The Future of the Women's Movement/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW
"Decay," said Seithenyn, "is one thing, and danger is another. Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it keeps out the water from the land and it lets in the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cup-bearer, fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we were to be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it."
"The stonework," said Teithrin, "is sapped and mined: the piles are rotten, broken and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky."
"That is the beauty of it," said Seithenyn. "Some parts of it are rotten, and some parts of it are sound."
"It is well," said Elphin, "that some parts are sound: it were better that all were so."
"So I have heard some people say before," said Seithenyn; " perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable sort of people who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation."—Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin.
THE women's movement is a great movement of adaptation. It is not directed against the community, nor against any section of the community. It is not anti-man: no movement for the liberation of woman can do man anything but good; for modern men to try to keep women in the old ways, while they go ahead, is a ridiculous attempt to produce an anachronism which is foredoomed. It is not anti-social: when people bring this accusation against it, they generally mean that it is anti-maternal; but the progressive women desire that motherhood should be as free and beneficent and instructed as human effort can make it, and they desire, too, that it shall be possible for far more women to have the opportunity of motherhood. It is not anti-democratic; for the extension of liberty and representation to the masses of women will diminish the privileges of the few. It is the anti-suffragists who are anti- democratic. They tell us that the opposition of women to their own enfranchisement is unprecedented and proves that there must be some great harm in liberty, which women feel, while men have never resisted their own enfranchisement. This is not true. Slaves, even male slaves, have been known to object to manumission. But, as a matter of fact, if you will inquire, you will find that nearly all the opposition of women is directed against the enfranchisement of other women, not themselves. Most anti-suffragists will agree that some women are fit for the vote. Scarcely any woman thinks that she herself is unfit; it is the other women who are unfit. When Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks of the incurable political ignorance of women, she does not mean that she is ignorant. It is the other women who are ignorant. Men have been every bit as strongly convinced that other men should not have the vote. It is undemocratic, it is arrogant, it is profoundly selfish, but it is human, not feminine, to endeavour to maintain privilege.
We are in for very big changes—social, economic and political. No one can doubt it. In what spirit are we going to make those changes? They are long overdue, and the amount of needless suffering caused by our slowness in adaptation is appalling. Dead creeds cumber the ground in all directions, and men make no serious effort either to resuscitate or decently to bury them. We say one thing and we do the other, and we merit the certificate given to us by international acclamation, of being the most canting nation on earth. Some of us do not like change. When did older people ever like change? Change implies thinking, and if there is one thing the majority of people hate more than another it is thinking. There is always in most of us a pathetic hope that some day we shall come to a state where the machinery of life will go of itself and we shall be safe and free from the necessity—so exhausting—of eternal vigilance. Free also from the terrible necessity of judging for ourselves and from the difficult task of loving our neighbour as ourselves. But those who hate change—the catlike people with whom I have every sympathy—should ask themselves, "Am I going to stop just here? And, if so, why? Is this really the warmest, prettiest spot, and is there room for the others here?" Most people who know even a corner of life, as it is for the less fortunate, would admit that the. present does not offer the most perfect conditions imaginable for all. "But it might be worse, and so we will not move, for fear of worse befalling. All the efforts of our forefathers, all their mistakes and sacrifices and heroisms we will accept, but this generation will not add one brave deed to the record of time." If this opinion were universal, this generation would be dead, and rotting fast.
A certain type of man is never tired of boasting that this is a "man's world" and that men have made it. They certainly have made many things, some good and some bad. But whatever they have made of the world, this type of man expects woman to be an impossible She,—impossible in the world he has chosen to make around her. This kind of man professes to admire beauty, peace, the amenities of life, and these are to be given him, if you please, by woman. He does not see that man has himself largely destroyed the beauty, peace and amenity of life. He has created the modern industrial system; he has taken women's work out of the home; he has filled the air with smoke and clangour; he has polluted the rivers; he has based the growth of millions of pounds upon the destruction of millions of human bodies; he has driven the humane spirit out of his activities, and then he has called upon woman to maintain it alone. She cannot do it alone. It is not reasonable to expect women to be capable of what Whitman finely calls "sane, athletic motherhood," in the midst of the noise and cruelty and dirt and meanness in which the daughters of the poor are reared, or of the futility and silliness to which so many of the daughters of the rich are heirs.
Women may not have produced great works of art, but they are artists in life. They are often said to be nearer nature than men. Certainly they seem to have a keener sense of reality and of essentials. They can be the greatest inspiration, when they are intellectually alive, when they have joy and freedom. In families where the' women's movement has opened the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women: jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship of sexes, classes and ages.
It is this genius for living that must be altogether liberated, and with it we shall see an immense liberation of the organising and governing power of women. The union of practicality and ideality, of which I have already spoken, must be used to its utmost. Women are less pompous and less wasteful than men. They "cut the cackle" and get to business sooner; I cannot conceive of a body of women tolerating the sort of thing that goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their concern.
The growth of humaner notions is both the fruit and the promise of comradeship; it is seen in the change of ideas about education and about crime and will appear in the ideas about war. People are realising that many vices are the result of the absence of healthy pleasures. We shall not need to punish so much for cruelty, drink, and sexual offences, when we have given people other things to think about and live for; nor for idleness and theft, when we have made employment safe. The reforms of the future are going to be constructive, not punitive, and in all these women's gifts will be priceless.
Men who wish to keep women in subjection justify themselves by two claims: (1) Those of men, their needs and appetites; (2) those of children. With regard to the needs of men, it is certainly essential that women should understand them, else they will be as stupid about men as men have been about women, and few conditions are so fertile in suffering as stupidity. The men, therefore, who, like Sir Almroth Wright, declare that men will not tolerate epicene institutions, are hopelessly wrong, for if there are to be two worlds, the man's and the woman's, and if all their work and their thinking are to be done apart, and if men are all the same to go on arranging the lives of women, with whom they have no relations but physical relations of sex, there will be less and less of that understanding, without which there can never be peace. Men who say greedily, "This world is ours, and we will give you just so much of it as we please, and it is for you to be thankful," are blaspheming. The world is not theirs to give, and although woman cannot fight man with physical force, let man not think that to give woman her liberty is to confer a favour upon her. It is only to do his duty, as a man is bound to do.
The men who are afraid women will not see eye to eye with them on the matter of men's temptations, use a double-edged argument, when they declare that there must be a double standard of sexual morality. It is sometimes based upon the physiological fact that a man can "have" a hundred children in the time that it takes a woman to "have" one. But this is to misuse words. A man does not have a child, nor does a woman: a man and woman together have a child. And, if we even conceded that promiscuity in a man would not be wrong, provided he could be promiscuous by himself, how can anyone defend promiscuity in a man, if it infallibly involves the corruption of women? Those who wish to defend promiscuity must find a better weapon than the double standard; for if promiscuity is bad in a woman, it must be bad that a man should corrupt a woman, and there is the added stain on this particular badness that it is mean and cowardly as well, for when he has corrupted her in this way, he not only deserts her, but he hales her before his tribunals and punishes her.
When men advocate the subjection of women for the sake of the child, it is difficult to speak with patience of the monumental conceit and arrogance of the notion. Women do not sentimentalise so much about children, because they are a part of women's work, and you do not sentimentalise about your work. I have said (Chapter XIII.) that girls ought not to be expressly trained to be mothers, and to prevent misunderstanding, it may be well to touch upon positive education.
Nothing in all the circumstances of a girl's upbringing ought to be allowed to injure her health, and, in consequence, her physical capacity to bear healthy children. Much of the anxiety expressed as to whether a girl may be perfectly healthy, as an individual, and yet unable to bear children, is misplaced. It is quite true that the finest types of women are likely to be less prolific than the more degraded type. The feeble-minded are the most prolific of all. It seems you cannot have both quantity and quality. But the great need of the world is precisely quality. Healthy girls are not sterile, and the causes of sterility are not to be found in the women's movement; they are to be found in idleness and luxury on the one hand, and in poverty on the other; beyond everything, they are to be found in vice and excess. The miserable health of the women of our working classes—the enormous majority of our women, that is to say—is one of the greatest dangers and social crimes of the day. But even all middle-class girls are not as healthy as they might be. There is a certain amount of overpressure in lessons and in games, and one knows of many cases where girls at home are worried into sickness by the conflicting claims upon them. Sometimes one hears of grotesque ignorance on the part of school- and house-mistresses, even on the part of mothers, of the very elements of personal hygiene. Girls should be taught from an early age to practise the hygiene of their own bodies, and to take a pride in being and keeping fit, and they should not think shame of easing off when they are not fit. It is most important in schools to get a sensible public opinion that encourages neither slackness nor prudery, and it is for the teachers to be well enough grounded in physiology to know how to direct and maintain this public opinion. A considerable amount of toughening is good for girls as for boys. Looking into the causes of overpressure, both mental and physical, one sees that most of it would never have occurred, if men had not made it so hard for women to get opportunities. Men have in the past so often argued that women and girls should have the desired opportunities, if they could fulfil the same conditions as boys and men, and I can remember in my schooldays a tremendous pressure to show that girls could fulfil the same conditions as boys. The women of the future will claim freedom and endowment when they fulfil the conditions suitable for women and girls.
Girls, as well as boys, should, before puberty, be taught the simple facts of sex, and this should be done in connection with other simple science teaching. They will accept these facts quite serenely, if they are not greatly stressed and differentiated from other knowledge. They should not be troubled with pathology until they are full grown. Boys and girls should be brought up together, and the barrack system of living should be entirely abolished for both sexes. This does not mean that boys and girls should do all the same things, either in work or play; these should be adapted to the ascertained capacities of the individuals and not arranged on rigid a priori schemes. If the girl has grown to young womanhood with a healthy and active body and mind, she will have all the essentials for good motherhood, and if she wishes to learn the details of mothercraft, by all means give her opportunity to do so. But it is not necessary, or even desirable, to force every young woman to do this. If she is broadly developed as a human being, she can learn mothercraft when she is about to marry. Then, indeed, she should learn it, and the man who is about to marry should also study the duties of parentage.
It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work. This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless, vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.
Women, who bear the children, will be increasingly concerned, as they grow in mental stature, with the quality of the children produced. Theirs, it is said, is the task of handing on the torch of life. They must ask themselves, with ever deepening sense of responsibility, what is the life they are making? Is it worthy? And, while sterility will rightly trouble them, because it is the result of disease, they will not allow themselves to be frightened by the smaller birth-rate per woman. They will perhaps think that the best remedy would be to make motherhood possible for the millions of maidens, now childless against their will. As they know more, they will recognise with joy that a woman's natural instinct to give herself when she loves and not otherwise, is a sound racial instinct, and that many problems will be solved when the action of natural selection is counterbalanced by sexual selection. When invited by reactionaries to widen still further the breach between men and women, and to admire the effects of specialisation and division of labour, women will perhaps ask themselves what these have done, even in the industrial world, and question whether they desire the same results in the family. The worker has lost his old joy in the work; the product of his work has lost beauty and excellence; the relations between employer and employee have become inhuman. Do we really wish, we women, to see these results in the home? Do men?
And woman not only bears the child, but she is its natural protector and guardian. In the way civilised men regard assaults on children, in their helplessness to protect the child from bad men,—and women,—in the monstrous absurdity of the phrase "the criminal child," and all the cruelties and stupidities involved in that phrase, one sees how men, with the best intentions, have failed, because they would insist upon doing women's work. Man is legally, by the laws man has made, the only parent of the child, and the condition of the child truly reflects this legal fiction. When men go abroad for a living, for adventure, for glory or for plunder, what becomes of their regard for the child? They beget everywhere, children, surely the most deserted on earth, who have neither father nor country, and they leave the problem of half-breeds as a most bitter inheritance for their children's children. Letourneau says that legal monogamy has for its object the regulation of succession and the division of property; so Hagar and Ishmael in all times and nations have been repudiated.
Now, at last, there are signs that the light is breaking. Knowledge is showing men that neither their own happiness nor the welfare of the child can ever be served by the subjection, the crippling or the thwarting of women. And intelligent men are coming over in their thousands. Even a very rough crowd in the Midlands, that had been stoning the women's suffrage, pilgrims, because the}^ were supposed to be militants, cried out to them as they went home, after a meeting, "We are all for it!" meaning they were all for the enfranchisement of women, although they felt so shocked at the violence of the militants that they felt impelled themselves to resort to worse violence.
Men have said to us over and over again, "You are quite right. You ought to get it, and you will get it. Go on fighting. It is a woman's question, and you women must solve it for yourselves." It is strange to women that such men have not seen the baseness of this attitude. It is strange that they cannot see that they alone have the power, and that, under their fair words, they are in effect saying, "Get it, if you can," for all the world like a bullying big boy who has stolen the smaller boy's bread. It is strange that they should be willing in this matter to show themselves so inferior to women; for when did women ever say to their menfolk: "Your freedom, your dignity, your ideals are nothing to me. These are men's questions; let them settle their affairs without our help "? Just as women have carried men in their arms, when they were weak and whimpering and ugly, till they could run alone; just as women have nourished the babes at their breasts, and given their lives for them, so have we women (in the words of Miss Anna Shaw) "carried all the weak causes in our arms, until they were strong and could run alone, and then—then—they forgot us!" In the French Revolution, at Peterloo, in the American crusade against slavery, among the Boers in South Africa, in the Chinese revolution, in Ireland now, when did women ever separate their lives and interests from those of men?
There is this excuse for the men: first, that they are by nature slower than women, and are only now awakening to the fact that, while men's lives have changed greatly during the past century, women's lives have changed immensely more, and that something like a complete revolution has taken place in the education and industrial position of women, and they cannot be expected to be the same as they were before these changes; and, secondly, that unlimited power is more demoralising even than subjection. Where men are treating women as equally human, the sense of comradeship is growing. One of the most moving speeches made at Budapest, at the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in June 1913, was a very simple statement by Miss Jenny af Forselles, a Finnish Member of Parliament. She said that, in the great national sorrow and the terrible struggle with a less civilised nation, their solace and inspiration was the comradeship between the women and men. Those who heard her will not forget the quiet thrill of her aspiration, expressed in her Biblical, slightly archaic German—"Wir wollen seyn ein einig Volk," and the hope it gave, that in some distant day the union of peoples might be a union of the whole free people.
I have refrained as much as possible from dogmatism about the true nature of Woman and about what women will do. I know some people confidently assert that women are better than men, and that women are going to perform miracles. Well, some of us think that the movement itself, now, is miraculous, and have had ample reward in the comradeship of men in the movement.
"Divinity hath surely touched my heart;
I have possessed more joy than earth can lend;
I may attain what time shall never spend.
Only let not my duller days destroy
The memory of thy witness and my joy."
Our faith would be weak if it could be dashed by the human faults in women, and of women in the movement as well as all the other women. It is cowardice, merely, to turn from the complex, fascinating, troublesome, real woman to a vapid ideal, or a devitalised norm. We must understand the real women and the real men, and have faith in them. Fear and distrust are no leaders for brave folk. The prayer which the worker in human material must ever have at heart is, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief."