Women in the movement often wish that the word humanist had not been appropriated, because it would far more properly connote the women’s movement than the word feminist.
It is significant of much that there is in the English language no commonly used substantive corresponding to “homo.” There is need, of course, for the words man and woman, but there is also need for a word denoting the species, irrespective of sex, and I have been driven to make use of a locution not common in English, in writing “a human.” But the common pronoun is non-existent and I have not used the neuter, lest it should alarm nervous persons. Perhaps when we have got over the panic fear of unsexing ourselves, we may find it safe to speak of a human, just as we do of a baby, as “it.”
There may seem to be a disappointing lack of prophesy in a book avowedly dealing with the future; but since I believe the women’s movement to be a seeking for knowledge and good, to show what is reasonable and good in the movement is to show what will persist and triumph. Through all our faults and mistakes, we women are aiming at better understanding and co-operation with men, and a better adaptation to one another of conditions and persons. We are having to hammer out for ourselves the right principles of government. We can take them ready-made from no man. Doubtless we shall flounder considerably, as men have done—and do. But there is little fear that in the long-run the best minds of men and women will not have a common principle.
Meanwhile we have to resist the tendency to easy and cheap generalisations about woman, her sphere, her vocation, and her capacity, based upon a very small amount of very partial investigation and a huge amount of inherited prejudice and native conceit. Men who ought to have some respect for scientific methods will, when some à priori theory of woman’s proper sphere has closed their minds, make the most palpably faulty deductions from imperfect data, and use their reputation in some other branch of science as cover for their bad reasoning. No statistics are more useful than vital statistics, and none have been more misused to prove some foregone conclusion. Everyone experienced in investigation knows how helpful it is to have some general hypothesis in view, by which to co-ordinate all phenomena, but knows also how necessary it is to be constantly watchful lest the hypothesis should obscure new and unexpected phenomena. When the investigator is himself personally involved, and when the hypothesis is one which the majority of men have thought self-evident for ages, and when the strongest of all impulses, next to hunger, confuses the mind of the investigator, we are justified in being very sceptical about the positive nature of his conclusions, until he can satisfy us that they have been reached by strictly logical methods of agreement and difference.
If to some reasonable and civilised men it may seem that I have given undue importance to the foolishnesses and barbarisms of another kind of men, I would ask those men to remember that these are among our masters and we may not ignore them. We might like to treat them “with the contempt they deserve,” but we have at present to live under the laws that they help to make. Doubtless, when we are free, we shall suffer fools more gladly than we do now, having less to fear from them.
INTRODUCTION
Those who open this book expecting to find in it a romantic sketch, rather in the style of Erewhon, of what the civilisation of the twentieth century is likely to be after women have won their freedom, will be doomed to disappointment. It does not deal with what a humorist in the Cambridge Historical Society used to call “that department of history which treats of the future.” Those who look for a plentiful supply of prophecy will not find it; but they will find a masterly sketch of the sources and aims of the women’s movement; and, in the author’s own words, a brief survey of the directions in which it appears to be travelling. They will find also wisdom, and knowledge, and understanding. Mrs. Swanwick avoids cheap and easy generalisation. She writes from a wide and deep knowledge, which has been gained from years of active work, especially in the women’s suffrage movement as it exists here and now; and she writes with the temperance and restraint which come of the philosophic mind.
Her book will be read and digested by her fellow-workers. They are quite certain to make it their own, for it is an armoury of facts and arguments bearing on their work. It ought also to be studied by every intelligent man and woman who perceives that the women’s movement is one of the biggest things that has ever taken place in the history of the world. Other movements towards freedom have aimed at raising the status of a comparatively small group or class. But the women’s movement aims at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half the human race—to lift it up to the freedom and valour of womanhood. It affects more people than any former reform movement, for it spreads over the whole world. It is more deep-seated, for it enters into the home and modifies the personal character. No greater praise can be given to Mrs. Swanwick’s book than to say that she treats of this great subject in a manner worthy of it.
Her pages on militancy will be carefully studied. She is known to be deeply antagonistic to violence in all its forms, and she gives the reasons for the faith that is in her. It is also well known that she is a leading member of the National union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the chief of the non-militant suffrage organisations. But though she criticises severely the Women’s Social and Political union, she is not among those who can see nothing but harm in their activities. Militant suffragism is essentially revolutionary, and, like other revolutionary agitations, has arisen from a want of harmony between economic and educational status and political status. Educationally, socially, and industrially women have made enormous advances during the last sixty years. But the laws controlling their political status have stood still. Similar conditions have invariably led to revolutionary outbursts except where lawmakers have had the sense to recognise the situation in time and adjust the political status of the group concerned to the changes which had already taken place in its general condition. It is by making these timely changes, and by grafting the bud of new ideas on the stem of old institutions, that our countrymen have shown their practical political instinct, and have, on the whole, saved the nation from the ruinous waste of revolution. They have not yet shown this good sense about women. But the signs of the times are full of hope that they may revert to type and be wise in time.
Dr. Arnold, writing from France within a generation of the Terror, said in reference to the destruction of the feudal power of the nobles over the French peasantry: “The work has been done … and in my opinion the blessing is enough to compensate the evils of the French Revolution; for the good endures, while the effects of the massacres and devastation are fast passing away.” If that could be said of the Terror cannot it be even more positively said of the comparatively innocuous “militancy” of recent years? The good endures, while the evil is temporary and passes away, is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.
MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.
“New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.”
J. R. Lowell.
The world is full of books about women,—most often alluded to in such books as “Woman.” The vast majority of these books have been written by men, and until quite lately the few women who wrote about women confined themselves to repeating the precepts laid down by men. There were remarkable exceptions, of course: Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily and Charlotte Bront?, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spoke as women and not as echoes of men. Quite recently women have suddenly broken the long silence, and there is a flood of exposition which is likely, from its volume and force, to make confusion take the place of silence. Ellen Key in Sweden, Rosa Mayreder in Austria, Mrs. Gilman in America and Olive Schreiner in South Africa are a few of the most distinguished writers; but there are troops of others who, in books and magazines and papers, strive to deliver their souls. This little book aims merely at being a brief survey of the women’s movement and of the directions it appears to be taking; a survey which shall deal with principles and the broad aspect of things rather than with details, and that will rather suggest what are the difficulties and in what spirit they should be approached, than offer a universal solution for the deepest and most complex problem that has been set before the human race.
The women’s movement in Great Britain has for the last seven years been directed so considerably into political channels, the struggle for the parliamentary vote has absorbed so much of the active, organised and thinking women of the nation, that one hears people talk sometimes as if the suffrage movement were the women’s movement, and as if, when the vote shall be won, there will be no more women’s movement. One would have to be very shallow and very insular, too, to think so. And what a tragedy it would be! What! Shall all these sacrifices be made to get the vote and then nothing be done with it? Shall the vote be at once the record of the progress of women and its grave? The women’s movement is world-wide, and whether or no it has taken a political turn depends on the circumstances of each several nation. That it will be of political import some day everywhere is unquestionable to us who believe that it will not die, but that it is life and “holds a promise for the race that was not at our rising.” A condition of virtuous anarchy may be the highest of all ideals; no one, it is to be imagined, regards government, laws and compulsion as good in themselves; but so long as governments exist, so long are social reforms at their mercy, and no civilisation is internally stable until it has moulded the body politic into harmony with itself. This is not to say that no progress can be made except by law-making; it is to say that the time comes in the development of every civilisation when laws and the administration of social affairs must change to meet the growing needs of the people. It is because British men have in the main acknowledged this, that the history of Great Britain has been in the main a peaceful history.
The women’s movement is felt in all departments of life. In the education and training of girls, and, since men are the sons and mates of women, in the education and training of boys; in social, economic, religious and political matters. Custom, opinion and prejudice are as important as legislation; administration of law is sometimes vastly more important than law-making. On all these lines, then, march the women, but not on the old beaten paths. Roadmakers they are, and besides the toil of making the roads, they have not infrequently to endure the harassment of the stones and dirt which are hurled at them by those who are sitting in the old track, and who resent their divergence from it.
In England the intensity of the political struggle is due to the fact that women have made such great advances along the lines of personal and social effort, while the recognition of them within the Constitution is still withheld. Moreover, the causes of this continued exclusion have been of late so merely political, so entirely the result of an artificial party system, that the women who desire enfranchisement for no party reasons at all, but from their consciousness of a deep human need, are exasperated by the pettiness and futility of politicians, who subordinate a great issue of social right and wrong to the miserable party game of recrimination and retaliation, of power and office, of ins and outs. The women who had for forty-six years been steadily building up a majority in the House of Commons, and had kept a majority unbroken for twenty-six years (a feat which can be recorded of no other reform party in parliamentary history), found themselves apparently no nearer the attainment of their object, for the morally insufficient but politically overwhelming reason that their majority was composed of men from all parts of the House.
I do not propose to give the history of the English suffrage movement during the administration of the last three Parliaments; to be clear and comprehensible, this would take a considerable volume in itself. I wish only to point out that these women have been driven to throw their energies more and more into a political direction because they have been made to feel that their majority in Parliament would not act until political pressure was put upon them to compel them to act. “I have been a suffragist all my life,” was the plaintive wail of the politician; “what more do you want?” Well, the women in the movement want the vote, and they are realising more and more, with every year that passes and nothing done, that they must concentrate upon winning the vote. It is hard enough at any time to get measures through Parliament unless there is a party advantage to be made out of them. Conceive how much this difficulty is multiplied when, besides the absence of party support, the reform is urged by women who have the powers of the purse and the press to contend with, and who have not one single vote wherewith to get the vote! Newspapers are owned, edited and written very largely by men and very largely for men; even what is known as the Woman’s Page has, till recently, been contrived in the interests of tradesmen, for purposes of advertisement. Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who figures as a rich woman is often merely an article de luxe for the man who provides for her, and, though he may hang her neck with jewels, he does not readily give her a cheque for her suffrage society. All the more need, then, for concentration, and the fact that these Englishwomen have, on a very moderate estimate, raised and spent in twelve months a sum of ￡100,000 in working for the vote alone, may be taken as some evidence of the intensity of their demand and of the wantonness of infliction upon them of further delay and further sacrifice.
I have said that in England women have made great progress on the lines of personal and social effort. There are reactionaries so consistent as to deny that there has been any progress at all, and in almost every direction of change it is possible to find people who think it was bad. The change in the lives of Englishwomen has been so rapid, however, that it stares us all in the face and cries out for recognition. Vainly we wail about the dedicated ways of womanhood, when scarcely a living woman is to be found there.
Much of the great change has been due to deliberate and devoted effort on the part of men as well as women, who, at any rate, thought they were making for progress. The great impulse towards the education of the people which characterised the nineteenth century made a far greater revolution in the lives of women than of men. Not only did elementary education put all the young girls of the working class on something like an equality with boys, but the foundation of public day schools and the decisions of Charity Commissioners gave girls of the middle class a chance of education in school subjects, and, what was of at least as much importance, removed them from the hothouse air of the home and the seminary and gave them the discipline of knowing their fellows and finding their level. The great movement for the higher education of girls secured, step by step, their instruction in the universities, their admission to degree examinations and, finally, their admission to degrees in all but the two most conservative universities. Of more recent growth is the inevitable development of postgraduate research among women. All these changes were deliberate and were regarded by those who initiated them as great reforms. So also were the efforts made, largely by the same group of people, to open careers to qualified women. All the world knows of the foundation of the great modern career of sick-nursing; of the more bitter and prolonged struggle of women to be allowed to study medicine and surgery and qualify as practitioners therein; of the gradual introduction of women into State service as clerks, inspectors and commissioners. All these changes had, to a greater or less degree, to be fought for by those who desired them. They represented improvements in the status of women, increase in power, in knowledge and in earnings. People resisted them with more or less tenacity, and used against the reformers the sort of arguments they are still using against further emancipation; but few can be found now who do not admit that, broadly speaking, they represented improvements. There are, of course, some Orientalists even in England, who think in their hearts that it was a great mistake to teach women to read. But most people now accept the principle that women should have the best education available, and only differ as to what that education should be.
Other vast changes have, however, been made in the lives of women which no women or friends of women consciously strove for, which no one regarded as great reforms, which were, in fact, the unintended and unforeseen results of man’s invention and man’s commercial and financial enterprise, directed solely towards the increase of purchaseable commodities and the manipulation of these in markets; not by any means directed towards the improvement of the lives of women and the home, towards the easing of labour, or the increase of beauty, peace and health. With the introduction of machinery there came the usual talk about its lightening the lot of the worker and so forth, but when one reads the history of the first factories, of child-labour and monstrous hours of work, inhuman and foul conditions and vast fortunes made in a few months by exploitation and speculation, one is forced to recognise that the passing of work out of the home, and of the woman into the factory was accomplished without thought of social consequences, and that, of all creatures on earth, the women were the most helpless to resist this change, had they wished to do so.
These, then, are the two great classes of revolution that have come over the lives of Englishwomen during the past hundred years. One blind, unintended, inexorable, whether for good or evil; the other fought and striven for with the highest idealism and devotion. Both wrong and disastrous in the eyes of some. Both, whether right or wrong, accomplishments, hard facts, which the sociologist must meet and either repeal or amend. The one thing he must not do is idly to bewail the revolution and refuse either to adapt persons to conditions or conditions to persons.
Pathetic people lament the disappearance of the woman of a hundred years ago, and some reproach the present generation with being rude to its great-grandmother. But surely any great-grandmother of sense would not wish the twentieth-century man to be mated with a nineteenth-century woman. Even regarding women merely as complements to men, it is desirable that the wife should be of the same generation as the husband. And it is nothing short of cruelty to desire to see an early Victorian lady under modern conditions; it would be like nothing so much as the liberation of a cage-bred canary into a flock of ravenous starlings.
The industrial revolution did extraordinary things to women. It drove them out of the shelter and subordination of the home and bluntly told them that they must compete for their lives in the open market with men. It taught them (a lesson which is hard indeed for women to learn, and which they are only learning very slowly) that only by the combination of individuals can progress be made in a world where no individuals, no loves count, and where there are no considerations but economic considerations. At the same time it gave them wages in hard cash for the work they had hitherto done as parts of the family organism, without wages in cash. These wages, for the most part shamefully inadequate for a human existence, have yet been unconditional and have produced in working women a sense of independence and a desire for “spending money” that, for good or evil, is having an immense effect in the comparison they make in their hearts between wage-earning and non-wage-earning employments. Lastly, the use of political pressure by working men, to further their industrial purposes, has slowly roused working women to desire power to put that same pressure on for their purposes.
All these effects have been slow in emerging and even slower in becoming clear; the aroused interest of more fortunate women has greatly helped in clarifying thought and bringing it to a practical issue. It is sometimes brought up against the suffrage movement that it is a middle-class movement, in the sense that women of education and some leisure were its pioneers. Undoubtedly it was so, in its inception. How could it have been otherwise? It is so no longer and it never was so, in the sense that middle-class women wished to secure something for themselves from which working women should be excluded; the very reverse was and is true, for, in demanding the franchise for all women on the same terms as men, privileged women are deliberately asking to be allowed to abandon some of their privileges. They are asking that the privileges of social influence which they now possess, and which the charwoman and the factory worker are without, shall be compensated for, to some extent at least, by the granting of a democratic franchise to less privileged women.
The entrance of women into money-earning employments has had two further effects of considerable importance. The Married Women’s Property Act was in part a result; for whereas it was plausible to hold that a woman had only a courtesy title to wealth which had been made and given or bequeathed to her by some man, it revolted everyone’s sense of fairness that, when a man had said at the altar, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” he should become entitled to the wages of the charwoman or the copyright of the novelist whom he had married. Another effect was that women began more consciously to compare their work with men’s work. So long as men always went out as “bread-winners” and women stayed in the home, it was possible to entertain extravagant notions of the arduousness of a man’s toil. Now that women are book-keepers, clerks, doctors and inspectors, they have a measure that they had not formerly, and to many women the peace, order, simplicity and convenience of office or factory may well have appeared in favourable contrast with the exacting and conflicting claims of the household, run too often with inadequate supplies, shortage of labour and antiquated tools.
Enough has been said in this very hasty survey to show the gigantic changes in the lives of women, the necessity for clear and unprejudiced thinking about those lives, and for a certain courage in experimenting with them. The women are thinking. What are they thinking about? About education and training; about marriage and parentage and prostitution; about custom and opinion and prejudice; about the economic and moral and religious side of all questions; about organisation and agitation, about politics and representation in politics; about laws and the administration of laws.
And the movement is world-wide. I shall speak mainly of the forms it has taken in England. They vary in every country. But the world is now so well in touch that the experience of one country becomes the experience of all, and what women undergo in one country smites the hearts of all women and rouses in them the sense of personal pride, of womanly dignity, of faith in woman’s work and soul. The women’s movement has brought about a solidarity unmatched by any other, a solidarity which represents a very high ideal of civilisation, a civilisation based upon the law of love and the knowledge of truth. As the president of the Woman Suffrage Alliance said at Budapest, women feel now that by the degradation of some women, all women are cheapened; that what is injurious to the human race is wrong, whether it be perpetrated in Chicago, in Singapore or in Brussels.
“Ole Uncle S., sez he, ‘I guess
It is a fact,’ sez he,
‘The surest plan to make a Man
Is, Think him so, J. B.,
Ez much ez you or me!’”
J. R. Lowell.
It is often said that the women’s movement is chaotic, that no one knows whither the modern woman is going, nor even whither she wants to go; woman is, in fact, adrift, having lost her helm (or perhaps only the helmsman), and is going, full steam, all round the compass.
It is very much easier to make such assertions, at least they sound less preposterous, if one keeps to the rhetorical singular and begs the whole question at issue by assuming that women are one in need, capacity and character, and that this eternal feminine has been once for all dissected, understood and catalogued, and that all variations are merely caprice. But let us drop the singular and we shall see that although women want as many different things as there are different women, there are two things which the women in the movement consciously desire and strive for beyond all others, and these are knowledge and scope. The women’s movement is one to open the doors of the world to women: that they may know the nature of their own bodies (to every mother her workshop), and the bodies of men, their mates, not according to the teaching of the schools and churches, but in the light of modern science; that they may have in their ranks women who know the condition of law and medicine and affairs; that the mind and character of women shall be enabled to play upon these matters with knowledge, and shall present to the world the complementary view to that given by the mind and character of men.
In so far as the deepest needs of men and women are one, men suffer as well as women from the ignorance or degradation of women; a stream cannot rise higher than its source, and men are the sons of women. In so far as the bodies and minds, the lives and experiences of men and women differ, in so far do both men and women suffer, if the specifically feminine character is unillumined by science, the specifically feminine activity hampered and checked by external law or economic necessity.
In this striving for knowledge and scope the women are in sympathy with the spirit of the time. Scientific men have abandoned the invention of worlds and have betaken themselves to the study of the world presented to them, in most matters except those in which sex plays a part. Here there are still some who talk about “Ideal Woman,” or “Normal Woman,” of being unsexed by knowledge and liberty, as if by nature women were unwomanly, and nothing but the stern restraints of darkness and bondage could keep them natural. In asking that these restraints should be removed, women are demanding the only conditions under which any really scientific generalisations can be made about woman’s sphere and woman’s nature.
As lately as the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Norton wrote:—
“He has made me dream that it was meant for a higher and stronger purpose, that gift which came not from man but from God! It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others, to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws, to ask the nation of gallant gentlemen whose countrywoman I am, for once to hear a woman’s pleading on the subject. Not because I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know, on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than I,—more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,—have watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others. Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs, but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong, which few women are able to do.”
Mrs. Norton knew what was the state of the law, having suffered cruelly from it, and there was, in her day, very little chance of any women knowing the law, except through just such personal bitter suffering. Few women, as she truly said, could combine this knowledge with the powers of exposition, agitation and eloquence which so distinguished her. This is less true now than it was then. Progressive women are determined that it shall cease to be true altogether. They are increasingly devoting themselves to studying the complex social system into which they are born and are themselves introducing new lives; they are supplementing the intuitions of motherhood with the reasonings of science; they are finding in the knowledge of racial poisons justification for what has hitherto been simple racial instinct. The defilement or the abuse of marriage by men, which has hitherto been regarded as venial, because the wife and child were property, acquire quite a different colour when women as well as men know the effects upon the race. It is possible to tell devoted ignorant wives that it is their part to endure all and never to refuse. Medical men have kept silence, priests have preached and lawyers have advised submission, and ignorant mothers have handed on these precepts to their daughters. “La femme est née pour souffrir,” says one mother of daughters; and the more woman suffers, the more truly womanly she is. “Entbehren sollst du,” quotes the anti-suffragist,—to women only,—and sacrifice, qua sacrifice, has been made the woman’s idol. But when she gets to know that the sacrifice is depriving her of motherhood or poisoning the children to come, how then? Will she be so much in love with sacrifice? Can anyone believe that a woman will retain the old attitude towards marriage after she has learnt the causes of many of the congenital diseases of children, or of what are ironically termed “diseases of women”? Whatever the view of enlightened women will be (and I decline altogether to prophesy), of one thing we may be quite certain, their view will be prodigiously changed by the light.
Women will not only obscurely feel, they will know; when they know, there is no power on earth that can prevent them from acting. The only question is whether they shall act freely, or whether their informed energy shall be thwarted, diverted and suppressed to the point of explosiveness and to the embitterment of their lives and characters. In Great Britain, at the present time, this question is acute; but it is being put all the world over, and different nations are answering it in different ways, and finding it amazingly difficult to learn from each other’s experience. Do we not even find English people prophesying direst results if the causes for divorce are made equal as between men and women, and these people are left open-mouthed when informed that in the northern portion of Great Britain they are so? While others declare that the mere notion of a woman being a Member of Parliament, of a jury, or of the police force, must be the cause of inextinguishable laughter, thereby convicting themselves of bad manners towards two European nations and the United States of America.
The wisest among those who educate the young are disbelieving in the doctrine of original sin; they no longer regard education as violently forcing a child into moulds; they believe that in giving scope for natural energy the teacher is doing almost all that a teacher can profitably do; they think that as the human race has evolved into two sexes which are indispensable to one another, the better they understand one another the closer will be their sympathy and co-operation with each other, and that, therefore, the segregation of the sexes is bad. The subjection of one sex to the other is also bad, since the slave-owner never can really know the slave, while the knowledge the slave has of her owner is bitter fruit. In the art of medicine, doctors are more and more setting themselves to remove obstructions to health. Even the penal codes of the world are slowly becoming less and less retributive. Women, therefore, are in the direct line of progressive thought when they demand that their vital force shall not be circumscribed and shackled, but that men shall give them the same scope as they claim for themselves. And progressive women declare that liberty will tend to assuage the war of the sexes, which is as old as the domination of man.
“’Tis such, a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our fair shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! let us look a little more—
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I have said that the women who are in the movement are craving two things, knowledge and scope. Many of those who are obstructing the movement are loud in their professions that they, too, want women to know more—about “womanly” matters; that they, too, desire that women should be allowed to do—what they are “fit” for. And when the inquirer asks what is womanly, and who is to be the arbiter, the reactionary replies, with a pitying smile, that it is surely not necessary at this period in the world’s history to ask what is womanly, and that the inquirer is rather perverse than honest; that human nature is the same all the world over, and much more particularly female human nature; that wise men down all the ages have written books showing that women are instinctive rather than logical, governed by the emotions, devoted to the individual and regardless of the whole, incapable of concerted action; and that these properties of woman, at any rate of normal woman, are specially devised by Nature for the making of good mothers and for nothing else, and that, moreover, the burden of motherhood which Nature has imposed upon women is so great that they have, or should have, no time or capacity for anything outside the exercise of that function.
I wish to declare at the outset that in my opinion any speculations about women, any schemes for their education and their life-conditions which do not take into account the fact that they alone can be the mothers of the race, are thereby rendered worthless and foolish. We have not to consider one generation only; even if some philosophers desire to do so, and if individuals here and there, as they do and always will, achieve it, the greatest of all impulses will drive to reproduction, and the strongest of all desires, after those for self-preservation and self-fulfilment (and frequently even before these), will be the desire of re-living in the children and re-living better than now. I use the word re-living not to mean that there is any survival of the conscious personality of the individual in successive generations, but to suggest the imaginative and purely altruistic contemplation of future generations which shall reap where we have sown; this, I believe, is one of the deepest and purest of those motive forces which lie beyond explanation or justification. And when I have said this is my opinion, I wish to add that in a large and varied experience of the so-called feminist movement, in England and abroad, I have found the importance of motherhood more fully understood and more religiously proclaimed by the women in the movement than by any other women. That they are in revolt against much that law and custom have laid upon motherhood is undoubted; also that they understand motherhood in a far wider sense than the vulgar one, and that they do not regard it as a specialised or vocational affair. It has been customary to divide female humans into women and mothers; this is altogether false. Women should not be trained to be mothers; to do so at once introduces all sorts of arbitrary limitations and restrictions and hampers the very mission it is designed to serve. Women should be trained to be whole human beings; the measure of a woman’s motherhood, like the measure of her love, is the measure of her whole nature. Cramp her nature, limit her activities, and you cramp and limit her love and her motherhood.
Of course the reactionary replies that we are demanding for women more than men have. That, if women have this great burden of motherhood, which men have not, the rest of the load must be lightened in proportion. We may all heartily agree that the load should be lightened, but who is to decide upon that portion of it from which women are to be exempt? Men only? Do we not find that reactionaries describe as a burden and a care what progressives regard as a tool or a weapon? There are people now, who, knowing that men have thought the franchise of such supreme importance that they have rioted and fought and died during centuries of the world’s history for the right to choose who should be their rulers, yet assert that to give women an equal share in that choice would be to impose a fresh burden upon them! In effect these people claim that women do their work better when it is left to men to decide what that work shall be and under what conditions it shall be performed; that, although woman is the guardian of the race, and bears the burden of motherhood, it is still to be left to man to dictate the terms of motherhood.
To us, on the other hand, it seems that no distinction of race or class is so fundamental and ineradicable as the distinction of sex. Breeds may be mixed, a rich man may become poor, or a poor man rich; a man may begin life as an employed person, and end it as an employer, or vice versa; alone from the cradle to the grave, man is man and woman is woman. When I insist on this I do not overlook all the interesting and as yet unproven speculations that are made as to the varying degrees of maleness and femaleness that there may be in different individuals, nor do I subscribe to the endless cocksure generalisings upon sexual variation (for until we can separate acquired from inherited characteristics, we shall never get very far); I am content to base the essential differences between men and women upon the known fact that their share in reproduction is different and produces difference of life, needs and temperament. How is it possible then, more peculiarly in sex-relations, for men alone wisely to prescribe to women?
For example. Because willingness to sacrifice is one of the attributes of motherhood, it is too often assumed that the sacrifice of the woman must be for the good of the race. Nature gives to each child two parents; man in his wisdom makes the laws which assign one only, mother or father, as may be most expedient for him,—never both,—and when he discusses racial problems, he is very apt to attribute any shortcomings to the woman, who “has only one task to perform and performs that badly.” He forgets that the child may inherit not only personal qualities but racial poisons from the father as from the mother, and that the liberty he denies the woman in sexual relations (giving as his reason the sacredness of the home and the family) has too often been used by him to the great damage of the race. He forgets, too, that whereas fatherhood is voluntary, motherhood by far too often is not. He adds laws to laws, dealing with factories and workshops, and leaves the mother’s factory—the home—to take its chance in the sauve-qui-peut of industrialism. In Great Britain he contrives a National Health Insurance Act and leaves out altogether from its compulsory provisions the health of the mother in the home, except for maternity benefit. In this same Insurance Act he arranges that the maidens shall pay for the widows, and the women shall pay for the unmarried mothers. And when death has removed the one parent whom the law allows, public provision and private charity alike have seldom any consolation to offer the widow who has lost her dearest, but to remove from her motherly care all or some of the children left to her (now undisputed) ownership. All these cruelties and absurdities are possible because of the subjection of women.
Reactionaries on the women’s question may be divided into sentimental and brutal reactionaries. The sentimentalists declare (very often in the same breath) that women are not in subjection, and that they like being in subjection, that progress lies along the lines of specialisation, and that women should not “interfere” with men’s work. Women, they aver, are not inferior to men, but true economy is shown by increased division of labour: man’s to command, woman’s to obey. There is to be a specialisation in the virtues, too. “Can we ever have,” asks Mr. Frederic Harrison pathetically, “too much sympathy, generosity, tenderness and purity? Can self-devotion, long-suffering and affection ever be a drug in the market? Can our homes ever be too cheerful, too refined, too sweet and affectionate? And is it degrading the sex of woman to dedicate her specially to this task?” (To me it seems “degrading the sex” of man to suggest that he has no need to practise all these fine qualities, but that he will practise them vicariously through woman, who is to be dedicated specially to them.) The sentimentalists suggest that this willing service women have for centuries rendered to men, and been happy and good. The bold bad feminists have wantonly stirred up revolt, and peace and happiness will only return when they have been routed and the “awful rule and right supremacy” of man re-established.
I think we may dismiss without much argument the assertion that women are not in subjection, and indeed, sooner or later, the reactionary always gets tripped up on this ground. It is not possible to study our social institutions without coming to the conclusion that they are the result of the subjection of women and that many of them tend to perpetuate that subjection. It is inconceivable that women, of their free and enlightened will, would have chosen this position. That some women are found to maintain that it is not subjection and they like it, is only a proof of the mental and moral effects of subjection upon them. There is a brave spirit which declares that “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage,” and much of women’s work has been done in that spirit. Exceptional women have triumphed over their prison (at what cost the life of the Bront?s may show), but the world is not composed of exceptional women, and the mass of women have been degraded by the narrowness and irresponsibility of their lives. One is familiar with the idealistic assertion that no one can injure you except you yourself. It is a fine thing to hold to your sovereign will and force it to command your life, but who can look round on the world as it is and not see everywhere signs of how men and women degrade their fellows by cruelty, carelessness and greed? It sounds like cant to tell the girl and boy who have been reared in a slum and have never known decency that they need not have allowed themselves to be degraded. It sounds like cant to tell a woman she is not in subjection to men’s law when this law does not allow that she is the parent of the child she has borne, and when men can at any time, and do, deprive her of the inviolability of her own body and of the right to earn an honest livelihood. No, it is not arguable whether women nearly all over the world (and certainly in England) are in subjection, and I do not intend to argue it. The only questions are, How came they so? Are the causes eternal and irremovable? Would it be well if they were removed?
I confess to a much higher regard for the honest brutalitarian than for the sentimentalist; for the man or woman who says candidly that women are subject to men because they are inferior to men, either physically, or intellectually, or both. Even among these there is a tendency to allow, with a shrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly conducted entirely by the light of one’s predispositions, and which leads nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly the faults encouraged by subjection. Men’s standards have been applied to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while. It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be that women’s lack of genius in the arts is due to some inferiority of mind, or it may be due to an essential incapacity for or an artificial prohibition of the passionate, concentrated egoism, which alone can produce the greatest works of imagination. The special pleader against women will declare that if they had any capacity at all, it would have shown itself in music and painting, for young ladies have always been encouraged to sing and to play and to sketch. And as for poetry, it is only necessary to have pencil and paper and—genius. As if the kind of parlour tricks that used to be expected of marriageable young ladies had any relation at all to creative art! The eighteenth century or early Victorian parent had a short way with any daughter who wished to take any art seriously. We know how Maria Edgworth humbly submitted to have her work blue-pencilled by her affectionate but inferior father, how Harriet Martineau suffered from the endless task of shirt-making, how Jane Austen hid her compositions under fancy work, lest visitors should suspect she was that unsexed thing, an artist.
But the whole discussion whether women are mentally inferior to men is indeed impertinent to the practical issue whether or no women should have their lives and work controlled by men. Only by liberty of action and scope for our powers can we develop healthily and harmoniously, and the fact that so much of a woman’s life and experience lies altogether outside what a man can experience should surely make men a little diffident about dictating conditions. The opportunity to develop is not a reward of virtue nor a prize for genius. Women, as well as men, should have the fullest possible opportunities for development, not because they are “equal” to men (a most unfortunate phrase), but because it is good business, socially speaking, to develop all your human as well as your material resources. The developed person will be more useful, more companionable, more reasonable, more happy and more amusing than the undeveloped. And if man be really the intellectual superior of woman, why should he fear her competition?
“He will not read her good,
Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
Through that dense hood:
Through terror, through distrust;
The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:
Through all that makes of him a sensitive
Abhorring dust.”
George Meredith.
In the last chapter the question was put whether women are intellectually and morally inferior to men, and the conclusion was that this was a question incapable of solution, certainly now, and probably always; furthermore, that, even if it were answered in the affirmative, this would be no reason for denying to women opportunities for their fullest development. We now come to another sort of superiority, which is capable of proof, which has been proved to demonstration and which of itself accounts perfectly for the subjection of women during the ages of human development in the past. This is, of course, the superiority of men as a whole, over women as a whole, in size, weight and muscle. It seems doubtful whether, among races where women have the same physical discipline as men, they are any less enduring of fatigue, and there are some hardships, such as shortage of food, broken nights and severe pain, which women seem better adapted to bear than men. Again, of men and women engaged in the same employment, such as the teaching profession—in which no one can say that women have the lighter task, for which women are much less highly paid, and which very rarely represents the whole of the work the woman teacher is expected to get through in the day—the women live longer than the men. The superiority of the male over the female in size, weight and muscle seems the only one established beyond doubt, and as this superiority is seen in most of the animals, there is a strong presumption that it is not entirely due to artificial conditions of feeding, exercise and so forth. The extraordinary increase in the average size of British girls during the last hundred or even fifty years shows, however, that semi-starvation, lack of exercise and of the nervous energy which comes from hope and a purpose in life, were the purely artificial causes of the extreme weakness of the weaker sex during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments that have been made in the reaction-time and relative sensibility of boys and girls, suffer from the circumstance that the subjects experimented upon could not be scientifically treated, and all that the experiments prove is that boys, often fed and always reared differently from girls, showed slightly quicker reaction-time, and, in a few cases, slightly more developed sensibility. Anyone who has begun to realise the extremely complex causes of good and bad nutrition and its close dependence on mental states will put himself the question whether the confined, thwarted, and monotonous lives of girls have not counted for very much in the imperfect nutrition of their nerves and therefore in their lack of initiative and response.
But now, of this undoubted muscular superiority of men. What has it led to? In early stages of civilisation, Might was Right. A man took what he could and kept it if he could. Nations and governments were founded on the same principle of self-protection and self-aggrandisement, and empires followed. Women did not escape this law of the strongest. In addition to what seems a congenital muscular inferiority, women had the enormous handicap (for fighting purposes) of motherhood. The nine months of gestation and the succeeding period of nourishing and cherishing the infant were, and are, and always will be sufficient reason why women cannot successfully resist men by force. Not infrequently have I heard women, and much more frequently men, say on public platforms that it is not true that women cannot fight; that some women are stronger than some men, and that women are only prevented by men from enrolling in the army and defending their country. This always seems to me the silliest stuff. How could men prevent women from fighting if women wanted to fight and were as strong as men? If women were as strong as men and as fond of using their strength in fight, and if they desired their enfranchisement, how is it that they have not fought for it and won it long ago? But the women’s battle is a far harder one: it is to induce men to give up the primary impulses of animal nature at the command of reason and knowledge; to refrain from taking what they can take, from commanding where they can enforce obedience. And this is a battle which was begun ages ago, and in every age has had its victories,—victories due, not to the pitting of physical force against physical force, but, first, to man’s deep need of woman, which prevented him from destroying her, as he destroyed all other weaker creatures when he had no use for them, and, second, to the mutual love of man and woman and their common bond in the child. Physical force is a great and vastly important part of the forces wielded by man, but it never has been the only one, and it is increasingly being brought under the dominion and guidance of other forces. Women, too, have their physical force, without which the race would be extinguished; and, in the last resort, if we could imagine the brutality of man contemplating a war à outrance against women, their strength would be found to lie, not in the fact that they could conquer men in a physical conflict, but that they could die. For those who can only read what is explicit, I hasten to add that I do not believe such a state of things could ever arise, although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of exterminating the enemy’s women.
If we find some of the women’s champions a little hazy on this matter, their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance of physical force as a “regrettable fact,” do lip-service to the gospel of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and heartfelt declaration that it was “only just and right that men, who alone can enforce the law, should make the law.” Now, if it is right and just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist does not deny that nations can wage wars; what he says is that war, at the present time, and between civilised countries, is “bad business.” I do not deny that most men could knock most women down; I say it would be bad business to use this power, and I believe that most civilised men would agree that it would be bad business, that they have no desire to rule women in this way, and that society will be much healthier and happier when men as a whole abandon the practice altogether. And the anti-suffragists who make such statements about men have so low an opinion of them that I am ashamed for them.
Another frequent absurdity of anti-suffrage argument is the assertion that we wish to destroy physical force, and that if we succeed, we shall become the easy prey of other less foolish nations. Now, to wish that physical force shall be controlled by knowledge, intelligence and right is not to desire its destruction; on the contrary. There is no enemy of health and vigour so subtle and so strong as ignorance and incontinence. It is not love and kindness, temperance, soberness and chastity which sap a nation’s strength and make its young men to fail when tested; it is ignorance, or disregard of nature’s laws, the sweating and overcrowding of millions, the slackness and self-indulgence of those whom their more fortunate conditions should have made leaders of men. It is to the interest of men that women should do their work well, and under the dominion of physical force, of fear and compulsion, women can never do their best work.
Women are making great claims: they are not only claiming that the men of their own land shall not govern them by physical force alone, but they are making what, to some quite honest people, seems an outrageous claim,—that they should have a right to an equal share with men in deciding foreign policy and the question of war. They claim this right, because they believe that it would be for the good of the State, and because they think the State owes it to them because they are citizens and not parasites; because they are doing an absolutely indispensable work and making sacrifices which are at least equal to the sacrifices men make for the safety, honour and welfare of the State. Let us examine into the grounds of this plea.
At an open-air meeting a man approached the speaker with what he evidently regarded as a poser: “If you get a man’s rights, will you women fulfil a man’s responsibilities?” It was a good question to ask at an open-air meeting, where close reasoning is almost impossible, and the answer, “No,” brought a sneering, “Ah, I thought not!” and a round of applause from the youths round the cart, who didn’t look as if they had thought much about even a lad’s responsibilities. The heckler was, of course, begging the question. By talking of “a man’s rights” he did not merely mean the rights which a man can now by law exercise; he implied that a man held these rights by virtue of certain services rendered by him, and that, if women claimed these same rights, they must be prepared to render these same services. I will deal in a subsequent chapter with the question whether, as a matter of fact, voting rights are, in modern England, dependent upon the military service or upon the physical force of the men who exercise them. For the moment I wish to discuss the ethical and social consequences of asserting that only one kind of service entitles a person to liberty, and that service being the taking of life, women, whose service consists in the giving of life, are not entitled to liberty. “A man’s responsibilities!” Let us take them at their very hardest. Let us contemplate the ideal world of the anti-suffragist, where man goes out daily to his toil in the cruel world—
“commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,”
while woman lies “warm at home, secure and safe.” He, if fighting is to be done, fights for home and country; she has no more arduous part than to weep, while he is away, and welcome home the victor. But stay! This version of affairs always assumes that the man is the victor. Have not the vanquished wives, too? Study the picture of any war, even the most modern and the most “civilised.” Are the women of the vanquished, the invaded country, “secure and safe”? From the tale of the Trojan women to the latest reports of Bulgarian or Servian atrocities, we find all truthful records give the lie to this rosy picture. Men who go to war have the honour and the glory, the bands and the banners, the stars and medals and monuments and maybe the glorious death. Women die, and see their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are killed, are their “responsibilities” killed with them? When the flower of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and beget the men of the future?
“The children are tying the sheaves, the women winnow the ear,
The children are plucking the grapes, the women yoking the steer,
Doing men’s tasks, and thinking men’s thoughts, with no time for a tear.”
These are only some few of the questions that surge up in a woman’s mind when men talk as if war concerned men only. But after all, in a modern civilised state, is war the only thing that counts? Is soldiering the only national service? Mr. Kipling’s grandiloquent phrase about woman’s hindering hand on the warrior’s bridle rein makes men and women who are mentally alive smile at its ludicrous inappropriateness to the greater part of life as we live it. And if we admit that, fighting being a man’s business, the details of how best to fight are properly left to men to determine, can we refuse to admit that, child-bearing and rearing being a woman’s business, the details of how to bear and rear children are properly left to women to determine? And if the amount of freedom persons possess depends on the amount of service they render to the State (a principle which, as I have shown in Chapter II., I do not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life. Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they shifted man’s claim to superiority from his military to his economic qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.
In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption that one frequently finds implicit in much of the feminist talk of the present day—the assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising. There are no signs of this in literature or history. If men have enjoyed fighting, and gloried in bloodshed, as many still do, that is because their blood was hot within them, and the women of their age and race loved them for it. The experiences of men and women have each made for civilisation, and women have not the man’s obvious temptation with fists to try conclusions, since they are for the most part foregone conclusions. If motherhood has been for much in the education of the race, so have science and the love of the arts and beauty. Agriculture, manufacture, commerce, even finance have engaged men’s hearts, and more often than not turned them from war. War is waste and the women’s movement may be taken as the type of all the great conflicts there have been between coercion and development, bullying and understanding, love and hate. What has been good in war has been the life-forces, the energy, the joy that men have put into it. They are finding other conflicts than those with their fellow-men, into which they can put these forces, and the women’s movement, in part the cause, is also in great measure the effect of the disappearance of barbarism.
“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas.
Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best. They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that of women. I have already touched upon the lack of foundation for this assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying, spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments “untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very like this in the course of the Dreyfus case, when it became a reproach to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women, according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “The women’s vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side.” (Italics mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterous views and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man (save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used by men of each other in political controversy.
We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,” he writes, “any considerable body of persons who are not represented in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that, even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.
How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man! Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be advised by them,” say the reactionaries. “Yes. And also you may not,” is the reply. Professor Dicey makes much of the distinction between civil, as distinct from political, rights. He speaks of reconciling his “enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in sovereign power.” But the male electorate is not all so enlightened as Professor Dicey, and civil rights depend upon political rights. Men less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education (and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women’s side), and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married Women’s Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for evermore men will feel like women?
Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we do not. The very existence of customs and laws and governments proves that men believe humanity needs these motives in addition to moral ones, and, unless you are an anarchist, you must agree that they do. When men get altogether away from women they forget women. It is natural. Therefore women, who suffer from being forgotten when their lives are at stake, require that men shall not in future be able to get altogether away from them when they are employed in governing them, as they do now in Parliament. Mr. Harrison gives us an interesting and touching little bit of information when he says, “To speak the truth, I only know one woman whom I would always trust to come to a right decision”; but this fact has really no general interest or value, and even if women did not, on the whole, represent the views of Mr. Harrison, this would not prevent them from representing their own, which is what matters in representative government. Mr. Harrison becomes appealing when he says, “Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman to decide these complex issues”; because that is just how we feel! We do not trust the average man to decide these complex issues. A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and perhaps when Mr. Harrison has grasped this feeling of ours, he will see that the proper thing is for neither man nor woman to attempt to decide these complex issues alone.
We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible it is for a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite; women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about. We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who make money and take life. “Things are in the saddle,” says Emerson, “and ride mankind.”
Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England “the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is, of course, entirely without foundation. The vote is not given to the family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote is not refused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the English women at home.
The possession, by the people, of the parliamentary vote does not make a democracy. Many other things are necessary for that. But the vote is a piece of the machinery of democracy without which it cannot work, and it is lamentable to hear men who call themselves Liberals, and who use all the old catchwords of the democratic party, refusing to apply their Liberalism to women and bringing against the enfranchisement of women all the ragged old arguments which used to be brought against men’s enfranchisement and which are ragged from the shot wherewith the old reformers riddled them. “Men know better than women what is good for women!” Yes, and the slave-owner knew what was good for his slaves; and the employer knew what was good for his employees; and the landlord knew what was good for his tenants! But the slave and the employee and the tenant did not think so then, and no one dares say so now. The women’s day is coming too, and the people of the future will deride those Liberals of the early twentieth century who talked of the Will of the People and forgot the mothers; who boasted of their intention to enfranchise every person “of full age and competent understanding” and left out half the people; who declared that “citizenship” should be the basis of voting rights and denied these rights to all women, thereby admitting (what the women had been rebuked for asserting) that Britons, when they happened to be female Britons, were slaves. No external defeats could have so sapped the prestige of the political Liberal party as the fact that it failed altogether, as a party, to recognise the force and the progressive idealism of the women’s movement. There is now in England no movement that can compare in vigour, intelligence and devotion with the women’s movement. When the Liberal party acknowledges this and identifies itself with the movement, it will once more step into the line of progress; until then it is true to say that the progressive women and the Labour party which supports them are the only democrats. Moreover, the penalty of supporting reaction in one direction is that the logic of events drives men into the logic of thought. Many a Liberal who hoped he could restrict his illiberalism to women, is finding himself forced into general principles of reaction which will sooner or later—horrible to contemplate!—overwhelm men too.
On the other hand, the effect upon women of the agitation for the vote has been enlarging beyond even the most sanguine expectations. I myself have seen women of the middle class, who began by desiring the vote from a personal and quite legitimate sense of their own worth and claims, led, from a sense of justice, to entertain the claims of other less fortunate women, and by degrees find their desire redoubled on behalf of these women, whose needs, experience and sympathy gradually demonstrated as far exceeding their own. No less remarkable is the enlargement of the lives of these less fortunate women, by the growth of sympathy and understanding between the different classes and by the linking up of public and private duties and aims. “Since she’s been a suffragist,” I have heard a man say, “my wife has seemed to take more interest in the home. It hasn’t taken her thoughts off; it has only made her think more.” And I have heard a middle-aged woman use the pathetic phrase, “Since I began to think,” meaning, “Since I joined the suffrage movement.”
Is it all unmixed good, then? Is the women’s movement singular in this, that it is perfect? Will women make no mistakes? By no means. Who could be so foolish as to think so? But by mistakes we learn. If you wish to learn a new language you must blunder in it first. One of the reasons of women’s slow development is that men are so afraid women will make fools of themselves. We all have a divine right to make fools of ourselves, because the force that created us decreed that only so could we learn, and the convention by which a woman is never allowed to be a fool all to herself, as an individual, but is made to sin for her whole sex, is an anti-progressive convention which must go. A woman fires a building and we are told “Woman” has disgraced herself, “She” is unfit for the vote. But men sack empires and burn cities to the ground and no one says “Man” has disgraced himself, “He” is unfit for the vote.
I think I hear the horror-stricken Anti declare, “A right to make a fool of yourself? But it is our Empire that you are asking for,—to play with! Our Empire which we made ourselves and which is so complex, so delicate, so nicely poised, that one push from a foolish woman’s little finger will send it reeling to destruction.” The Anti wants to make our flesh creep; but it refuses. We don’t for a moment admit that the Empire, with its millions of men and women, belongs to men any more than it belongs to women. We can’t believe, either, that the Empire is in so shockingly delicate a condition as the Antis make out. The cry is for safety. Only Death is safe.
“Permanence hangs by the grave;
Sits by the grave green-grassed,
On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.”
Life is never safe, yet the happy warrior prefers life. The Empire was certainly not made by people who chattered of safety and permanence, nor will it be kept by such people.
The direction in which reactionaries anticipate most trouble is one where I believe it would be last to show itself. It is in foreign affairs, in the relations with other countries, in the issues of peace and war that they see most danger, if women shared responsibility with men. I do not believe it, because for one thing these matters are exceedingly remote from the electorate, and in the vague way in which popular sentiment makes itself felt it is highly improbable that women’s sentiment would on any particular issue differ from men’s. It is difficult to conceive of Englishwomen loving Germans while Englishmen were burning to cut their throats. What is possible is that women may gradually help men to see what very bad business war is, simply because it is obviously and always such bad business for women, and while undoubtedly some men trade in war, no women do. The idea is freely expressed that men would resent women having power to control the forces of the army and navy, when women cannot themselves serve in the army and navy. It does not seem clear why they should, for they do not seem to resent women helping to control the police force, although women do not serve in the police. In this latter case the matter comes much more closely home to everyday life and yet we have no trouble. Sometimes the difficulty is put in another way. We in England, it is asserted, may be willing that women should share in the control of their own lives, but if we allow this, we shall lose the respect of more “virile” countries. But the “feminisation” of politics (to use their phrase) will not give the country one man less, nor will it make one man weaker or less virile. If really the respect of other countries depends upon the amount of our physical force, that force will still be there, undiminished, and in course of time, as we fervently believe, through better and humaner conditions, will be greatly increased. We do not find the Scandinavian races nor our Australian cousins to be particularly womanish, yet Norway and Australia have given all their women the vote.
My theme hitherto has been that the domination of physical force has been the cause of the subjection of women, and that it is contrary to progress and civilisation that physical force should dominate moral and intellectual force. But, of course, physical force has never been entirely dominant, otherwise the mind of man never would have emerged from the mind of the beast. All progress is due to the growth of mind controlling physical forces, and the anti-suffragists who assert that the vote has been and is merely the counter which represents the physical force of the voters, and that no one would dream of obeying a law if he once suspected that it were not made by those who possessed the preponderance of physical force, are making an assertion which not only reflects quite undeservedly on the intelligence of men, but which is patently contrary to facts. Things may be bad; they might be much better; but physical force, in this crude sense, never has entirely ruled the world since prehistoric times. The idea at the back of the anti-suffragist contention is, as far as one can make it out, that you cannot compel a man to do a thing against his will, if he feels that he has the strength to resist. We must admit that. But there are many ways of moving the will besides the crude way of physical force; there are various kinds of compulsion and various forms of resistance. The Antis at one moment declare the intellectual superiority of men over women, and the next moment involve themselves in a line of argument which presupposes man’s entire deafness to reason. Man is, however, gradually discovering that he may get more out of his fellow-man (and à fortiori out of his fellow-woman) by agreement than by compulsion, and the resistance offered by out-and-out striking is only an extreme case of the moral law of diminishing returns upon increased compulsion. It has been found that slave-labour is the least productive labour; it is slowly getting to be believed that overwork means under-production. The degree of physical force used by men against women has not been sufficient at any period to destroy women, but it has crippled them; it has resulted in not getting the best out of them. Though stupid men and blackguards have not understood this, the better sort always have, and the great mass of men have never even dreamed of applying their force to its utmost against women. It is quite true that Government rests on physical force in the sense that Governments dispose of physical force; but those who form the Government are not chosen for their personal possession of physical force, nor even with any thought that they represent the physical force of the community. In a country with representative institutions the Government is supposed to represent the opinions and interests (not the physical force) of the majority of the electors. Before the modern extensions of the franchise, the country was actually ruled by the votes of men who were few relatively to the whole population, and, therefore, by no means represented the physical force of the community, and before the days of parliamentary government a small oligarchy or even an autocracy ruled. Democratic government has, in fact, come to birth and steadily grown with the steady decline of the rule of physical force. And it will be seen that this must be so, when once we have grasped the fact that the unmoral use of physical force may here and there profit an individual but is always bad business for the community.
If we abandon the visions of the Antis, we shall see that, as a matter of prosaic fact, the vote in England is given to a man not as a reward of virtue (as the assertion, “woman has disgraced herself,” would seem to imply), nor as a prize for intellectual ability (as those who speak slightingly of women’s intellect would suggest), nor as the guerdon of physical prowess (as the physical force party declare), nor does it depend upon his being a husband and father. An Englishman who has, by debauchery, ruined body, mind and spirit, and who has neither wife nor child, may yet have the necessary qualifications to vote, for these are a confused and illogical jumble of accretions, but, such as they are, they depend on the possession of property. It is proposed by Liberals to abolish these and to enfranchise a man in virtue of his manhood. Once you see the immorality, the waste and the stupidity of the physical force argument, there is no possible ground for refusing to enfranchise a woman in virtue of her womanhood.
Who made the law thet hurts, John,
Heads I win,—ditto tails?
“J. B.” was on his shirts, John,
Onless my memory fails.
Ole Uncle S., sez he, “I guess
(I’m good at thet),” sez he,
“Thet sauce for goose ain’t jest the juice
For ganders with J. B.,
No more than you or me.”
J. R. Lowell.
We come now to the question, what is the use of the vote, about which women are making such a bobbery? Not more bobbery, be it well understood, than men have made; not nearly as much, if we are to take as a measure the amount of suffering that men have been willing to inflict and the crimes they were willing to perpetrate in pursuit of the franchise.
We exaggerate the use of the vote, say the Antis. Well, even if it is possible to exaggerate the use of the vote, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the significance of the continued denial of the vote. To the awakened, organised, articulate women who are demanding the vote, the shifts and excuses and dodges of politicians, the exhibitions of mob spirit and the revelations of passions and motives usually hidden have been startling. Women, whose private lives were fortunate, have been taught that they were living in a fool’s paradise concerning the lives of other women. The sight of woman-baiting by a mob of her political masters; the listening to debates in the House of Commons; above all, the arguments used by anti-suffragists have made women infinitely keener and more conscious of their position than they were before. Many of these things have been as startling as a blow in the face. The letter of Sir Almroth Wright, the verses published by Mr. Rudyard Kipling under the title, The Female of the Species, the animus of Mr. Belfort Bax and the vulgarities and shallows of Mr. Harold Owen and the Anti-Suffrage Review must have converted thousands of men and women who before had refused to believe that such views were at the back of the opposition to women’s enfranchisement.
But do we exaggerate the value of the vote? People often talk as if the vote were only of use for making more and more laws, and ascribe to women the desire to “make men good by Act of Parliament.” They forget that votes may also be of use to resist and to modify legislation; that, through Parliament, attention is called to the administration of public affairs; that Bills are capable of amendment, if the electors will be keen and united enough for their amendment; above all, that Parliament raises money by taxation of women as well as of men, and that Parliament alone decides how this money shall be spent. Three million women and nine million men profit by the Insurance Act. Is this not sufficient commentary on the assertion that a woman’s chief business is to mind the baby and that men protect her in that business? The only medical care that she gets from the Insurance Act (barring maternity benefit) is when she refuses to mind the baby or has no baby to mind.
There are two ways in which the possession of the vote will benefit women: first, by raising their status, and, second, by giving them power to influence Parliament directly through their representatives. The matter of status seems to me by far the more important of the two, but because it is intangible, people with no imagination cannot grasp it. Yet men from the days of ancient Greece and Rome to now have very passionately clung to the badge of citizenship. We find magistrates now in England adjusting their sentences so as to avoid adding the humiliation of disfranchisement to other penalties of the law; we find Parliament debating earnestly how relief may be given to poor men without involving them in pauperisation, which means the loss of the vote; we remember how Members of Parliament pleaded for the coloured man in South Africa that “the intolerable slur of disfranchisement” should not be cast upon him, and we note with burning indignation that these Members are quite placidly content that this intolerable slur should remain upon their own mothers and wives. It is only an idea. Yet ideas have moved the world, and this idea that women are not born to be the slaves of men has rankled for ages; now that it has found expression, it rankles no longer, it has become an inspiration to millions of lives, not only of women but of men too.
As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds of politicians when any women’s problem is presented to them: it is, to prohibit. As Miss Gore-Booth has remarked, politicians of the type of Mr. John Burns cry out periodically, “Go and see what the women are doing and tell them not to!” It is always done, ostensibly, in the interests of the mothers and their children, but women know that what the mothers want is the means and freedom to do their work, not prohibition. What is the matter with the poor is their poverty, says Mr. Shaw. What is the matter with the mothers is their poverty and the ignorance that comes out of poverty. Remove the poverty and the ignorance and you will have done vastly more to check the infant death-rate and the manufacture of unemployables than you will by prohibiting all the mothers in the land from earning (not from working! No one ever proposes really to relieve them from toil!) and putting them absolutely into the power of men.
The influence of the women’s vote would be felt by no means only at election times. In the countries where it exists it has not so much affected the balance of parties; that is to say, it has not had just that element of fighting that so interests the sensation lover and that is so fundamentally contrary to real progress. There has been no apparent opposition of interests and no sex-war, but politics have been peacefully penetrated by the women’s point of view. Women without the vote can do something to form public opinion; but women with the vote will find public opinion far easier to move. Acts of Parliament do not spring full-grown from the minds of politicians; we see how different interests are at work moulding them, before they are even presented as Bills, and it is the voters who are listened to, the voters whom the Minister in charge addresses and persuades and treats with, the voters whose amendments are first taken. I do not deny that politicians do sometimes consult women, but what women? Some say they consult their own wives; who selected these wives, and for what qualities? It is farcical, when democracy insists that men shall choose their own rulers, to tell women that they get the equivalent when men choose what and how many women they will “consult.” Voting women may be expected to influence Bills both in their introduction and in their passage through Parliament. Members have repeatedly stated that they could have voted for certain amendments or measures if they had felt that they owed their seat in Parliament in part to the votes of women who favoured these measures. A member represents only his constituents, and in the long-run he votes in accordance with the views of his constituents. If he does not, it is their fault for electing him.
There are, moreover, the indirect effects of the possession of the vote. The politician who is also a statesman should know that Acts of Parliament only work well with the intelligent co-operation of the people. Who can expect the women to co-operate intelligently in working Acts about which they were never consulted, and which no one ever takes the trouble to explain to them? Men say they were never consulted about the Insurance Act. But it was their own fault if they allowed themselves to be overridden. The women could not help themselves. In addition to the certainty of better co-operation, there is the increased sense of responsibility, the stimulus to thought and organisation, the fact that politicians and reformers all concentrate on educating the voter or the potential voter. We all know the candidate who will only answer questions from electors, and any woman who has not been permitted to ask her own question, but has been compelled to put men up to ask it, knows with what pathetic ease such men are fobbed off. Men are not educated in women’s questions as they should be, and the women themselves are not educated and independent. In his fine speech in the House on 6th May 1913, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said: “I share the opinion of those who say that the mere granting of the votes to women would not directly increase wages, and so on. But the difficulty we have got is that when we try to increase women’s wages there is a sort of subordinate frame of mind in which women approach all these points. They are careless. They will not organise. They will not take pains and trouble to look after themselves. What is the reason? The reason is that they have always been accustomed to shuffle responsibility for their own actions upon somebody else’s shoulders. The very argument which the Prime Minister used this afternoon, that we were doing so well for women, was the most humiliating argument that any Liberal could use against such a reform as we are asking for. We want women to do these things for themselves, because they can do them a great deal better than men can do them. We want to get them into the frame of mind of independent and self-respecting citizens who will co-operate with us, and not merely ask us to do things for them, when they can do them much better for themselves. What would happen if the franchise were given would be this: Women would take a far keener interest in such questions as wages, a far keener interest in their place in the factory or workshop. Women as enfranchised citizens would join the unions, would make their economic demands with far more advantage, with far more spirit, with a much more rigid backbone than they do now. Up would go wages as an indirect consequence of the vote having been given to them.” So we come back to status after all as the most important of all the effects of enfranchisement. I hope to return later on to this matter of low status, and show how it has been responsible for other evils than political evils.
Many opponents of women’s suffrage are really anti-suffragists in a far wider sense than they will admit; the arguments which many of them use are arguments against the franchise altogether. But if the anti-suffragist happens to be a candidate for Parliament, he dare not speak his mind about the existing male electors, lest they should not return, to represent them, a man who expresses so frank a contempt for them; he does not, therefore, express it. But some of the women anti-suffragists do, and we may learn a good deal from them as to the hidden sentiments of the men like-minded with them. One of the fallacies into which they most frequently drop is the confusion between legislating and electing legislators. They become eloquent about the disaster that would follow if women voters decided matters of foreign policy and high finance, and some cheap fun is made at the notion of the charwoman negotiating a loan, and the society beauty delimiting a frontier. But the male voters do not perform these functions, and the women voters would not be called upon to do so. The strongest argument against the Referendum is that the great mass of the people cannot and never will be fit to judge of matters requiring specialisation, nor to conduct negotiations requiring secrecy and despatch. Popular election means that the people chooses its rulers, chooses those—whom it should then trust—who shall carry out in detail the policy whose broad lines the people approve. Free press, free speech, open debates are the safeguards and opportunities for criticism and revision, but not for legislation and administration, which are the functions of governments and not of electors. There is no system conceivable that will work if the people will not work it. Men, unfortunately, are to be found who expend their ingenuity in discovering how best they can make representative institutions unworkable, and these men are by no means on one side of the House only. A great deal of the preposterous machinery of Parliament has been set up to circumvent the wreckers, who are, in practice, whatever they may call themselves, anti-democratic. But no machinery can take the place of common sense. It is the belief of the progressives that women have at least as much common sense as men, and that they have proved themselves far better diplomatists, perhaps because they have never had the same temptations as men to rely upon physical force as an “argument.”
The conclusion is, that to be without representation in a country professedly governed by representative institutions, is to be perilously near to a state of slavery. If women were given the vote, England would be a better place, not because women are better than men, but because conduct is not right or wrong independently of its effects, and the effects of slavery are bad both for slave and for owner.
(1) The Wage-Earner
“And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend,
That all is done in reverent care of her;
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night;
And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
The Taming of the Shrew, IV. i.
The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course, very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force.
It is difficult to believe in the intellectual honesty of those feminists who declare that women must fight men on an equality in the economic world. I have read articles insisting that women must not only bear the child, but make provision for the child, unaided by men, either individually or collectively. Such proposals depend on the evolution of a race of Superwomen unlike any the world has seen, and no one has demonstrated, or even suggested, how such a race is to be formed. The women who dream these dreams are very attractive visionaries, but I do not propose to follow them into their Utopia, for the reason that I am more interested in the world of reality. In this world of reality, we must face the fact that women, for every child they bear in health and strength, are made less capable of producing exchange value (called wealth), and that not only motherhood, but potential motherhood, affects and always will affect the market value of a woman’s work. The people who do not admit this are exceedingly few; but those who do admit it are sharply divided in their views as to how the resultant evils are to be met, and even those who believe most earnestly in the women’s movement, differ in their solutions of the economic problem. Yet the economic slavery of women is worse and more difficult to deal with than any other slavery, and it cannot be met by machinery only; it must be met by a change of heart, a change as needful in women themselves as in men. Women must have pride and belief in themselves and their work, and men must leave off applying to women a cash standard wholly inappropriate to that part of the community whose work is so largely work for the future.
I have preferred to begin with this statement of the women’s economic handicap, because I find the great and ineluctable weight of it more often under-rated by women in the movement than by those I have called reactionaries. The queer thing is, that the reactionaries who make such play with the burden of woman, are those who propose to pile on to the necessary burden of the child the totally unnecessary additional burdens of ignorance and lack of training, and a thousand restrictions of law and custom, while still making no serious attempt to remove all necessity for earning. Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast, one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free.
Women are notoriously paid less than men, and the reactionaries are very fond of giving us a somewhat superfluous lesson in elementary economics, to account for these lower wages. They say that wages depend on the demand for, and supply of, labour, and that these depend on the amount of skill required, the pleasantness and healthiness of the work, the amount and the cost of training for it, and so forth. They say that women’s work is less efficient than men’s, partly on account of their essential inferiority (one instance of this being their greater liability to sickness), and partly because of their expectation of matrimony, which makes their work less constant and makes their parents less willing to expend money in training them. Finally, they say that women have other sources of income than their labour, and that their wages being supplemented from these sources, they are able and willing to take lower wages than men, able and willing in many cases to accept wages upon which one woman cannot live. These sources are twofold: their male relations partly keep them, so that their wage is only a pocket-money wage; or other men partly keep them, in return for their favours.
With the exception of the somewhat sweeping assertions about the essential inferiority of women’s work, I am prepared to admit all these statements as being manifestly in accordance with facts as they are. This does not increase my enthusiasm for facts as they are; on the contrary, it makes me cast about for means of changing them, and some of them seem to be already in course of rapid change. As for the greater incidence of sickness among women making their work less valuable, it would be interesting to inquire how much of that sickness is due to the low standard of living, caused by low wages: by overwork from having to do housework and needlework when the day’s wage-work is done, by poor food, lack of rational pleasures, and the depression of knowing that, however hard they work, there is no future before them; a woman cannot rise. There is another cause of depression, in the nature of the “dependents” a woman generally has. A man’s “dependents” mostly include a wife, who nurses and looks after him, and children, in whom he can have hope and pride. A woman’s dependents are the crippled husband, the old mother, the invalid sister for whom there is no hope. When a woman falls sick, there is frequently no one to give her the little comforts and help which may prevent the sickness from becoming serious. It is more than doubtful whether women’s greater liability to sickness is not simply the result of conditions too hard and depressing for the health of anyone, man or woman. Perhaps men would break down far sooner than women, under the strain of a life as joyless as that which most women are expected to endure.
Of the essential inferiority of women’s work, I will only say that, except in the matter of muscular power, it is entirely unproven. Many employers prefer women, saying they are quieter, cleaner, more sober, more trustworthy, than men; others disagree. The willingness of parents to allow time and money for the training of their girls is being considerably modified, and it is in the power of public opinion to modify it much further. The liability of women to marry and pass out of wage-earning is a drawback which will always exist to some extent, but which would be greatly reduced by better organisation. The existence of a class of pocket-money workers has been very much exaggerated, and there is no reason why women should not, by judicious combination, practically eliminate this peculiarly obnoxious type of blackleg. The supplementing of wages by prostitution is a more difficult problem, to which I will return in a later chapter.
Are there no other causes for women’s low wages? Let us see. Demand and Supply regulate wages, they say. Then anything that tends to restrict the field of labour wherein a group of persons may compete, lowers the wages of that group of persons. So long as by law women cannot be lawyers, chartered accountants, or clergymen of the Church of England; so long as, by administrative action, women are excluded from all the well-paid posts in the Civil Service, and married women tied out from teaching and the post office; so long as, by custom and the action of men’s trade unions, women are either directly refused admission into trades or indirectly refused by being denied apprenticeship; so long as all these artificial restrictions of women’s labour exist, will the supply of women’s labour in other directions be artificially increased and their wages lowered.
So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of these being political forces, which have established fair wages clauses for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned the principle of laissez-faire some half a century ago, and most of us have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly. A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary, language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is that, in this instance, as in many others, the work was to be taken away from the women because some men wanted it, and they were not ashamed to use their political power to try to filch the work from the women, though they were ashamed to own up to the reason. Their intention was thwarted, because there were men in Parliament and out who refused to be convinced by the pretension that the restriction was for the women’s good, and because the women made a tremendous fuss, came up to London, held meetings of protest, and roused the country and the press. But this was the third battle over this one position; and why should women be called upon to defend their right to earn their livelihood in honest, necessary labour? If women were to demand legislation to prohibit men from following the “unmanly” and “unhealthy” occupation of selling sarsanet over a counter, or writing accounts in a book, and “taking the bread out of the mouths of the women,” there would be more to be said for it than there has been for many restrictions men have made on women’s work.
What the women in the movement want is the opening up of trades and professions to women. We should then find what women could do, and it would be unnecessary to prohibit them from doing what they could not do. If, further, a living wage were insisted on, those who did the work best, whether men or women, would be employed, and those who were not worth a living wage to any employer would drop out of employment and be dealt with by the State. It is bad business for man to treat woman as a competitor in the labour market, whom he will grind down and grind out altogether if he can. A sweated and degraded womanhood is as great a danger to the community as a sweated and degraded manhood.
(2) The Mother
“In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man;
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth;
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.”
John Masefield.
The neglected motherhood of England cried out for attention, and it is getting attention with a vengeance. A veritable Babel is being raised on the subject of mothers. Progressive women are all for more recognition and support of motherhood, but the difference between the reactionaries and them is that they hold the first thing necessary, to give intelligent support and recognition, is the liberation of the mother from all the antiquated rubbish of coverture law and from some of the worst results of economic servitude. Else indeed may women find that they have only exchanged King Log for King Stork. While King Log is reigning, little is done for the mothers directly by the State. Women, when they marry, are merged into their husbands, who hold them as property, and have towards them certain legal responsibilities, of a nature somewhat analogous to those they have towards other living and sentient pieces of property, The State has always dimly known that in the quality of its citizens lay its true and lasting wealth; but penal laws, which used actually to mutilate men and women, and which still tend to reduce their vitality and to drive them to imbecility and madness, are plain witnesses of how imperfectly this truth has been grasped. Improvements in these respects are, however, on the way. This is said to be the age of the child, and through the child it is becoming also the age of the mother.
In England, at the present day, a working man has almost absolute power over his wife. That he uses this power in the main as humanely as he does, is a proof of how much better men are than the laws which they make or tolerate, and of how much real affection there is between men and women. The fact remains that, especially among working people, where the woman can have no money of her own unless she is in a position to earn it, the husband has the most awful powers of inflicting torture and wretchedness upon his whole family, and that it is distinctly safer for a working woman not to be married to the man she lives with. That working women so greatly prefer being married, again shows how strong in them is idealism and the love of social order. What may an Englishman do with his wife? His physical force is supported by law as regards his “marital rights.” He can insist on his wife’s faithfulness to him, while using complete licence himself. He is supposed to maintain her in accordance with his station in life, but if he fails, it is very difficult for her to find redress. She can pledge his credit if he has any, but it may be refused, and she can then only get maintenance from him by leaving him and taking the children with her and throwing herself on the rates. The Parish will then take action, not for the sake of the woman or her children, but to save the rates! That is to say, she must become a pauper before she can get what he is supposed by law to give her. Even when the law has given her a maintenance order, the recovery of the money is made vastly difficult and precarious, and if the husband absconds, it is no one’s business to find him, unless, again, the woman becomes a pauper.
What would men say of a law which only allowed them to recover their debts on the same terms?
The husband can prevent his wife from earning, and he can claim any money she saves out of the housekeeping. He can bring up the children as he pleases, and control them even after his death, by will. He can leave the whole of his property as he pleases, even if it has been accumulated by the joint-work of his wife and himself, and if by doing so he leaves her and her children destitute. If he is wilfully idle and refuses to maintain her, she can “have the law of him,” and send him to prison: much good that does her! The latitude allowed by the law in the matter of personal chastisement of the wife has been a byword ever since Truth published its weekly list. I have read this list on and off for over twenty years and I see no change. One week is very like another. Flogging a wife till she is covered with bruises, driving her out of the house on a winter’s night in her nightgown, kicking her when she is with child, and other assaults too abominable to mention have been held insufficient to entitle the wife to a separation. I repeat, it is safer for the woman to need no separation because she has never tied the knot.
By far the greater number of men do not by any means do what the law allows them, but are kind, toiling and fond husbands and fathers. But even when the father is the best of fellows, it happens in millions of cases that he is not able, under modern conditions, to make adequate provision for his family, and no working men can make adequate provision for the widows and young children they may leave. The State began to make serious provision when it introduced free elementary education. The next step was free meals for the needy, and this was rapidly followed by free medical inspection and treatment of children in schools. All these developments are undoubtedly socialistic, and involve the principle of giving, not according to deserts, but according to needs. And the interesting situation arises that—although we go on saying that the man supports his family, and must, therefore, have a much larger wage than the woman—when the State pays for education, food, doctoring, nursing, it does so from the rates, which are paid by women as well as by men. No rate-collector troubles whether his rate is levied on a woman or a man; nor does he inquire whether the woman is supporting a family or no. Our experience of socialistic legislation so far goes to show that male politicians are disposed to say to women, “What’s yours is mine; what’s mine’s my own.” The Insurance Act is perhaps the most flagrant example of this, for by its provisions the State’s weekly twopence goes to nine million men and three million women; it is paid for out of the pockets of the taxpayers, and so is the whole of the cost of administering the Act. Practically all women feel the weight of taxation, yet here the men profit three times as much as the women, and by an extraordinary irony, the women who are selected to be left out of sickness benefit are the very women who are doing the admittedly womanly work of making a home, and nearly all women are left out of unemployment benefit.
It is easy to see how these anomalies arise. It is not by any means easy to provide a remedy for them. One scheme, propounded by Mr. H. G. Wells, and with a few ardent supporters, is the State endowment of motherhood. If this were adopted, the individual man would be relieved of the necessity of providing for his child, and the individual woman would be relieved of her economic dependence on her husband. There has been markedly little support for this proposal as yet among women in England, although Ellen Key in Sweden is a warm advocate, seeing in it the opportunity of women to do their life-work well. So far as the scheme applies to women who have lost their husbands, there is a considerable measure of approval; it has sometimes been described as “boarding out children with their mothers,” and is, to a very limited and inadequate extent, actually practised by some Poor Law authorities. A small beginning, too, has been made in the maternity benefit, and now that it has been made payable to the mother, it may be considered a true experiment in the direction of endowment.
In the abstract there is a great deal to be said for the notion that, since children are not properly held to be the property of their parents, and since the welfare of the children is the highest interest and the gravest concern of the State, it is the State as a whole that should shoulder the responsibility of the children, and they should not be at the mercy of the vicissitudes of one single life. The women should have the responsibility of bearing and rearing the children, and the men should have the responsibility of providing maintenance for the children and their guardians; but the men should pool their responsibilities, and, out of taxation levied upon all men, the children and child-bearing women should be supported. In this way it is claimed that the personal relations of men and women would be relieved of the economic incubus: the husband would be the woman’s mate, but would cease to be necessarily her employer. If she chose to keep his house, that would be a piece of voluntary service, to be paid for by him like other voluntary service; for cooking and cleaning and blacking grates is not a part of motherhood. Under such a system, each sex would really make the contribution characteristic of that sex, and the question of a “family wage” would be solved. A man would be able equitably to claim a higher wage than a woman for the same work, on the ground that, as a man, he was taxed as women were not, for his share of supporting the human family, and the widows and spinsters would cease to be burdened out of their smaller wages with rates and taxes to pay for the unfulfilled duties of men. The proposal has, in fact, so many theoretical advantages that it is curious so few women can be found to look at it favourably. The reactionary would naturally not do so, because all changes are abhorrent to her. The progressive women are, some of them, oppressed by the dreary details in which Mr. Wells has revelled, and by the awful prospects of standardisation and inspection, and red tape. Utopias are always so appalling to all but their creators, and when I read Mr. Wells’ enthusiastic description of how his endowed mothers will live, my soul is filled with “an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.” Is this, I ask myself, an instinct which it would be folly to suppress? Or is it merely that the idea is too new for me, progressive though I like to think myself? I don’t know.
I cannot agree that there would be anything derogatory to womanhood in the maintenance by men of women whose motherhood prevented them from maintaining themselves. The actuarial standard, of which we heard so much during the debates on the Insurance Bill, is totally inapplicable to mothers. They have a claim on the State and should be proud to make it. Too often, the poor woman trembles to confess that she is with child, and is tempted or even compelled to destroy it unborn. This is an abomination and a most grievous injury to both women and men. But the supporters of the scheme have not yet given a consistent reply to those who ask what is to be done for the mother when the children are grown up. Is she to be pensioned? It is not enough to say that she can return to wage-earning, for this is generally not true. By marriage she is often compelled to leave the place of her employment, and every year taken from wage-earning makes it more difficult to return to it.
This is a much greater practical difficulty than the fear of over-population which some people raise. People are always in a panic about the birth-rate; it is always too high for some and too low for others. They suggest that if the endowment of motherhood were instituted, and a man altogether relieved of the individual duty of maintaining his offspring, there would be no limit to that offspring. It is quite possible that a free womanhood would in itself provide the natural and right limit. Those who talk as if women would deliberately have as many children as possible, so as to go on earning motherhood grants, overlook the fact that at present the women who have the largest families are those who are the least able to support them, and suffer most from having too many. It is a well-established fact that increased comfort and refinement decrease fertility, at the same time that they decrease infant mortality. Furthermore, it might be hoped that the endowment of motherhood might make it possible for many men who now remain single and are a great danger to the community, to marry.
It is not my task, and it would be an impossible one, to say whether the women of the future will develop the family along individualist or socialist lines. That they will not be content with things as they are is one certainty. Another is that they ought to be made free to reform conditions in full consultation and agreement with men. Lady Aberconway has suggested that men should be obliged by law to give their wives a fixed proportion of their incomes, and there appear to be in England more followers of this idea than of the endowment of motherhood. It should certainly be possible for a wife to sue for maintenance, without being compelled to go on the rates, but the fixed payment of wives has very many and very great practical difficulties, and it would not help the millions of cases where the man’s total earnings are inadequate. Many men, even now, give not a proportion, but practically the whole of their wages to the wife to administer. A fixed proportion of one wage may be enough, and the same proportion of another too little, and a small family may easily be brought up on what would be penury for a large one.
What is urgently needed is, that the problem should be dealt with by men and women not in the spirit of bargaining, or endeavouring each to best the other, but with a single endeavour to do right by one another and by the child. Nature has so arranged matters that the women cannot evade a considerable portion of the burden of parentage. Men can, and not infrequently do, evade the whole of the burden of parentage. Together all good men and women should so contrive their body politic that every child shall have the care and nurture it requires. Hitherto man’s outlook as regards marriage has been personal rather than racial. When the inequality of the marriage law with regard to infidelity is objected to, he has, for ages past, explained that he has made infidelity a more serious fault in a woman than in a man, because the result of it in a woman might be that her husband would have to support another man’s child. This is so, of course, but it is generally a far less serious injury to the race than the results of a man’s infidelity are. It seems to be a law of nature that some of the present must always be sacrificed for the future. The woman may have to sacrifice liberty, genius, life itself. Neither can the man with impunity evade his sacrifice. And he may not regard it as a gift or a favour to the woman, for which she must, in return, be subservient. It is his toll to the future, the future of his world as well as hers.
(3) The Housewife
O the soap vat is a common thing!
The pickle-tub is low!
The loom and wheel have lost their grace
In falling from the dwelling-place
To mills where all may go!
The bread-tray needeth not your love;
The wash-tub wide doth roam;
Even the oven free may rove;
But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
The Altar of the Home!
C. P. Gilman.
In the great majority of households the wife and mother is also the housewife. In the great majority of households this arrangement is the most economical and suitable in every sense. So long as families live each in a separate home there will be a vast amount of domestic work to be done in the home, and a great deal of this work being suited to women’s strength and capacities, it seems more appropriate, as well as more economical, that each woman should do the domestic work of her own home, and do it to her liking among her own children and her own possessions, rather than go out and do another woman’s work for wages. Further, a woman who is attending to the needs of young children is perforce a great deal in the home with the children, and therefore it is again economical that whatever work she does, in addition to caring for the children, should be work that can be done in the intervals, and that does not require her to waste time and strength in leaving the home. A large part of the function of child nurture is merely to be there, on guard and for emergencies. The child is both better and happier that is not too much interfered with; that lies kicking and crowing on a mattress, making acquaintance with its toes, and as it grows older, finds its own games and delights, in copying the arts and crafts of its elders. In sickness the whole of the guardian’s attention may be taken, but in health it is a fact that a woman can best develop the child by being herself occupied, so long, be it well understood, as the occupation does not take the whole of her attention. Babies must be talked to and sympathised with, and as they grow older the busy guardian must not be so busy that she cannot play their plays with them. The sort of work which occupies the hands and only a portion of the head is obviously the sort of work which is appropriate to the child-minder. A floor can be scrubbed, a grate blacked, bread made, and clothes mended with a baby on a mattress in the room, and a couple of tinies playing shop in a corner. It is not an easy life, and the mother may often feel she “doesn’t know which way to turn”; but if children were not too many and houses were more convenient, and all housekeeping tools more adequate, and the housekeeping money sufficient, the life of the mother who is also the housewife would be a happy and healthy life; she could hope to do her work really well, and most women would prefer it to any other.
What are the causes of the present discontents among housewives? Many indeed. They feel that the woman who is not only bearing and rearing the children, but also buying and cooking and washing and cleaning and mending for the whole family, should have some of that independence which comes from handling the money she has earned and saved. I remember a man at a street-corner meeting once heckling me with the question whether a woman had not all that she required if she had “love an’ her keep.” He was a candid fellow, and when I asked him whether “love an’ his keep” would satisfy him, and whether he did not like to have some of the money he had earned as “spending money,” to do what he pleased with, go to a football match,—or even make his wife a present,—he laughed and said, “Well it takes a woman to think of such things! Of course I do,—I never looked at it in that light before.” The mother while she is bearing children should be “kept” in health and strength; the woman who is making wealth by personal services just as much as any other worker, should be paid for her services. If this is not done, if a woman only gets her keep as any other domestic animal does, it is likely that, in modern times, she will be tempted to go out to work, when it would be better for all concerned that she should stay at home and work. Very often, of course, she is not merely tempted, but forced to go. The result is that we see women with the treble burden of child-bearing, wage-earning out of the home, and housework within the home. Small wonder when each of these is ill-done. The marvel is how well done they often are.
Sometimes, again, by the conditions under which the men choose to work, a monstrous burden is piled upon the housewife. The men who have been most persistent and most successful in obtaining an eight-hour day for themselves, have been those who have laid the heaviest burden upon the women. In the cottage of a miner you will sometimes find men working on each of the three shifts, and one housewife to do for them all. This means four sets of meals (where there are young children as well), and three sets of hot baths, and that condition of things which a good housewife detests more than any other, of never being “tidied up.” A canvasser reports how she found a housewife of this class looking so worn out over her ironing that the visitor remarked on it, and the patient housewife replied, “You see, I’ve not been rightly to bed for a fortnight.” It is these men, too, some of them, who were so outraged at the suggested “indignity” of compulsory baths at the pithead. The freeborn Briton reserves to himself the right to bring his coal dust home to the scrubbed boards and washed pillows of his domestic drudge, and when he secures his eight-hour day, does not dream of employing some other woman to help his wife with her extra shifts, so that she, as well as he, may go “rightly to bed.”
Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working women look old at thirty.
The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often sunk in indifference. When people criticise the “folly” of teaching girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied, I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star of hope for the housewives of the future. For it is quite certain that if the women are not dissatisfied, the men never will be, and things will never improve. It is difficult to find the beginning of the vicious circle in which domestic affairs now are. You are no craftsman if you do not take pride and joy in your tools, and is it not mockery to ask the English cottager to take pride in her tools? Think of the crowded condition of the rooms, so that the Sunday clothes must be kept in the parlour, and there is no room whatever for storing perishable food, to say nothing of groceries! Think of the extravagant, ramshackle grates on which these women are expected to cook appetising food, without which the men will go to the public-house! Think of the washing on a wet day! The man gets out of the place as soon as ever he can, and we do not wonder nor blame him. It seems to me indecent to blame the woman if she succumbs to such conditions. When she revolts from them, she ought to have the hearty help and sympathy of every reformer in the land.
So it is not housework that so many women are revolting from. It is largely the horrible conditions under which so much housework has to be done. But it is also this: that it is not wise to put all women under one harrow, and particularly it is foolish to insist on mixing up the notions of motherhood and housewifery into an inextricable tangle. Because, in individual homes in the past the woman who bore the children had to cook and clean and housekeep, it does not follow at all that this must always be so for ever and ever. Some women who are by no means clever at child nurture, and who detest housewifery, are capable of bearing excellent children, beautiful and strong. It would be to impoverish the race to say such women should not have children (and they and the men who love them would laugh at you if you did). It would be stupid to sacrifice the welfare of the children to the incompetent rearing of such women, and one can only pity the men who have to eat the dinners they cook. Why not admit frankly that women differ, and always will differ? Why try to press them all into the same mould? If a woman has been a highly trained and very competent class-teacher before her marriage, is it wisdom or economy to declare that, after her marriage, she must abandon all her special training, her natural and acquired gifts, and black her husband’s boots and cook his dinner? Even if she has babies, is that any reason why she should become a general servant?
Slowly, very slowly, because everything to do with women is so hedged round with fears and tabus of all kinds, there is arising the possibility of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative nurseries. To some intensely individualistic women these will be a terror; they would rather slave themselves to death than have a common kitchen or a common dining-room; and some would not for the world miss one cry of the baby, one clutch of its little grasping hands. Let these women have their babes and their households to themselves; why not? But why should the other women not also have what they want, and do what they can? No one, looking round the world of men and women, can honestly say that men do as a matter of fact choose their wives from the girls who love baby-minding, cooking and cleaning beyond all things. Young men are not thinking about such things at all when courting, and they go for nothing in the sex-attraction a girl possesses. We women, if we have lived a good while, have all known scores of girls left unwed who would have made better mothers and better housekeepers than those who have married, and in some cases “could have married a dozen times” as the saying goes. The fact is that the perfect wife, mother, nurse, teacher and housekeeper is very rarely one person.
Girls are less domesticated now, largely because the development of industry has made them less so. Bread, jams, pickles, candles, hams, yarn, cloth and clothes that used to be made in the home are now made in the factory. It seems to me perfectly clear that by degrees much of the cooking and laundering, even of the poor, will be done on a large scale by those who receive wages for doing it. The discomfort and unhealthiness of laundry work in a small cottage, and the waste of time and fuel in cookery, are manifest to everyone who has ever seen them. There will be a development of the crèche or day nursery in all towns, and eventually those who love the individualist life will find it best in country districts, while the towns will be given over to the men and women of co-operative and gregarious temperaments.
These developments will, of course, bring with them their characteristic dangers and disadvantages. Neither progress nor stagnation is safe; but the one is life, the other is death. What is necessary is to face things as they are and not go on eternally pretending that the world is what it is not: that women all have sheltered happy homes, if only they would stay in them; that it is only idleness or perversity which prevents women from making their own bread (without a suitable oven) and stocking their own jam (without even a shelf to put it on). We have seen enough of the very serious disadvantages of modern industrialism to have a shrewd idea of what the dangers of further development will be, and it would be the wisest thing for sociologists not to attempt to sweep back the tide, but to direct its channels for the future.
The divorce of the producer and the consumer has had many bad effects as well as some good. While people prepared their own food and made their own clothes and furniture, there was a direct personal incentive to make them good. This incentive must be replaced by one as strong, or quality will drop. The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement, that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power of finance, of trusts and combinations, to beat out competitors and to rig the market, acts more often than not in direct opposition to the real interests of the consumer. Hence enormous waste of material wealth, adulteration and shoddy, and the ugliness that comes from bad material and bad workmanship overlaid with vulgar ornament.
The fact is that, like everything else, housewifery is becoming a matter of much greater specialisation on the one hand, and on the other the modern state of affairs requires a modern mind. Collective effort and political action are in these complicated conditions necessary, and the purely individualistic attitude of mind is hopelessly old-fashioned. If woman is to be the housewife of the future, it is the woman of the future and not of the past who must tackle these questions, and men must give the woman of the future her head.