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Title: The Intelligence of Woman
Author: W. L. George
Release Date: May 22, 2010 [EBook #32479]
Language: English
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THE INTELLIGENCE
OF WOMAN
BY
W. L. GEORGE
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1916
_Copyright, 1916_,
BY W. L. GEORGE.
_All rights reserved_
Published, November, 1916
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN 1
II FEMINIST INTENTIONS 61
III UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN 94
IV WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT 119
V THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME 130
VI THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY 165
VII SOME NOTES ON MARRIAGE 204
I
THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN
1
Men have been found to deny woman an intellect; they have credited her
with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and
effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. But intellect in
its broadest sense, the capacity consecutively to plan and steadfastly
to execute, they have often denied her.
The days are not now so dark. Woman has a place in the state, a place
under, but still a place. Man has recognized her value without coming to
understand her much better, and so we are faced with a paradox: while
man accords woman an improved social position, he continues to describe
her as illogical, petty, jealous, vain, untruthful, disloyal to her own
sex; quite as frequently he charges her with being over-loyal to her own
sex: there is no pleasing him. Also he discerns in this unsatisfactory
creature extreme unselfishness, purity, capacity for self-sacrifice. It
seems that the intelligence of man cannot solve the problem of woman,
which is a bad sign in a superior intelligence. The trouble lies in
this: man assumes too readily that woman essentially differs from man.
Hardly a man has lived who did not so exaggerate. Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, agreed to despise women; Napoleon seemed to view them as
engines of pleasure; for Shakespeare they may well have embodied a
romantic ideal, qualified by sportive wantonness. In Walter Scott, women
appear as romance in a cheap edition; Byron in their regard is a beast
of prey, Doctor Johnson a pompous brute and a puritanical sensualist.
Cervantes mixed in his romantic outlook a sort of suspicious hatred,
while Alexandre Dumas thought them born only to lay laurel wreaths and
orange blossoms (together with coronets) on the heads of musketeers.
All, all--from Thackeray, who never laid his hand upon a woman save in
the way of patronage, to Goethe, to Dante, to Montaigne, to
Wellington--all harbored this curious idea: in one way or another woman
differs from man. And to-day, whether we read Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr.
George Moore, M. Paul Bourget, or Mr. Hall Caine, we find that there
still persists a belief in Byron's lines:--
"What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger
Is woman!"
Almost every man, except the professional Lovelace (and he knows
nothing), believes in the mystery of woman. I do not. For men are also
mysterious to women; women are quite as puzzled by our stupidity as by
our subtlety. I do not believe that there is either a male or a female
mystery; there is only the mystery of mankind. There are to-day
differences between the male and the female intellect; we have to ask
ourselves whether they are absolute or only apparent, or whether they
are absolute but removable by education and time, assuming this to be
desirable. I believe that these differences are superficial, temporary,
traceable to hereditary and local influences. I believe that they will
not endure forever, that they will tend to vanish as environment is
modified, as old suggestions cease to be made.
This leads us to consider present idiosyncrasies in woman as a sex, her
apparently low and apparently high impulses, her exaltations, and, in
the light of her achievements, her future. I do not want to generalize
hastily. The subject is too complex and too obscure for me to venture so
to do, and I would ask my readers to remember throughout this chapter
that I am not laying down the law, but trying only to arrive at the
greatest possible frequency of truth. This is a short research of
tendencies. There are human tendencies, such as belief in a divine
spirit, painting pictures, making war, composing songs. Are there any
special female tendencies? Given that we glimpse what distinguishes man
from the beast, is there anything that distinguishes woman from man? In
the small space at my disposal I cannot pretend to deal extensively with
the topic. One reason is the difficulty of securing true evidence.
Questions addressed to women do not always yield the truth; nor do
questions addressed to men; for a desire to please, vanity, modesty,
interfere. But the same question addressed to a woman may, according to
circumstances, be _sincerely_ answered in four ways,--
1. Truthfully, with a defensive touch, if she is alone with another
woman.
2. With intent to cause male rivalry if she is with two men.
3. With false modesty and seductive evasiveness if she is with one
man and one woman.
4. With a clear intention to repel or attract if she is with a man
alone.
And there are variations of these four cases! A man investigating
woman's points of view often finds the response more emotional than
intellectual. Owing to the system under which we live, where man is a
valuable prey, woman has contracted the habit of trying to attract. Even
aggressive insolence on her part may conceal the desire to attract by
exasperating. These notes must, therefore, be taken only as hints, and
the reader may be interested to know that they are based on the
observation of sixty-five women, subdivided as follows: Intimate
acquaintance, five; adequate acquaintance, nineteen; slight
acquaintance, forty-one; married, thirty-nine; status uncertain, eight;
celibate, eighteen. Ages, seventeen to sixty-eight (average age, about
thirty-five).
2
It is most difficult to deduce the quality of woman's intellect from her
conduct, because her impulses are frequently obscured by her policy. The
physical circumstances of her life predispose her to an interest in sex
more dominant than is the case with man. As intellect flies out through
the window when emotion comes in at the door, this is a source of
complications. The intervention of love is a difficulty, for love,
though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for
the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and
the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should
be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect
is the ideal skeleton of a man's mental power. It may be defined as an
aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement,
combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement
or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon,
Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France,
are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can
tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,--a frailty which
probably explains why there has never been a British or American
intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all
alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American
mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since
the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing
life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing
life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena;
seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.
In this sense it can probably be said that no woman has ever been an
intellectual. A few may have pretensions, as, for instance, "Vernon
Lee," Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Wharton, perhaps Mrs. Hetty Green. I do not
know, for these women can be judged only by their works. The greatest
women in history--Catherine of Russia, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Queen
Elizabeth--appear to have been swayed largely by their passions,
physical or religious. I do not suppose that this will always be the
case. For reasons which I shall indicate further on in this chapter, I
believe that woman's intellect will tend toward approximation with that
of man. But meanwhile it would be futile not to recognize that there
exist to-day between man and woman some sharp intellectual divergences.
One of the sharpest lies in woman's logical faculty. This may be due to
her education (which is seldom mathematical or scientific); it may
proceed from a habit of mind; it may be the result of a secular
withdrawal from responsibilities other than domestic. Whatever the
cause, it must be acknowledged that, with certain trained exceptions,
woman has not of logic the same conception as man. I have devoted
particular care to this issue, and have collected a number of cases
where the feminine conception of logic clashes with that of man. Here
are a few transcribed from my notebook:
_Case 33_
My remark: "Most people practice a religion because they are too
cowardly to face the idea of annihilation."
Case 33: "I don't see that they are any more cowardly than you. It
doesn't matter whether you have a faith or not, it will be all the same
in the end."
The reader will observe that Case 33 evades the original proposition; in
her reply she ignores the set question, namely why people practice a
religion.
_Case 17_
_Votes for Women_, of January 22, 1915, prints a parallel, presumably
drawn by a woman, between two police-court cases. In the first a man,
charged with having struck his wife, is discharged because his wife
intercedes for him. In the second a woman, charged with theft, is sent
to prison in spite of her husband's plea. The writer appears to think
that these cases are parallel; the difference of treatment of the two
offenders offends her logic. From a masculine point of view two points
differentiate the cases:
In the first case the person who may be sent to prison is the
bread-winner; in the second case it is the housekeeper, which is
inconvenient but less serious.
In the first case the person who intercedes, the wife, is the one who
has suffered; in the second case the person who intercedes, the husband,
has not suffered injury. The person who has suffered injury is the one
who lost the goods.
_Case 51_
This case is peculiar as it consists in frequent confusion of words. The
woman here instanced referred to a very ugly man as looking Semitic. She
was corrected and asked whether she did not mean simian, that is, like a
monkey. She said, "Yes," but that Semitic meant looking like a monkey.
When confronted with the dictionary, she was compelled to acknowledge
that the two words were not the same, but persisted in calling the man
Semitic, and seriously explained this by asserting that Jews look like
monkeys.
Case 51, in another conversation, referred to a man who had left the
Church of England for the Church of Rome as a "pervert." She was asked
whether she did not mean "convert."
She said, "No, because to become a Roman Catholic is the act of a
pervert."
As I thought that this might come from religious animus, I asked whether
a Roman Catholic who entered a Protestant church was also a pervert.
Case 51 replied, "Yes."
Case 51 therefore assumes that any change from an original state is
abnormal. The application to the charge of bad logic consists in this
further test:
I asked Case 51 whether a man originally brought up in Conservative
views would be a pervert if he became a Liberal.
Case 51 replied, "No."
On another occasion Case 51 referred to exaggerated praise showered upon
a popular hero, and said that the newspapers were "belittling" him.
I pointed out that they were doing the very contrary; that indeed they
were exaggerating his prowess.
Confronted with the dictionary, and the meaning of "belittle", which is
"to cheapen with intent", she insisted that "belittling" was the correct
word because "the result of this exaggerated praise was to make the man
smaller in her own mind."[1]
[1] The notes as to Case 51 have not an absolute bearing upon logic in
general, but the reasons put forth in her defense by Case 51 are
indicative of a certain kind of logic which is not masculine. I must add
that Case 51 is a woman of very good education, with many general
interests.--THE AUTHOR.
_Case 63_
In the course of a discussion on the war in which Case 63 has given vent
to moral and religious views, she remarks, "Thou shalt not kill."
I: "Then do you accept war?"
Case 63: "War ought to be done away with."
I (attempting to get a straight answer): "Do you accept war?"
Case 63: "One must defend one's self."
Upon this follows a long argument in which I attempt to prove to Case 63
that one defends, not one's self but the nation. When in difficulties
she repeats, "One must defend one's self."
She refuses to face the fact that if nobody offered any resistance,
nobody would be killed; she completely confuses the defense of self
against a burglar with that of a nation against an invader. Finally she
assumes that the defense of one's country is legitimate, and yet insists
on maintaining with the Bible that one may not kill!
_Case 33_
Case 33: "Why didn't America interfere with regard to German atrocities
in Belgium?"
I: "Why should she?"
Case 33: "America did protest when her trade was menaced."
I: "Yes. America wanted to protect her interests, but does it follow
that she should protest against atrocities which do not menace her
interests?"
Case 33: "_But her interests are menaced._ Look at the trade
complications; they've all come out of that."
Case 33 has confused trade interests with moral duty; she has confused
two issues: atrocities against neutrals and destruction of American
property. When I tell her this, she states that there is a connection:
that if America had protested against atrocities, the war would have
proceeded on better lines because the Germans would have been
frightened.
I: "How would this have affected the trade question?"
Case 33 does not explain but draws me into a morass of moral indignation
because America protested against trade interference and not against
atrocities. She finally says America had no right to do the one without
the other, which logically is chaos. She also demands to be told what
was the use of America's signing the Geneva Convention and the Hague
Convention. She ignores the fact that these conventions do not bind
anybody to fight in their defense but merely to observe their
provisions. I would add that Case 33 is a well-educated woman,
independent in views, and with a bias toward social questions.
Naturally, where there is a question of love, feminine logic reaches the
zenith of topsy-turvy-dom. Here is a dialogue which took place in my
presence.
_Case 8_
Case 8, who was about to be married, attacked a man who had had a
pronounced flirtation with her because he suddenly announced that he
was engaged.
Case 8: "How can you be so mean?"
The man: "But I don't understand. You're going to be married. What
objection can you have to my getting engaged?"
Case 8: "It's quite different." Nothing could move Case 8 from that
point of view.[2]
[2] Probably owing to woman's having for centuries been taught to regard
the vain aspirations of the male as her perquisites.--THE AUTHOR.
I do not contend that bad logic is the monopoly of woman, for man is
also disposed to believe what he chooses in matters such as politics,
wars, and so forth, and then to try to prove it. Englishmen as well as
Englishwomen find victory in the capture of a German trench,
insignificance in the loss of a British trench; man, as well as woman,
is quite capable of saying that it always rains when the Republicans are
in power, should he happen to be a Democrat; man also is capable of
tracing to a dinner with twelve guests the breaking of a leg, while
forgetting the scores of occasions on which he dined in a restaurant
with twelve other people and suffered no harm. Man is capable of every
unreasonable deduction, but he is more inclined to justify himself by
close reasoning. In matters of argument, man is like the Italian brigand
who robs the friar, then confesses and asks him for absolution; woman is
the burglar unrepentant. This may be due to woman as a rule having few
guiding principles or intellectual criteria. She often holds so many
moral principles that intellectual argument with her irritates the
crisper male mind. But she finds it difficult to retain a grasp upon a
central idea, to clear away the side issues which obscure it. She can
seldom carry an idea to its logical conclusion, passing from term to
term; somewhere there is a solution of continuity. For this reason
arguments with women, which have begun with the latest musical play,
easily pass on, from its alleged artistic merit, to its costumes, their
scantiness, their undesirable scantiness, the need for inspection,
inspectors of theaters, and, little by little, other inspectors, until
one gets to mining inspectors and possibly to mining in general. The
reader will observe that these ideas are fairly well linked. All that
happens is that the woman, tiring of the central argument, has pursued
each side issue as it offered itself. This comes from a lack of
concentration which indisposes a woman to penetrate deeply into a
subject; she is not used to concentration, she does not like it. It
might lead her to disagreeable discoveries.
It is for this reason--because she needs to defend purely emotional
positions against man, who uses intellectual weapons--that woman is so
much more easily than man attracted by new religions and new
philosophies--by Christian Science, by Higher Thought, by Theosophy, by
Eucken, by Bergson. Those religions are no longer spiritual; they have
an intellectual basis; they are not ideal religions like Christianity
and Mohammedanism and the like, which frankly ask you to make an act of
faith; what they do is to attempt to seduce the alleged soul through the
intellect. That is exactly what the aspiring woman demands: emotional
satisfaction and intellectual concession. Particularly in America, one
discovers her intellectual fog in the continual use of such words as
mental, elemental, cosmic, universality, social harmony, essential
cosmos, and other similar ornaments of the modern logomachy.
_Case 16_
Case 16 told me that my mind did not "functionalize" properly. And gave
me as an authority for the statement Aristotle, before whom, of course,
I bow.
A singular and suggestive fact is that woman generally displays pitiless
logic when she is dealing with things that she knows well. An expert
housekeeper is the type, and there are no lapses in her argument with a
tradesman. It is a platitude to mention the business capacity of the
Frenchwoman, and many women are expert in the investment of money, in
the administration of detail, in hospital management, in the rotation of
servants' holidays (which, in large households, is most complex). It
would appear that woman is unconcentrated and inconsequent only where
she has not been properly educated, and this has a profound bearing on
her future development. There is a growing class, of which Mrs. Fawcett,
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, the Countess of Warwick, Miss Jane Addams, are
typical, who have bent their minds upon intellectual problems; women
like Miss Emma Goldman; like Miss Mary McArthur, whose grasp of
industrial questions is as good as any man's. They differ profoundly
from the average feminine literary artist, who is almost invariably
unable to write of anything except love. I can think of only one modern
exception,--Miss Amber Reeves; among her seniors, Mrs. Humphry Ward is
the most notable exception, but not quite notable enough.
This tendency is, I believe, entirely due to woman having always been
divorced from business and politics, to her having been until recently
encouraged to delight in small material possessions, while discouraged
from focusing on anything non-material except religion, and from
considering general ideas. Particularly as regards general ideas woman
has lived in a bad atmosphere. The French king who said to his queen,
"Madam, we have taken you to give us children and not to give us
advice," was blowing a chill breath upon the tender shoot of woman's
intelligence. Neither he nor other men wished women to conceive general
ideas: women became incapable of conceiving or understanding them.
Thence sprang generalization, the tendency in woman to make sweeping
statements, such as "All men are deceivers," or "Men can do what they
like in the world," or "Men cannot feel as women do." It is not that
they dislike general questions, but that they have been thrust back from
general questions, so that they cannot hold them. Here is a case:
_Case 2_
With the object of entertaining an elderly lady, who is an invalid, I
explain, _in response to her own request_, the case that Germany makes
for having declared war. She asks one or two questions, and then
suddenly interrupts me to ask what I have been doing with myself lately
in the evenings.
This is a case of interest in the particular as opposed to the general.
It is an instance of what I want to show,--that woman drifts toward the
particular because she has been driven away from the general. To
concentrate too long upon the general is to her merely fatiguing.
Doubtless because of this, many middle-aged women become exceedingly
dull to men. So long as they are young all is well, for few men care
what folly issues from rosy lips. But once the lips are no longer rosy,
then man fails to find the companion he needs, because companionship, as
differentiated from love, can rest only on mental sympathy. Middle-aged
man is often dull too; while the middle-aged woman may concern herself
overmuch with the indigestion of her pet dog, the middle-aged man is
often unduly moved by his own indigestion. But, broadly speaking, a
greater percentage of middle-aged and elderly men than of such women
are interested in political and philosophical questions.
These men are often dull for another reason: they are more conventional.
The reader may differ from me, but I believe that woman is much less
conventional than man. She does all the conventional things and attacks
other women savagely for breaches of convention. But you will generally
find that where a man may with impunity break a convention he will not
do so, while, if secrecy is guaranteed, a woman will please herself
first and repent only if necessary. It follows that a man is
conventional because he respects convention; woman conventional because
she is afraid of what may happen if she does not obey convention. I
submit that this shows a greater degree of conventionality in man. The
typical Englishman of the world, wrecked on a desert island, would get
into his evening clothes as long as his shirts lasted; I do not think
his wife, alone in such circumstances, would wear a low-cut dress to
take her meal of cocoanuts, even if her frock did up in front.
It is this unconventionality that precipitates woman into the so-called
new movements in art or philosophy. She reacts against what is, seeking
a new freedom; even if she is only seeking a new excitement, a new
color, a new god, unconsciously she seeks a more liberal atmosphere,
while man is nearly always contented with the atmosphere that is. When
he rebels, his tendency is to destroy the old sanctuary, hers to build a
new sanctuary. That is a form of idealism,--not a very high idealism,
for woman seldom strains toward the impossible. In literature I cannot
call to mind that woman has ever conceived a Utopia such as those
imagined by Bellamy, Samuel Butler, William Morris, and H. G. Wells. The
only woman who voiced ideas of this kind was Mary Wollstonecraft, and
her views were hardly utopian. Nothings, such as Utopias, have been
always too airy for woman. The heroes in the novels she has written,
until recently and with one or two exceptions,--such as some of the
heroes of George Eliot,--are either stagey or sweet. Mr. Rochester is
stagey, Grandcourt is stagey, while the hero of "Under Two Flags" is
merely Turkish Delight.
3
A quality which singularly contrasts with woman's vague idealism is the
accuracy she displays in business. This is due to her being
fundamentally inaccurate. It is not the accurate people who are always
accurate; it is the inaccurate people on their guard.[3] Woman's
interest in the particular predisposes her to the exact, for accuracy
may be defined as a continuous interest in the particular. I suspect
that it indicates a probability that by education, and especially
encouragement, woman may develop a far higher degree of concentration
than she has hitherto done. In her way stands a fatal facility, that of
grasping ideas before they are half-expressed. It is a quality of
imagination, natural rather than induced. Any schoolteacher will confirm
the statement that in a mixed class, aged eleven to twelve, the essays
of the girls are better than those of the boys. This is not so in a
mixed university. I suspect that this latter is quite as much due to the
academic judgment, which does not recognize imagination, as to the fact
that in the later years of their lives the energies of girls are
diverted from intellectual concentration (and also expression) toward
the artistic and the social. This untrained concentration produces a
certain superficiality and an impetuousness which harmonize with the
intrusion of side issues,--to which I have referred,--and with the
burgeoning of side issues on the general idea.
[3] I have observed for two years the steady growth in the accuracy of
the work of Case 33, due to her having concentrated upon her instinctive
inaccuracy.--THE AUTHOR.
Nowhere is this better shown than in the postscript habit. Men do not,
as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and
persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than
other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by
postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the
postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before
me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary
letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written
outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality. The writers
have run on, seduced by irrelevance, and have not been able to stop to
consider in all its bearings the subject of the letter. Each postscript
represents a development or qualification, which must indicate the waste
by bad education of what may be a very good mind.
I would say in passing that we should not attach undue importance to
woman's physical disabilities. It is true that woman is more conscious
of her body than is man. So long as he is fed, sufficiently busy, in
good general health, he is normal. But woman is far more often in an
unbalanced physical condition. There is a great deal to be said for the
Hindu philosophical point of view, that the body needs to be just so
satisfied as to become imperceptible to the consciousness, as opposed to
the point of view of the Christian ascetics, who unfortunately carried
their ideas so far that they ended by thinking more of their hair shirt
than of Him for whose sake they wore it. In this sense woman is
intellectually handicapped because her body obtrudes itself upon her. It
is a subject of brooding and agitation. I suspect that this is largely
remediable, for I am not convinced that it is woman's peculiar physical
conditions that occasionally warp her intellect; it is equally possible
that a warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions.
Therefore, if, as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this
intellect, profound changes may with time appear in these physical
conditions.
4
The further qualification of woman's intellect is in her moral attitude.
I would ask the reader to divest himself of the idea that "moral"
refers only to matters of sex. Morality is the rule of conduct of each
human being in his relations with other human beings, and this covers
all relations. Because in some senses the morality of woman is not the
morality of man, we are not entitled to say with Pope that
"Woman's at best a contradiction still."
She is a contradiction. Man is a contradiction, apparently of a
different kind, and that is all. Thence spring misunderstandings and
sometimes dislike, as between people of different nations. I do not want
to labor the point, but I would suggest that in a very minor degree the
apparent difference between man and woman may be paralleled by the
apparent difference between the Italian and the Swede, who, within two
generations, produce very similar American children. But man, who
generalizes quite as wildly as woman when he does not understand, is
determined to emphasize the difference in every relation of life. For
instance, it is commonly said that woman cannot keep her promise. This
seems to me entirely untrue; given that as a rule woman's intellect is
not sufficiently educated to enable her to find a good reason for
breaking her promise, it is much more difficult for her to do so. For we
are all moral creatures, and if a man must steal the crown jewels, he is
happier if he can discover a high motive for so doing. Man has a
definite advantage where a loophole has to be found, and I have known
few women capable of standing up in argument against a trained lawyer
who has acquired the usual dexterity in misrepresentation.
In love and marriage, particularly, woman will keep plighted troth more
closely than man; there is no male equivalent of jilt, but the male does
jilt on peculiar lines; while a woman who knows that her youth, her
beauty are going must bring things to a head by jilting, the male is
never in a hurry, for his attractions wane so very slowly. Why should he
jilt the woman,--make a stir? So he just goes on. In due course she
tires and releases him, when he goes to another woman. That is jilting
by inches, and as regards faithfulness a pledged woman is more difficult
to win away than a pledged man. (To be just, it should be said that
unfaithfulness is in the eyes of most men a small matter, in the eyes of
most women a serious matter.) A pledged woman will remain faithful long
after love has flown; the promise is a mystic bond; none but a tall
flame can hide the ashes of the dead love. And so, when Shakespeare
asserts,--
"Frailty, thy name is woman,"
he is delivering one of the hasty judgments that abound in his solemn
romanticism.
This applies in realms divorced from love,--in questions of money, such
as debts or bets. Women do run up milliners' bills, but men boast of
never paying their tailors. And if sometimes women do not discharge the
lost bet, it is largely because a tradition of protection and patronage
has laid down that women need not pay their bets. Besides, women usually
pay their losses, while several men have not yet discharged their debts
of honor to me. It is a matter of honesty, and I think the criminal
returns for the United States would produce the same evidence as those
for England and Wales. In 1913 there were tried at Assizes for offences
against property 1616 men and 122 women. The records of Quarter Sessions
and of the courts of Summary Jurisdiction yield the same result, an
enormous majority of male offenders,--though there be more women than
men in England and Wales! And yet, in the face of such official figures,
of the evidence of every employer, man cherishes a belief in woman's
dishonesty! One reason, no doubt, is that woman's emotional nature leads
her, when she is criminal, to criminality of an aggravated kind. She
then justifies Pope's misogynist lines:
"O woman, woman! When to ill thy mind
Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend."
Most men, however, have abandoned the case against woman's dishonesty
and confine themselves to describing her as a liar, forgetting that they
generally dislike the truth when it comes from a woman's lips, and
always when it reflects upon their own conduct. For centuries man has
asked that woman should flatter, but also that she should tell the
truth: such a confusion of demands leads the impartial mind to the
conclusion that vanity cannot be a monopoly of the female. But it is
quite true that woman does not always cherish truth so well as man. The
desire for truth is intellectual, not emotional. Truth is a cold
bed-fellow, as might be expected of one who rose from a well. And among
women cases of disinterested lying are not uncommon. Here is Case 16:
An elderly woman talked at length about not having received insurance
papers, and made a great disturbance. It later appeared that she had not
insured. On another occasion she informed the household that her
son-in-law had been cabled to from South Africa to come and visit his
dying mother. It was proved that no cable had been sent.
I have a number of cases of this kind, but this is the most curious. I
suspect that this sort of lying is traceable to a need for romance and
drama in a colorless life. It springs from the wish to create a romantic
atmosphere round one's self and to increase one's personal importance.
Because men hold out hands less greedy toward drama and romance they are
less afflicted, but they do not entirely escape, and we have all
observed the new importance of the man whose brother has been
photographed in a newspaper or, better still, killed in a railway
accident. If he has been burned in a theater, the grief of his male
relatives is subtly tinged with excited delight. Romance, the wage of
lies, is woman's compensation for a dull life.
5
Vanity is as old as the mammoth. Romantic lying, obviously connected
with vanity, is justly alleged to be developed in woman. No doubt
woman's chief desire has been to appear beautiful, and it is quite open
to question whether the leaves that clothed our earliest ancestress were
gathered in a spirit of modesty rather than in response to a desire for
adornment.
But it should not be too readily assumed that vanity is purely a
feminine characteristic. It is a human characteristic, and the favor of
any male savage can be bought at the price of a necklace of beads or of
an admiral's cocked hat. The modern man is modish too, as much as he
dares. At Newport as at Brighton the dandy is supreme. It would be
inaccurate, however, to limit vanity to clothes. Vanity is more subtle,
and I would ask the reader which of the three principal motives that
animate man--love, ambition, and gold lust--is the strongest. The desire
to shine in the eyes of one's fellows has produced much in art and
political service; it has produced much that is foolish and ignoble. It
has led to political competition, to a wild race for ill-remunerated
offices, governorships, memberships of Parliament. Representatives of
the people often wish to serve the people; they also like to be marked
out as the people's men. There are no limits to masculine desire for
honors; seldom in England does a man refuse a peerage; Frenchmen are
martyrs to their love of ribbons, and not a year passes without a
scandal because an official has been bribed to obtain the Légion
d'Honneur for somebody, or, funnier still, because an adventurer has
blacked his face, set up in a small flat, impersonated a negro
potentate, and distributed for value received grand crosses of fantastic
kingdoms. Even democratic Americans have been known to seek titled
husbands for their daughters, and a few have become Papal barons or
counts.
Male vanity differs from female, but both are vanity. The two sexes even
share that curious form of vanity which in man consists in his calling
himself a "plain man", bragging of having come to New York without shoes
and with a dime in his pocket; which, in woman, consists in neglecting
her appearance. Both sexes convey more or less: "I am what I am, a
humble person ... but quite good enough." The arrogance of humility is
simply repulsive.
Ideas such as the foregoing may proceed from a certain simplicity. Woman
is much less complex than the poets believe. For instance, many men hold
that woman's lack of self-consciousness, as exemplified by disturbances
in shops, has its roots in some intricate reasoning process. One must
not be carried away: the truth is that woman, having so long been
dependent upon man, has an exaggerated idea of the importance of small
sums. Man has earned money; woman has been taught only to save it. Thus
she has been poor, and poverty has caused her to shrink from
expenditure; often she has become mean and, paradoxically enough, she
has at the same time become extravagant. Poverty has taught her to
respect the penny, while it has taught her nothing about the pound. If
woman finds it quite easy to spend one tenth of the household income on
dress, and even more,[4] it is because her education makes it as
difficult for her to conceive a thousand dollars as it is for a man to
conceive a million. It is merely a question of familiarity with money.
[4] See "Uniforms for Women," and observe extreme figures and details of
feminine expenditure on clothes.
Besides, foolish economy and reckless expenditure are indications of an
elementary quality. In that sense woman is still something of a savage.
She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been
educated. This may be a very good thing, and it certainly is an
agreeable one from the masculine point of view. Whether we consider
woman's attitude to the law, to social service, or to war, it is the
same thing. In most cases she is lawless; she will obey the law because
she is afraid of it, but she will not respect it. For her it is always
_sic volo, sic jubeo_. I suspect that if she had had a share in making
the law she would not have been like this, for she would have become
aware of the relation between law and life. Roughly she tends to look
upon the law as tyrannous if she does not like it, as protective if she
does like it. Probably there is little relation between her own moral
impulse, which is generous, and the law, which is only just. (That is,
just in intention.) This is qualified by the moral spirit in woman,
which increasingly leads her to the view that certain things should be
done and others not be done. But even then it is likely that at heart
woman does not respect the law; she may respect what it
represents,--strength,--but not what it implies,--equity. She is
infinitely more rebellious than man, and where she has power she
inflames the world in protest. I do not refer to the militant
suffragists, but to woman's general attitude. For instance, when it is
proposed to compel women to insure their servants, to pay employer's
compensation for accident, to restrict married women's control of their
property, to establish laws regulating the social evil, we find female
opposition very violent. I do not mean material opposition, although
that does occur, but mental hostility. Woman surrenders because she
must, man because he ought to.
That is an attitude of barbarism. It is a changing attitude; the ranks
of social service have, during the last half-century, been
disproportionately swollen by woman. Our most active worker in the
causes of factory inspection, child protection, anti-sweating, is to-day
woman. Woman is emerging swiftly from the barbarous state in which she
was long maintained. She will change yet more,--and further on in this
chapter I will attempt to show how,--but to-day it must be granted that
there runs in her veins much vigorous barbarian blood. Her attitude to
war is significant. During the past months I have met many women who
were inflamed by the idea of blood; so long as they were not losing
relatives or friends themselves, they tended to look upon the war as the
most exciting serial they had ever read. Heat and heroism, what could be
more romantic? Every woman to whom I told this said it was untrue, but
in no country have the women's unions struck against war; the
suffragettes have organized, not only hospitals, but kitchens,
recreation rooms, canteens for the use of soldiers; many have clamored
to be allowed to make shells; some, especially in Russia, have carried
rifles. In England, thirteen thousand women volunteered to make war
material; women filled the German factories. Of course, I recognize that
this is partly economic: women must live in wartime even at the price of
men's lives, and I am aware that a great many women have done all they
could to arrest the spread of war. In England many have prevented their
men from volunteering; in America, I am told, women have been solid
against war with Germany. But let the reader not be deceived. A subtle
point arises which is often ignored. If women went to war instead of
men, their attitude might be different. Consider, indeed, these two
paragraphs, fictitious descriptions of a battlefield:--
"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young men, with torn bodies,
their faces pale in the moonlight. The rays lit up the face of one that
lay near, made a glitter upon his little golden moustache."
"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young girls. The moonlight
streamed upon their torn bodies and their fair skins. The rays fell upon
one that lay near, drawing a glow from the masses of her golden hair."
Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do
not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will
hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered--how hateful! That girls
should be slaughtered--it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of
woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her
humanitarian attitude. I will not press the point that as a savage she
may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that
a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a sexual
consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed,
just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male
reader.
Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based
their attitude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the
Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is
absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely
claim no greater nobility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched
suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid
in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price.
To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in
Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a
goddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as
neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.
6
We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a
characteristic of sex; it is merely the exaggeration of a human
characteristic. For instance, it is currently said that women make
trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and
will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to
understand an obvious syllogism, their passion for side issues, their
generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused,
make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male
member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation.
What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of
degree, not of quality.
Where the emotionalism of women grows more pronounced is in matters of
religion and love. There is a vague correspondence between her attitude
to the one and to the other, in outwardly Christian countries, I mean.
She often finds in religion a curious philter, both a sedative and a
stimulant. Religion is often for women an allotrope of romance; blind
as an earthworm she seeks the stars, and it is curious that religion
should make so powerful an appeal to woman, considering how she has been
treated by the faiths. The Moslem faith has made of her a toy and a
reward; the Jewish, a submissive beast of burden; the Christian, a
danger, a vessel of impurity. I mean the actual faiths, not their
original theory; one must take a faith as one finds it, not as it is
supposed to be, and in the case of woman the Christian religion is but
little in accord with the view of Him who forgave the woman taken in
adultery. The Christian religion has done everything it could to heap
ignominy upon woman: head-coverings in church, practical tolerance of
male infidelity, kingly repudiation of queens, compulsory child-bearing,
and a multiplicity of other injustices. The Proverbs and the Bible in
general are filled with strictures on "a brawling woman", "a
contentious woman"; when man is referred to, mankind is really implied.
Yet woman has kissed the religious rods. One might think that indeed she
was seduced and held only by cruelty and contempt. She is now, in a
measure, turning against the faiths, but still she clings to them more
closely than man because she is more capable of making an act of faith,
of believing that which she knows to be impossible.
The appeal of religion to woman is the appeal of self-surrender,--that
is, ostensibly. In the case of love it is the same appeal, ostensibly;
though I suspect that intuition has told many a woman who gave herself
to a lover or to a god that she was absorbing more than she gave: in
love using the man for nature whom she represents, in faith performing a
pantheistic prodigy, the enclosing of Nirvana within her own bosom.
But speculation as to the impulse of sex in relation to religion, in
Greece, in Egypt, in Latin countries, would draw me too far. I can
record only that to all appearances a portion of the religious instinct
of woman is derived from the love instinct, which many believe to be
woman's first and only motive. It is significant that among the
sixty-five cases upon which this article is based there are several
deeply religious single women, while not one of the married women shows
signs of more than conventional devotion. I incline to believe that
woman is firstly animal, secondly, intellectual; while man appears to be
occasionally animal and primarily intellectual.
Observe indeed the varying age at which paternal and maternal instincts
manifest themselves. A woman's passion for her child generally awakes at
birth, and there are many cases where an unfortunate girl, intending to
murder her child, as soon as it is born discovers that she loves it. On
the other hand, a great many men are indifferent to their children in
infancy and are drawn to them only as they develop intellectual quality.
This is just the time when woman drifts from them. Qualified by
civilized custom, the attitude of woman toward her child is very much
that of the cat toward her kitten; as soon as the kitten is a few weeks
old, the mother neglects it. A few months later she will not know it.
Her part is played. So it is not uncommon to find a woman who has been
enthralled by her baby giving it over entirely to hired help: the baby
is growing intellectualized; it needs her no more except as a kindly but
calm critic. And frequently at that time the father begins to
intervene, to control the education, to prepare for the future. Whether
in the mental field this means much more than the difference in
temperament between red hair and black hair (if that means anything), I
do not know; but it is singular that so often the mother should drift
away from her child just at the moment when the father thinks of
teaching it to ride and shoot and tell the truth. Possibly by that time
her critical work is done.
Indicative of the influence of the emotions is the peculiar
intensification of love in moments of crisis, such as war, revolution,
or accident. Men do not escape this any more than women: the German
atrocities, for instance, largely proceed from extreme excitement. But
men have but slender bonds to break, being nearly all ready to take
their pleasure where they can, while women are more fastidious. Woman
needs a more highly charged atmosphere, the whips of fear or grief, the
intoxication of glory. When these are given her, her emotions more
readily break down her reserves; and it is not remarkable that in times
of war there should be an increase in illegitimate births as well as an
increase in marriages. Woman's intellect under those pressures gives
way. A number of the marriages contracted by British soldiers about to
leave for the front are simple manifestations of hysteria.
As for caprice, it has long been regarded as woman's privilege, part of
her charm. Man was the hunter, and his prey must run. Only he is annoyed
when it runs too fast. He is ever asking woman to charm him by
elusiveness and then complaining because she eludes him. There is hardly
a man who would not to-day echo Sir Walter Scott's familiar lines,--
"O Woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made."
It is not woman's fault. The poetry of the world is filled with the
words "to win" and "to woo"; one cannot win or woo one who does not
baffle; one can only take her, and men are not satisfied to do only
that. Man loves sincerity until he finds it; he can live neither with it
nor without it; this is true most notably in the lists of love. He is
for falsehood, for affectation, lest the prize should too easily be won.
Both sexes are equally guilty, if guilt there be.
More true is it that many women lie and curvet as a policy because they
believe thus best to manage men. They generally believe that they can
manage men. They look upon them as "poor dears." They honestly believe
that the "poor dears" cannot cook, or run houses, or trim hats, ignoring
the fact that the "poor dears" do these things better than anybody, in
kitchens, in hotels, and in hat shops. Especially they believe that they
can outwit them in the game of love. This curious idea is due to woman's
consciousness of having been sought after in the past and told that she
did not seek man but was sought by him. Centuries of thraldom and
centuries of flattery have caused her to believe this--the poor dear!
In ordinary times, when no world-movements stimulate, the chief
exasperation of woman resides in jealousy. It differs from male
jealousy, for the male is generally possessive, the female competitive.
I suspect that Euripides was generalizing rashly when he said that woman
is woman's natural ally. She is too sex-conscious for that, and many of
us have observed the annoyance of a mother when her son weds.
Competition is always violent, so much so that woman is generally
mocking or angry if a man praises ever so slightly another woman. If
she is young and able to make a claim on all men, she tends to be still
more virulent because her claim is on _all_ men. This is partly due to
the marriage market and its restrictions, but it is also partly natural.
No doubt because it is natural, woman attempts to conceal that jealousy,
nature being generally considered ignoble by the civilized world. In
this respect we must accept that an assumption of coldness is considered
a means of enticing man. It may well be that, where woman does not
exhibit jealousy, she is with masterly skill suggesting to the man a
problem: why is she not jealous? On which follows the desire to make her
jealous, and entanglement.
Because of these powerful preoccupations, when woman adopts a career she
has hitherto frequently allowed herself to be diverted therefrom by
love. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was very common for a
woman to abandon the stage, the concert platform, and so forth, when she
married. A change has come about, and there is a growing tendency in
women, whether or not at the expense of love I do not know, to retain
their occupations when they marry. But the tendency of woman still is to
revert to the instinctive function. In days to come, when we have
developed the individual and broken up the socialized society in which
we live, when the home has been swept away and the family destroyed, I
do not believe that this factor will operate so powerfully. In the way
of change stand the remnants of woman's slavish habit. No longer a
slave, she tends to follow, to submit, to adjust her conduct to the wish
of man, and it is significant that a powerful man is seldom henpecked.
The henpecked deserve to be henpecked, and I would point out that there
is no intention in these notes to attempt to substitute henpecked
husbands for cockpecked wives. The tendency is all the other way, for
woman tends to mould herself to man.
A number of cases lie before me:
Case 61 married a barrister. Before her marriage she lived in a
commercial atmosphere; after marriage she grew violently legal in her
conversation. Her husband developed a passion for motoring; so did Case
61. Observe that during a previous attachment to a doctor, Case 61 had
manifested a growing interest in medicine.
Case 18 comes from a hunting family, married a literary man, and within
a few years has ceased to take any exercise and mixes exclusively with
literary people.
Case 38, on becoming engaged to a member of the Indian Civil Service,
became a sedulous student of Indian literature and religion. On her
husband's appointment to a European post, her interest did not diminish.
She has paid a lengthy visit to India.
There are compensating cases among men: I have two. In one case a
soldier who married a literary woman has turned into a scholar. In the
other a commercial man, who married a popular actress, has been
completely absorbed by the theater, and is now writing successful plays.
It would appear from these rather disjointed notes that the emotional
quality in woman is more or less at war with her intellectual aims.
Indeed it is sometimes suggested that where woman appears, narrowness
follows; that books by women are mostly confined to love, are not cosmic
in feeling. This is generally true, for reasons which I hope to indicate
a little farther on; but it is not true that books where women are the
chief characters are narrow. Such novels as _Anna Karenina_, _Madame
Bovary_, _Une Vie_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ make that point
obvious. As a rule, books about men, touching as they do, not only upon
love, but upon art, politics, business, are more powerful than books
about women. But one should not forget that books written round women
are mostly written by women. As women are far less powerful in
literature than men, we must not conclude that books about women are
naturally lesser than books about men. The greatest books about women
have been written by men. But few men are sufficiently unprejudiced to
grasp women; only a genius can do so, and that is why few books about
women exist that deserve the epithet great. It remains to be seen
whether an increased understanding of the affairs of the world will
develop among women a literary power which, together with the world,
will embrace herself.
7
In the attempt to indicate what the future may reserve for woman, it is
important to consider what she has done, because she has achieved much
in the face of conservatism, of male egotism, of male jealousy, of
poverty, of ignorance, and of prejudice. These chains are weaker to-day,
and the goodwill that shall not die will break them yet; but many
women, a few of whose names follow, gave while enslaved an idea of
woman's quality. Examine indeed this short list:[5]
[5] I associate the arts with intellectual quality. (See "Woman and the
Paintpot.") Broadly, I believe that all achievements, artistic or
otherwise, proceed from intellect.
_Painting:_ Angelica Kauffmann, Madame Vigée le Brun, Rosa Bonheur.
_Music and drama:_ Rachel, Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Teresa
Carreño, Sadayacco.
_Literature:_ George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Madame de Staël,
Madame de Sévigné, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning. More recent,
Mrs. Alice Meynell, Miss May Sinclair, "Lucas Malet," Mrs. Edith
Wharton, "Vernon Lee."
_Social service and politics:_ Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Jane
Addams, Madame Montessori, Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Ennis Richmond, Mrs.
Beecher Stowe, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Mrs. Sidney
Webb, Miss Clementina Black, Josephine Butler, Mrs. Pankhurst, Elizabeth
Fry. Observe the curious case of Mrs. Hetty Green, financier.
This list could be enormously increased, and, as it is, it is a random
list, omitting women of distinction and including women of lesser
distinction. But still it contains no unknown names, and, though I do
not pretend that it compares with a similar list of men, it is an
indication. I am anxious that the reader should not think that I want to
compare Angelica Kauffmann with Leonardo, or Jane Austen with
Shakespeare. In every walk of life since history began there have been a
score of men of talent for every woman of talent, and there has never
been a female genius. That should not impress us: genius is an accident;
it may be a disease. It may be that mankind has produced only two or
three geniuses, and that one or two women in days to come may redress
the balance, and it may be that several women have been mute inglorious
Miltons. We do not know. But in the matter of talent, notably in the
arts, I submit that woman can be hopeful, particularly because most of
the names I give are those of women of the nineteenth century. The
nineteenth century was better for woman than the eighteenth, the
eighteenth better than the seventeenth: what could be more significant?
In the arts I feel that woman has never had her opportunity. She has
been hailed as an executive artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a
creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly
discounted,--told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew
unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an
atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. She has
persistently been told that certain subjects were "not fit for nice
young ladies"; she has been shut away from the expression of life.
Here is a typical masculine attitude, that of Mr. George Moore, in _A
Modern Lover_. Mr. George Moore, who seems to know a great deal about
females but less about women, causes in this book Harding, the novelist,
who generally expresses him, to criticize George Sand, George Eliot, and
Rosa Bonheur: "If they have created anything new, how is it that their
art is exactly like our own? I defy any one to say that George Eliot's
novels are a woman's writing, or that The Horse Fair was not painted by
a man. I defy you to show me a trace of feminality in anything they ever
did; that is the point I raise. I say that women as yet have not been
able to transfuse into art a trace of their sex; in other words, unable
to assume a point of view of their own, they have adopted ours."
This is cool! I have read a great deal of Mr. George Moore's art
criticism: when it deals with the work of a man he never seeks the
_masculine_ touch. He judges a man's work as art; he will not judge a
woman's work as art. He starts from the assumption that man's art is
art, while woman's art is--well, woman's art. That is the sort of thing
which has discouraged woman; that is the atmosphere of tolerance and
good-conduct prizes which she has breathed, and that is the stifling
stupidity through which she is breaking. She will break through, for I
believe that she loves the arts better than does man. She is better
ground for the development of a great artist, for she approaches art
with sympathy, while the great bulk of men approach it with fear and
dislike, shrinking from the idea that it may disturb their
self-complacency. The prejudice goes so far that, while women are
attracted to artists as lovers, men are generally afraid of women who
practice the arts, or they dislike them. It is not a question of sex; it
is a question of art. All that is part of sexual heredity, of which I
must say a few words.
But, before doing so, let me waste a few lines on the male conception of
love, which has influenced woman because love is still her chief
business. To this day, though it dies slowly, the male attitude is still
the attitude to a toy. It is the attitude of Nietzsche when saying, "Man
is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior." This idea is so
prevalent that Great Britain, in its alleged struggle against
Nietzschean ideas, is making abundant use of the Nietzschean point of
view. No wonder, for the idea runs not only through men but through
Englishmen: "woman is the reward of war,"--that is a prevalent idea,
notably among men who make war in the neighborhood of waste-paper
baskets. It has been exemplified by the British war propaganda in every
newspaper and in every music hall, begging women to refuse to be seen
with a man unless he is in khaki. It has had government recognition in
the shape of recruiting posters, asking women "whether their best boy is
in khaki." It has been popularly formulated on picture postcards
touchingly inscribed, "No gun, no girl."
All that--woman as the prize (a theory repudiated in the case of Belgian
atrocities)--is an idea deeply rooted in man. In the eighteen-sixties
the customary proposal was, "Will you be mine?" Very faintly signs are
showing that men will yet say, "May I be yours?" It will take time, for
the possessive, the dominating instinct in man, is still strong; and
long may it live, for that is the vigor of the race. Only we do not want
that instinct to carry man away, any more than we want a well-bred horse
to clench its teeth upon the bit and bolt.
We want to do everything we can to get rid of what may be called the
creed of the man of the world, which is suggested as repulsively as
anywhere in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's _Departmental Ditties_:
"My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward--get out! She has been there
before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking
in lore.
"Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of
Marriage.
Blister we not for _bursati_? So when the heart is vext,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next."
There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Molière, in Thackeray, in
Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized
if she has "been there before", while man may brag of having "been there
before" as often as possible; of man lovelacing for his credit's sake
and woman adventuring at her peril.
8
I submit that each man and woman has two heredities: one the ordinary
heredity from two parents and their forbears, the other more complex and
purely mental--the tradition of sex. Heredity through sex may be defined
as the resultant of consecutive environments. I mean that a woman, for
instance, is considerably influenced by the ideas and attitudes of her
mother, grandmothers, and all female ascendants. They had a tradition,
and it is the basis of her outlook. Any boy born in a slum can, as he
grows educated, realize that the world lies before him; literature and
history soon show him that many as lowly as he have risen to fame, as
artists, scientists, statesmen; he may even dream of becoming a king,
like Bonaparte. To the boy nothing is impossible; if he is brave, there
is nothing he may not tear from the world. He knows it, and it
strengthens him; it gives him confidence. What his fathers did, he may
do; the male sexual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a
man said to me, "Thank God, I am a man." Contrast with this the
corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave
tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything
because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do
nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing
they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because
uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of
the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to
believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the
comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence,
instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little
is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most
cases she hardly has energy to struggle.
A little while ago, when Britain was floating a large war loan, one
woman told me that she could not understand its terms. We went into them
together, and she found that she understood perfectly. _She was
surprised._ She had always assumed that she did not understand finance,
and the assumption had kept her down, prevented her from understanding
it. Likewise, and until they try, many women think they cannot read maps
and time-tables.
With that heredity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will
deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority
must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily
snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found
out one's elders, it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and
woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the
old slavery that was in her forbears' blood. To me this seems foolish,
and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to
think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of
colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient
because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I
think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of
training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic
in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to
counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of
to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with
the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I
think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent
in sex. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I
suspect that they are mainly due to sexual heredity, to environment, to
suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human
creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men,
there are no women, but only sexual majorities.
The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though
particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the
Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had
no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was
later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among
the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir
Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled
the mediæval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had
any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up
babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had
become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such
as _The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore_. She was growing significant
in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about
1850 she turned into the "perfect lady" who kept an album bound in
morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had
a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already
the Brontës and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon
was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty
years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to
the House of Commons.
To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which
she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman
governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service.
She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition
of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women
are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists
have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in
their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does
matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical
disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately
intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do
not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless,
more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions
and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is
to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman
than by man, simply because that as a sex he is in power, and the people
who are in power never want to alter anything.
Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings,
her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She
is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her
clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it
must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and
woman in her emancipation campaign is still too busy to think of the art
of charming. I suspect that as time passes and she suffers less
intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old
graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late
years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown
much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there
were so many things woman might not do. Almost any movement would bring
her up against a barrier; that is why it seems that she does nothing in
the world except break barriers. How genuine woman's rebellion is, no man
can say. It may be that woman's impulse toward male occupations and
rights is only a reaction against the growing difficulty of gaining a
mate, children, and a home. But I very much more believe that woman is
straining toward a new order, that the swift evolution of her mind is
leading her to contest more and more violently the assumption that there
are ineradicable differences between the male and the female mind. As
she grows more capable of grasping at education, she will become more
worthy of it; her intellect will harden, tend to resemble that of man;
and so, having escaped from the emptiness of the past into the special
fields which have been conceded her, she will make for broader fields,
fields so vast that they will embrace the world.
II
FEMINIST INTENTIONS
1
The Feminist propaganda--which should not be confounded with the
Suffrage agitation--rests upon a revolutionary biological principle.
Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there
are no women; there are only sexual majorities. To put the matter less
obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory,
according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the
female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or
feminine "_spheres_", and that they propose to identify absolutely the
conditions of the sexes.
Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards
the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend
to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize
the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary
results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious
Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I
have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name
I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with
having "let the cat out of the bag" in my little book, _Woman and
To-morrow_. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in
the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of
a sex war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little
sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter
everything while leaving everything unaltered.
An essential difference between "Feminism" and "Suffragism" is that the
Suffrage is but part of the greater propaganda; while Suffragism desires
to remove an inequality, Feminism purports to alter radically the mental
attitudes of men and women. The sexes are to be induced to recognize
each other's status, and to bring this recognition to such a point that
equality will not even be challenged. Thus Feminists are interested
rather in ideas than in facts; if, for instance, they wish to make
accessible to women the profession of barrister, it is not because they
wish women to practice as barristers, but because they want men to view
without surprise the fact that women may be barristers. And they have no
use for knightliness and chivalry.
Therein lies the mental revolution: while the Suffragists are content to
attain immediate ends, the Feminists are aiming at ultimate ends. They
contend that it is unhealthy for the race that man should not recognize
woman as his equal; that this makes him intolerant, brutal, selfish, and
sentimentally insincere. They believe likewise that the race suffers
because women do not look upon men as their peers; that this makes them
servile, untruthful, deceitful, narrow, and in every sense inferior.
More particularly concerned with women, it is naturally upon them and
their problems that they are bringing their first attention to bear.
The word "inferior" at once arouses comment, for here the Feminist often
distinguishes himself from the Suffragist. He frequently accepts woman's
present inferiority, but he believes this inferiority to be transient,
not permanent. He considers that by removing the handicaps imposed upon
women, they will be able to win an adequate proportion of races. His
case against the treatment of women covers every form of human relation:
the arts, the home, the trades, and marriage. In every one of these
directions he proposes to make revolutionary changes.
The question of the arts need not long detain us. It is perfectly clear
that woman has had in the past neither the necessary artistic training,
nor the necessary atmosphere of encouragement; that families have been
reluctant to spend money on their daughter's music, her painting, her
literary education, with the lavishness demanded of them by their son's
professional or business career. Feminists believe that when men and
women have been leveled, this state of things will cease to prevail.
In the trades, English Feminists resent the fact that women are excluded
from the law, generally speaking, the ministry, the higher ranks of
business and of the Civil Service and so forth, and practically from
hospital appointments; also that women are paid low wages for work
similar to that of men.
They complain too that the home demands of woman too great an
expenditure of energy, too much time, too much labor; that the
concentration of her mind upon the continual purchasing and cooking of
food, on cleaning, on the care of the child, is unnecessarily developed;
they doubt if the home can be maintained as it is if woman is to develop
as a free personality.
With marriage, lastly, they are perhaps most concerned. Though they are
not in the main prepared to advocate free union, they are emphatically
arrayed against modern marriage, which they look upon as slave union.
The somewhat ridiculous modifications of the marriage service introduced
by a few couples in America and by one in England, in which the word
"obey" was deleted from the bride's pledge, can be taken as indicative
of the Feminist attitude. Their grievances against the home, against the
treatment of women in the trades, are closely connected with the
marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a
housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the
complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it
follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where
the attitudes of love do not exist. For them who favor absolute
equality, partnership, sharing of responsibilities and privileges,
modern marriage represents a condition of sex-slavery into which woman
is frequently compelled to enter because she needs to live, and in which
she must often remain, however abominable the conditions under which the
union is maintained, because man, master of the purse, is master of the
woman.
Generally, then, the Feminists are in opposition to most of the world
institutions. For them the universe is based upon the subjection of
woman: subjection by law, and subjection by convention. Before
considering what modifications the Feminists wish to introduce into the
social system, a few words must be said as to this distinction between
convention and the law.
2
Convention, which is nothing but petrified habit, has lain upon woman
perhaps more heavily than any law, for the law can be eluded with
comparative ease, and she who eludes it may very well become a heroine,
merely because we are mostly anarchists and dislike the law. Every man
is in himself a minority, and is opposed to the law because the law is
the expression of the will of the majority, that is to say, the will of
the vulgar, of the norm. But convention is far more subtle: it is the
result of the _common_ agreement of wills. Therefore, as it is a product
of unanimity, the penalties which follow on the infractions of its
behests are terrible; she who infringes it becomes, not a heroine, but
an outcast. The law is, then, nothing by the side of etiquette.
Hence Feminist propaganda. While the Suffragists wish to alter the law,
the Feminists wish to alter also the conventions. It may not be too much
to say that they would almost be content with existing laws if they
could change the point of view of man, make him take for granted that
women may smoke, or ride astride, or fight; cease to be surprised
because Madame Dieulafoy chooses to wear trousers; briefly, renounce the
subjective fetich of sex. Still, as they realize that states become more
socialistic every day, they realize also that through the law only can
they hope to change manners. The mental revolution which they intend to
effect must therefore be prefaced by a legal revolution.
The first Feminist intention is economic,--proceeds on two lines:
1. They intend to open every occupation to women.
2. They intend to level the wages of women and men.
As regards the first point, they are not as a rule unreasonable. If they
demand that women should practice the law as they do in France, preach
the Gospel as they do in the United States of America, bear arms, as in
Dahomey, it is not because they attach any great value to these
occupations, but because they consider that any limitation put upon
woman's activities is intrinsically degrading; so keenly do they feel
this, that some serious Feminists took part some years ago in the
controversy on, "Are there female angels?"
The second point is more important. It is a well-established fact that
women are paid less than men for the same work: for instance, in
England, women begin at wages which are less than those of men as
teachers, post-office and other civil servants. The Feminists are not
prepared to agree that this condition is due to some inherent
inferiority of woman: in their view her _inferiority_ is transitory, is
due to her _inferior_ position. One Feminist, C. Gascoigne Hartley, in
_The Truth About Women_, outlines a bold hypothesis: "What, then, is the
real cause of the lowness of remuneration offered to women for work
when compared with men? Thousands of women and girls receive wages that
are insufficient to support life. They do not die, they live; but how?
The answer is plain. Woman possesses a marketable value attached to her
personality which man has not got. The woman's sex is a saleable thing."
Briefly, if a woman works less well than a man, less fast, less
continuously, it is because she is inadequately rewarded. They reverse
the common position that woman is not well paid because woman is not
competent, basing themselves on the parallel that liberty alone fits men
for liberty. They argue that woman is not competent because she is not
well paid; consequently, those Feminists who are inclined toward
Radicalism in politics demand a minimum wage in all trades, which shall
be the same for women and men.
The economic change will be brought about by revolutionary methods, by
sex strikes and sex wars. The gaining of the vote is, in the Feminist's
view, nothing but an affair of outposts. Conscious propagandists do not
intend to allow the female vote to be split as it might recently have
been between Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft. They intend to use
the vote to make women vote as women, and not as citizens; that is to
say, they propose to sell the female vote _en bloc_ to the party that
bids highest for it in the economic field. To the party that will, as a
preliminary, pledge itself to level male and female wages in government
employ, will be given the Feminist vote; and if no party will bid, then
it is the Feminist intention to run special candidates for all offices,
to split the male parties, and to involve them in consecutive disasters
such as the one which befell the Republican party in the last
presidential election in the United States.
Side by side with this purely political action, Feminists intend to use
industrial strikes in exactly the same manner as do the Syndicalist
railwaymen, miners, and postmen of Europe; well aware that they have
captured a number of trades, such as millinery, domestic service,
restaurant attendance, and so forth, and large portions of other trades,
such as cotton-spinning in Lancashire, they propose to use as a basis
the vote and the political education that follows thereon, to induce
women to group themselves in women's trade-unions, by means of which
they will hold up trades, and when they are strong enough, hold up
society itself.
I enunciate these views with full sympathy, which can hardly be refused
when one realizes that the sweated trades are almost entirely in the
hands of women,--laundry, box-making, toys, artificial flowers, and the
like. The fact that the underpaid trades are women's trades, and that
the British Government has been compelled to institute wage-boards to
bring up women's pay from four cents an hour to the imposing figure of
six cents, and the recent white-slavery investigations in America, are
evidence enough that public opinion should hesitate before blaming any
industrial steps women may choose to take. For it should not be
forgotten that woman risks more than comfort and health, and that the
underpayment of her sex often forces her to degradation.
Conscious of the temporary inferiority of woman, an inferiority
traceable to centuries of neglect and belittling patronage, the
Feminists propose to increase woman's power by making her fitter for
power. They are well aware that the enormous majority of women receive
but an inferior education, that in their own homes, especially in the
South of England, they are not encouraged to read the newspaper (which I
believe to be a more powerful instrument of intellectual development
than the average serious book), and that any attempt on their part to
acquire more information, to attend lectures, to join debating clubs,
tends to lower their "charm value" in the eyes of men. That point of
view they are determined to alter in the male. They propose to kill the
prejudice by the homoeopathic method: that is to say, to educate woman
more because man thinks she is already too educated. Briefly, to kill
poison by more poison. For this purpose they intend to throw open
education of all grades to women as well as to men, to remove such
differences as exist in England, where a woman cannot obtain an Oxford
or Cambridge degree. They propose to raise the school age of both sexes,
and to not less than sixteen. The object of this, so far as women are
concerned, is to prevent the exploitation of little girls of fourteen,
notably as domestic servants.
Some Feminists favor co-education, on the plea that it enables the sexes
to understand each other, and these build principally on the success of
American schools. A more violent section, however, desires to place the
education of girls entirely in the hands of women, partly because they
wish to enhance the sex war, and partly because they consider that
continual intercourse between the sexes tends to deprive ultimate love
of its mystery and its charm. But both sections fully agree that the
broadest possible education must be given to every woman, so as to fit
her for contest with every man.
3
So much, then, for the mental revolution and its eventual effects on the
position of women in the arts, the trades, and the schools. In the
industrial section, especially, we have already had an indication of the
main line of the Feminist attitude, a claim to a right to choose. This
right is indeed the only one for which the Feminists are struggling, and
they struggle for those obscure reasons which lie at the root of our
wish to live and to perpetuate the race. It is no wonder, then, that the
Feminists should have designs upon the most fundamental of human
institutions, marriage and motherhood.
In the main, Feminists are opposed to indissoluble Christian marriage.
Some satisfaction has been given to them in a great many states by the
extension of divorce facilities, but they are not content with piecemeal
reform such as has been carried out in the United States, for they
realize quite well that divorce cuts both ways, and that it is not
satisfactory for a wife to be married in one state, and divorced under a
slack law in another. Indeed I believe that one of the first Feminist
demands in America would be for a federal marriage law.
But alterations in the law are minor points by the side of the emotional
revolution that is to be engineered. Roughly speaking, we have to-day
reasonable men and instinctive women. Such notably was Ibsen's view:
"Woman cannot escape her primitive emotions." But he thought she should
control these inevitables so far as possible: "As soon as woman no
longer dominates her passions, she fails to achieve her objects."[6] The
distinction between reason and instinct, however, is not so wide as it
seems; for reason is merely the conscious use of observation, while
instinct is the unconscious use of the same faculty; but as the trend of
Feminism is to make woman self-conscious and sex-conscious, the
Feminists can be said broadly to be warring against instinct, and on the
side of reason. They look upon instinct as indicative of a low
mentality. For instance, the horse is less instinctive than the zebra,
and a curious instance of this was yielded by certain horses in the
South African war, which were unable to crop the grass because they had
always eaten from mangers. Civilization, we may say, had caused the
horses to degenerate, but nobody will contend that the horse is not more
intelligent than the zebra, more capable of love, even of thought.
Briefly, the horse approximates more closely to a reasonable being than
does the instinctive wild beast.
[6] _La Femme dans le Théâtre d'Ibsen_, by FRIEDERICKE BOETTCHER.--THE
AUTHOR.
The Feminists therefore propose, by training woman's reason, to place
her beyond the scope of mere emotion and mere prejudice, to enable her
to judge, to select a mate for herself and a father for her children,--a
double and necessary process.
There is a flavor of eugenics about these ideas: the right to choose
means that women wish to be placed in such a position that, being
economically independent to the extent of having equal opportunities,
they will not be compelled to sell themselves in marriage as they now
very often do. I do not refer to entirely loveless marriages, for these
are not very common in Anglo-Saxon states, but to marriages dictated by
the desire of woman to escape the authority of her parents, and to gain
the dignity of a wife, the possession of a home and of money to spend.
In the Feminist view, these are bad unions because love does not play
the major part in them, and often plays hardly any part at all. The
Feminists believe that the educated woman, informed on the subject of
sex-relations, able to earn her own living, to maintain a political
argument, will not fall an easy prey to the offer held out to her by a
man who will be her master, because he will have bought her on a truck
system.
Under Feminist rule, women will be able to select, because they will be
able to sweep out of their minds the monetary consideration; therefore
they will love better, and unless they love, they will not marry at all.
It is therefore probable that they will raise the standard of masculine
attractiveness by demanding physical and mental beauty in those whom
they choose; that they will apply personal eugenics. The men whom they
do not choose will find themselves in exactly the same position as the
old maids of modern times: that is to say, these men, if they are unwed,
will be unwed because they have chosen to remain so, or because they
were not sought in marriage. The eugenic characteristic appears, in that
women will no longer consent to accept as husbands the old, the
vicious, the unpleasant. They will tend to choose the finest of the
species, and those likely to improve the race. As the Feminist
revolution implies a social revolution, notably "proper work for proper
pay", it follows that marriage will be easy, and that those women who
wish to mate will not be compelled to wait indefinitely for the
consummation of their loves. Incidentally, also, the Feminists point out
that their proposals hold forth to men a far greater chance of happiness
than they have had hitherto, for they will be sure that the women who
select them do so because they love them, and not because they need to
be supported.
This does not mean that Feminism is entirely a creed of reason; indeed a
number of militant Feminists who collected round the English paper, _The
Freewoman_, have as an article of their faith that one of the chief
natural needs of woman and society is not less passion, but more. If
they wish to raise women's wages, to give them security, education,
opportunity, it is because they want to place them beyond material
temptations, to make them independent of a protector, so that nothing
may stand in the way of the passionate development of their faculties.
To this effect, of course, they propose to introduce profound changes
in the conception of marriage itself.
Without committing themselves to free union, the Feminists wish to
loosen the marriage tie, and they might not be averse to making marriage
less easy, to raising, for instance, the marriage age for both sexes;
but as they are well aware that, in the present state of human passions,
impediments to marriage would lead merely to an increase in irregular
alliances, they lay no stress upon that point. Moreover, as they are not
prepared to admit that any moral damage ensues when woman contracts more
than one alliance in the course of her life,--which view is accepted
very largely in the United States, and in all countries with regard to
widows,--they incline rather to repair the effects of bad marriages,
than to prevent their occurrence.
Plainly speaking, the Feminists desire simpler divorce. They are to a
certain extent ready to surround divorce with safeguards, so as to
prevent the young from rushing into matrimony; indeed they might "steep
up" the law of the "Divorce States." On the other hand, they would
introduce new causes for divorce where they do not already exist, and
they would make them the same for women and men. For instance, in Great
Britain a divorce can be granted to a man on account of the infidelity
of his wife, while it can be granted to a woman only if to infidelity
the husband adds cruelty or desertion. Such a difference the Feminists
would sweep away, and they would probably add to the existing causes
certain others, such as infectious and incurable diseases, chronic
drunkenness, insanity, habitual cruelty, and lengthy desertion. It
should be observed that the campaign is thus as favorable to men as it
is to women, for many men who have now no relief would gain it under the
new laws. As Feminism is international, the programme of course includes
the introduction of divorce where it does not exist,--in Austria, Spain,
South American states, and so forth.
What exact form the new divorce laws would take, I cannot at present
say, for Feminism is as evolutionary as it is revolutionary, and
Feminists are prepared to accept transitory measures of reform. Thus, in
the existing circumstances, they would accept a partial extension of
divorce facilities, subject to an adequate provision for all children.
In the ultimate condition, to which I refer later on, this might not be
necessary, but as a temporary expedient, Feminists desire to protect
woman while she is developing from the chattel condition to the
free-woman condition. Until she is fit for her new liberty, it is
necessary that she should be enabled to use this liberty without paying
too heavy a price therefor. Indeed this clash between the transitory and
the ultimate is one of the difficulties of Feminism. The rebels must
accept situations such as the financial responsibility of man, while
they struggle to make woman financially independent of man, and it is
for this reason that different proposals appear in the works of Ellen
Key, Rosa Mayreder, Charlotte Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and others, but
these divergences need not trouble us, for Feminism is an inspiration
rather than a gospel, and if it lays down a programme, it is a temporary
programme.
Personally, I am inclined to believe that the ultimate aim of Feminism
with regard to marriage is the practical suppression of marriage and the
institution of free alliance. It may be that thus only can woman develop
her own personality, but society itself must so greatly alter, do so
very much more than equalize wages and provide work for all, that these
ultimate ends seem very distant. They lie beyond the decease of
Capitalism itself, for they imply a change in the nature of the human
being which is not impossible when we consider that man has changed a
great deal since the Stone Age, but is still inconceivably radical.
Ultimate ends of Feminism will be attained only when socialization shall
have been so complete that the human being will no longer require the
law, but will be able to obey some obscure but noble categorical
imperative; when men and women can associate voluntarily, without thrall
of the State, for the production and enjoyment of the goods of life. How
this will be achieved, by what propaganda, by what struggles and by what
battles, is difficult to say; but in common with many Feminists I
incline to place a good deal of reliance on the ennobling of the nature
of the male. That there is a sex war, and will be a sex war, I do not
deny, but the entry of women into the modern world of art and business
shows that an immense enlightenment has come over the male, that he no
longer wishes to crush as much as he did, and therefore that he is
loving better and more sanely. Therein lies a profound lesson: if men do
not make war upon women, women will not make war upon men. I have spoken
of sex war, but it takes two sides to make a war, and I do not see that
in the event of conflict the Feminists can _alone_ be guilty.
One feature manifests itself, and that is a change of attitude in woman
with regard to the child. Indications in modern novels and modern
conversation are not wanting to show that a type of woman is arising who
believes in a new kind of matriarchate, that is to say, in a state of
society where man will not figure in the life of woman except as the
father of her child. Two cases have come to my knowledge where English
women have been prepared to contract alliances with men with whom they
did not intend to pass their lives,--this because they desired a child.
They consider that the child is the expression of the feminine
personality, while after the child's birth, the husband becomes a mere
excrescence. They believe that the "Wife" should die in childbirth, and
the "Mother" rise from her ashes. There is nothing utopian about this
point of view, if we agree that Feminists can so rearrange society as to
provide every woman with an independent living; and I do not say that
this is the prevalent view. It is merely one view, and I do not believe
it will be carried to the extreme, for the association of human beings
in couples appears to respond to some deep need; still, it should be
taken into account as an indication of sex revolt.
That part of the programme belongs to the ultimates. Among the
transitory ideas, that is, the ideas which are to fit Feminism into the
modern State, are the endowment of motherhood and the lien on wages. The
Feminists do not commit themselves to a view on the broad social
question whether it is desirable to encourage or discourage births.
Taking births as they happen, they lay down that a woman being
incapacitated from work for a period of weeks or months while she is
giving birth to a child, her liberty can be secured only if the fact of
the birth gives her a call upon the State. Failing this, she must have a
male protector in whose favor she must abdicate her rights because he is
her protector. As man is not handicapped in his work by becoming a
father, they propose to remove the disability that lies upon woman by
supplying her with the means of livelihood for a period surrounding the
birth, of not less than six weeks, which some place at three months.
There is nothing wild in this scheme, for the British Insurance Act
(1912) gives a maternity endowment of seven dollars and fifty cents
whether a mother be married or single. The justice of the proposal may
be doubted by some, but I do not think its expediency will be
questioned. On mere grounds of humanity, it is barbarous to compel a
woman to labor while she is with child; on social grounds it is not
advantageous for the race to allow her to do so: premature births,
child-murder, child-neglect by working mothers, all these facts point to
the social value of the endowment.
4
The last of the transitory measures is the lien on wages. In the present
state of things, women who work in the home depend for money on husbands
or fathers. The fact of having to ask is, in the Feminists' view, a
degradation. They suggest that the housekeeper should be entitled to a
proportion of the man's income or salary, and one of them, Mrs. M. H.
Wood, picturesquely illustrates her case by saying that she hopes to do
away with "pocket-searching" while the man is asleep. Mrs. Wood's ideas
certainly deserve sympathy; though many men pay their wives a great deal
more than they are worth and are shamefully exploited--a common modern
position--it is also quite true that many others expect their wives to
run their household on inadequate allowances, and to come to them for
clothes or pleasure in a manner which establishes the man as a pasha.
When women have grown economically independent, no lien on wages will be
required, but meanwhile it is interesting to observe that there has
recently been formed in England a society called "The Home-makers' Trade
Union", one of whose specific objects is, "To insist as a right on a
proper proportion of men's earnings being paid to wives for the support
of the home."
Generally speaking, then, it is clear that women are greatly concerned
with the race, for all these demands--support of the mother, support of
the child, rights of the household--are definitely directed toward the
benevolent control by the woman of her home and her child. I have
alluded above to these Feminist intentions: they affect the immediate
conditions as well as the ultimate.
Among the ultimates is a logical consequence of the right of woman to be
represented by women. So long as Parliamentary Government endures, or
any form of authority endures, the Feminists will demand a share in this
authority. It has been the custom during the Suffrage campaign to
pretend that women demand merely the vote. The object of this is to
avoid frightening the men, and it may well be that a number of
Suffragists honestly believe that they are asking for no more than the
vote, while a few, who confess that they want more, add that it is not
advisable to say so; they are afraid to "let the cat out of the bag",
but they will not rest until all Parliaments, all Cabinets, all Boards
are open to women, until the Presidential chair is as accessible to them
as is the English throne. Already in Norway women have entered the
National Assembly: they propose to do so everywhere. They will not
hesitate to claim women's votes for women candidates until they have
secured the representation which they think is their right, that is, one
half.
These are the bases, roughly outlined, on which can be established a
lasting peace.
I do not want to exaggerate the difficulties and perils which are bound
up in this revolutionary movement, but it is abundantly clear that it
presupposes profound changes in the nature of women and of men. While
man will be asked for more liberalism and be expected to develop his
sense of justice (which has too long lain at the mercy of his erratic
and sentimental generosity), woman will have to modify her outlook. She
is now too often vain, untruthful, disloyal, avaricious, vampiric;
briefly she has the characteristics of the slave. She will have to
slough off these characteristics while she is becoming free, she will
have to justify by her mental ascent the increase in her power.
Feminists are not blind to this, and that is why they lay such stress
upon education and propaganda.
One of the most profound changes will, I think, appear in sex relations.
The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the
woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with
a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive
in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a
revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to
flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a
contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man.
The New Woman has not the support of the saner Feminists. Says Ellen
Key, in _The Woman Movement_, "These cerebral, amaternal women must
obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its
limited but intensive exercise of power, meagre beside the feeling of
power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of
the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to
_falsify life values_ in their own favor so that they themselves shall
represent the highest form of life, the 'human personality', in
comparison with which the 'instinctive feminine' signifies a lower stage
of development, a poorer type of life." If this were the ultimate type,
very few men would be found in the Feminist camp, for the coming of the
New Woman would mean the death of love. If the death of love had to be
the price of woman's emancipation, I, for one, would support the
institution of the zenana and the repression of woman by brute force;
but I do not think we need be anxious.
If the New Woman is so aggressive, it is because she must be aggressive
if she is to win her battle. We cannot expect people who are laboring
under a sense of intolerable injury to set politely about the righting
of that injury: when woman has entered her kingdom she will no longer
have to resort to political nagging; her true nature will affirm itself
for the first time, for it is difficult to believe that it has been able
to affirm itself under the entirely artificial conditions of androcracy.
Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given
exceptional freedom show us in society that women can be free and yet
be sweet. Indeed they almost demonstrate the Feminist contention that
women must be free before they are sweet, for are not these women--of
whom all of us can name a few--the noblest and most desirable of their
kind? The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches
it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.
There is one type of woman, however, whom I venture to call "Old Woman",
who is probably a bitterer foe of Feminism than any man, and that is the
super-feminine type, the woman for whom nothing exists except her sex,
who has no interests except the decking of her body and the quest of
men. This woman, who once dominated her own species, still represents
the majority of her sex. It is still true that the majority of women are
concerned with little save the fashions, novels, plays, and vaudeville
turns. These women want to have "a good time" and want nothing more;
they are ready to prey upon men by flattering them; they encourage their
own weakness, which they call "charm", and generally aim at being
pampered slaves, because, from their point of view, it pays better than
being working partners. Evidence of this is to be found in women's
shops, in the continual change in fashions, each of which is a signal to
the male, and in the continual increase in the sums spent on adornment:
it is not uncommon for a rich woman to spend five hundred dollars on a
frock; two hundred and fifty dollars has been given for a hat; and
twenty-five thousand dollars for a set of furs.
As Miss Beatrice Tina very well says, "Woman is woman's worst enemy",
though she is not referring to this type. So long as woman maintains
this attitude, compels men to forget her soul in the contemplation of
her body, so long will she remain a slave, for this preoccupation goes
further than clothes.
In a book recently published,[7] an account is given of the late Empress
of Austria, who was evidently one of the lowest of the slave type. It is
noteworthy that she had no love for her children because their coming
had impaired her beauty. Now I do not suggest that Feminists are arrayed
against the care of the body; far from it, for the campaign has many
associates among those who support physical culture, the fresh-air
movement, ancient costume revival, and the like; but Feminists are well
aware that concentration on adornment diverts woman from the development
of her brain and her soul, and enhances in her the characteristics of
the harem favorite. One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is
a uniform for women. The interested parties point out that men
practically wear uniform, that there is hardly any change from year to
year in their costume, and that any undue adornment of the male is
looked upon as bad form. Thus, while few men can with impunity spend
more than five hundred dollars a year on their clothes, many women do
not consider themselves happy unless they can dispose of anything
between five and twenty times that amount. This, while involving the
household in difficulties, lowers the status of woman by lowering her
mentality.
[7] _My Past_, by COUNTESS MARIE LARISCH.
Feminists do not ask for sumptuary laws, having very little respect for
the law, but for a new vision, which is this: Man, intellectually
developed, decks himself in no finery, because it is not essential to
his success; woman must likewise abandon frippery if she is to have
energy enough to reach his plane. They propose to attain their object by
the force of their example, and I have received several letters on the
subject, which show that the idea of fixing the fashions is not
entirely wild, for fashion consists after all in wearing what everybody
wears, and if an influential movement is started to maintain the costume
of women on a very simple basis, it may very well prevail and kill much
of their purely imitative vanity by showing them that undue devotion to
self-adornment is very much worse than immoral: in other words, that it
is in bad taste.
Incidentally the Feminists believe that the downfall of many women is
procured by the offer of fine clothes. They hope, therefore, to derive
some side-profits from the simplification of woman's dress.
The question also arises as to whether woman can become intellectually
independent, whether she does not naturally depend upon the opinion of
man. It is suggested that not even rich women are actually independent,
that women place marriage above their art, their work; but I do not
think this is a very solid objection, for the vaunted independence of
men is not so very common; they currently take many of their opinions
from their reading in newspapers and books, and must often subordinate
their views and their conduct to the will of their employer. The main
answer to this suggestion is that we must not consider woman as she
was, but woman "as she is becoming", as a creature of infinite
potentialities, as virgin ground.
It may be _petitio principii_ to say that, as woman has produced so much
that is fine, she would have produced very much more if she had not been
hampered by law and custom, derided by the male, but bad logic is often
good sense. This should commend itself to men who are no longer willing
to support the idea that women are inherently inferior to them, but who
are willing to give them an opportunity to develop in every field of
human activity. Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views,
expel _vir_ and enthrone _homo_, can woman cease to appear before him as
a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role,
that of partner and mate.[8]
[8] Note: This chapter should be taken as the summary of an intellectual
position. Its points are considered in detail in the four chapters that
follow.
III
UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN
1
The change which has come over politics reflects closely enough the
change which has come about in the direction of man's desire. In times
of peace, diplomacy and the affairs of kings have given place to wages
and the housing of the poor; that which was serious has become pompous;
that which was of no account now stands in the foreground. And so it
is not absurd to suggest that one of those things which once made jests
for the comic paper and the Victorian paterfamilias has, little by
little, with the spread of wealth, become a problem of the day, a
problem profound and menacing, full of intimations of social decay, not
far remote in its reactions from the spread of a disease.
That problem is the problem of women's dress, or rather it is the
problem of the fashions in women's dress. Women have never been content
merely to clothe themselves, nor, for the matter of that, until very
recently, have men; but men have grown a new sanity, while women, if we
read aright the signs of the times, have grown naught save a new
insanity. We have come to a point where, for a great number of women,
the fashions have become the motive power of life, and where, for almost
every woman, they have acquired great importance. Women classify each
other according to their clothes; they have corrupted the drama into a
showroom; they have completely ruined the more expensive parts of the
opera house; they have invaded the newspapers in myriad paragraphs, in
fashion-pages, and do not spare even the august columns of the most
dignified papers. This preoccupation does not exist among men. We have
had our dandies and we still have our "nuts" and dudes; but it never
served a man very well to be a dandy or a beau, and most of us to-day
suspect that if the "nut" were broken, he would be found to contain no
kernel.
Men have escaped the fashions and therewith they have spared themselves
much loss of energy and money. For it is not only the fashions that
matter: it is the cost of women's clothes, the intrinsic cost; it is
their continual changes for no reason, changes which sometimes produce,
and sometimes destroy, beauty; sometimes promote comfort, and often
cause torture. But always by their drafts upon its wealth, women lead
humanity nearer to poverty, envy, discontent, frivolity, starvation,
prostitution,--to general social degradation. Nothing can mitigate these
evils until woman is induced to view clothing as does the modern man,
until, namely, she decides to wear a uniform.
2
The costliness of women's clothes would not be so serious if the
fashions did not change at so bewildering a speed. We have come to a
point where women have not time to wear out their clothes, flimsy though
they be; where we ought to welcome the adulteration of silk and wool;
where we ought to hope that every material may get shoddier and more
worthless, so that the new model may have a chance to justify its short
life by the badness of the stuff. To-day women will quite openly say, "I
won't buy that. I couldn't wear it out." They actually _want_ to wear
out their clothes! The causes of this are obvious enough. We are told
that there are "rings" in Paris, London, and Vienna which decree every
few months that the clothes of yesterday have become a social stigma;
this is true, but much truer is the view that women are in the grasp of
a new hysteria; that, lacking the old occupations of brewing, baking,
child-rearing, spinning, they are desperately looking for something to
do. They have found it: they are undoing the social system.
It was not always so. It is true that all through history, even in
biblical times, moralists and preachers inveighed against the gewgaws
that woman loves. They cried out before they were hurt; if he were alive
to-day, Bossuet might, for the first time, fail to find words.
To the old curse of cost we have added change, as any student of costume
will confirm; for in past ages the clothing of women did not change very
rapidly. There is hardly any difference between the costume of 1755 and
that which Queen Marie Leszczynska wore ten years later; in Greece,
between B.C. 500 and 400, the Ionic _chiton_ and _himation_ varied but
little; the Doric _chiton_ did not vary at all; the variations in the
over-mantle were not considerable. Any examination of early sculpture,
of Attic vases, or of terra cottas, will show that this is true. The
ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court, together with their royal mistress,
wore the same kind of clothes through their adult years. Their clothes
were sometimes costly, but when bought they were bought, and until worn
out were not discarded. And our grandmothers had that famous
black-silk dress, so sturdy that it stood up by itself, very like a
Victorian virtue; it lasted a lifetime, sometimes became an heirloom.
There was no question then of fashion following on fashion at a whirling
pace. Women were clothed, sometimes beautifully, sometimes hideously,
but at any rate they scrapped their gowns only when they were worn out;
now they scrap them as soon as they have been worn. The results of this
I deal with further on, but here already I can suggest these results by
quoting a few facts. Before me lies one of Messrs. Barker's
advertisements; it seems that there are reception gowns, restaurant
gowns; that there are coats for the races, and coats for the car, wraps
for one thing, and wraps for another--and the advertisement adds that
these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all
this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertisement of Messrs.
Tudor Brothers, who have gowns for Ascot, and--this is quite true--gowns
for Alexandra Day.
I have looked in vain for gowns for July 23, for gowns to be worn
between a quarter past eleven and half-past twelve in the morning, and
for special mourning gowns for a cousin's stepfather. Some occasions are
shamefully disregarded. They are not disregarded by everybody; at least
I presume that the lady quoted by Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson in her lecture
in March, who possessed one hundred and ten nightdresses, could cope
with any eventuality; there is also the lady, mentioned to me by a
friend who made some American investigations for me, who possesses one
hundred and fifty pairs of slippers. There is, too, the _Bon Marché_ in
Paris, where, out of a staff of six thousand to seven thousand, are
employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special
workroom for the creation of models.
As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they
merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is
destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of
new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels,
gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out
the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies
a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to
reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told
that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty
does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more
swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon
as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps
down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne
asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the
same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few
hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be
valuable in Grafton Street.
I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme
to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the
difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a
greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in
wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies;
to-morrow will come the saturnalia.
3
There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of
men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable
classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well.
I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.
_Boston._--Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.
Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made
by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.
Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.
Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to
$350.
On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20
to $45; hats easily attain $125.
Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stores, $90 to $250. Dressmakers
charge $450 to $600.
_New York._--Winter street dress, $225.
Skunk muff and stole, $200.
Hats for the year, at least $250 to $300.
Footwear, $250 per annum.
I am informed that a lady in active society can "manage with care" on
$2500, but really needs $4500 to $5000.
A "moderate" wardrobe allows for "extremely simple" gowns costing $125
each; the lady in question requires at least six new evening dresses and
six remodeled, per annum. She wore an average set of furs, price $1500.
_London._--Debenham & Freebody blouse, $10.
Ponting's Leghorn hat, $8. Gorringe straws, $12 to $14.
I am informed that where the household income is $3500 to $7500 a year
the ordinary prices are as follows:
Coats and skirts, $50 to $75.
Evening dresses, $75 to $120.
Hats, $7.50 to $20.
Silk stockings are cheap at $1.50, and veils at $1.50.
Now these are all moderate figures and will shock nobody, but if they
are compared with the prices paid by men, they are, without any question
of fashion, outrageous. I believe they are high because it is men and
not women who pay, because the dressmaker trades on man's
sex-enslavement. But I am concerned just now less with causes than
with facts, and would rather ask how the modest $100 evening gown
compares with the man's $63 dress suit (by a good tailor). How does the
$63 coat and skirt compare with a man's lounge suit, price $36 by
anybody save Poole, and by him only $52.50? No man has, I believe, paid
more than $9 for a silk hat, while his wife pays at least $20. The point
is not worth laboring, it is obvious; while every man knows that a "good
cut" does not account for the discrepancy, as he too pays, but pays
moderately, for the art of a good tailor. And, mark you, apart from
cost, men's clothes last indefinitely, while women's, if they have the
misfortune to last, must be given away.
The prices I have quoted are moderate prices, and I cannot resist the
temptation to give some others which are not unusual. I am informed that
$400 can easily be charged for an afternoon dress, $1000 for an evening
dress, $200 for a coat and skirt; that it is quite easy to spend $5000 a
year on underclothes and $250 on an aigrette. I observe a Maison Lewis
Ascot hat, price $477. Yantorny will not make a shoe under $60; a pair
of his shoes made of feathers is priced by him at $2400.
As for totals: I have private information of an expenditure of $30,000 a
year on dress; one of $70,000 is reported to me from America. I have
seen a bill for dress and lingerie alone, incurred at one shop, for
$35,000 in twelve months.
4
It might be thought that this ghastly picture speaks for itself, but
evidently it does not, as hardly anybody takes any notice of the
question. I will venture to draw attention to the results of what is
happening, ignoring the abnormal figures, because I wish to reason from
what happens all the time rather than from what happens now and then, to
figure the position in which the world finds itself because women do not
hesitate to spend upon their clothes a full ten per cent of the
household income. This figure is correct: such inquiries as I have been
able to make among women of my acquaintance prove it. Out of a joint
income of $12,500 a year one woman spends $1350 a year on clothes;
another, out of $5750 a year, last year $655; a third, out of $8000 a
year $700, but she is a "dowdy."
In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept
up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while
her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid,
there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes,
swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for
a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for
games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a
comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided
the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the
woman's back.
In the lower classes the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean
workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,--but their
daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had
practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not
an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the
condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and
tea-shop girls are concerned, I assert that their main object in leaving
the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they
flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no
other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for
my novel, _A Bed of Roses_, I scheduled the cases of about forty London
prostitutes. In about twenty-five per cent of the cases the original
cause, direct or contributory, was a desire for luxury which took the
form of fine clothes. Now these women tell one what they think one would
like to hear, and, where they scent sympathy, as much as possible
attribute their fall to man's deceit. But acumen develops in the
investigator; the figure of twenty-five per cent is correct or may even
be an underestimate.
The conclusion is that from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand
women now on the streets of London have been brought there by a desire
for self-adornment. Meanwhile there is no labor available for the poor
consumer, because the energy of the dressmaker is diverted toward the
rich; while Miss So-and-So is paid $4000 a year to design hats, the
workwoman wears a man's cap rescued from the refuse heap.
I shall be told that the rich are not responsible for the luxurious
desires of the poor; but that is evidently nonsense: the rich themselves
are not innocent of prostitution. I have had reported the case of a
well-paid Russian dancer whose dress bills are paid by two financiers;
that of a French actress who calmly states that she needs three lovers,
one for her hats, one for her lingerie, and one for her gowns; and a
close inquiry into the "bridge losses" which occasionally provoke the
fall of rich men's daughters will show that these are dressmakers'
bills. All this is not without its effect upon the poor. The girl of the
lower classes, hypnotized by fashion plates, compelled to witness at the
doors of fashionable churches, in the street, at the music halls, and
even at the picture palaces, the continuous streaming past of the
fashion pageant, develops an intolerable desire for finery. You may say
that she is wrong, that she should practice self-denial, but this is not
an age of self-denial; luxury is in the air, we despair of happiness and
take to pleasure, we feel the future life too far ahead, we want to
enjoy. It is natural enough, especially for girls who are young and who
feel unfairly outclassed by richer women who are neither as young nor as
beautiful; but still it is base. If baseness is to go, the lesson must
come from the top; if there is to be self-denial, then _que messieurs
les assassins commencent!_ Until the rich woman realizes that her
example is her responsibility it will be fair to say that the Albemarle
Street $500 gown has its consequence in a prostitute on the Tottenham
Court Road.
The rich woman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the
woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind
of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public
interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite,
and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the
investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster
connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited
extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women,
and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.
It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they
permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and
that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be
beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her
fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern
clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human
cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys
to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture
of her sisters. And I said, "She wants to be more beautiful." Is that
quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be
beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet
the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break
every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women
truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our
little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the Japanese, and
our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen,
and Dante's Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the
crinoline and then the hobble skirt.
Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for
they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all
they observe is "something blue" or an effect they call "very doggy";
they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest;
that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that
they certainly fear their dressmakers' bills. Nor is it even true that
women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in
their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth
is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hysteria, an advertisement,
an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women's
qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental
baseness.
5
Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they
already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some
years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were "in", and
hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young
women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube
stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the
problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish
women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in
sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear,
provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not
too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin,
force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer
socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to
make it a _permanent_ uniform.
We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms
which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the
tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, Japanese,
Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly.
All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any
others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at
night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or
three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I
repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.
Men's uniforms are not ugly; I would any day exchange my lounge suit for
the uniform of a guardsman--if I might wear it. In this "if" is the
essence of the whole idea, the whole practicability of it. Men wear
uniform, that is to say lounge suits in certain circumstances, morning
coats in others, evening clothes in yet others. They never vary. We are
told that they vary. Tailors show new suitings, the papers print
articles about men's fashions, and perhaps a button is added or a lapel
is lengthened, and that is all. Nobody cares. Men follow no fashions so
far as the fable of men's fashions is true; they dare not do so, because
to do so serves them ill in society. A man who dares to break through
the uniform idea of his sex is generally dubbed a "bounder"; if he is
one of the very young, fancy-socked, extreme-collared kind, people smile
and say, "It'll wear off with time." And women, who tolerate the dandies
at tea-time, love the others.
The uniform would have to be brought in by a group of leaders of fashion
determined to abolish fashion. I could sketch a dozen uniforms, but
women would make a great to-do, forgetting that most fashions are
created by men, so I will confine myself to timid suggestions.
1. For general outdoor wear the coat and skirt is the best, together
with a blouse. Lace and insertion should be abandoned, and I feel that
the skirt is too long for walking; sometimes it is certainly too tight
to enable a woman to get into an omnibus or railway carriage gracefully.
Probable price, complete, $50.
2. For summer wear, a plain blouse and skirt; not the atrocious blouse
ending at the belt, but the beautiful tunic-blouse that falls over the
hips. Both blouse and skirt would need to be made of a permanently
fixed, plain, and uni-colored material. Total cost, $25.
3. If the skirt were shortened, leggings, gaiters, and stockings would
have to be standardized; the shoe buckle, being too costly, would
disappear.
4. A fixed type of hat, without feathers or aigrettes, made in straw and
trimmed with flowers; produced in scores of thousands, it ought not to
cost more than $2.50.
5. A fixed type of evening gown, price $24 or $32, without any lace or
trimmings, sequins, paillettes; without overlays of flimsies of any
kind; no voile, no chiffon, no tulle, no muslin, but a stuff of good
quality, hanging in straight folds. Jewelry to be banned.
6. The afternoon dress should be completely suppressed; it responds to
no need.
7. The total annual cost would be about $150.
I shall be asked whether this can be done. I think it can. Recently the
Queen of Italy created a vogue for coral ornaments among the Roman
ladies so as to restore their livelihood to the fishermen of Torre del
Greco. That points the way; we do not need sumptuary laws, though, in
times to come, when capitalism is nothing but a historical incident, we
may have passed through such laws into a fuller freedom. It is enough
to decree that any variation from the new standard is _bad form_. Human
beings will break all laws, but they shrink if you tell them that they
are infringing the rules of etiquette. There are many men to-day who
would like to wear satin and velvet: they dare not because it is bad
form. If, therefore, a permanent clothing scheme were established by
strong patrons, if it were agreeable to the eye, which is easy to
arrange, I believe that fashions could be fixed because it would be
known that a woman who went beyond the uniform must either be
disreputable or suffer from bad taste.
6
I shall be told that I am warring against art. That is not true: some
fashions are beautiful, some are hideous. Who would to-day wear the
crinoline? Who would wear the gigot sleeve? They are ugly--but, stay!
Are they? Will they not be worn in an adapted form some time within the
next generation? They will, because fashions are not works of art; they
are only fashions. Women do not adapt the fashions to themselves, they
adapt themselves to the fashions, and it is a current joke that even
woman's anatomy is adjusted to suit the clothes of the day.
Doubtless I shall be challenged on this, and told that woman's
individuality expresses itself in her clothes. That again is not true;
the girl with a face like a Madonna will wear a ballet skirt if it comes
in, and if she has to "adapt" the ballet skirt to the Madonna idea I
should like to know how it is going to be done. Indeed the one thing
woman avoids doing is expressing her individuality; she wants what Oscar
Wilde called "the holy calm of feeling perfectly dressed", that is, like
everybody else, and a little more expensively.
It may be retorted, however, that uniform is not cheap. That again is
untrue. When a uniform is standardized, turned out in quantities and
never varied, it can be made very cheaply. Men's clothing, which is not
fully standardized, is such that no man need spend more than $250 a
year. That is the condition I want for women. Of course it will make
unemployed, and our sympathy will be invoked for dressmakers thrown out
of work: that is the old argument against railways on behalf of coaches,
against the mule-jenny, against every engine of human progress, and it
is sheer barbarism. Labor redistributes itself; money wasted on women's
clothes will be used in other trades which will reabsorb the labor and
make it useful instead of sterile.
An apparently more powerful argument is that uniform would deprive women
of their individuality: it cannot be much of an individuality that
depends upon a frock, and I am reduced to wonder whether some women lose
their personality once their frock is taken off. Still, there is a
little force in the argument, for it seems to lead to the conclusion
that beautiful women will enjoy undue advantage when dressed as are the
ill-favored. But this is not a true conclusion; it is not even true to
say that one cannot be distinctive in uniform, as anybody will realize
who compares a smart soldier with an untidy one. I have myself worn a
soldier's coat and know what care may make of it. Nor do I believe that
the beautiful would win; by winning is meant winning men, but we know
perfectly well that it is not body which wins men: it wins them only to
lose them after a while. It is something else which wins men:
individuality, wit, gaiety, cleverness, or cleverness clever enough to
appear foolish. And we men who wear uniform, does not our individuality
manage to attract? It does; and indeed I go further: I assert that
fashions smother individuality because they are tyrannical and much more
obtrusive than uniforms. Woman's charms are to-day dwarfed because men
are dazzled and misled by the meretricious paraphernalia which clothe
woman; the true charms have to struggle for life. I want to give them
full play, to enable men to choose better and more sanely, no longer the
empty odalisque but the woman whose personality is such that it can
dominate her uniform. That will be a true race and a finer than the game
of sex-temptation which women think they are playing.
It may be said that uniform will do away with class distinctions, that
one will no longer be able to tell a lady from one who is not. That is
not true. What one will no longer be able to tell is a rich woman from a
poor one; and who is to complain of that? Surely it will not be men, for
it is not true, I repeat, that men admire extravagant clothes; nor are
they tempted by them; nor do women dress to tempt them: at any rate, the
seduction of Adam was not compassed in that way.
Besides, women give away their own case: if their clothes were intended
to attract men, then surely married women would cease to follow the
fashions unless, which I am reluctant to conclude, they still desire to
pursue after marriage their nefarious, heart-breaking career.
The last suggestion is that women would not wear the uniform. Not follow
a fashion? This has never happened before.
I adhere therefore to my general view that if woman is to be diverted
from the path that leads straight toward a greater degradation of her
faculties; if household budgets are to be relieved so as to leave money
for pleasure and for culture; if true beauty is to take the place of
tinsel, feathers, frills, ruffles, _poudre de riz_; if middle-class
women are to cease to live in bitterness because they cannot keep up
with the rich; if the daughters of the poor are no longer to be
stimulated and corrupted by example into poverty and prostitution, it
will be necessary for the few who lead the many to realize that
simplicity, modesty, moderation, and grace are the only things which
will enable women to gain for themselves, and for men, peace and
satisfaction out of a civilization every day more hectic.
IV
WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT
It is in a shrinking spirit that I venture to suggest that woman has so
far entirely failed to affirm her capacity in the pictorial arts, for I
address myself to an audience which contains many sculptors and
pictorial artists, an audience of serious and enthusiastic people to
whom art matters as much and perhaps more than life. But it is of no use
maintaining illusions; woman has exhibited, and is exhibiting, very
great artistic capacities in the histrionic art, in dancing, in
executive music, and in literature. There is, therefore, no case for
those who argue that woman has no artistic capacity. She has. I select
but a few out of the many when I quote the actresses, Siddons, Rachel,
La Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry; the dancers, La Duncan, Pavlova,
Genée; the literary women, the Brontës, Madame de Staël, George Eliot,
Sappho, Christina Rossetti; among the more modern, May Sinclair and
Lucas Malet.
At first sight, however, it is curious that I should be able to quote no
composers and no dramatists; it is impossible to take Guy d'Hardelot and
Theresa del Riego seriously. And the women dramatists, taken as a whole,
hardly exist. This would go to show that there is some strength in the
contention that woman is purely executive and uncreative; but this
cannot be true, for the list of writers I have given, which is very far
from being exhaustive, and which is being augmented every day by
promising girl writers, shows that woman has creative capacity, creative
in the sense that she can evolve character and scene, and treat
relations in that way which can be described as art. If, therefore,
there have been no women painters of note, it cannot be because woman
has no creative capacity. It may be suggested that those women who have
creative capacity turn to literature, but that is a very rash
assumption. For creative men turn to any one of the half-dozen forms of
art, and are not monopolized by literature; there is no reason, mental
or physical, why the female genius should be capable of traveling only
along one line. The problem is a problem of direction, a problem of
medium.
My potential opponents will probably deny that there have been, and are,
no women painters. They will quote the names of Angelica Kaufmann, of
Vigée-Lebrun, of Rosa Bonheur, of Berthe Morisot, of Elizabeth Butler;
the more modern will mention Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch; the most
modern will put forward Anne Estelle Rice; and one or two may shyly
whisper Maude Goodman. But, honestly, does this amount to anything? I do
not suppose that Lady Elizabeth Butler's "Inkermann" or "Floreat Etona"
will outlive the works of Detaille or of Meissonier, however doubtful be
the value of these men; the fame of Angelica Kaufmann, though enhanced
by the patronage of kings, has not been perpetuated by Bartolozzi, in
spite of that etcher's inflated reputation. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair"
hangs in the National Gallery, and another of her works in the
Luxembourg, but merits which balance those of Landseer are not enough;
and Berthe Morisot walked, it is true, in the footprints of Manet, but
did her feet fill them? The truth of the matter is that there has not
been a woman Velasquez, a woman Rembrandt.
Now, as some of my readers may know, I do not make a habit of belittling
woman and her work. My writings show that I am one of the most extreme
feminists of the day, and I am well aware that woman must not be judged
upon her past, that it is perhaps not enough to judge her on her present
position, and that imagination, the only spirit with which criticism
should be informed if it is to have any creative value, should take note
of the potentialities of woman. But still, though we may write off much
of the past and flout the record of insult and outrage which is the
history of woman under the government of man, we cannot entirely ignore
the present: the present may not be the father of the future, but it is
certainly one of its ancestors. We have to-day a number of women who
paint--the great majority, such as Mrs. Von Glehn, Ella Bedford, Lucy
Kemp-Welch, and others who are hung a little higher over the line, are
rendering Nature and persons with inspired and photographic zeal;
others, such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessie Dismorr, Georges Banks, are
inclined to "fling their paint pot into the faces of the public." Some
do not abhor Herkomer, others are banded with Matisse; but though to be
Herkomer may not be supreme, and though to be Matisse may perhaps be
insane, it must regretfully be conceded that the heights of the Royal
Academy and of Parnassus (or whatever the painter's mountain may be) are
not haunted by the woman painter. Without being carried away by the
author of "Bubbles", I am not inclined to be carried away by Maude
Goodman and the splendours of "Taller Than Mother." Lucy Kemp-Welch's
New Forest ponies are ponies, but I do not suppose that they will be
trotting in the next century; they do not balance even the work of
Furse.
Let me not be reproached because I use the low standard of the Royal
Academy, for if woman has a case at all she must prove herself on all
planes; it is as important that she should equal the second-rate people
as that she should shine among the first-rate. I do not look for a time
to come when woman will be superior to man, but to a time, quite remote
enough for my speculations, when she will be his equal, when she will be
able to keep up with all his activities. Curiously enough, the advanced
female painters are not so inferior to the advanced men painters as are
the stereotyped women to their masculine rivals. There is excellence in
the work of Anne Estelle Rice and Georges Banks, though they perhaps do
not equal Fergusson; but they are less remote from him in spirit and
realization than are the lesser women from the lesser men. That is a
fact of immense importance, for it is evident that nothing is so hopeful
as this _reduction_ in the inferiority of female painting. It may be
that masculine painting is decaying, which would facilitate woman's
victory, but I do not think so; modern masculine painting has never been
so vigorous, so inspired by an idea since the great religious uprush of
the Primitives.
Women are striving to conform not to a lower but to a higher standard, a
standard where the sensuality of art is informed by intellect. If,
therefore, they conform more closely to the standard which men are
establishing, they are more than holding their own; they are gaining
ground.
Yet they are still, in numbers and in quality, much inferior to the men.
Anne Estelle Rice alone cannot tilt in the ring against Fergusson,
Gaugin, Matisse, Picasso. And it is not true that they have been
entirely deprived of opportunity. Up to the 'seventies or 'eighties,
woman was certainly very much hampered by public opinion. For some
centuries it had been held that she should paint flowers, but not
bodies; nowadays, dizzily soaring, she has begun to paint cranes and
gasometers. The result of the old attitude was that the work of women
was mainly futile because it was expected to be futile; though painters
were not always gentlemen, female painters seemed to have to be ladies,
but times changed. There came the djibbah, Bernard Shaw, and the
cigarette; women began to flock into Colarossi's and the Slade, into the
minor schools where, I regret to say, the new spirit has yet to blow and
to do away with the interesting practice of the life class where the
male model wears bathing drawers. Woman has had her opportunity, and any
morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse you can see her carrying her
paraphernalia towards the Grande Chaumière and the other studios. She is
suffering a good deal from the effects of past neglect, but much of that
neglect is so far away that we must ask ourselves why woman has not yet
responded to the more tender attitude of modern days. For she has not
entirely responded; she is still either a little afraid of novelty or
inclined to hug it, to affront the notorious perils of love at first
sight.
I believe that the causes of women's failure in painting are
twofold--manual and mental. Though disinclined to generalize upon the
female temperament, because such generalizations generally lead to the
discovery of a paradox, I am conscious in woman of a quality of
impatience.
While woman will exhibit infinite patience, infinite obstinacy, in the
pursuit of an end, she is often inclined to leap too quickly towards
that end. To use a metaphor, she may spend her whole life in trying to
cut down a tree without taking the preliminary trouble to have her ax
sharpened; she does unwillingly the immense labor on the antique, she
neglects her anatomy, she sacrifices line to color.
This is natural enough, for she has a keen sense of color. As witness
her clothes. When clothes are the work of woman they are generally
beautiful in color; when they are beautiful in line they are generally
by Poiret. For line tends to be pure and cold, and I hope I will shock
nobody when I suggest that purity and coldness are masculine rather than
feminine. Color is the expression of passion, line is the expression of
intellect, or rather of that curious combination of intellect and
passion, of intellect directing passion, and of passion inflaming
intellect, which is art as understood by man. It is to this second group
of causes, those I have called mental, that the inferiority of the
woman painter is traceable. There is a lack of intellect in her work. It
is true that the male painter is often just a painter, and that I can
think of no case to-day which reproduces the engineering capacities of
Leonardo da Vinci, but I refer rather to a general intellectual sweep
than to a specialized capacity. Men do not hold themselves so far aloof
from politics, business and philosophy as do women; too many of the
latter read nothing whatever. For some painters a novel is too much,
while their selection among the contents of the newspaper might be
improved upon by a domestic servant. There is a lack of depth, a lack of
intellectual quality, of that "general" quality which, directed into
other channels, produces the engineer, the business man and the
politician. I do not believe in "artistic capacity", "scientific
capacity", "business capacity"; there is nothing but "capacity" which
takes varying forms, just as there is red hair and black hair, but
always hair. In male painting intellect sometimes stands behind passion;
in female painting the attitude is purely sensuous, and that is not to
be wondered at: from the days of the anthropoid ape to this one we have
developed nothing in woman but the passionate quality; we have taught
her to charm, to smile, and to lie until she thinks she can do nothing
but charm, and believes in her own lies. We have refused her education,
we have made her into a slave. Thus, while many of the male painters are
not intellectuals, they have been able to draw upon the higher average
quality of the male mind, while woman to-day, desirous of so doing, will
find very little to the credit of the account of her sex.
What is the conclusion to be drawn? It is to my mind obvious enough. If
woman is producing inferior work it is because she is still an inferior
creature, but I do not think she will remain one. Her progress during
the last thirty years has been staggering; she has forced herself into
the trades, into professions, into politics; she has produced standard
works; in one or two cases she has been creative in science; and I
believe, therefore, that her intellect is on the up grade, and that her
sex is accumulating those resources which will serve as a background to
the artistic development of her passionate faculty. Woman is about to
gain political power. She will use it to improve the education of her
sex, to broaden its opportunities. She is coming out into the world in
coöperation and in conflict with man; she will become more
self-conscious, and gain a solidarity of sex upon which will follow
mutual mental stimulation and specialized sex development. For that
reason I believe woman's progress will not be less in the pictorial arts
than in other fields if she develops in herself the fullness of life and
its implications. She will inevitably wage the sex war: she will gain
her artistic deserts after the sex peace.
V
THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME
There is something the matter with the home. It may be merely the subtle
decay which, in birth beginning and in death persisting, escorts all
things human and perchance divine. It may be decay assisted by the
violence of a time unborn and striving through novelty toward its own
end, or toward an endlessness of change. But, whatever the causes, which
interest little a hasty generation, signs written in brick and mortar
and social custom, in rebellion and in aspiration, are not wanting to
show that the home, so long the center of Anglo-Saxon and American
society, is doomed. And, as is usual in the twentieth century, as has
been usual since the middle of the nineteenth, woman is at the bottom of
the change. It is women who now make revolutions. A hundred years ago it
was men who made revolutions; nowadays they content themselves with
resolutions. So it has been left for woman, more animal, more radical,
more divinely endowed with the faculty of seeing only her own side, to
sap the foundations of what was supposed to be her shelter.
I do not suppose that the household has ever been quite as much of a
shelter for women as the Victorian philosophers said, and possibly
believed; an elementary study of the feminist question will certainly
incline the unprejudiced to see that the home, which has for so long
masqueraded in the guise of woman's friend, has on the whole been her
enemy; that instead of being her protector it has been her oppressor;
that it has not been her fortress, but her jail. Woman has felt in the
home much as a workman might feel if he were given the White House as a
present, told to live in it and keep it clean without help on two
dollars a week. If the home be a precious possession, it may very well
be a possession bought at too high a price--at the price of youth, of
energy, and of enlightenment. The whole attitude of woman toward the
home is one of rebellion--not of all women, of course, for most of them
still accept that, though all that is may not be good, all that is must
be made to do. Resignation, humility, and self-sacrifice have for a
thousand generations been the worst vices of woman, but it is apparent
that at last aggressiveness and selfishness are developing her toward
nobility. She is growing aware that she is a human being, a discovery
which the centuries had not made, and naturally she hates her gilded
cage.
Woman is tired of a home that is too large, where the third floor gets
dirty while she is cleaning the first; of a home that cannot be left
lest it should be burglared; of a home where there is always a slate
wrong, or a broken window, or a shortage of coal. She is tired of being
immolated on the domestic hearth. One of them, neither advanced nor
protesting, gave me a little while ago an account of what she called a
characteristic day. I reproduce it untouched:
THE DAY OF A REALLY NICE ENGLISHWOMAN
8 A.M.--Early tea; rise; no bath. [The husband has the only bath,
and the boiler cannot make another until ten.]
9 A.M.--Breakfast. [The husband takes the only newspaper away to
the office.]
9.30 A.M.--Conversation with the cook: hardness of the butcher's
meat; difficulty because there are only three eatable animals;
degeneration of the butter; grocery and milk problems.
Telephone.--A social engagement is made.
Conversation with the cook resumed: report on a mysterious disease
of the kitchen boiler; report on the oil-man; report on the
plumber.
Correspondence begun and interrupted by the parlor-maid, who
demands a new stock of glass.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the parlor-maid's demand for
change with which to pay the cleaner.
Rush up-stairs to show which covers are to go.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the telephone: the
green-grocer states that some of the vegetables she wants cannot be
procured.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the nurse, who wishes to
change the baby's milk.
Three telephone calls.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the housemaid, who wants
new brooms.
11 A.M.--The children have gone; the servants are at work.
Therefore:
11-11.15 A.M.--Breathing space.
11.15-11.45 A.M.--Paying bills--electricity, gas, clothes; checking
the weekly books, reading laundry circulars.
12 M.--Goes out. It is probably wet [this being England], so, not
being very well off, she flounders through mud. Interview with the
plumber as to the boiler; shoes for Gladys; glass for the
parlor-maid; brooms for the housemaid; forgets various things she
ought to have done; these worry her during lunch.
1.30 P.M.--Lunch.
2.30 P.M.--Fagged out, lies down, but--
2.45 P.M.--The husband telephones to tell her to go to the library
and get him a book.
3.15 P.M.--Is fitted by the dressmaker. Feels better.
4.30 P.M.--Charming at tea.
5.45 P.M.--Compulsory games with the children.
6.15 P.M.--Ultimatum from the servants: the puppy must be killed
for reasons which cannot be specified in an American magazine.
6.30-6.35 P.M.--Literature, art, music, and science. Then dress for
dinner.
7.30 P.M.--Charming at dinner. Grand fantasia to entertain the male
after a strenuous day in the city. Conversation: golf, business,
cutting remarks about other people, and _no contradicting_.
8.45-9.15 P.M.--Literature, art, music, and science.
Last post: Circulars, bills, invitations to be answered; request
from a brother in India to send jam which can be bought only in a
suburb fourteen miles distant.
10.30 P.M.--Attempted bath, but the plumber has not mended the
boiler, after all.
11 P.M.--Sleep ... up to the beginning of another nice
Englishwoman's day.
She may exaggerate, but I do not think so, for as I write these lines
three stories of a house hang over my head, and I hear culinary noises
below. Being a man, I am supposed to rule all this, but, fortunately,
not to govern it. And I am moved to interest when I reflect that in this
street of sixty houses, that which is going on in my house is probably
multiplied by sixty. I have a vision of those sixty houses, each with
its dining room and drawing-room, its four to eight bedrooms, and its
basement. There are sixty drawing-rooms in this street, and at 11 A.M.
there is not a single human being in them; and at 3 P.M. there is nobody
in the sixty dining rooms, except on Sunday, when a few men are asleep
in them. And I have horrid visions of our sixty kitchens, our sixty
sculleries, our sixty pantries; of our one hundred and fifty servants,
and our sixty cooks (and cooks so hard to get and to bear with when
you've got them!). And I think of all our dinner sets, of the twelve
thousand pieces of crockery which we need in our little street. To think
of twelve thousand articles of crockery is to realize our remoteness
from the monkey. And the nurses, as they pass, fill me with wonder, for
some of them attend one child, some two, while sometimes three children
have two nurses--until I wonder what percentage of nurse is really
required to keep in order an obviously unruly generation.
Complex, enormous, it is not even cheap. Privacy, the purest jewel
humanity can find, seems to be the dearest. This inflated individual
home, it is marvelous how it has survived! Like most human
institutions, it has probably survived because it was there. It has
taken woman's time; it has taken much of her energy, much of her health
and looks. Worst of all, it seems to have taken from her some of the
consideration to which as a human being she was entitled. Let there be
no mistake about that. In spite of proclamations as to the sacredness of
the home and the dignity of labor, the fact remains that the domestic
man, the kind that can hang a picture straight, is generally treated by
male acquaintances with sorrowful tolerance; should he attempt to wash
the baby, he becomes the kind of man about whom the comic songs are
written. (I may seem rather violent, but I once tried to wash a baby.)
So that apparently the dignified occupations of the household are not
deemed dignified by man. This is evident enough, for office-cleaners,
laundresses, step-girls, are never replaced by men. These are the
feminine occupations, the coarse occupations, requiring no special
intelligence.
The truth is that the status of domestic labor is low. An exception is
made in favor of the cook, but only by people who know what cooking is,
which excludes the majority of the world. It is true that of late years
attempts have been made to raise the capacity of the domestic laborer by
inducing her to attend classes on cooking, on child nurture, etc., but,
in the main, in ninety-nine per cent of bourgeois marriages, it is
assumed that any fool can run a house. It matters very little whether a
fool can run a house or not; what does matter from the woman's point of
view is that she is given no credit for efficient household management,
and that is one reason why she has rebelled. It does not matter whether
you are a solicitor, an archbishop, or a burglar, the savor goes out of
your profession if it is not publicly esteemed at its true worth. We
have heard of celebrated impostors, of celebrated politicians, but who
has ever heard of a celebrated housekeeper?
The modern complaint of woman is that the care of the house has divorced
her from growing interests, from literature and, what is more important,
from the newspaper, partly from music, entirely from politics. It is a
purely material question; there are only twenty-four hours in every day,
and there are some things one cannot hustle. One can no more hustle the
English joint than the decrees of the Supreme Court. Moreover, and this
is a collateral fact, an emptiness has formed around woman; while on
the one side she was being tempted by the professions that opened to
her, by the interests ready to her hand, the old demands of less
organized homes were falling away from her. Once upon a time she was a
slave; now she is a half-timer, and the taste of liberty that has come
to her has made her more intolerant of the old laws than she was in the
ancient days of her serfdom. Not much more than seventy years ago it was
still the custom in lower middle-class homes for the woman to sew and
bake and brew. These occupations were relinquished, for the distribution
of labor made it possible to have them better done at a lower cost.
In the 'fifties and the 'sixties the great shops began to grow, stores
to rise of the type of Whiteley and Wanamaker. Woman ceased to be
industrial, and became commercial; her chief occupation was now
shopping, and if she were intelligent and painstaking she could make a
better bargain with Jones, in Queen's Road, than with Smith, in
Portchester Street. But of late years even that has begun to go; the
great stores dominate the retail trade, and now, qualities being equal,
there is hardly anything to pick between universal provider Number 1, at
one end of the town, and Number 2, equally universal, at the other.
Also the stores sell everything; they facilitate purchases; the
housekeeper need not go to ten shops, for at a single one she can buy
cheese, bicycles, and elephants. That is only an indication of the
movement; the time will come, probably within our lifetime, when the
great stores of the towns will have crushed the small traders and turned
them into branch managers; when all the prices will be alike, all the
goods alike; when food will be so graded that it will no longer be worth
the housekeeper's while to try and discover a particularly good
sirloin--instead she will telephone for seven pounds of quality AF,
Number 14,692. Then, having less to do, woman will want to do still
less, and the modern rebellion against house and home will find in her
restlessness a greater impetus.
When did the rebellion begin? Almost, it might be said, it began in the
beginning, and no doubt before the matriarchate period women were
striving toward liberty, only to lose it after having for a while
dominated man. In later years women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, but
more obscure, strove to emancipate themselves from the thralldom of the
household. The aspiration of woman, whether Greek courtesan, French
worldling, or English factory inspector, has always been toward equality
with man, perhaps toward mastery. And man has always stood in her path
to restrict her, to arrest her development for his pleasure, as does
to-day the Japanese to the little tree which he plants in a pot. The
clamor of to-day against the emancipated woman is as old as the rebukes
of St. Paul; Molière gave it tongue in _Les Femmes Savantes_, when he
made the bourgeois say to his would-be learned wife:
"Former aux bonnes moeurs l'esprit de ses enfants,
Faire aller son ménage, avoir l'oeil sur ses gens
Et régler la dépense avec économie
Doit être son étude et sa philosophie."
Man has laid down only three occupations: _kirche_, _küche_, _kinder_.
Hence the revolt. If man had not so much desired that woman should be
housekeeper and courtesan, she would not so violently have rebelled
against him, for why should one rebel until somebody says, "Thou shalt"!
At the words "Thou shalt", rebellion becomes automatic, and, so long as
woman has virility in her, so will it be. Still, leaving origins alone,
and considering only the last fifty or sixty years of our history, it
might be said that they are divided into three periods:
(_a_) The shiny nose and virtue period.
(_b_) The powder-puff and possible virtue period.
(_c_) The Russian ballet and leopard-skin period.
There are exceptions, qualifications, occasional retrogressions, but,
taking it roughly, that is the history of English womanhood from wax
fruit to Bakst designs. There were crises, such as the early 'eighties,
when bloomers came in and women essayed cigarettes, and felt very
advanced and sick; when they joined Ibsen clubs and took up Bernard
Shaw, and wore eyeglasses and generally tried to be men without
succeeding in being gentlemen. There was another crisis about 1906, when
suffrage put forward in England its first violent claims. That, too, was
abortive in a sense, as is ironically recorded in a comic song popular
at the time:
"Back, back to the office she went:
The secretary was a perfect gent."
But still, in a rough and general way, there has been a continual and
growing discontent with the heavy weight of the household, the
complications of its administration. There has been a drive toward
freedom which has affected even that most conservative of all animals,
the male. There have been conscious rebellions as expressed, for
instance, by Nora who "slammed the door"; by the many girls who decide
to "live their own lives", as life was expounded in the yellow-backs of
the 'nineties; by the growing demand for entry into the professions; for
votes; for admission to the legislatures. There is nothing irrelevant in
this; given that by the nature of her position in society and of the
duties intrusted to her in the household, she was cut off from all other
fields of human activity, it may be said that every attempt that woman
has made to share in any activity that lay beyond her front door has
been revolutionary and directed at the foundations of the English
household system. Whether this has also been the case in America, where
a curious type of woman has been evolved--pampered, selfish,
intelligent, domineering, and wildly pleasure-loving--I cannot tell.
Nor is it my business; like other men, the Americans have the wives they
deserve.
But behind the conscious rebellions are the subtle and, in a way,
infinitely more powerful unconscious rebellions, the dull discontents
of overworked and over-preoccupied women; the weariness, the desire for
pleasure and travel, for change, for time to play and to love, and--what
is more pathetic--for time just to sit and rest. The epitaph of the
charwoman--
"Weep for me not, weep for me never,
I'm going to do nothing, nothing forever--"
embodies pains deep-buried in millions of women's hearts. Most people do
not know that, because women never smile so brightly as when they are
unhappy. Sometimes I suspect that public pronouncements and suffrage
manifestoes have had very much less to do with modern upheavals than
these slumberous protests against the multiplicity of errands and the
intricacies of the kitchen range.
Even man has been affected by the change, has begun to realize that it
is quite impossible to alter custom while leaving custom unaltered,
which, as anybody knows who reads parliamentary debates, is mankind's
dearest desire. Changes in his habits and in his surroundings, such as
the weekend, the servant problem, the restaurant, the hotel; all these
have been separate disruptive factors, have begun to bring about the
downfall of the English household. I do not know that one can assign a
predominant place to any one of these factors; they are each one as the
drop of water that, joined with its fellows, wears away stone. Moreover,
in socio-psychologic investigation it is often found that what appears
to be a cause is an effect, and _vice versa_. For instance, with regard
to restaurant dining, it may be that people frequent restaurants because
the home cooking is bad, and, on the other hand, it may be that home
cooking has become bad because people have neglected it as they found it
easier to go to the restaurant. This attitude of mind must qualify the
conclusion at which I arrive, and it is an attitude which must be
sedulously cultivated by any one who wants to know the truth instead of
wishing merely to have his prejudices confirmed.
But, all allowances made, it is perfectly clear that the first group of
disruptive factors, such as the restaurant dinner, the week-end, the
long and frequent holidays, the motor car, the spread of golf, is
inimical to the home idea and, therefore, to the house idea. (Home means
house, and does not mean flat, for which see further on.) The home idea
is complex; it embraces privacy, possession; it implies a place where
one can retreat, be master, be powerful in a small sphere, take off
one's boots, be sulky or pleasant, as one likes. It involves, above all,
a place where one does not hear the neighbor's piano, or the neighbor's
baby, or, with luck, the neighbor's cat; but where, on the other hand,
one's own piano, one's own baby, and one's own cat are raised to a high
and personal pitch of importance. It involves everything that is
individual--one's own stationery block, one's crest, or, if one is not
so fortunate, one's monogram upon the plate. If the S.P.C.A. did not
intervene, I think one might often see in the front garden a cat branded
with a hot iron: "Thomas Jones. His Cat." It is the rallying-point of
domestic virtue, the origin of domestic tyranny. It is the place where
public opinion cannot see you and where, therefore, you may behave
badly. Most wife beaters live in houses; in flats they would be afraid
of the opinion of the hall porter. And yet the home is not without its
charm and its nobility, for its bricks and mortar enshrine a spirit that
is worshiped and for which much may be sacrificed. Cigars have been
given up so that the home might have a new coat of paint; amusements,
holidays, food sometimes--all these have been sacrificed so that, well
railed off from the outside world by a front garden, if possible by a
back garden, too--or, still more delightful, far from the next house--a
little social cosmos might be maintained. So far has this gone in the
north of England that many people who could well afford servants will
not have them because, as they say, they cannot bear strangers in the
house. And very desirable houses in the suburbs of London, with old,
walled gardens, have been given up because it was unbearable to take tea
under the eyes of passengers on the top of the motor busses.
The home spirit, however, is not content merely with coats of paint and
doilies; it demands mental as well as material worship. It demands
importance; it insists that it is home, sweet home, and that there is no
place like it (which is one comfort); that it is the last thought of the
drowning sailor; that the trapper, lost in the deepest forests of
Canada, sees rising in the smoke of his lonely camp fire a delicious
vision of Aunt Maria's magenta curtains. It lays down that it is wrong
to leave it, quite apart from the question of burglars; it has invented
scores of phrases to justify otherwise unpleasant husbands who had
"given a good home" to their wives; phrases to censure revolting
daughters "who had good homes, and what more could they want?" It has
frowned upon everything that was outside itself, for it could not see
anything that was not itself. It has hated theaters, concerts, dances,
lectures, every form of amusement; and, as it has to bear them, likes to
refer to them archly as debauches, or going on the razzle-dazzle, or the
ran-dan, according to period. It has powerfully allied itself with the
pulpit and, in impious circles, with fancy work and crochet; it has
enlisted a considerable portion of the Royal Academy to depict it in
various scenes for which the recipe is: One tired man with a sunny smile
returning to his home; one delighted wife; suitable number of ebullient
children and, inevitably, a dog. The dog varies. In England they
generally put in a terrier, in war time a bulldog; in Germany it may be
a dachshund; and in other countries it is another kind of dog, but it is
always the same idea.
And so it is not wonderful that the home has looked censoriously upon
everything that took people away from its orbit. Likewise it is not
wonderful that people have fled to anything available so as to escape
the charmed circle. The week-end is in general a very over-rated
amusement, for it consists mainly in packing and preparing to catch a
train, then thinking of packing and catching a train, then packing and
catching a train; but still the week-end amounts to a desertion, and
hardly a month passes without a divine laying of savage hands upon the
excursion. There was a time when holidays themselves were looked upon as
audacious breaches of the conventions. In the early nineteenth century
nobody went to Brighton except the Regent and the smart set; even in the
Thackerayan period people did not think it necessary to leave London in
August, and when they took the Grand Tour they were bent on improving
their minds. The Kickleburys could not go up the Rhine without a
powerful feeling of self-consciousness; I think they felt that they were
outraging the Victorian virtues, so they had to make up for it by taking
a guide, who for four or five weeks lectured them day and night upon the
ruins of Godesberg. All this was opposed to the spirit of the home, just
as anything which is outside the home is opposed to the spirit of the
home, as was, for instance, every dance that has ever been known. In the
_Observer_, in 1820, appeared a poem expressing horror and disgust of
the waltz, and, curiously enough, very much in the same terms as the
diatribes in the American papers of 1914 against the turkey trot and
the bunny hug. When the polka came in, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, good people clustered to see it danced, just like the more
recent tango, and it was considered very fast. All this may appear
somewhat irrelevant, but my case is mainly that the old attitude, now
decaying, is that anything that happened outside the home, whether sport
or amusement, was anything between faintly and violently evil. The old
ideal of home was concentrated in Sunday: a long night; heavy breakfast;
church; walk in the park; heavy dinner, including roast beef; profound
sleep in the dining room; heavy tea; then nothing whatever; church;
heavy supper; nothing whatever; then sleep. There is not much of this
left, and from the moment when Sunday concerts began and the picture
galleries were opened, when chess was played and the newspaper read, the
old solidities of the home trembled, for the home was an edifice from
which one could not take one stone.
In chorus with the cry for new pleasures, the reaction against the old
discomfort, came a more powerful influence still, because it was
direct--the servant problem. The Americans know this question, I think,
better even than the British, for in their country a violent democracy
rejects domestic service and compels, I believe, the use of recent
emigrants from old enslaved Europe who have not yet breathed the
aggressive and ambitious air that has touched the Stars and Stripes. In
Great Britain the crisis is not yet, and it may never come, for this is
not the English way. In England we are aware of a crisis only fifty
years later, because for that half-century we have successfully
pretended that there was no crisis. So we come in just in time for the
reaction, and say: "There you are. I told you nothing was changed." Yet,
so persistent is the servant problem that even England has had to take
some notice of it. As Mr. Wells said, the supply of rough, hardworking
girls began to shrink. It shrank because so many opportunities for the
employment of women were offered by the factories which arose in England
in the 'forties and the 'fifties, by the demand for waitresses, for
shorthand writers, typists, shopgirls, elementary schoolmistresses, etc.
The Education Act of 1870 gave the young English girls of that day a
violent shock, for it informed them of the existence of Paris, assisted
them toward the piano. And then came the development of the factory
system, the spread of cheapness; with the rise in wages came a rising
desire for pretty, cheap things almost as pretty as the dear ones;
substitutes for costly stuffs were found; compositions replaced ivory,
mercerized cotton rivaled silk, and little by little the young girl of
the people discovered that with a little cleverness she could look quite
as well as the one whom her mother called "Madam"; so she ceased to call
her "Madam." Labor daily grows more truculent, so there is no knowing
what she will call the ex-Madam next; but one thing is certain, and that
is that she will not serve her. She will not, because she looks upon
service as ignominious; she has her own pride; she will not tell you
that she is in a shop, but that she is "in business"; if she is "in
service", often she will say nothing about it at all, for the other
girls, who work their eleven hours a day for a few shillings a week,
despise her. They at least have fixed hours and they do not "live in";
when they have done their work they are free. They may have had less to
eat that day than the comfortable parlor-maid, and maybe they have less
in their pockets, but they are free, and they do not hesitate to show
their contempt to the helot. I think that new pride has done as much as
anything to crush the old, large, unwieldy home, for its four stories
and its vast basement needed many steady, hardworking slaves, who only
spoke when they were spoken to and always obeyed. It is not that
mistresses were bad; some were and some were not, but from the modern
girl's point of view they were all bad because they had power at any
time of day or night to demand service, to impose tasks that were not
contracted for, to forbid the house to the servant's friends, to make
her loves difficult, to forbid her even to speak to a man. Whether the
mistress so behaved did not matter; she had the power, and in a society
growingly individual, growingly democratic, that was bound to become a
heavy yoke.
And so, very slowly, the modern evolution began. The first to go were
the immense houses of Kensington, Paddington, Bayswater,
Bloomsbury,--those old houses within hail of Hyde Park,--which once held
large families, all of them anxious to live not too far from the Court.
They fell because it was almost impossible to afford enough servants to
keep in order their three or four reception rooms, and their eight, ten,
twelve bedrooms; they fell because the birth rate shrank, and the large
families of the early nineteenth century became exceptional; they fell
also because the old rigidity, or rather the stateliness, of the home
was vanishing; because the lady of the house ventured to have tea in her
drawing-room when there were no callers, and little by little came to
leave newspapers about in it and to smoke in it. With the difficulties
of the old houses came a demand for something smaller, requiring less
labor. This accounts for the villas, of which some four hundred thousand
have been built in the suburbs of London, in the villages London has
absorbed. They are atrocious imitations of the most debased Elizabethan
style; they show concrete where they should use stone, but, as their
predecessors showed stucco, they are not much worse. They exhibit
painted black stripes where there should be beams; they have sloping
roofs, gables, dormer windows, everything cunningly arranged to make as
many corners as possible where no chair can stand. They have horrid
little gardens where the builder has buried many broken bricks, sardine
tins, and old hats; they represent the taste of the twentieth century;
they are quite abominable. But still the fact remains that they are
infinitely smaller, more manageable, more intelligently planned than
the spacious old houses of the past, where every black cupboard bred
the cockroach and the mouse. They are easy to warm and easy to clean;
their windows are not limited by the old window tax; they have bathrooms
even when their rent is only one hundred and fifty dollars a year; and
especially they have no basement. The disappearance of the basement is
one of the most significant aspects of the downfall of the old
household, for it was essentially the servants' floor, where they could
be kept apart from their masters, maintaining their own sports and the
mysterious customs of a strange people; when the door of the kitchen
stairs was shut, one would keep out everything connected with the
servants, except perhaps the smell of the roast leg of mutton. That did
not matter, for that was homelike. The basement was a vestige of feudal
English society; it was brother to the servants' quarters and the
servants' hall. Now it is gone. In many places the tradesmen's entrance
has vanished, and the cabbage comes to the front door. The sacred
suppressions are no more, and in a developing democracy the master and
mistress of the house stately dine, while on the other side of a wall
about an inch thick Jane can be heard conversing with the policeman.
The growth of the small house has never stopped during the last forty or
fifty years. A builder in the southwest of London, of whom I made
inquiries, told me that he had erected four hundred and twenty houses,
and that not one of them had a basement; this form of architecture had
not even occurred to him. I have also visited very many homes in the
suburbs of London, and I have looked in vain for the old precincts of
the serving maid. The small house has powerfully affected the old
individual attitude of home, for the hostile dignity of the past cannot
survive when one man mows the lawn and the other clips the roses, each
in his own garden, separated only by three sticks and some barbed wire.
In detached houses it is worse, for they are now so close together that
in certain architectural conditions preliminaries are required before
one can take a private bath. The whole direction of domestic
architecture is against the individual and for the group. The modern
home takes away even the old stores; there are no more pickle cupboards
and jam cupboards, and hardly linen cupboards. Why should there be when
jam and pickles come from the grocer, and few men have more than twelve
shirts? There is not even a store for coal. Some years ago I lived in a
house that was built in 1820, and its coal cellar held eight tons; I now
inhabit one, built in 1860, in which I can accommodate four tons; the
house now being built in the suburbs cannot receive more than one ton.
The evolution of the coal cellar is a little the evolution of English
society from the time when every man had to live a good deal for
himself, until slightly better distribution made it possible for him to
combine with his fellows. He need not now store coal, for there is a
service of coal to his doorstep. Besides, the offspring of coal are
expelling their ancestor; gas and electricity, both centrally supplied
from a single source, are sapping the old hearthstone that was fed by
one small family, and for that family alone glowed. A continual
socialization has come about, and it is not going to stop. What is done
in common is on the whole better done, more cheaply done. But what is
done in common is hostile to the old home spirit, because the principle
of the home spirit is that anything done in common is--well, common!
As for the old houses of fifteen to sixteen rooms, they have had to
accommodate themselves to the new conditions. First they tried to
maintain themselves by reducing their rents. I know of a case, in
Courtfield Gardens, where a house leased twenty-six years ago at one
thousand dollars a year, was leased again about ten years ago at seven
hundred and fifty dollars a year, and is now being offered at five
hundred dollars a year. The owner does not want his premises turned into
a boarding house, but he cannot find a private tenant, because hardly
anybody nowadays can manage five floors and a basement. In my own
district, where the houses tower up to heaven, I see the process at
work,--rents falling, pitiful attempts of the landlords to prevent their
houses from turning into maisonnettes and boarding houses, to prevent
the general decay. But they are beaten. The vast Victorian houses within
three miles of Charing Cross are, one by one, being cut up into flats;
in the unfashionable districts they are being used for tenements; and
there are splendid old houses in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where
in the day of Dickens lived the fashionables, which now house half a
dozen workingclass families and their lodgers. There is one of these old
glories near Lamb's Conduit Street, where a Polish furrier and his six
unwashed assistants work under a ceiling sown with sprawling nymphs,
while melancholic and chipped golden lions' heads look down from either
side of a once splendid Georgian mantelpiece. It is very reactionary of
me, I am afraid, but I cannot help feeling it a pity that this old
house, where would suitably walk the ghost of Brinsley Sheridan, must be
one of the eggs broken to make the omelette of the future.
But these old houses must go. Why should one preserve an old house? One
does not preserve one's old boots. The old houses have been seized by
the current of revolt against the home; they have mostly become boarding
and apartment houses. This is not only because their owners do not know
what to do with them; one does not run a boarding house unless it pays,
and so evidently there has been a growing demand for the boarding house.
Boarding houses fail, but for every one that fails two rise up, and
there is hardly a street in London that has not its boarding house, or
at least its apartment house. There are several in Park Lane itself;
there is even one whose lodgers may look into the gardens of Buckingham
Palace. I do not know how many boarding houses there are in London, for
no statistics distinguish properly between the boarding house, the
apartment house, the private hotel, the hotel, and the tavern. But,
evidently, the increase is continuous, and part of the explanation is to
be found elsewhere than in the traveler. Of course, the traveler has
enormously increased, but he alone cannot account for the scores of
thousands of people who pass their years in apartment and boarding
houses. They live there for various reasons--because they cling to the
old family idea and think to find "a home from home"; because they
cannot afford to run separate establishments; and very many because they
are tired of running them, tired of the plumber, tired of the housemaid.
There are thousands of families in London, quite well-to-do, who prefer
to live in boarding houses; they hate the boarding house, but they hate
it less than home. They feel less tied; they have less furniture; they
like to feel that their furniture is in store where they can forget all
about it. They have lost part of their old love for Aunt Maria's magenta
curtains--the home idea has become less significant to them. And this
applies also to hotels. The increase of hotels in London, in every
provincial city, all over the world, is not entirely explained by the
traveler, though, by the way, the increase in traveling is a sign of the
decay of the home. The old idea, "You've got a good home and you've got
to stay there," suffers whenever a member of the home leaves it for any
reason other than the virtuous pursuit of his business. All over the
center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels
have risen--the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the
Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in
some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An
enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park; another is projected
at Hyde Park Corner; the Strand Palace is open, and at the Regent Palace
there are, I understand, fourteen hundred bedrooms. The position is that
a proportion of London's population is beginning to live in these hotels
without servants of their own, without furniture of their own, without
houses of their own. A more detached, a freer spirit is invading them,
and a desire to get all they can out of life while they can, instead of
solemnly worshiping the Englishman's castle.
It does not come easily, and it does not come quickly. During the last
twenty-five years most of the blocks of flats to be found in London have
risen, with their villainously convenient lifts for passengers and
their new-fangled lifts for dust bins and coal, with their electricity
and their white paint, and other signs of emancipation. They were not
popular when they came, and they are disliked by the older generation;
it is still a little vicious to live in a West End flat. And when the
younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you
can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one
should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enough, I see many
more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a
certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the
older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now
much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human
life, the kitchen. There are now in London quite a number of flats, such
as, I think, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Court, Artillery
Mansions, where the tenants live in agreeable suites and either take
their meals in the public restaurant or have them brought up to their
flat. The difficulty of service is being reduced. The sixty households
are beginning to do without the sixty cooks, and never use more than a
few dozen at a time of their two hundred pieces of crockery. There are
no more tradesmen, nor is there any ordering; there is a menu and a
telephone. There are no more heated interviews with the cook, and no
more notices given ten minutes before the party, but a chat with a
manager who has the manners and the tact of an ambassador. There is no
more home work in these places.
I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more
clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only
makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and
uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally
ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the
furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new
system--blocks of flats with a central restaurant--will probably, in a
more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I
conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say
blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden
which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one
room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very
necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will
also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its
furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is
developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be
provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance
of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no
coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There
will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining room,
run--and this is very important--_by a committee of tenants_.
That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will
buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase
by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid
laundry maid will check the lists--there will no longer be, as once upon
a time on Saturday evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists.
It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks.
The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few
persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours,
without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household
will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything
that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the
wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the
communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day;
there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I
have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can
do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.
I think I will close upon that phrase: There will be no mice in those
days. For somehow the industrious mouse, scuffling behind the loose
wainscoting over the rotten boards, is to me curiously significant of
the old, hostile order, when every man jealously held what was his own
and determined that it should so remain--dirty, insanitary, tiresome,
labor-making, dull, inexpressibly ugly, inexpressibly inimical to
anything fresh and free, providing that it was wholly and sacredly his
own.
VI
THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY
1
As with the home, so with the family. It would be strange indeed if a
stained shell were to hold a sound nut. All the events of the last
century--the development of the factory system, the Married Women's
Property Act, the birth of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the entry of woman into
professions, the discovery of co-education and of education itself,
eugenics, Christian Science, new music halls and halfpenny papers, the
Russian ballet, cheap travel, woman suffrage, apartment houses--all this
change and stress has lowered the status of one whom Pliny admired--the
father of a family. The family itself tends to disappear, and it is many
years since letters appeared in _The Times_ over the signature, "Mother
of Six." The family is smaller, and, strangely enough, it is sweeter
tempered: would it be fair to conclude, as might an Irishman, that it
would agree perfectly if it disappeared?
I do not think that the family will completely disappear any more than
scarlet fever or the tax collector. But certainly it will change in
character, and its evolution already points toward its new form. The
old-fashioned family sickened because it was a compulsory grouping. The
wife cleaved unto her husband because he paid the bills; the children
cleaved unto their parents because they must cleave unto something.
There was no chance of getting out, for there was nothing to get out to.
For the girl, especially, some fifty years ago, to escape from the
family into the world was much the same thing as burgling a
penitentiary; so she stayed, compulsorily grouped. Personally, I think
all kinds of compulsory groupings bad. If one is compelled to do a
thing, one hates it; possibly the dead warriors in the Elysian Fields
have by this time taken a violent dislike to compulsory chariot races,
and absolutely detest their endless rest on moss-grown banks and their
diet of honey. I do not want to stress the idea too far, but I doubt
whether the denizens of the Elysian Fields, after so many centuries, can
tolerate one another any more, for they are compelled to live all
together in this Paradise, and nothing conceivable will ever get them
out.
Some groupings are worse than others, and I incline to think that
difference of age has most to do with the chafe of family life. For man
is a sociable animal; he loves his fellows, and so one wonders why he
should so generally detest his relations. There are minor reasons.
Relationship amounts to a license to be rude, to the right to exact
respect from the young and service from the old; there is the fact that,
however high you may rise in the world, your aunt will never see it.
There is also the fact that if your aunt does see it, she brags of it
behind your back and insults you about it to your face. There is all
that, but still I believe that one could to a certain extent agree with
one's relations if one met only those who are of one's own age, for
compulsory groupings of people of the same age are not always
unpleasant; boys are happiest at school, and there is fine fellowship
and much merriment in armies. On the other hand, there often reigns a
peculiar dislike in offices. I do not want to conclude too rashly, but I
cannot help being struck by the fact that in a school or in an army the
differences of age are very small, while in an office or a family they
are considerable. Add on to the difference of age compulsory
intercourse, and you have the seeds of hatred.
This applies particularly where the units of a family are adult. The
child loves the grown-ups because he admires them; a little later he
finds them out; still a little later, he lets them see that he has found
them out, and then family life begins. In many cases it is a quite
terrible life, and the more united the family is the more it resembles
the union between the shirt of Nessus and Hercules's back. But it must
be endured because we have no alternative. I think of cases: of such a
one as that of a father and mother, respectively sixty-five and sixty,
who have two sons, one of whom ran away to Australia with a barmaid,
while the other lived on his sisters' patrimony and regrettably stayed
at home; they have four daughters, two of whom have revolted to the
extent of earning their living, but spend the whole of their holidays
with the old people; the other two are unmarried because the father,
imbued with the view that _his_ daughters were too good for any man,
refused to have any man in the house. There is another couple in my
mind, who have five children, four of whom live at home. I think I will
describe this family by quoting one of the father's pronouncements:
"There's only one opinion in this house, and that's mine!" I think of
other cases, of three sisters who have each an income of two hundred
dollars a year on which they would, of course, find it very difficult to
live separately. The total income of six hundred dollars a year enables
them to live--but together. The eldest loves cats; the next hates cats,
but loves dogs; this zoölogical quarrel is the chief occupation of the
household; the third sister's duty is to keep the cats and dogs apart.
Here we have the compulsory grouping; I believe that this lies at the
root of disunion in that united family.
The age problem is twofold. It must not be thought that I hold a brief
against old age, though, being myself young, I tend to dislike old age
as I shall probably dislike youth by and by. On the whole, the attitude
of old age is tyrannical. I have heard dicta as interesting as the one
which I quote a few lines above. I have heard say a mother to a young
man, "You _ought_ to feel affection for me"; another, "It should be
enough for you that this is my wish." That is natural enough. It is the
tradition of the elders, the Biblical, Greek, Roman, savage hierarchies
which, in their time, were sound because, lacking education of any kind,
communities could resort only to the experience of the aged. But a thing
that is natural is not always convenient, and, after all, the chief
mission of the civilizer is to bottle up Nature until she is wanted.
This tyranny breeds in youth a quite horrible hatred, while it hardens
the old, makes them incapable of seeing the point of view of youth
because it is too long since they held it. They insist upon the society
of the young; they take them out to call on old people; they drive them
round and round the park in broughams, and then round again; they
deprive them of entertainments because they themselves cannot bear noise
and late hours, or because they have come to fear expense, or because
they feel weak and are ill. It is tragic to think that so few of us can
hope to die gracefully.
The trouble does not lie entirely with the old; indeed, I think it lies
more with the young, who, crossed and irritated, are given to badgering
the old people because they are slow, because they do not understand the
problems of Lord Kitchener and are still thinking of the problems of Mr.
Gladstone. They are harsh because the old are forgetful, because their
faded memories are sweet, because they will always prefer the late Sir
Henry Irving to Mr. Charles Hawtrey. The young are cruel when the old
people refuse to send a letter without sealing it, or when they insist
upon buying their hats from the milliner who made them in 1890 and makes
them still in the same fashion. They are even harsh to them when they
are deaf or short-sighted and fumbling; they come to think that a wise
child should learn from his sire's errors.
It is a pity, but thus it is; so what is the use of thinking that the
modern family must endure? It is no use to say that the old are right or
that the young are right; they disagree. It is nobody's fault, and it is
everybody's misfortune. They disagree largely because there is too much
propinquity. It is propinquity that brings one to think there is
something rather repulsive in blood relations. It is propinquity that
brings one to love and then later to dislike. Mr. George Moore has put
the case ideally in his _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, where Doris, the girl
who has escaped from her family with the hero says: "This is the first
time I have ever lived alone, that I have ever been free from questions.
It was a pleasure to remember suddenly, as I was dressing, that no one
would ask me where I was going; that I was just like a bird myself, free
to spring off the branch and to fly. At home there are always people
round one; somebody is in the dining room, somebody is in the
drawing-room; and if one goes down the passage with one's hat on, there
is always somebody to ask where one is going, and if you say you don't
know, they say: 'Are you going to the right or to the left? Because, if
you are going to the left, I should like you to stop at the apothecary's
and to ask....'"
Yes, that is what happens. That is the tragedy of the family; it lives
on top of itself. The daughters go too much with their mothers to shop;
there are too many joint holidays, too many compulsory rejoicings at
Christmas or on birthdays. There are not enough private places in the
house. I have heard one young suffragist, sentenced to fourteen days for
breaking windows, say that, quite apart from having struck a blow for
the Cause, it was the first peaceful fortnight she had ever known. This
should not be confounded with the misunderstood offer of a wellknown
leader of the suffrage cause who offered a pound to the funds of the
movement for every day that his wife was kept in jail.
In a family, friendships are difficult, for Maude does not always like
Arabella's dearest friend; or, which is worse, Maude will stand
Arabella's dearest friend, whom she detests, so that next day she may
have the privilege of forcing upon Arabella her own, whom Arabella
cannot bear. That sort of thing is called tolerance and self-sacrifice;
in reality it is mutual tyranny, and amounts to the passing on of
pinches, as it were, from boy to boy on the benches of schools. In a
developing generation this cannot endure; youthful egotism will not
forever tolerate youthful arrogance. As for the old, they cannot
indefinitely remain with the young, for, after all, there are only two
things to talk of with any intensity--the future and the past; they are
the topics of different generations.
Still, for various reasons, this condition is endured. It is cheaper to
live together; it is more convenient socially; it is customary, which,
especially in England, is most important. But it demands an impossible
and unwilling tolerance, sometimes fraudulent exhibitions of love,
sometimes sham charity. It is not pleasant to hear Arabella, returning
from a walk with her father, say to Maude: "Thank Heaven, that's over!
Your turn to-morrow." Perhaps it would not be so if the father did not
by threat or by prayer practically compel his daughters to "take duty."
There are alleviations--games, small social pleasures, dances--but
there is no freedom. A little for the sons, perhaps, but even they are
limited in their comings and goings if they live in their father's
house. As for the girls, they are driven to find the illusion of freedom
in wage labor, unless they marry and develop, as they grow older, the
same problem.
2
Fortunately, and this may save something of the family spirit, times are
changing. It must not be imagined from the foregoing that I am a
resolute enemy of any grouping between men and women, that I view with
hatred the family in a box at the theater or round the Sunday joint. I
am not attracted by the idea of family; a large family collected
together makes me think a little of a rabbit hutch. But I recognize that
couples will to the end want to live together, that they will be fond of
their children, and that their children will be fond of them; also that
it is not socially convenient for husband and wife to live in separate
blocks of flats and to hand over their children to the county council.
There are a great many children to-day who would be happier in the
workhouse than in their homes, but there exists in the human mind a
prejudice against the workhouse, and social psychology must take it into
account. All I ask is that members of a family should not scourge one
another with whips and occasionally with scorpions, and I conceive that
nothing could be more delightful than a group of people, not too far
removed from one another by age, banded together for mutual recreation
and support. So anything that tends to liberalize the family, to
exorcise the ghost of the old patriarch, is agreeable.
Patriarch! What a word--the father as master! He will not be master very
long, and I do not think that he will want to remain master, for his
attitude is changing, not as swiftly as that of his children, but still
changing. He is not so sure of himself now when he doubts the
advisability of pulling down the shed at the back of the garden, and his
youngest daughter quotes from Nietzsche that to build a sanctuary you
must first destroy a sanctuary. And, though he is rather uncomfortable,
he does not say much when in the evening his wife appears dressed in a
Russian ballet frock or even a little less. He is growing used to
education, and he fears it less than he did. In fact, he is beginning to
appreciate it.
His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women
that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a
generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits.
She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters
consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but
the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a
great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her
mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace,
perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has
turned her back rather rudely upon her mother's pursuits, such as tea
and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and
proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the
railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very
fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not
complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on
the face?
Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the
change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because
the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as
might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is
to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less
kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely
because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no
longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his
infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of
the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while
he crusaded in the Holy Land--he, too, has gone. And the merchant in
broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on
Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if
told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather
than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton's lines--
"Who overcomes by force
Hath overcome but half his foe."
He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by
little--thanks mainly to the "yellow" press--has acquired a chastened
liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the
vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the
seaside--all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with
respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful
century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a
change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the
million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen
scraps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into
his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or
so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.
Naturally, women have in this direction developed further than men, for
they had more leeway to make up. Man has so long been the educated
animal that he did not need so much liberalizing. I do not refer to the
Middle Ages, when learning was entirely preëmpted by the male (with the
exception of poetry and music), for in those days there was no education
save among the priests. I mean rather that the great development of
elementary learning, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth
century, affected men for about a generation before it affected women.
In England, at least, university education for women is very recent, for
Girton was opened only in 1873, Newnham, at Cambridge, in 1875; Miss
Beale made Cheltenham College a power only a little later, and indeed it
may be said that formal education developed only about 1890. Both in
England and in the United States women have not had much more than a
generation to make up the leeway of sixty centuries. It has benefited
them as mothers because they did not start with the prejudices left in
the male mind by the slow evolution from one form of learning to
another; women did not have to live down Plato, Descartes, or Adam
Smith; they began on Haeckel and H. G. Wells. The mothers of to-day have
been flung neck and crop into Paradise; they came in for the new times,
which are always better than the old times and inferior only to
to-morrow. They were made to understand a possible democracy in the
nursery because all round them, even in Russia, even in Turkey,
democracy was growing, some say as a rose, some say as a weed, but
anyhow irrepressibly. Who could be a queen by the cradle when more
august thrones were tottering? So woman quite suddenly became more than
a pretty foil to the educated man, she became something like his
superior and his elder; little by little she has begun to teach him who
once was her master and still in fond delusion believes he is.
It cannot be said that the mother has until very recently liked
education. She has suffered from the prejudice that afflicted her own
mother, who thought that because she had worked samplers all girls must
work samplers; the "old" woman's daughter, because she went to
Cheltenham, tends to think that her little girl ought to go to
Cheltenham. It is human rather than feminine, for generations follow one
another at Eton and at Harvard. But more than feminine, I think it is
masculine because, until very recently, woman has disliked education,
while man has treated it with respect; he has not loved it for its own
sake, but because he thought that _nam et ipsa scientia potestas est_.
Not a very high motive, but still the future will preoccupy itself very
little with the reasons for which we did things; it will be glad enough
if we do them. Perhaps we may yet turn the edges of swords on the blasts
of rhetoric.
An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in
the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one
prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows
something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes
that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is
no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said,
"What's that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is
perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or
herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that
the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather
he desires to develop the child's personality, and in its early years
this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the
beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in
for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled
precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their
personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan't." This will
pass as all things pass, the old child and the rude child, just like the
weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new
generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time
that was not better than its father and the herald of a finer son.
Generally the parent will help, for his new attitude can be expressed in
a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He
has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a
little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of
the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in
the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a
little better than he found it"; he has passed on to wanting his son to
be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming
to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to
want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he
bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is
escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the
entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make
of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that
head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity.
The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four
times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to
expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli
prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically,
in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons;
but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will
have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the
old respects and fears. The modern mother has begun to consider herself
as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that
"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."
She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of æsthetic school
inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less
animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of
mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it
is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to
say, "_the_ baby" instead of "_my_ baby." It is a revolutionary
atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when
it wants to earn its parents' approval, for modern parents are fair
judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was
nonplussed by his son, and could not help him in his _delectus_, but the
modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of
railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to
want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often
addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to
the close, hard family idea.
Likewise, man and wife have come to look upon each other rather
differently; not differently enough, but then humanity never does
anything enough; when it comes near to anything drastic it grows afraid.
Man still thinks that "whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing", but
he is no longer finding the one he sought not so long ago. She is no
longer his property, and it would not occur to the roughest among us to
offer a wife for sale for five shillings in Smithfield market, as was
done now and then as late as the early nineteenth century. Woman is no
longer property; she has been freed; in England she has even been
allowed, by the Married Women's Property Act, to hold that which was her
own. The Married Women's Property Act has modified the attitude of the
mother to her child and to her husband. She is less linked when she has
property, for she can go. If every woman had means, or a trade of her
own, we should have achieved something like free alliance; woman would
be in the position of the woman in "Pygmalion", whom her man could not
beat because, she not being married to him, if he beat her she might
leave him--in its way a very strong argument against marriage.
But most women have no property, and yet, somehow, by the slow loosening
of family links, they have gained some independence. I am not talking of
America, where men have deposited their liberty and their fortunes into
the prettiest, the greediest, the most ruthless hands in the world; but
rather of England, where for a long time a man set up in life with a dog
as a friend, a wife to exercise it, and a cat to catch the mice. Until
recently the householder kept a tight hand upon domestic expenditure; he
paid all the bills, inspected the weekly accounts with a fierce air and
an internal hope that he understood them; rent, taxes, heat, light,
furniture, repairs, servants' wages, school fees--he saw to it that
every penny was accounted for and then, when pleased, gave his wife a
tip to go and buy herself a ribbon with. (There are still a great many
men who cannot think of anything a woman may want except a ribbon; in
1860 it was a shawl.) When a woman had property, even for some time
after the Act, she was not considered fit to administer it. She was not
fit, but she should have been allowed to administer it so as to learn
from experience how not to be swindled. Anyhow, the money was taken from
her, and I know of three cases in a single large family where the wife
meekly indorses her dividend warrant so that the husband may pay it into
his banking account. That spirit survives, but every day it decays; man,
finding his wife competent, tends to make her an allowance, to let her
have her own banking account, and never to ask for the pass book. He has
thrown upon her the responsibility for all the household and its
finance; by realizing that she was capable he has made her capable.
Though she be educated, he loves her not less; perhaps he loves her
more. It is no longer true to say with Lord Lyttleton that "the lover in
the husband may be lost." Formerly the lover was generally lost, for
after she had had six children before she was thirty the mother used to
put on a cap and retire. Now she does not retire; indeed, she hides his
bedroom slippers and puts out his pumps, for life is more vivid and
exterior now; this is the cinema age.
Finding her responsible, amusing, capable of looking after herself, man
is developing a still stranger liberalism; he has recognized that he
may not be enough to fill a woman's life, that she may care for
pleasures other than his society, and indeed for that of other men. He
has not abandoned his physical jealousy and will not so long as he is a
man, but he is slowly beginning to view without dismay his wife's
companionship with other men. She may be seen with them; she may lunch
with them; she may not, as a rule, dine with them, but that is an
evolution to come. This springs from the deep realization that there are
between men and women relations other than the passionate. It is still
true that between every man and every woman there is a flicker of love,
just a shadow, perhaps; but not so long ago between men and women there
was only "yes" or "no," and to-day there are also common tastes and
common interests. This is fine, this is necessary, but it is not good
for the old British household where husband and wife must cleave unto
each other alone; where, as in the story books, they lived happy ever
after. As with the home, so with the family; neither can survive when it
suffers comparison, for it derives all its strength from its
exclusivism. As soon as a woman begins to realize that there is charm in
the society of men other than her uncles, her brothers, and her
cousins, the solid, four-square attitude of the family is menaced.
Welcome the stranger, and legal hymen is abashed.
All this springs from woman's new estate--that of human being. She must
be considered almost as much as a man. Where there is wealth her tastes
must be consulted, and more than one man has been sentenced by a
tyrannous wife to wear blue coats and blue ties all his life. She is
coming to consider that the husband who dresses in his wife's bedroom
should be flogged, while the one who shaves there should be
electrocuted. And she defends her view with entirely one-sided logic and
an extended vocabulary. Here again is a good, a necessary thing; but
where is the old family where a husband could in safety, when slightly
overcome, retire to bed with his boots on? He is no longer king of the
castle, but a menaced viceroy in an insurgent land.
All through society this loosening of the marriage bond is operative. By
being freer within matrimony men and women view more tolerantly breaches
of the matrimonial code. There was a time when a male co-respondent was
not received: that is over. In those days a divorcée was not received
either, even when the divorce was pronounced in her favor. Nowadays, in
most social circles, the decree absolute is coming to be looked upon as
an absolution. I do not refer to the United States, where (I judge only
from your novels) divorce outlaws nobody, but to steady old England, who
still pretends that she frowns on the rebels and finally takes them back
with a sigh and wonders what she is coming to. What England is coming to
is to a lesser regard for the marriage bond, to a recognition that
people have the right to rebel against their yoke. There totters the
family--for marriage is its base, and the more English society receives
in its ranks those who have flouted it, the more it will be shaken by
the new spirit which bids human creatures live together, but also with
the rest of the world. Woman was kept within the family by threats, by
banishment, by ostracism, but now she easily earns forgiveness. At least
English society is deciding to forget if it cannot forgive the guilt--a
truly British expedient. At the root is a decaying respect for the
marriage bond, a growing respect for rebellion. That tendency is
everywhere, and it is becoming more and more common for husband and wife
to take separate holidays; there are even some who leave behind them
merely a slip: "Gone away, address unknown." They are cutting the wire
entanglements behind which lie dangers and freedoms. All this again
comes from mutual respect with mutual realization, from education, and
especially from late marriages. Late marriages are one of the most
potent causes of the break-up of the family, for now women are no longer
caught and crushed young; they are no longer burdened matrons at thirty.
The whole point of view has changed. I remember reading in an
early-Victorian novel this phrase: "She was past the first bloom of her
youth; she was twenty-three." The phrase is not without its meaning; it
meant that the male was seeking not a wife, but a courtesan who, her
courtesanship done, could become a perfect housekeeper. Now men prefer
women of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, forsake the _backfisch_ for her
mother, because the mother has personality, experience, can stimulate,
amuse, and accompany. Only the older and more formed woman is no longer
willing to enter the family as a jail; she will enter it only as a
hotel.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, from child to parent erosion also operates. I do not think
that the modern child honors its father and its mother unless it thinks
them worthy of honor. There is a slump in respect, as outside the family
there is a slump in reverence. As in the outer world a man began by
being a worthy, then a member of Parliament, then a minister, finally
was granted a pension and later a statue; and as now a man is first a
journalist, then a member of Parliament, a minister, and in due course a
scoundrel, so inside the family does a father become an equal instead of
a tyrant, and a good sort instead of an old fogy. For respect, I
believe, was mainly fear and greed. The respect of the child for its
father was very like the respect that Riquet, the little dog, felt for
Monsieur Bergeret. Anatole France has expressed it ideally:
"Oh, my master, Bergeret, God of Slaughter, I worship thee! Hail, oh God
of wrath! Hail, oh bountiful God! I lie at thy feet, I lick thy hand.
Thou art great and beautiful when at the laden board thou devourest
abundant meats. Thou art great and beautiful when, from a thin strip of
wood causing flame to spring, thou dost of night make day...."
That was a little the child's cosmogony. Then the child became educated,
capable of argument. In contact with more reasonable parents it grew
more reasonable. The parent, confronted with the question, "Why must I
do what you order?" ceased to say, "Because I say so." That reply did
not seem good enough to the parent, and it ceased to be good enough for
the child. If the child rebelled, the only thing to do was to strike it,
and striking is no longer done; the parent prefers argument because the
child is capable of understanding argument. The child is more lawful,
more sensitive; it is unready to obey blindly, and it is no longer
required to obey blindly, because, while the parent has begun to doubt
his own infallibility, the child has been doing so, too. The child is
more ready and more able to criticize its parents; indeed, the whole
generation is critical, has acquired the habit of introspection. The
child is a little like the supersoul of Mr. Stephen Leacock, and is
developing thoughts like, "Why am I? Why am I what I am? How? and why
how?" Obviously, such questions, when directed at one's father and
mother, are a little shattering. It is true that once upon a time the
child readily obeyed; now and then it criticized, but still it obeyed,
for it had been told that its duty was to execute, as was its parents'
to command. But duty is in a bad way, and I, for one, think that we
should be well rid of duty, for it appears to me to be merely an excuse
for acting without considering whether the deed is worthy. The man who
dies for his country because he loves it is an idealist and a hero; the
man who does that because he thinks it his duty is a fool. The
conception of duty has suffered; from the child's point of view, it is
almost extinct; it has been turned upside down, and there is a growth of
opinion that the parent should have the duties and the child the
privileges. It is the theory of _La Course du Flambeau_, where Hervieu
shows us each generation using and bleeding the elder generation. Or
perhaps it is a more subtle conception. It may be that the eugenic idea
is vaguely forming in the young generation, and that, in an unperceived
return to nature, they are deciding to eat their grandfathers, a
primitive taste which I have never been able to understand. Youth,
feeling that the world is its orange to suck, is inclined to consider
that the elder generation, being responsible for its presence, should
look after it and serve it. That is not at all illogical; it is borne
out by Chinese law, where, if you save a man from suicide, you must feed
him for the rest of his life.
Or perhaps it is a broader view, a more socialized one. Very young, the
child is acquiring a vague sense of its responsibility to the race, is
very early becoming a citizen. It is directed that way; it hears that
liberty consists in doing what you like, providing you injure no other
man. Its personality being encouraged to develop, the child acquires a
higher opinion of itself, considers that it owes something to itself,
that it has rights. Sacrifice is still inculcated in the child, but not
so much because it is a moral duty as because it is mental discipline.
The little boy is not told to give the chocolates to his little sister
because she is a dear little thing, and he must not be cruel to her and
make her cry; he is told that he must give her the chocolates because it
is good for him to learn to give up something. That impulse is the
impulse of Polycrates, who threw his ring into the sea. But, then,
Polycrates had no luck. The child, more fortunate, is tending to realize
itself as a person, and so, as it becomes more responsible, acquires
tolerance; it makes allowances for its parents, it is kind, it realizes
that its parents have not had its advantages. All that is very
swollen-headed and unpleasant, but still I prefer it to the old
attitude, to the time when voices were hushed and footsteps slowed when
father's latchkey was heard in the lock. To the child the parent is
becoming a person instead of the God of Wrath; a person with rights, but
not a person to whom everything must be given up. Sacrifice is out of
date, and in the child as well as in the elders there is a denial of the
dream of Ellen Sturges Cooper, for few wake up and find that life is
duty. _My_ life, _my_ personality--all that has sprung from Stirner,
from Nietzsche, from the great modern reaction against socialism and
uniformity; it is the assertion of the individual. It is often harsh;
the daughter who used to take her father for a walk now sends the dog.
But still it is necessary; old hens make good soup. I do not think that
this has killed love, for love can coexist with mutual forbearance,
however much Doctor Johnson may have doubted it. Doctor Johnson was the
bad old man of the English family, and I do not suppose that anybody
will agree that
"If the man who turnips cries
Cry not when his father dies,
'Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father."
A possible sentiment in an older generation, but sentiments, like
generations, grow out of date; they are swept out by new ideas and new
rejections--rejection of religion, rejection of morals. We tend toward
an agnostic world, with a high philosophical morality; we have attained
as yet neither agnosticism nor high morality, but the child is shaking
off the ready-made precepts of the faiths and the Smilesian theories. It
is unwillingly bound by the ordinances of a forgotten alien race; as a
puling child, carried in a basket by an eagle, like the tiny builders of
Ecbatana, it calls for bricks and mortar with which to build the airy
castle of the future.
3
As a house divided against itself, the family falls. It protests, it
hugs that from which it suffered; it protests in speech, in the
newspapers, that still it is united. The clan is dead, and blood is not
as thick as marmalade. There are countries where the link is strong, as
in France, for instance. I quote from a recent and realistic novel the
words of a mother speaking of her young married daughter:
"Every Tuesday we dine at my mother's, and every Thursday at my
mother-in-law's. Of course, now, at least once a week we go to Madame
de Castelac; later on I shall expect Pauline and her husband every
Wednesday."
"That is a pity," said Sorel. "That leaves three days."
"Oh, there are other calls. Every week my mother comes to us the same
evening as does my father-in-law, but that is quite informal."
Family dinners are rare in England. They flourish only at weddings and
at funerals, especially at funerals, for mankind collected enjoys woe.
But other occasions--birthdays, Christmas--are shunned; Christmas
especially, in spite of Dickens and Mr. Chesterton, is not what it was,
for its quondam victims, having fewer children, and being less bound to
their aunts' apron strings, go away to the seaside, or stay at home and
hide. That is a general change, and many modern factors, such as travel,
intercourse with strangers, emigration, have shown the family that there
are other places than home, until some of them have begun to think that
"East or West, home's worst." There is a frigidity among the relations
in the home, a disinclination to call one's mother-in-law "Mother."
Indeed, relations-in-law are no longer relatives; the two families do
not immediately after the wedding call one another Kitty or Tom. The
acquired family is merely a sub-family, and often the grouping resembles
that of the Montagues and the Capulets, if Romeo and Juliet had married.
Mrs. Herbert said, charmingly, in _Garden Oats_, "Our in-laws are our
strained relations."
With the closeness of the family goes the regard for the name, once so
strong. I feel sure that in all seriousness, round about 1850, a father
may have said to his son that he was disgracing the name of Smith. Now
he may almost disgrace the name of FitzArundel for all anybody cares.
There was a time when it was thought criminal that a man should become a
bankrupt, but few families will now mortgage their estate to prevent a
distant member's appearance before the official receiver. The name of
the family is now merely generic, and the bold young girl of to-morrow
will say, "My father began life as a forger and was ultimately hanged,
but that shouldn't bother you, should it?" Much of that deliquescence is
due to the factory system, for it opened opportunities to all, which
many took, raised men high in the scale of wealth; one brother might be
a millionaire in Manchester, while another tended a bar in Liverpool.
Sometimes the rich member of the family came back, such as the uncle who
returned from America with a fortune, in a state of sentimental
generosity, but most of the time it has meant that the family split into
those who keep their carriage and those who take the tram. Perhaps
Cervantes did not exaggerate when saying that there are only two
families: Have-Much and Have-Little.
4
What the future reserves I disincline to prophesy. It is enough to point
to tendencies, and to say, "Along this road we go, we know not whither."
But of one thing I feel certain: the family will not become closer, for
the individualistic tendency of man leads to instinctive rebellion; his
latent anarchism to isolate him from his fellows. There is a growing
rebellion among women against the thrall of motherhood, which, however
delightful it may be, is a thrall--the velvet-coated yoke is a yoke
still. I do not suppose that the mothers of the future will unanimously
deposit their babies in the municipal crèche. But I do believe that with
the growth of coöperative households, and especially of that quite new
class, the skilled Princess Christian or Norland nurses, there will be a
delegation of responsibility from the mother to the expert. It will go
down to the poor as well as to the rich. Already we have district
nurses for the poor, and I do not see why, as we realize more and more
the value of young life, there should not be district kindergartens.
They would remove the child still more from its home; they would throw
it in contact with creatures of its own age in its very earliest years,
prepare it for school, place it in an atmosphere where it must stand by
itself among others who will praise or blame without special
consideration, for they are strangers to it and do not bear its name.
I suspect, too, that marriage will be freer; it will not be made more
easy or more difficult, but greater facilities will be given for divorce
so that human beings may no longer be bound together in dislike, because
they once committed the crime of loving unwisely. This, too, must loosen
the family link, to-day still strong because people know that it is so
hard to break it. It will be a conditional link when it can easily be
done away with, a link that will be maintained only on terms of good
behavior on both sides. The marriage service will need a new clause; we
shall have to swear to be agreeable. The relation between husband and
wife must change more. Conjugal tyranny still exists in a country such
as England where the wife is not co-guardian of the child, for during
his wife's lifetime a husband may remove her child into another country,
refuse her access save at the price of a costly and uncertain legal
action. The child itself must have rights. At present, all the rights it
has are to such food as its parents will give it; it needs very gross
cruelty before a man can be convicted of starving or neglecting his
child. And when that child is what they call grown up--that is to say,
sixteen--in practice it loses all its rights, must come out and fend for
itself. I suspect that that will not last indefinitely, and that the new
race will have upon the old race the claim that owing to the old race it
was born. A socialized life is coming where there will be less freedom
for those who are unfit to be free, those who do not feel categorical
impulses, the impulse to treat wife and child gently and procure their
happiness. Men will not indefinitely draw their pay on a Friday and
drink half of it by Sunday night. Their wages will be subject to liens
corresponding to the number of their children. These liens may not be
light, and may extend long beyond the nominal majority of the child. I
suspect that after sixteen, or some other early age, children will, if
they choose, be entitled to leave home for some municipal hostel where
for a while their parents will be compelled to pay for their support. It
will be asked, "Why should a parent pay for the support of a child who
will not live in his house?" It seems to me that the chief reply is,
"Why did you have that child?" There is another, too: "By what right
should this creature for whom you are responsible be tied to a house
into which it has been called unconsulted? Why should it submit to your
moral and religious views? to your friends? to your wall-paper?" It is a
strong case, and I believe that, as time goes on and the law is
strengthened, the young will more and more tend to leave their homes. In
good, liberal homes they will stay, but the others they will abandon,
and I believe that no social philosopher will regret that children
should leave homes where they stay only because they are fed and not
because they love.
So, flying apart by a sort of centrifugal force, the family will become
looser and looser, until it exists only for those who care for one
another enough to maintain the association. It cannot remain as it is,
with its right of insult, its claim to society; we can have no more
slave daughters and slave wives, nor shall we chain together people who
spy out one another's loves and crush one another's youth. The family
is immortal, but the immortals have many incarnations--from Pan and
Bacchus sprang Lucifer, Son of the Morning. There is a time to
come--better than this because it is to come--when the family,
humanized, will be human.
VII
SOME NOTES ON MARRIAGE
1
The questioning mind, sole apparatus of the socio-psychologist, has of
late years often concerned itself with marriage. Marriage always was
discussed, long before Mrs. Mona Caird suggested in the respectable
'eighties that it might be a failure, but it is certain that with the
coming of Mr. Bernard Shaw the institution which was questioned grew
almost questionable. Indeed, marriage was so much attacked that it
almost became popular, and some believe that the war may cut it free
from the stake of martyrdom. Perhaps, but setting aside all prophecies,
revolts and sermons, one thing does appear: marriage is on its trial
before a hesitating jury. The judge has set this jury several questions:
Is marriage a normal institution? Is it so normal as to deserve to
continue in a state of civilization? given that civilization's function
is to crush nature.
A thing is not necessarily good because it exists, for scarlet fever,
nationality, art critics, and black beetles exist, yet all will be
rooted out in the course of enlightenment. Marriage may be an invention
of the male to secure himself a woman freehold, or, at least, in fee
simple. It may be an invention of the female designed to secure a
somewhat tyrannical protection and a precarious sustenance. Marriage may
be afflicted with inherent diseases, with antiquity, with spiritual
indigestion, or starvation: among these confusions the
socio-psychologist, swaying between the solidities of polygamy and the
shadows of theosophical union, loses all idea of the norm. There may be
no norm, either in Christian marriage, polygamy, Meredithian marriage
leases; there may be a norm only in the human aspiration to utility and
to happiness.
For we know very little save the aimlessness of a life that may be
paradise, or its vestibule, or an instalment of some other region. Still
there is a key, no doubt: the will to happiness, which, alas! opens
doors most often into empty rooms. It is the search for happiness that
has envenomed marriage and made it so difficult to bear, because in the
first rapture it is so hard to realize that there are no ways of
living, but only ways of dying more or less agreeably.
Personally, I believe that with all its faults, with its crudity, its
stupidity shot with pain, marriage responds to a human need to live
together and to foster the species, and that though we will make it
easier and approach free union, we shall always have something of the
sort. And so, because I believe it eternal, I think it necessary.
But why does it fare so ill? Why is it that when we see in a restaurant
a middle-aged couple, mutually interested and gay, we say: "I wonder if
they are married?" Why do so many marriages persist when the love knot
slips, and bandages fall away from the eyes? Strange cases come to my
mind: M 6 and M 22, always apart, except to quarrel, meanly jealous,
jealously mean, yet full of affability--to strangers; M 4 and many
others, all poor, where at once the wife has decayed; when you see youth
struggling in vain on the features under the cheap hat, you need not
look at the left hand: she is married. It is true that however much they
may decay in pride of body and pride of life, when all allowances are
made for outer gaiety and grace, the married of forty are a sounder,
deeper folk than their celibate contemporaries. Often bled white by
self-sacrifice, they have always learnt a little of the world's lesson,
which is to know how to live without happiness. They may have been
vampires, but they have not gone to sleep in the cotton wool of their
celibacy. Even hateful, the other sex has meant something to them. It
has meant that the woman must hush the children because father has come
home, but it has also meant that she must change her frock, because even
father is a man. It has taught the man that there are flowers in the
world, which so few bachelors know; it has taught the woman to interest
herself in something more than a fried egg, if only to win the favor of
her lord. Marriage may not teach the wish to please, but it teaches the
avoidance of offence, which, in a civilization governed by negative
commandments, is the root of private citizenship.
2
For the closer examination of the marriage problem, I am considering
altogether one hundred and fifty cases; my acquaintance with them varies
between intimate and slight. I have thrown out one hundred and sixteen
cases where the evidence is inadequate: the following are therefore not
loose generalizations, but one thing I assert: those one hundred and
sixteen cases do not contain a successful marriage. Out of the remaining
thirty-four, the following results arise:
Apparently successful 9
Husband unfaithful 5
Wife unfaithful 10
Husband dislikes wife 3
Wife dislikes husband 7
Success is a vague word, and I attempt no definition, but we know a
happy marriage when we see it, as we do a work of art.
It should be observed that when one or both parties are unfaithful, the
marriage is not always unsuccessful, but it generally is; moreover,
there are difficulties in establishing proportion, for women are
infinitely more confidential on this subject than are men; they also
frequently exaggerate dislike, which men cloak in indifference. Still,
making all these allowances, I am unable to find more than nine cases of
success, say six per cent. This percentage gives rise to platitudinous
thoughts on the horrid gamble of life.
Two main conclusions appear to follow: that more wives than husbands
break their marriage vows, and (this may be a cause as well as an
effect) that more wives than husbands are disappointed in their hopes.
This is natural enough, as nearly all women come ignorant to a state
requiring cool knowledge and armored only with illusion against truth,
while men enter it with experience, if not with tolerance born of
disappointment. I realize that these two conclusions are opposed to the
popular belief that a good home and a child or two are enough to make a
woman content. (A bad home and a child or nine is not considered by the
popular mind.)
There is no male clamor against marriage, from which one might conclude
that man is fairly well served. No doubt he attaches less weight to the
link; even love matters to him less than to women. I do not want to
exaggerate, for Romeo is a peer to Juliet, but it is possible to
conceive Romeo on the Stock Exchange, very busy in pursuit of money and
rank, while Juliet would remain merely Juliet. Juliet is not on the
Stock Exchange. If business is good, she has nothing to do, and if Satan
does not turn her hands to evil works, he may turn them to good ones,
which will not improve matters very much. Juliet, idle, can do nothing
but seek a deep and satisfying love: mostly it is a lifelong
occupation. All this makes Juliet very difficult, and no astronomer will
give her the moon.
Romeo is in better plight, for he makes less demands. Let Juliet be a
good housekeeper, fairly good looking and good tempered; not too stupid,
so as to understand him; not too clever, so that he may understand her;
such that he may think her as good as other men's wives, and he is
satisfied. The sentimental business is done; it is "Farewell! Farewell!
ye lovely young girls, we're off to Rio Bay." So to work--to money--to
ambition--to sport--to anything--but Juliet. While he forgets her, the
modern woman grows every day more attractive, more intellectually vivid.
She demands of her partner that he should give her stimulants, and he
gives her soporifics. She asks him for far too much; she is cruel, she
is unjust, and she is magnificent. She has not the many children on whom
in simpler days her mother used to vent an exacting affection, so she
vents it on her husband.
Yet it is not at first sight evident why so easily in England a lover
turns into a husband, that is to say, into a vaguely disagreeable person
who can be coaxed into paying bills. I suspect there are many
influences corrupting marriage, and most of them are mutual in their
action; they are of the essence of the contract; they are the mental
reservations of the marriage oath. So far as I can see, they fall into
sixteen classes:--
1. The waning of physical attraction.
2. Diverging tastes.
3. Being too much together.
4. Being too much apart. (There is no pleasing this institution.)
5. The sense of mutual property.
6. The sense of the irremediable.
7. Children.
8. The cost of living.
9. Rivalry.
10. Polygamy in men and "second blooming" in women.
11. Coarseness and talkativeness.
12. Sulkiness.
13. Dull lives.
14. Petty intolerance.
15. Stupidity.
16. Humour and aggressiveness.
There are other influences, but they are not easily ascertained;
sometimes they are subtle.
M 28 said to me: "My husband's grievance against me is that I have a
cook who can't cook; my grievance against him is that he married me."
Indeed, sentiment and the scullery painfully represent the divergence of
the two sexes. One should not exaggerate the scullery; the philosopher
who said "Feed the brute" was not entirely wrong, but it is quite easy
for a woman to ignore the emotional pabulum that many a man requires. It
is quite true that "the lover in the husband may be lost", but very few
women realize that the wife can blot out the mistress. Case M 19
confessed that she always wore out her old clothes at home, and she was
surprised when I suggested that though her husband was no critic of
clothes, he might often wonder why she did not look as well as other
women. Many modern wives know this; in them the desire to please never
quite dies; between lovers, it is violent and continuous; between
husband and wife, it is sometimes maintained only by shame and
self-respect: there are old slippers that one can't wear, even before
one's husband.
The problem arises very early with the waning of physical attraction. I
am not thinking only of the bad and hasty marriages so frequent in young
America, but of the English marriages, where both parties come together
in a state of sentimental excitement born of ignorance and rather
puritanical restraint. Europeans wed less wisely than the Hindoo and
the Turk, for these realize their wives as Woman. Generally they have
never seen a woman of their own class, and so she is a revelation, she
is indeed the bulbul, while he, being the first, is the King of men. But
the Europeans have mixed too freely, they have skimmed, they have
flirted, they have been so ashamed of true emotion that they have made
the Song of Solomon into a vaudeville ditty. They have watered the wine
of life.
So when at last the wine of life is poured out, the draught is not new,
for they have quaffed before many an adulterated potion and have long
pretended that the wine of life is milk. For a moment there is a
difference, and they recognize that the incredible can happen; each
thinks the time has come:
_"Wenn ich dem Augenblick werd sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön . . ."_
Then the false exaltation subsides: not even a saint could stand a daily
revelation; the revelation becomes a sacramental service, the
sacramental service a routine, and then, little by little, there is
nothing. But nature, as usual abhorring a vacuum, does not allow the
newly opened eyes to dwell upon a void; it leaves them clear, it allows
them to compare. One day two demi-gods gaze into the eyes of two
mortals and resent their fugitive quality. Another day two mortals gaze
into the eyes of two others, whom suddenly they discover to be
demi-gods. Some resist the trickery of nature, some succumb, some are
fortunate, some are strong. But the two who once were united are
divorced by the three judges of the Human Supreme Court: Contrast,
Habit, and Change.
Time cures no ills; sometimes it provides poultices, often salt, for
wounds. Time gives man his work, which he always had, but did not
realize in the days of his enchantment; but to woman time seldom offers
anything except her old drug, love. Oh! there are other things,
children, visiting cards, frocks, skating rinks, Christian Science teas,
and Saturday anagrams, but all these are but froth. Brilliant, worldly,
hard-eyed, urgent, pleasure-drugged, she still believes there is an
exquisite reply to the question:
"Will the love you are so rich in
Light a fire in the kitchen,
And will the little God of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?"
Only the little God of Love does not call, and the butcher does.
It is her own fault. It is always one's own fault when one has
illusions, though it is, in a way, one's privilege. She is attracted to
a strange man because he is tall and beautiful, or short and ugly and
has a clever head, or looks like a barber; he comes of different stock,
from another country, out of another class--and these two strangers
suddenly attempt to blend a total of, say, fifty-five years of different
lives into a single one! Gold will melt, but it needs a very fierce
fire, and as soon as the fire is withdrawn, it hardens again. Seldom is
there anything to make it fluid once more, for the attraction, once
primary, grows with habit commonplace, with contrast unsatisfactory,
with growth unsuitable. The lovers are twenty, then in love, then old.
It is true that habit affects man not in the same way as it does woman;
after conquest man seems to grow indifferent, while, curiously enough,
habit often binds woman closer to man, breeds in her one single fierce
desire: to make him love her more. Man buys cash down, woman on the
instalment plan, horribly suspecting now and then that she is really
buying on the hire system. A rather literary case, Case M 11, said to
me: "I am much more in love with him than I was in the beginning; he
seemed so strange and hard then. Now I love him, but ... he seems tired
of me; he knows me too well. I wonder whether we only fall in love with
men just about the time that they get sick of us."
Her surmise may be correct: there is no record of the after-life of
Perseus and Andromeda, and it is more romantic not to delve into it.
Neither they nor any other lovers could hope to maintain the early
exaltations. I am reminded of a well-known picture by Mr. Charles Dana
Gibson, showing two lovers in the snow by the sea. They are gazing into
each other's eyes; below is written: "They began saying good-by last
summer." Does any one doubt that a visit to the minister, say, in the
autumn, might have altered the complexion of things? And no wonder, for
they were the unknown, and through marriage would become the known. It
is only the unknown that tempts, until one realizes that the unknown and
the known are the same thing, as Socrates realized that life and death
are the same thing, mere converses of a single proposition. It is the
unknown makes strange associates, attracts men to ugly women, slatterns
to dandies. It is not only contrast, it is the suspicion that the
unexpected outside must conceal something. The breaking down of that
concealment is conquest, and after marriage there is no conquest; there
is only security: who could live dangerously in Brooklyn? Once licensed,
love is official; its gifts are doled out as sugar by a grocer, and
sometimes short weighed. Men suffer from this and many go dully
wondering what it is they miss that once they had; they go rather heavy,
rather dense, cumbrously gallant, asking to be understood, and
whimpering about it in a way that would be ridiculous if it were not a
little pathetic. Meanwhile, their wives wonder why all is not as it was.
It is no use telling them that nothing can ever be as it was, that as
mankind by living decays, the emotions and outlook must change; to have
had a delight is a deadly thing, for one wants it again, just as it was,
as a child demands always the same story. It must be the same delight,
and none who feel emotion will ever understand that "the race of
delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces."
It is true that early joys may unite, especially if one can believe that
there is only one fountain of joy. I think of many cases,--M 5, M
33,--where there is only one cry: "It is cruel to have had delights, for
the glamour of the past makes the day darker." They will live to see the
past differently when they are older and the present matters less. But
until then, the dead joy poisons the animate present; the man must drift
away to his occupation, for there is nothing else, and the woman must
harden by wanting what she cannot have. She will part herself from him
more thoroughly by hardening, for one cannot count upon a woman's
softness; it can swiftly be transmuted into malicious hatred.
3
This picture of pain is the rule where two strangers wed, but there are
some who, taking a partner discover a friend, many who develop agreeable
acquaintanceship. Passion may be diverted into a common interest, say in
conchology; if people are not too stupid, not too egotistic, they very
soon discover in each other a little of the human good will that will
not die. They must, or they fail. For whereas in the beginning foolish
lips may be kissed, a little later they must learn to speak some wisdom.
In this men are most exacting; they are most inclined to demand that
women should hold up to their faces the mirror of flattery, while women
seem more tolerant, often because they do not understand, very often
because they do not care, and echo the last words of Mr. Bernard Shaw's
Ann: "Never mind her, dear, go on talking;" perhaps because they have
had to tolerate so much in the centuries that they have grown expert.
One may, however, tolerate whilst strongly disapproving, and one must
disapprove when one's egotism is continually insulted by the other
party's egotism. There is very little room for twice "I" in what ought
to have been "We", and we nearly all feel that the axis of the earth
passes through our bodies. So the common interests of two egotisms can
alone make of these one egotism. The veriest trifle will serve, and pray
do not smile at Case M 4, who forgive each other all wrongs when they
find for dinner a _risotto à la Milanaise_. A slightly spasmodic
interest, and one not to be compared with a common taste for golf, or
motoring, or entertaining, but still it is not to be despised. It is so
difficult to pick a double interest from the welter of things that
people do alone; it is so difficult for wives truly to sympathize with
games, business, politics, newspapers, inventions; most women hate all
that. And it is still more difficult, just because man is man and
master, for him really to care for the fashions, for gossip, for his
wife's school friends, and especially her relations, for tea parties,
tennis tournaments at the Rectory, lectures at the Mutual Improvement
Association, servants' misdeeds, and growths in the garden. Most men
hate all that. People hold amazing conversations:
She: "Do you know, dear, I saw Mrs. Johnson again to-day with that man."
He: (Trying hard) "Oh! yes, the actor fellow, you mean."
She: (Reproachfully) "No, of course not, I never said he was an actor.
He's the new engineer at the mine, the one who came from Mexico."
He: "Oh! yes, that reminds me, did you go to the library and get me
Roosevelt's book on the Amazon?"
She: "No dear, I'm sorry I forgot. You see I had such a busy day, and I
couldn't make up my mind between those two hats. The very big one and
the very small one. _You_ know. Now tell me what you _really_ think--"
and so on.
It is exactly like a Tchekoff play. They make desperate efforts to be
interested in each other's affairs, and sometimes they succeed, for they
manage to stand each other's dullness. They assert their egotism in
turns. He tells the same stories several times. He takes her for a
country walk and forgets to give her tea, and she never remembers that
he hates her dearest friend Mabel. Where the rift grows more profound is
when trifles such as these are overlooked, and particularly where a man
has work that he loves, or to which he is used, which is much the same
thing. In early days the woman's attitude to a man's work varies a good
deal, but she generally suspects it a little. She may tolerate it
because she loves him, and all that is his is noble. Later, if this work
is very profitable, or if it is work which leads to honour, she may take
a pride in it, but even then she will generally grudge it the time and
the energy it costs. She loves him, not his work. She will seldom
confess this, even to herself, but she will generally lay down two
commandments:
1. Thou shalt love me.
2. Thou shalt succeed so that I may love thee.
All this is not manifest, but it is there. It is there even in the days
of courtship, when a man's work, a man's clothes, a man's views on
bimetallism are sacred; in those days, the woman must kowtow to the
man's work, just as he must keep on good terms with her pet dog. But the
time almost invariably comes when the man kicks the pet dog, because
pet dogs are madly irritating sometimes--and so is a man's work. There
is something self-protective in this, for work is so domineering. I
should not be at all surprised to hear that Galatea saw to it that
Pygmalion never made another statue. (On second thoughts it strikes me
that there might be other reasons for that.)
It is true that Pygmalion was an artist, and these are proverbially
difficult husbands: after an hour's work an artist will "sneer, backbite
and speak daggers." Art is a vampire, and it will gladly gobble up a
wife as well as a husband, but the wife must not do any gobbling. She
does not always try to, and there are many in London who follow their
artist husbands rather like sandwichmen between two boards, but they are
of a trampled breed, indigenous, I suspect, to England. I think they
arise but little in America, where, as an American said to me, "women
labor to advance themselves along a road paved with discarded husbands."
(This is an American's statement, not mine, so I ask the Reverend John
Bootfeller, President of the Kansas and Nevada Society for the
Propagation of the Intellect, to spare me his denunciations.)
But leaving aside such important things as personal pettinesses, which
too few think important, it must be acknowledged that women seldom
conceive the passion for art that can inflame a man. They very seldom
conceive a passion for anything except passion,--an admirable tendency
for which they blush as one does for all one's natural manifestations.
They hardly ever care for philosophy; they generally hate politics, but
they nearly always love votes. They are quite as irritating in that way
as men, who almost invariably adore politics and detest realities,
sometimes love science and generally prefer record railway runs. But
where such an interest as a science or an art has reigned supreme in a
man, and reasserts itself after marriage, she recognizes her enemy, the
serpent, for is he not the symbol of wisdom? Invariably he rears his
head when the love fever has subsided. Woman's impulse is more artistic
than man's, but it seldom touches art; her artistic impulse is not yet
one of high grade; she is the flower arranger rather than the flower
painter, the flower painter rather than just the painter. But this
instinct that is in all women and in so few men avails just enough to
make them discontented, while the great instinct that is in a few men is
always enough to make them wretched.
It would not be so bad if they had not to live together, but social
custom has decided that couples must forsake their separate ways and
evermore follow the same. Most follow the common path easily enough,
because most follow the first path that offers, but many grumble and
cast longing eyes at side tracks or would return to the place whence
they came. They cannot do so because it is not done, because other feet
have not broken paths so wide that they shall seem legitimate. When
husband and wife care no longer for their common life, the only remedy
is to part: then the contradictory strain that is in all of us will
reassert itself and make them rebound towards each other. If the law
were to edict that man and wife should never be together for more than
six months in the year, it would be broken every day, and men and women
would stand hunger and stripes to come together for twelve months in
twelve. If love of home were made a crime, a family life would arise
more touching than anything Queen Victoria ever dreamed. But from the
point of view of a barbarous present, this would never do, for the very
worst that can happen to two people is to reach the fullness of their
desire. The young man who raves at the young woman's feet: "Oh! that I
were by your side day and night! Oh! that ever I could watch you move!
I grudge the night the eight hours in which you sleep!"-- Well, that
young man is generally successful in his wooing and gets what he wants;
a little later he gets a little more. For proximity is a dangerous
thing; it enables one to know another rather well: full knowledge of
mankind is seldom edifying. One sees too much, one sees too close; a
professional Don Juan who honors me with his friendship told me that he
has an infallible remedy against falling in love more often than three
times a day: "Stand as close to your charmer as you can, look at her
well, very well, at every feature; watch her attitudes, listen to every
tone of her voice; then you will discover something unpleasant, and you
will be saved." That is a little what happens in marriage; for ever and
ever people are together, hearing each other, watching each other.
Listen to M 14:
"I really was very much in love with him and only just at the end of the
engagement did I notice how hard he blew his nose. After we were
married, I thought: 'Oh! don't be so silly and notice such little
things, he's such a splendid fellow.' A little later--'Oh! I do wish he
wouldn't blow his nose like that, it drives me mad.' Now I find myself
listening and telling myself with an awful feeling of doom: 'He's going
to blow his nose!'"
(She never tells him that he trumpets like an elephant. She fears to
offend him. She prefers to stand there, exasperated and chafed. One day
he will trumpet down the walls of her Jericho.)
There are awful little things between two people. Here are some of them:
M 43. When tired, the wife has a peculiar yawn, roughly: "Hoo-hoo!
Hoo-hoo!" The husband hears it coming, and something curls within him.
M 98. Every morning in his bath the husband sings: "There is a fountain
fill'd with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins," always the same.
M 124. The wife buys shoes a quarter size too small and always slips
them off under the table at dinner. Then she loses them and develops
great agitation. This fills her husband with an unaccountable rage.
M 68. The wife is afflicted with the _cliché_ habit and can generally
sum up a situation by phrases such as: "All is not gold that glitters."
Or, "Such is life." Or, "Well, well, it's a weary world." The husband
can hear them coming.
There are scores of these little cruel things which wear away love as
surely as trickling water will wear away a stone. (Observe how
contagious _clichés_ are!) The dilemma is horrible; if the offended
party speaks out, he or she may speak out much too forcibly and raise
this sort of train of thought: "He didn't seem to mind when we were
engaged. He loved me then, and little things didn't matter. He doesn't
love me now. I wonder whether he is in love with some one else. Oh! I'm
so unhappy." If, on the other hand, one does not speak out forcibly, or
does not speak at all, the offender goes on doing it for the rest of his
or her life, and there is nothing to do except to wait until one has got
used to it and has ceased to care. But by that time one has generally
ceased to care for the offender.
There are ideal marriages where both parties aim at perfection and are
willing to accept mutual criticism. But there is something a little
callous in this form of self-improvement society. People who are too
much together are always making notes, adding up in their hearts bitter
little adverse balances with which they will one day confront the fallen
lover. Some slight offense will bring up the bill of arrears. A quarrel
about a forgotten ticket will give life to the cruel thing he said seven
years before about her mother's bonnets, or her sudden dismissal of the
cook, or the dreadful day when he sat on the eggs in the train. (Clumsy
brute!) All these things pile up and pile up until they form a terrible,
towering cairn made up of tiny stones, but of great total weight, just
as an avalanche rests securely upon a crest until a whisper releases it.
Nearly all marriages are in a state of permanent mobilization. There is
only one thing to do, to remember all the time that one could not hope
to meet one quite great enough to be one's mate, and that this is the
best the world can do. The thought that nobody can quite understand one
or quite appreciate one arouses a delicious sorrow and an enormous
pride.
4
Too much together is bad, and too much apart may be worse. As I
suggested before, there is no pleasing this institution.
It is easier to live too separate than too close, for one comes together
freshly, and marriage feels less irremediable when it hardly exists.
There really are couples who care for each other very well, who meet in
a country house and say: "What! you here! How jolly!" That is an extreme
case. In practice, separateness means conjugal acquaintanceship.
Different pleasures, different friends, perhaps different worlds;
indeed, one is mutually fresh, but traveling different roads, one may
find that there is nothing in common. Of two evils, it is better perhaps
to be too intimate than too distant, because there are many irritating
things that with reminiscence become delightful. The dreadful day when
he sat on the eggs in the train is not entirely dreadful, for he looked
so silly when he stood up, removing the eggs, and though one was angry,
one vaguely loved him for having made a fool of himself. (There are nine
and sixty ways of gaining affection, and one of them is to be a
good-tempered butt.)
Separateness, naturally, cannot coincide with the sense of mutual
property. This is perhaps the cause of the greatest unhappiness in
marriage, for so many forget that to be married is not to be one. They
do not understand that however much they may love, whatever delights
they may share, whatever common ambitions they may harbor, whatever they
hope, or endeavor, or pray, two people are still two people. Or if they
know it, they say, "He is mine." "She is mine." If one could give
oneself entirely, it would be well enough, but however much one may want
to do so one cannot, just because one is the axis of the earth. Because
one cannot, one will not, and he that would absorb will never forgive.
He will be jealous, he will be suspicious, tyrannical, he will watch and
lay traps, he will court injury, he will air grievances, because the
next best thing to complete possession is railing at his impotency to
conquer. That jealousy is turned against everything, against work,
against art, against relatives, friends, dead loves, little children,
toy dogs: "Thou shalt have none other gods but me" is a human
commandment.
Men do not, as a rule, suffer very much from this desire to possess,
because they are so sure that they do possess, because they find it so
difficult to conceive that their wife can find any other man attractive.
They are too well accustomed to being courted, even if they are old and
repulsive, because they have power and money; only they think it is
because they are men. Beyond a jealous care for their wives' fidelity,
which I suspect arises mainly from the feeling that an unfaithful wife
is a criticism, they do not ask very much. But women suffer more deeply
because they know that man has lavished on them for centuries a
condescending admiration, that the king who lays his crown at their feet
knows that his is the crown to give. While men possess by right of
possession, women possess only by right of precarious conquest. They
feel it very bitterly, this fugitive empire, and their greatest tragedy
is to find themselves growing a little older, uncertain of their power,
for they know they have only one power; they are afraid, as age comes,
of losing their man, while I have never heard of a husband afraid of
losing his wife, or able to repress his surprise if she forsook him.
It would not matter so much if the feeling of property were that of a
good landlord, who likes to see his property develop and grow beautiful,
but mutual property is the feeling of the slave owner. Sometimes both
parties suffer so, and by asking too much lose all. Man seldom asks
much: if only a wife will not compromise his reputation for
attractiveness while maintaining her own by flirtation, if she will
accept his political views, acquire a taste for his favorite holiday
resorts, and generally say, "Yes, darling", or "No, darling",
opportunely, she need do nothing, she has only "beautifully to be." He
is not so fortunate, however, when she wants to possess him, for she
demands that he should be active, that the pretty words, caresses, the
anxious inquiries after health, the presents of flowers and of stalls
should continue. It is not enough that he should love her; he must still
be her lover. When she is not sure that he still is her lover, a
madness of unrest comes over her; she will lacerate him, she will invent
wishes so that he may thwart them, she will demand his society when she
knows it is mortgaged to another occupation, so that she may suffer his
refusal, exaggerate his indifference. Here are cases:
M 21. She: "He used to take me to dances. The other day he wouldn't
come, he said he was tired. He wasn't tired when we were engaged."
The Investigator: "But why should he go if he didn't want to?"
She: "Because I wanted to."
The Investigator: "But he didn't want to."
She: "He _ought_ to take pleasure in pleasing me."
(The conversation here degenerates into a discussion on duty and becomes
uninteresting.)
M 4. The husband is a doctor with a very extended city practice. He is
busy eleven hours a day and has night calls. His marriage has been
spoilt because in the first years the wife, who is young and gay, could
not understand that the man, who was always surrounded by people, in
houses, streets, conveyances, should not desire society. She resented
his wish to be alone for some hours, to shut himself up. There were
tears, and like most people she looked ugly when she cried. She was
lonely, and when one is lonely, it is difficult to realize that other
people may be too much surrounded.
5
A great deal of all this, however, might pass away if one could feel
that it would not last. Nothing matters that does not last. Only one
must be conscious of it, and in marriage many people are dully aware
that they have settled down, that they have drawn the one and only
ticket they can ever hope to draw, unless merciful death steps in. There
will be no more adventures, no more excitements, no more marsh fires,
which one knows deceptive yet loves to follow. It will be difficult to
move to other towns or countries, to change one's occupation; it will
even be difficult to adopt new poses, for the other will not be taken
in. One will be for evermore what one is. True there is elopement,
divorce; in matters of art, there is the artist courage that enables a
man to see another suffer for the sake of his desire. But all this is
very difficult, and few of us have courage enough to make others suffer;
if one had the courage to do no harm at all, it might not be so bad, but
not many can follow Mr. Bernard Shaw: "If you injure your neighbor, let
it not be by halves." They almost invariably do injure by halves: he
that will not kill, scratches. There is no refuge from a world of rates,
and taxes, and bills, and houses overcrowded by children, and old
clothes, dull leaders in the papers, stupid plays, the morning train,
the unvarying Sunday dinner. It is so bad sometimes that it causes
willful revolt. I sincerely believe that a great many men would be model
husbands if only they were not married. Only when everything is
respectable and nice there is a terrible temptation to introduce a
change; the wild animal in man, that is in a few a lion, in most a
weasel, reacts against the definite, the irremediable, the assured. He
must do something. He must break through. He must prove to himself that
he has not really sentenced himself to penal servitude for life. That is
why so few of the respectable are respectable, and why reformed rakes do
make good husbands. (Generally, that is, for a few rakes feel that they
must keep up their reputation; on the other hand, a really respectable
man knows no shame.)
Curiously enough, children seem to act both against and in favor of
these disruptive factors. It is difficult to deprive children of
influence; they must part, or they must unite. They are somebody in the
house; they make a noise, and it depends upon temperament whether the
noise exasperates or delights. Parents are divided into those who love
them, and those who bear their children; generally, men dislike little
babies, unless they are rather strong men whom weakness attracts, or
unless they feel pride of race, while women, excepting those who live
only for light pleasures, give them a quite unreasoning affection.
Children are a frequent source of trouble, for the tired man's nerves
are horribly frayed by screams and exuberances. He shouts: "Stop that
child howling!" and if his wife assumes a saintly air and says that "she
would rather hear a child cry than a man swear," the door opens towards
the club or public house. Likewise, a man who has given so many jewels
that the mother of the Gracchi might be jealous, will never understand
the appalling weariness that can come over the mother in the evening,
when she has administered, say, twelve meals, four or eight baths, and
answered several hundreds of questions varying between the existence of
God and the esoterics of the steam engine. Loving the children too much
to blame them, she must blame some one, and blames him.
People do not confess these things, but the socio-psychologist must
remember that when a man quietly picks up a flower pot and hurls it
through the window, the original cause may be found in the behavior of
the departmental manager six hours before. The irritation of children
can envenom two lives, for it seems almost inevitable that each party
should think the other spoils or tyrannizes. It is not always so, and
sometimes children unite by the bond of a common love; very much more
often they unite by the burden of a common responsibility. Indeed, it is
this financial responsibility that draws two people close, because tied
together they must swim together or sink together, until they are so
concerned individually with their salvation that they think they are
concerned with the salvation of the other. That bond of union is
dangerous, because marriage is expensive, and because one tends to
remember the time when bread was not so dear and flesh and blood so
cheap. There is affluence in bachelordom; there is atrocious discomfort
too, but when one thinks of the good old times, one generally forgets
all except the affluence. Of the present, one sees only that one cannot
take the whole family to Yellowstone; of the past, one does not see the
sitting room, or the hangings on which the landlady merely blew. The
wife thinks of her frocks, garlands of the sacrificial heifer, the
husband of the days when he could afford to be one of the boys. And, as
soon as the past grows glamorous, the present day grows dull; always
because one must blame something, one blames the other. It is so much
more agreeable to spend a thousand dollars than to spend a hundred, even
if one gets nothing for it. It is power. It is excitement. One thinks of
money until one may come to think of nothing but money, until, as
suggested before, a husband turns into a vaguely disagreeable person who
can be coaxed into paying bills. In the working class especially there
is bitterness among the women, who before their marriage knew the taste
of independence and of earned money in their purses. It is a great love
that can compensate a woman for the loss of freedom after she has
enjoyed it.
Nothing indeed can compensate a woman for this, except a lover, that is
to say, a return to an older state. That is to what she turns, for
strange as it may seem, marriage does not vaccinate against the
temptations of love. She does not easily love again, for she has been
married, and while it is easy to love again when one has been
atrociously betrayed, just because one invests the new with everything
that the old held back, it is difficult to love again when the promised
love turned merely to dullness. There is nothing to strike against.
There is no contrast, and so women slip into relationships that are
silly, because there is nothing real behind them. Boredom is the root of
all evil, and I doubt whether busy and happy women seek adventure, for
few of them want it for adventure's sake: they seek only satisfaction.
That is what most men cruelly misunderstand; they blame woman instead of
searching out their own remissness. Sins of omission matter more than
sins of commission, more even than infidelities, for love, which is all
a woman's life, is only a momentous incident in that of a man. Love may
be the discovery of a happiness, but man remains conscious of many other
delights. Woman is seldom like that. You will imagine a man and a woman
who have blundered upon mutual understanding standing upon the hill from
which Moses saw Canaan. The woman would fill her eyes with Canaan, and
could see nought else, while the man gazing at the promised land would
still be conscious of other countries. In the heart of a man who is
worth anything at all, love must have rivals,--art, science,
ambition,--and it is a delight to woman that there should be rivals to
overcome, even though it be a poor slave she tie to her chariot wheels.
Marriage does not always suffer when people drift away from their
allegiance; in countries such as France notably, where many husbands and
wives do not think it necessary to trust, or tactful to watch each
other, the problem does not set itself so sharply. It is mainly in
Anglo-Saxon countries where the little blue flower has its altars that
the trouble begins. A rather fascinating foreigner said to me once:
"Englishwomen are very troublesome; they are either so light that they
do not understand you when you tell them you love them, or so deep that
you must elope every time. This is a difficult country." I do not want
to seem cynical, but the polygamous nature of man is so ill-recognized
and the boredom of woman such a national institution that when it is too
late to pretend that that which has happened has not happened, most of
the mischief has already been done. Why a husband or wife who has found
attraction in another should immediately treat his partner abominably is
not easily understood, for falling in love with the present victim need
not make him rude or remiss to the rest of the world. But the British
are a strange and savage people. Also, when in doubt they get drunk, so
I fear I must leave a clearer recognition of polygamous instincts to the
slow-growing enlightenment of the mind of man.
He is growing enlightened; at least he is infinitely more educated than
he was, for he has begun to recognize that woman is to a certain extent
a human being, a savage, a barbarian, but entitled to the consideration
generally given to the Hottentot. I do not think woman will always be
savage, though I hope she will not turn into the clear-eyed,
weather-beaten mate that Mr. H. G. Wells likes to think of--for the
future. She has come to look upon man as an equation that can be solved.
He, too, in a sense, and both are to-day much less inclined than they
were fifty years ago to overlook a chance of pleasing. It is certain
that men and women to-day dress more deliberately for each other than
they ever did before, that they lead each other, sometimes with dutiful
unwillingness, to the theatre or the country; it is very painful
sometimes, this organization of pleasure, but it is necessary because
dull lives are bad lives, and better fall into the river than never go
to the river at all. It is dangerous and vain to take up the attitude,
"I alone am enough." Yet many do: as one walks along a suburban street,
where every window is shut, where every dining room has its aspidistra
in a pot, one realizes that scores of people are busily heaping ash upon
the once warm fire of their love. The stranger is the alternative; he
obscures small quarrels; if the stranger is beautiful, he urges to
competition; if he is inferior, he soothes pride. But above all, the
stranger is change, therefore hope. The stranger is an insurance against
loss of personal pride; he compels adornment, for what is "good enough
for my husband" is not good enough for the lady over the way. The
stranger serves the pleasure lust, this violent passion of man, and
cannot harm him because the lust for pleasure, within the limits of
hysteria, involves a desire for good looks, for elegance, for gaiety;
above all, love of pleasure was reviled of our fathers, and whatever our
fathers thought bad is become a good thing. Our fathers did not
understand certain forms of pride: there is more than pride of body in
good looks, good clothes, and showing off before acquaintances: there is
achievement, which means pride of conquest. I imagine that the happiest
couple in the world is the one where each lives in perpetual fear that
somebody will run away with the other.
Looking at it broadly, I see marriage as a Chinese puzzle, almost, but
not quite, insoluble. Spoilt by coldness, spoilt by ardour, spoilt by
excess, spoilt by indifference, spoilt by obedience, by stupidity, by
self-assertion, spoilt by familiarity, spoilt by ignorance. Spoilt in
every possible way that man can invent. Spoilt by every ounce of
influence a jealous or ironical world can muster, spoilt by habit, by
contrast, by obtuseness quite as much as by overclose understanding. And
yet it stands. It stands because there is nothing much to put into its
place, because marriage is the only road that leads a man away from his
dinner when he is forty-five, or teaches a woman to preserve her
complexion. It stands like most human things, because it is the better
of two bad alternatives. Only because it stands we must not think that
it will never change. All things change, otherwise one could not bear
them. I suspect that marriage, that was once upon a time the taking of a
woman by a man, which has now grown legalized, and may become courteous,
will turn into a very skilled occupation. It will be recognized still
more than now that all freedom need not be lost after putting on the
wedding ring. As legal right and privilege grow, as women develop
private earnings, a consciousness of worth must arise. Already women
realize their value and demand its recognition. If they demand it long
enough, they will get it. I suspect that the economic problem is at the
root of the marriage problem, for people are not indiscriminate in their
relationships, and even Don Juan, after a while, longs to be faithful,
if only somebody could teach him how to be it. Marriage can be made
close only by making divorce easy, by extending female labor. For labor
makes woman less attractive and to be attractive is rather a trap: how
much higher can a woman rise? But the economic freedom of woman will
mean that she need not bind herself; she will be able to break away, and
in those days she will be most completely bound, for who would run away
from a jail if the door were always left open?
I detest Utopia, and these things seem so far away that I am more
content to take marriage as it is in the hope that unhealthy novels,
unnecessary discussions, unwholesome views, and unnatural feelings may
little by little reform mankind. Meanwhile, I hold fast to the private
maxim that hardly anything is unendurable if one sets up that all
mankind could not give one a quite worthy mate. But there is another
alleviation: understanding not only that one is married to somebody
else, but also that somebody else is married to yourself, and that it is
quite as hard for the other party. There are many excellent things to be
done; here are a few:
(1) Do not open each other's letters. (For one reason you might not
like the contents.) And try not to look liberal if you don't even
glance at the address or the postmark.
(2) Vary your pursuits, your conversation, and your clothes. If
required, vary your hair.
(3) If you absolutely must be sincere, let it be in private.
(4) (Especially for wives.) Find out on the honeymoon whether
crying or swearing is the more effective.
(5) Once a day say to a wife: "I love you"; to a husband: "How
strong you are!" If the latter remark is ridiculous, say: "How
clever you are!" for everybody believes that.
(6) Forgive your partner seventy times seven. Then burn the ledger.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
_By the author of "The Second Blooming"_
THE STRANGERS' WEDDING
_By_ W. L. GEORGE
12mo. Cloth. 450 pages. $1.35 _net_.
Readers of "The Second Blooming," one of the most discussed novels of
1915, will welcome the announcement of another novel of married life by
this talented English author.
"The Strangers' Wedding" is the story of Roger Huncote, a young man of
the upper classes who, inflamed with philanthropic ideals, joins a
settlement to work among the poor. He is speedily undeceived as to the
usefulness of the movement and the worthiness of those who control it,
and conceiving an unreasonable disgust of his own class, marries the
daughter of a washerwoman. Realizing that there may be little
difficulties, he believes that when two people care deeply for each
other nothing else can matter. But Huncote has much to learn; and most
of the story is concerned with the pitiful misunderstandings between
the young husband and the young wife, both of whom are charming but as
unable to meet as east and west. Mr. George indicates with much
psychological subtlety the reversion of the "strangers" to their own
class, which ultimately leads them to a happy ending.
This novel is throughout pathetic, but it contains a great deal of broad
humor and deserves its sub-title, "The Comedy of a Romantic."
_By the Author of "The Stranger's Wedding"_
THE SECOND BLOOMING
_By_ W. L. GEORGE
12mo. 438 pages. $1.35 _net_.
A strong and thoughtful story.--_New York World._
A story of amazing power and insight.--_Washington Evening Star._
Mr. George is one of the Englishmen to be reckoned with. One now says
Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett--and W. L. George.--_New York Globe._
This writer has entered with more courage and intensity into the inner
sanctuaries of life than Mr. Howells and Mr. Bennett have cared to
do.--_Chicago Tribune._
Mr. George follows a vein of literary brilliancy that is all his own,
and his study of feminine maturity will find ample vindication the round
world over.--_Philadelphia North American._
It is a book which is bound to appeal to women, for it is so
extraordinarily true to life; so many women have passed and are passing
through remarkably similar experiences.--_London Evening Standard._
It is perhaps the biggest piece of fiction that the present season has
known. The present reviewer may frankly say, without exaggeration, that
he has not had a treat of similar order since the still memorable day
when he first made the acquaintance of Mr. Galsworthy's "Man of
Property."--_Frederic T. Cooper in the Bookman (N. Y.)._
_The Racial Characteristics of French and English_
THE LITTLE BELOVED
_By_ W. L. GEORGE
12mo. Cloth. $1.35 _net_
Not since Thackeray, indeed, has any English novelist done a more
impressive study of the typical Englishman. It is not only a good story;
it is a notable study of national character.--_Baltimore Sun._
Not merely a splendid opportunity for contrast between the temperamental
differences of French and English, but a narrative of earnest merit. We
are met by a full world of English characters.--_New York Post_.
First and last, interesting. It is crowded with impressions, glimpses,
and opinions. There are many characters and they are all living....
Reading his book is a real adventure, by no means to be missed.--_New
York Times._
A vigorous novel based upon the process--constructive and
destructive--whereby a typical French youth, mercurial, passionate,
spectacular, is transformed into a staid and stolid English householder
and husband.--_Chicago Herald._
Mr. George, one of the most promising of the younger English writers,
has shown the process of naturalization from a more striking viewpoint,
in this story of the changing of a Frenchman into an English citizen.
With this purpose and his nervous, irritable nature trouble is sure to
ensue, and he has adventures in plenty.--_Boston Transcript._
"Once read, will not quickly be forgotten."--_Providence Journal._
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
_By_ W. L. GEORGE
12mo. Cloth. $1.35 _net._
Mr. George's study of the evolution of this Israel Kalisch is a
remarkable work in realistic fiction.--_New York World._
A novel of more than usual value.... It is a life-drama, such as is
going on continually in London and New York.--_Hearst's Magazine._
The story contains a very pretty love element.... Such an objective
picture as is here presented will do more than sermons to reveal the
futility of the sacrifice which anarchy sometimes makes of noble
minds.--_New York Post._
Mr. George unquestionably has the gift of description, not only of
places but of men. Kalisch, egotistic, self-confident, fearless, making
his way from Gallicia through Hungary to starve and fight in New York,
is an impressive conception.--_The Bookman._
Israel, Warsch, Leimeritz, the various women who successively love
Israel, they are so true, so vital that we can almost see and hear them
speak and breathe. Yes, this is a great novel, even though it
alternately fires and freezes the very marrow of the soul.--_Chicago
Herald._
LITTLE, BROWN & CO., PUBLISHERS
34 BEACON STREET, BOSTON
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