it is the man's; for, like Milton, in his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word "subjection" first and foremost. That condition, which, according to Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was, you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential even to the paradisal state; and when in Paradise Lost he laid down this law of "subjection" as the right condition for unfallen womanhood, he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to operate. The woman was to subject herself to man—
"with submission,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay."
Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.
Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure of this—that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone else—whether it be her children or her husband—may over-indulge. It is womanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits to the starving of herself or of her children by a drunken or a lazy husband is not in any positive sense womanly—for she is then proving herself ineffective for her social task. And she would be more effective, and therefore more womanly, if she could, by any means you like to name, drive that lazy husband into work, or abstract from that drunken husband a right share of his wages. And if by making his home a purgatory to him she succeeded, she would be more womanly in the valuable sense of the word than if (by submission to injustice) she failed, and let her children go starved.
Then, again, a woman may see that the children she and her husband are producing ought never to have been born. And if that is so, is it womanly for her to go on bearing children at the dictates of the man, even though St. Paul says, "Wives, obey your husbands"? Is she any more womanly, if she knowingly brings diseased offspring into the world, than he is manly in the fathering of them?
But now, come out of the home into Society—not into any of those departments of unsolved problems where humanity is seen at its worst—pass all those by for the moment—and come to the seat of administration—into that great regulator of Society, the law-courts (in the superintendence and constitution of which woman is conspicuous by her absence). There, as in matters connected with the male code of honour, any duty of initiative on the part of women may seem, at first sight, to be far removed. But let us see! In the law-courts you meet with a doctrine—a sort of unwritten law—that there are certain cases to which women must not listen. And occasionally "all decent women" are requested to leave the court, when "decent" men are allowed to stay. Now, in the face of that request it must be a very painful thing indeed for a woman to hold her ground—but it may be womanly for her to do so. It may be that in that case there are women witnesses; and I do not think our judges sufficiently realise what mental agony it may be to a woman to give evidence in a court where there are only men. I am quite sure that in such cases, if the judge orders women generally out of court, he ought to provide one woman to stand by the woman in the witness-box. How would any man feel, if he were called before a court composed only of women, women judges, a woman jury, women reporters, and saw all men turned out of the court before he began his evidence? Would he feel sure that it meant justice for him? I think not.
Now these cases to which women are not to listen almost always specially concern women; yet here you have men claiming to deal with them as much as possible behind the woman's back, and to keep her in ignorance of the lines on which they arrive at a conclusion. Surely, then, it would be well for women of expert knowledge and training to insist that these things shall not be decided without women assessors, and to be so "womanly" as to incur the charge of brazenness and immodesty in defending the woman's interest, which in such matters is also the interest of the race.
But it is only very gradually—and in the face of immemorial discouragement—that this communal or social spirit, when it began to draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced the reproach raised against it, of "unwomanliness," of an intrusion by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had to throw over at each stage of its advance—things to which beautiful names have been given, things which were assumed all through the Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in the woman's nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish. The ideal of woman's life was that she should live unobserved except when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, "Happy the woman who has no history." Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of struggle, the history of woman's social development; and every fresh effort of that social spirit to find itself and to become effective has always had to face, at the beginning of each new phase in its activity, the charge of unwomanliness.
Compare that attack, fundamental in its nature, all-embracing in its condemnation, with the kind of attack levelled against the corresponding manifestations of the social or reforming spirit in man. In a man, new and unfamiliar indications of a stirring-up of the social conscience may earn such epithets of opprobrium as "rash," "hot-headed," "ill-considered," "impracticable," "utopian"—but we do not label them as "unmanly." Initiative, fresh adventure of thought or action in man have always been regarded as the natural concomitant of his nature. In a woman they have very generally been regarded as unnatural, unwomanly. The accusation is fundamental: it does not concern itself with any unsoundness in the doctrines put forward; but only with the fact that a woman has dared to become their mouthpiece or their instrument. Go back to any period in the last 200 years, where a definitely new attempt was made by woman toward civic thought and action, and you will find that, at the time, the charge of "unwomanliness" was levelled against her; you find also that in the succeeding generation that disputed territory has always become a centre of recognised womanly activity. Take, for instance, the establishment of higher training for girls; there are towns in this country where the women, who first embarked on such a design, were jeered and laughed at, and even mobbed. And the same thing happened in an even greater degree to the women who sought to recover for their own sex admission to the medical profession: and while the charge levelled against them was "unwomanliness," it was yet through their instincts of reserve and sex-modesty that their enemies tried to defeat them. Even when they gained the right of admission to medical colleges there were lecturers who tried, by the way they expressed themselves in their lectures, to drive them out again.
Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the opposition to a woman's invasion of a department where men had shown a hopeless incompetence at once based itself on the plea that such a task was "unwomanly." Though in their own homes from time immemorial, women had been nursing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, servants, masters, through all the refined and modestly-conducted diseases to which these lords of creation are domestically subject, directly one woman proposed to carry her expert knowledge into a public department and nurse men who were strangers to her, she was told that she was exposing herself to an experience which was incompatible with womanly modesty. Well, she was prepared to let her womanly modesty take its risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember, for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home, their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so, breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home, the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women which we have in our hospitals to-day.
Take again the special and peculiar opposition which women had to face when they began to agitate against certain laws which particularly affected the lives of women and did cruel wrong to them even in their home relations. Read the life of Caroline Norton, for instance—a woman whose husband brought against her a public charge of infidelity, though privately admitting that she was innocent; and when, after that charge was proved to be baseless, she separated from her husband, refusing to live with him any more, then he, in consequence of that refusal cut her off absolutely from her children, though they were all under seven years of age. That wrong, which our laws had immemorially sanctioned, roused her to action, and it was through her efforts, so long ago as 1838, that the law was altered so as to allow a mother of unblemished character right of access to her own children during the years of early infancy!
And that is how the law still stands to-day—a woman's contribution—the most that could be done at the time for justice to women. But there is no statue to Caroline Norton in Parliament Square—or anywhere else, so far as I know.
But what I specially want to draw attention to is this—that when she wrote the pamphlet with which she started her agitation all her relatives entreated her not to publish it, because it would be an exposure to the world of her own private affairs. By that time, however, Caroline Norton had learned her lesson in "womanliness," and she no longer said 'Happy is the woman who has no history." Her answer was: "There is too much fear of publicity among women: with women it is reckoned a crime to be accused, and such a disgrace that they wish nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it." Does not that set forth in all its weakness the conventional womanly attitude of the period?
The Bill which, through her efforts, was brought three times before Parliament, was at first defeated. How? By the votes of the Judges, to whom the House of Lords left the matter to be decided. And Lord Brougham, in speaking against that Bill used this line of argument: There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those which are not necessary—the necessary hardships being the greater; and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind! Was ever a more perverted and devilish interpretation given to the Scripture, "To him that hath shall be given, and from her that hath not shall be taken even that which she hath."
Let us remember that we are the direct descendants and inheritors of the age and of the men who pronounced these unjust judgments, and that no miracle has happened between then and now to remove the guilt of the fathers from the third and the fourth generation. Heredity is too strong a thing for us to have any good ground for believing that our eyes, even now, are entirely opened. There are many of us who cannot drink port at all, because our grandfathers drank it by the bottle every night of their lives.
We inherit constitutions, personal and political—we also inherit proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs expressed once—else they had not become proverbs—an almost universal contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no more. But their source and incentive are still quite recognisable; and their dwindled spirit still lives in our midst.
There was one, for instance, on which genteel families were brought up in the days of my youth—a rhymed proverb which laid it down that—
A whistling woman and a crowing hen
Are hateful alike to God and men.
Now let us look into the bit of real natural history which lies at the root of that proverb. A crowing hen is a disturbance, but so is a crowing cock. But the hen is not to crow because she only lays eggs, and because the bulk of hens manage to lay eggs without crowing. They make, it is true, a peculiar clutter of their own which is just as disturbing; but that is a thoroughly feminine noise and a dispensation of Providence; and they don't do it at all times of the night, and without a reason for it, as cocks do. But as a matter of fact it is far more easy to prevent a cock from crowing than a hen from cluttering; you have only to put a cock in a pen the roof of which knocks his head whenever he rears himself up to crow and he will remain as silent as the grave, though he will continue to do that spasmodic duty by his offspring which is all that nature requires of him. But no such simple method will stop the cluttering of a hen when her egg is once well and truly laid; the social disturbance caused by the pomp of masculine vain-glory is far less inevitable than the disturbance caused by the circumstances of maternity. Yet the normal masculine claim to pomp of sound is more readily allowed in our proverbial philosophy than the occasional feminine claim.
And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance, a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goes about in flocks, 13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex. And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists) are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly "manly" occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a nation lies mainly—nay, entirely—in eugenics, in sinking every other consideration for that great and central one—the perfecting of the conditions of maternity.
But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman's whistling was not when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not have been troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper. Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a mother—less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid it down that there are certain things which women can't do; and so, when the exceptional woman does it, she is—or she was the day before yesterday—labelled "unwomanly."
I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly accomplishment—something attained—which has not been so generally attained hitherto.
Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact, so impossible to maintain. For you can have no code or standard of manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence, anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a false code of womanliness.
Take, for example, that matter of duelling already referred to, in relation to the male code of honour, and the manliness which it is supposed to encourage and develop. You might be inclined to think that it lies so much outside the woman's sphere and her power of control, as to affect very little either her womanliness or her own sense of honour. But I hope to show by a concrete example how very closely womanliness and woman's code of honour are concerned and adversely affected by that "manly" institution of duelling—how, in fact, it has tended to deprive women of a sense of honour, by taking it from their own keeping and not leaving to them the right of free and final judgment.
Here is what happened in Germany about seven years ago. A young married officer undertook to escort home from a dance the fiancée of another officer; and on the way, having drunk rather more than was good for him, he tried to kiss her. She resented the liberty, and apparently made him sufficiently ashamed of himself to come next day and beg her pardon. Whether she would grant it was surely a matter for herself to decide; she accepted his apology, and there, one would have thought, the matter might have ended. But unfortunately, several months later, word of this very ordinary bit of male misdemeanour reached the ears of the lady's betrothed. It at once became "an affair of honour"—his affair, not the lady's affair—his to settle in his own way, not hers to settle in her way. Accordingly he calls out his brother officer, and, probably without intending it, shoots him dead. The murdered man, as I have said, was married, and at that very time his wife was in expectation of having a child. The child was prematurely born to a poor mother gone crazed with grief. There, then, we get a beautiful economic product of the male code of honour and its criminal effects on Society; and if traced to its source we shall see that such a code of honour is based mainly on man's claim to possession and proprietorship in woman—for, had the woman not been one whom he looked upon as his own property, that officer would have regarded the offence very lightly indeed. But because she was his betrothed the woman's honour was not her own, it was his; she was not to defend it in her own way—though her own way had proved sufficient for the occasion—he must interfere and defend it in his. And we get for result, a man killed for a petty offence—the offence itself a direct product of the way in which militarism has trained men to look on women—a woman widowed and driven to the untimely fulfilment of her most important social function in anguish of mind, and a child born into the world under conditions which probably handicapped it disastrously for the struggle of life.[1]
Now, obviously, if women could be taught to regard such invasions of their right to pardon offence in others as a direct attack upon their own honour and liberty—a far worse attack than the act of folly which gave occasion for this tragedy—and if they would teach these possessive lovers of theirs that any such intrusion on their womanly prerogative of mercy was in itself an unforgivable sin against womanhood—then such invasions of the woman's sphere would quickly come to an end. They might even put an end to duelling altogether.
See, on the other hand, how acceptance of such an institution trains women to give up their own right of judgment, to think even that honour, at first hand, hardly concerns them. Is it not natural that, as the outcome of such a system from which we are only gradually emerging, we should hear it said of these conventionally womanly women that they have "a very low sense of honour."
Low it must naturally be. For that attitude of complaisant passivity on the part of the woman while two male rivals fight to possess her is the normal attitude of the female in the lower animal world; but it is an attitude from which, as the human race evolves into more perfect self-government, you see the woman gradually drawing away. While it pleases something in her animal instincts, it offends something in her human instincts; and while to be fought over is the highest compliment to the female animal, it is coming to be something like an insult to the really civilized woman—the woman who has the spirit of citizenship awake within her. One remembers how Candida, when her two lovers are debating which of them is to possess her—brings them at once to their senses by reminding them that it is not in the least necessary that she should be possessed by either of them; but she does in the end give herself to the one who needs her most. That may be the truest womanliness under present conditions; as it may once have been the truest womanliness for the woman to give herself to the strongest. But it may be the truest womanliness, at times, for the woman to bring men to their senses by reminding them that it is not necessary for her to give herself at all. To be quite sure of attaining to full womanliness, let her first make sure that she possesses herself. In the past men have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action, her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic independence. So long as convention lays upon women any special and fundamental claim of control—a claim altogether different in kind and extent from the claim it lays upon men—so long may it be the essentially womanly duty of every woman to have quick and alive within her the spirit of criticism, and latent within her blood the spirit of revolt.
- ↑ It may be noted that the war has caused a recrudescence of this brutal "code of honour" in our own country. But here it has not troubled to resume the obsolete form of the duel. The "defender of his wife's honour" simply commits murder, and the jury acquits.