The Higher Education of Women/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
CONCLUSION.
O guard against misconception on so obscure and so complex a subject as that of the present inquiry is a somewhat hopeless endeavour. But it may, perhaps, be worth while to say once more, what has so often been said already, that those who ask for a fuller and freer life for women have no desire to interfere with distinctions of sex. The question under debate is not whether, as a matter of fact, there is such a thing as distinctive manhood and womanhood; for that no one denies. The dispute is rather as to the degree in which certain qualities, commonly regarded as respectively masculine and feminine characteristics, are such intrinsically, or only conventionally; and further, as to the degree of prominence which it is desirable to give to the specific differences in determining social arrangements. It is not against the recognition of real distinctions, but against arbitrary judgments, not based upon reason, that the protest is raised. If, in the exigencies of controversy, expressions may sometimes be used which seem to involve a denial of differences in the respective natures of women and of men, it must be regarded as a misfortune for which the advocates of restriction and suppression are responsible. When broad assertions are made as to natural fitness and unfitness, and a course of action is founded upon them, it becomes necessary, at least, to ask for proof. When proof is wanting, it is not unnatural to fall back upon feeling; and prejudices, dignified by the name of instincts, are appealed to as decisive when rational argument fails. The whole question is clouded over by this confusing procedure. The instincts, to which so much importance is attached, differ in the most bewildering manner. What one person's instinct pronounces lawful and becoming, another finds revolting. Assumptions are made, and a fabric of argument is built up upon data which are unverified, and which it is at present impossible either to verify or absolutely to contradict. For, until artificial appliances are removed, we cannot know anything certainly about the native distinctions. As to the future, who can say? It may be that,
'In the long years liker must they grow,
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
More as the double-natured poet each:'
or it may be that, when 'full-summed in all their powers,' new shades of unlikeness—refinements of diversity hitherto unimagined—may appear. It is neither necessary nor expedient to prejudge the question; and those whose faith in the reality and permanence of the native distinctions is the strongest are the least tempted to make rash assertions on either side. The excessive apprehensiveness shown by some people on this point seems to indicate a deeprooted distrust in the strength of their position. The fear betrays a doubt. No one urges that girls should be denied the use of cold water, or fresh air, or light, or animal food, lest they should grow into boys. Yet that these conditions tend to produce masculine vigour cannot be denied. Those who are afraid that a free range of thought and action would injure the delicacy of the female mind, ought, in consistency, to carry their precautions a little farther. The atmosphere of a hothouse, judiciously darkened, abstinence from exercise, and a vegetarian diet would have an evident tendency to produce a sickly delicacy of complexion, to give languor to the limbs, and feebleness to the voice, and in every way to make girls much more unlike their brothers than they were by nature. And if this is the object of education, the appropriate means ought to be used.
In the meantime, a great part of the difficulties which beset every question concerning women would be at once removed by a frank recognition of the fact, that there is between the sexes a deep and broad basis of likeness. The hypothesis that men and women are essentially and radically different, embarrasses every discussion. When facts are proved and admitted, scarcely any progress has been made, because it is assumed that their action is modified by their application to the feminine nature. Conditions which would certainly make a man happy or miserable, as the case might be, are supposed to have a different, if not an exactly opposite, effect upon a woman. The theory has been asserted and reasserted so incessantly, that even women themselves have been partly persuaded to believe it. And it is, no doubt, so far true, that while the education and the circumstances of women are widely different from those of men, every agency brought to bear upon either must act somewhat differently. But to create facts, and then to argue from them as if they were the result of an unalterable destiny, is a method which convinces only so long as it is enforced by prejudice. 'Chacun selon sa capacité'—'à chaque producteur l'ouvrage auquel il est propre'—these are maxims of unquestioned validity. But who shall say for another—much more, who shall say for half the human race—this, or this, is the measure of your capacity; this, and no other, is the work you are qualified to perform? 'Women's work,' it is said, 'is helping work.' Certainly it is. And is it men's work to hinder? The vague information that women are to be ministering angels is no answer to the practical questions, Whom are they to help, and how? The easy solution, that it is their nature to do what men cannot do, or cannot do so well, has never been adopted in practice, inasmuch as everything in the world that there is to do, the care of infants alone excepted, men are doing; and there is nothing that a trained man cannot do better than an untrained woman. Literature and art, teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing—these are the recognised feminine occupations, and they are all shared by men. The pursuit of them does not turn men into women, or women into men. Miss Yonge and Mrs Oliphant 'help' Mr Trollope in supplying the world with novels; and it is not thought necessary to guard either party from writing masculine or feminine novels respectively. Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses do not come into unseemly rivalry, although women teach boys and men teach girls. By and by it will be found equally superfluous to prescribe limitations in any department of thought or industry.
It can scarcely be necessary to discuss at length the difficulty expressed in the frequent question,—if women take to doing men's work, what are men to do? Will not the intrusion of women into professions and trades already overcrowded, lower the current rate of wages, and by thus making men less able to support their families—in the long run, do more harm than good? As to the manner and degree in which the labour-market might be affected by such a readjustment as is proposed, it is difficult to predict anything with certainty. It is impossible to tell beforehand how many women would take to what is called (by a very conspicuous petitio principii) men's work, and how large a portion of their lives they would devote to it. If women, already destined to work for their bread, chose to earn it in some hitherto unaccustomed way, it is obvious that in the exact measure in which their entrance into a new profession reduced the rate of wages in that particular calling, it would tend to raise it in some other which they would have otherwise pursued, and the balance would thus be redressed. If, on the other hand, women are not supporting themselves, they are being supported by somebody else, consuming either present earnings or accumulated savings. To keep them from earning money does not prevent their spending it. Let us suppose the event, not a very probable one, that the introduction of women into the medical profession would lower the average rate of remuneration by one-third, in which case the professional income of an ordinary medical man would be lessened in the same proportion. Let us suppose, also—a not at all improbable case—that the doctor's wife, or sister, or daughter, would earn, in the practice of her profession, a sum equivalent to the one-third he has lost. Evidently, the doctor and his family would be where they were, neither better nor worse off than before. In the meantime, the public would be so much the richer by getting its medical attendance one-third cheaper. Whatever might be the temporary effect of opening any particular profession to women, one thing is certain, it can never be for the interest of society, in a purely economical aspect, to keep any class of its members in idleness. A man who should carry one of his arms in a sling, in order to secure greater efficiency and importance to the other, would be regarded as a lunatic. The one free member might very probably gain a little extra dexterity, of an abnormal sort, but that the man would be on the whole a loser, is obvious. The case of the body politic is precisely analogous. The economical argument is all in favour of setting everybody to work. Such difficulties as exist are of a moral or æsthetic nature, and require for their disentanglement considerations of a different sort from those which govern the comparatively easy economical question.
Much misapprehension has probably arisen from a confusion between a standard or law of life and the persons to whom it is applied. A standard or law says nothing about the character of the persons who are expected to conform to it. It pronounces no opinion upon their nature beyond what is implied in assuming it to be not impossible for them to live by it. The command, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself,' implies that such love is possible to men; but it may be manifested in countless ways—in heroic conflict or in patient endurance, in passionate ardour or meek submission. If it be true that certain gifts and graces are specially congenial to the masculine or feminine nature, the presentation of a common standard will draw them out according to their kind, without the risk of seeming to dispense with the less easy virtues. Just as when you plant two rose-trees in the same ground, you imply the belief that certain general conditions of soil and atmosphere are good for both, but you make no attempt to influence variations of colour or of perfume; so the Christian theory of education implies an essential resemblance between the sexes, without interfering in any way with native differences. If, indeed, you adopt the analogy, not without a certain fanciful charm, according to which men are trees and women flowers, the separate system is right. You do wisely to plant the oak in the forest, and to shelter the delicate geranium in the hothouse. But this view implies that men and women are of a different genus, which no one in his senses would maintain. The popular simile of the oak and the ivy is equally untenable. Advocates on both sides are apt to talk as if men and women were distinct races, handing down their respective characteristics from generation to generation. The fact is, as every one knows, that hereditary qualities are transmitted from father to daughter, and from mother to son, with much impartiality. The influences tending to create dissimilarity, which, in our day at least, are at work, without a moment's intermission, from the cradle to the grave, are incessantly neutralised in each successive generation. If it were not so, it is difficult to imagine what the human race would become. One thing is certain, it would very soon cease to be human.
Writers on this subject commonly adopt somewhat of a threatening tone in reference to any proposed change. They warn women that if the oak and ivy theory is given up, what is called the old chivalry will die out, and they must no longer expect to be protected. And it is further urged that men would suffer, no less than women, from the absence of any demand upon their protective instincts. We are indebted to Mr Kingsley for a very clear and moderate statement of this view in a chapter of 'The Roman and the Teuton' on the Lombard Laws.
'It is to be remarked,' he says, 'that no free woman can live in Lombardy, or, I believe, in any Teutonic state, save under the "mundium" of some one. You should understand this word "mund." Among most of the Teutonic races, women, slaves and youths, at least not of age to carry arms, were under the mund of some one. Of course, primarily the father, head of the family, and if he died, an uncle, elder brother, &c. The married woman was, of course, under the mund of her husband. He was answerable for the good conduct of all under his mund; he had to pay their fines if they offended; and he was bound, on the other hand, to protect them by all lawful means.
'This system still lingers in the legal status of women in England, for good and evil; the husband is more or less answerable for the wife's debts; the wife, till lately, was unable to gain property apart from her husband's control; the wife is supposed, in certain cases of law, to act under the husband's compulsion. All these, and many others, are relics of the old system of mund for women; and that system has, I verily believe, succeeded. It has called out, as no other system could have done, chivalry in the man. It has made him feel it a duty and an honour to protect the physically weaker sex. It has made the woman feel that her influence, whether in the state or in the family, is to be not physical and legal, but moral and spiritual; and that it therefore rests on a ground really nobler and deeper than that of the man. The modern experiments for emancipating women from all mund, and placing them on a physical and legal equality with the man, may be right, and may be ultimately successful. We must not hastily prejudge them. But of this we may be almost certain, that, if they succeed, they will cause a widespread revolution in society, of which the patent danger will be, the destruction of the feeling of chivalry, and the consequent brutalisation of the male sex.'
These are terrible warnings, and may well make any one hesitate in lifting a finger to aid in a revolution charged with such disastrous possibilities. But is it really true that the male sex is likely to be brutalised by learning that a man must no longer rely upon physical and legal influence, but must rest his claims to allegiance on a moral and spiritual basis? Is it good for a man to feel that his influence rests on a ground less noble and deep than that of women, and to satisfy himself with a lower moral position? The mund system may have succeeded,—in other words, it may have been the best thing possible, in a rude and barbarous age, when serfdom also was in full force and 'succeeded' in its way—a time when force was met by force, and individual protection was a surer resource than that of law. But even as applying to those days, the success of the system seems to have been somewhat incomplete. How it worked—or failed to work—Mr Kingsley shows in a few graphic lines, in his recent tale, 'Hereward.' Describing the fate of the little Torfrida, his hero's daughter, he tells us, that 'she was married to Hugh of Evermue, who is not said to have kicked her; and was, according to them of Crowland, a good friend to their monastery, and therefore, doubtless, a good man. Once, says wicked report, he offered to strike her, as was the fashion in those chivalrous days. Whereon she turned upon him like a tigress, and bidding him remember that she was the daughter of Hereward and Torfrida, gave him such a beating, that he, not wishing to draw sword upon her, surrendered at discretion; and they lived all their lives afterwards as happily as most other people in those times.'
Mr Gladstone lays down, that 'as the law of force is the law of the brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law does man approximate to the brute; and in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the emancipation and due ascendancy of women are not a mere fact: they are the emphatic assertion of a principle; and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force, and the enthronement of other and higher laws in its place, and in its despite.' The advocates of the protective theory seem scarcely to have realised that the idea of protection implies the corresponding idea of attack. It assumes, as part of its essence, that somebody is attacking, or what occasion would there be for defence? Might it not be well for everybody to abandon the attitude of attack? To assert that in a civilised country women want such protection as any human arm can give, is a contradiction in terms. It is supposing, either that the law permits outrages upon the defenceless, or that it can be broken with impunity. That we in England are as yet only partially emerged from barbarism is indeed true. The time-honoured customs handed down from the days of Hugh of Evermue have not yet disappeared, and cases of assault, almost invariably committed by the natural protector, are not uncommon in English households. But the law undertakes to interfere—and does interfere, though as yet in a somewhat impotent manner—for the defence of hapless wives and children. It can scarcely be the true policy of an age which professes to be enlightened and humane, to suffer general licence to prevail, in order that a few rare souls, able to be a law to themselves and other people, may have the occasion for displaying exceptional heroism. If the scheme of Divine Providence requires that there should be outlets for the protective energies, they are likely to be found for a long time yet, in the infirmities of age, of infancy, and of poverty, without encouraging morbid or affected weakness in human beings intended by nature to be healthy and strong. There is still plenty of fighting to do, though the progress of civilisation has removed the warfare into new fields, and demands new weapons. Evil now appears in a subtle, intangible shape, against which physical strength is of little avail. But the generosity and the courage which constituted the true beauty and worth of chivalry can never become obsolete. The chivalrous spirit now shows itself in the abandonment of unjust privileges, in the enactment of equal laws, and in facing ridicule, opposition, and discouragement in behalf of unpopular ideas. The great battle between good and evil is for ever going on. The form is renewed from age to age, but the spirit is the same. Let us take care lest, in clinging to forms from which the spirit has departed, in shutting our eyes to keep out the dawning day, we may be blindly fighting the battle of the Philistines, all unwittingly ranged among the enemies of the cause we desire to serve.