Part 11
Just as we have been forced by contact with the outside world to cultivate not weakness but health, so by the same contact we have been forced to cultivate not folly but intelligence. The silly angel may be a success in the home; she is not a success in trade or business. Man may desire to clasp her and kiss her and call her his own; but there are moments when he tires of seeing her make hay of his accounts and correspondence. His natural predilection for her type may, and often does, induce him to give her the preference over her fellows in business matters; but he usually ends by admitting that, for certain purposes at least, the human being with brains is preferable to the seraph without them. It has been borne in upon the modern woman that it pays her to have brains—even although they must be handled very cautiously for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of her master. She learned that lesson not in her own sphere, but in the world outside it; and it is a lesson that has already had far-reaching consequences. Having, in the first instance, acquired a modicum of intelligence because she had to, she is now acquiring it in larger quantities because she likes it. The trades which do not require the qualification of stupidity are counteracting the effect upon her of the trade which did—the compulsory trade of marriage.
XVIII
If the division of the home, and the inevitable consequences that followed on that division, had done nothing more than teach some of us to value our health and respect our brains we should have very good cause to bless the break-up of that over-estimated institution. But, as a matter of fact, our contact with the wider world is doing a great deal more for us than that. It is testing our powers in new directions; it is bringing new interests into our lives; it is teaching us how very like we are unto our brothers—given similar environment; and, most important of all, it is sweeping away with a steady hand that distrust and ignorance of each other which was alike the curse and the natural result of age-long isolation in the home and immemorial training in the service, not of each other, but only of our masters.
It may be true that women in general once disliked and meanly despised each other. At any rate, man has always desired that it should be true; so, the aim and object of woman’s life being the gratification of his desires, such mutual dislike and contempt was no doubt cultivated and affected by her. But if it was true once, it is not true now; except, maybe, amongst the silly angel class—a class already growing rarer, and soon, one hopes, to be well on the way to extinction. The working-woman, the woman with wider interests than her mother’s, in learning to respect herself is learning to respect her counterpart—the human being, like unto herself, who, under the same disadvantages, fights the same battle as her own. And recognizing the heaviness, the unfairness of those disadvantages, she recognizes the bond of common interest that unites her to her sister. In short, for the first time in her history she is becoming actively class-conscious.
We speak best of that which we have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears; therefore I make no excuse for obtruding my personal experiences in this connection. For many years the women who came into my life intimately and closely were, with few exceptions, women who had to work—journalists, artists, typists, dressmakers, clerks; practically all of them dependent on their own work and practically all of them poor—some bitterly poor. And that class, because I know it so well, I have learned to respect. It is a class which has few pleasures in life, because it has so little money to spend on them; which, as a rule, works harder than a man would work in the same position, because its pay is less; which is not unexposed to temptation, but holds temptation as a thing to be resisted; yet which is tolerant to those who fail under it, knowing the excuse to be made for them. The woman belonging to that class does not turn away from the sinner who walks the street with a painted face; likely enough she remembers that she, too, was brought up to believe that the awakening of sexual desire must be her means of livelihood, and she knows that, if she had not cast that belief behind her, she, too, when need pressed upon her, might have walked the streets for hire. Wherefore she is more inclined to say to herself, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” She has learned to know men as the sheltered woman seldom knows them; to know more of the good in them, more of the ill; she has met and talked with them without compliment and without ceremony; has taken orders from and been rebuked by them; has been to them fellow-worker and sometimes friend; has sometimes met and fought the brute in them. In the same way she has worked with women and learned to know them; and the result of her experience is, that she has lost any natural distrust of her own sex which she may once have possessed; has come to rely upon her own sex for the help which she herself is willing enough to render. The sense of a common interest, the realization of common disabilities, have forced her into class-consciousness and partisanship of her class. I know many women of the type I have described—women who have gone through the mill, some married, some unmarried. And of them all I know hardly one whose life is not affected, to an appreciable extent, by the sense of fellowship with her sisters.
The average man, it seems to me, fails utterly to realize how strong this sense of fellowship, of trade unionism, can be in us; he has (as I have already pointed out) explained away its manifestations in the match-making industry by accounting for them on other grounds. He has forgotten that it was a woman who, for the sake, not of a man, but of another woman, went out into a strange land, saying: “Whither thou goest I will go; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” To him, one imagines, that saying must always have been a dark one; to us there seems nothing strange in it.
A friend of my own (who will forgive me for repeating her confidence) told me the other day of a happening in her life that, to my mind, exactly illustrates the awakening of class-consciousness amongst women. It was the careless speech of a man, addressed to her while she was still a very young girl, to the effect that all women over fifty should be shot. The words were lightly spoken, of course, and were probably intended half as a compliment to her manifest youth; certainly they were not intended as an insult. But their effect was to rouse in her a sense of insult and something akin to a passion of resentment that she and her like should only be supposed to exist so long as they were pleasing, only so long as they possessed the power of awakening sexual desire. She took them as an insult to herself because they were an insult to women in general; and, lightly spoken as they were they made upon her an impression which helped to mould her life.
I give my friend’s experience because it seems to me to be typical; because amongst women of my own class I know others who have felt the same rush of anger at the revelation of a similar attitude towards the sex they belong to; who have raged inwardly as they recognized that character, worth, intellect were held valueless in woman, that nothing counted in her but the one capacity—the power of awaking desire. That is an attitude which we who have become conscious of our class resent with all our souls; since we realize that to that attitude on the part of man, to compliance with it on the part of woman, we owe the degradation of our class.
Most important of all, the knowledge of each other and the custom and necessity of working side by side in numbers is bringing with it the consciousness of a new power—the power of organization. It is a power that we have hitherto lacked, not because we were born without the seed of it in our souls, but because our fenced-in, isolated lives have given small opportunity for its growth and development. And it is a power which we are now acquiring because we have been forced to recognize the need of it, because we can no longer do without it. It is being borne in on us that if we are to have fair play, if our wages are to rise above subsistence point, if we are to be anything more than hewers of wood, drawers of water, and unthinking reproducers of our kind, we have to stand together; that if we are to have any share of our own in the world into which we were born, if our part in it is to be anything more than that of the beggar with outstretched hand awaiting the crumbs that fall from another’s table, we have to work together. And it is work in the mill, the factory, the office that is teaching us the lesson of public spirit, of combination for a common purpose—a lesson that was never taught us in the home where we once lived narrowly apart.
XIX
IF what I have written has any truth in it, I have shown that we have good grounds for believing that the degradation of woman’s position and the inferiority of woman’s capacities are chiefly due to the compulsory restriction of her energies and ambitions to the uncertain livelihood and ill-paid trade of marriage. I have shown that the trade is ill paid simply because it is largely compulsory; that, in accordance with economic law, the wife and mother will be held cheap for just so long as she is a drug in the market. I have shown how the unsatisfactory position of the wife and mother, the unsatisfactory training to which she has been subjected from her childhood up, affects the earning and productive powers of woman in those other occupations which the change in social and industrial conditions has forced her to adopt; and I have shown how the new influences engendered by her new surroundings are gradually and inevitably counteracting the peculiar habit of mind acquired in the narrow precincts of the home. It remains to be considered how far these influences are reaching and affecting the life of the home itself—how far they are likely to improve the position not only of the woman who earns her own wage and directs her own life, but of the woman who has no means of augmenting the low remuneration which is at present considered sufficient for the duties of a wife and mother.
I suppose that in the recent history of woman nothing is more striking than the enormous improvement that has taken place in the social position of the spinster. In many ranks of life the lack of a husband is no longer a reproach; and some of us are even proud of the fact that we have fought our way in the world without aid from any man’s arm. At any rate, we no longer feel it necessary to apologize for our existence; and when we are assured that we have lost the best that life has to offer us, we are not unduly cast down. (I am speaking, of course, of the independent woman with an interest in life and in herself; not of the poor, mateless product of tradition that we exist only to awaken desire in man. There are still many such, no doubt—the victims of a servile training. On whom may God have mercy—man having no use for them and they none for themselves!) By sheer force of self-assertion we have lifted ourselves from the dust where we once crawled as worms and not women; we no longer wither on the virgin thorn—we flourish on it; and ungarnished though we be with olive-boughs, we are not ashamed when we meet with our enemies in the gate.
So far as I can see, nothing like the same improvement has taken place in recent years in the position of the average married woman. So far as I can see, the average husband, actual or to be, still entertains the conviction that the word helpmeet, being interpreted, means second fiddle; and acts in accordance with that honest conviction. He still feels that it is the duty of his wife to respect him on the ground that he did not happen to be born a woman; he still considers it desirable that the mother of his children should not be over wise. He still clings to the idea that a wife is a creature to be patronized; with kindness, of course—patted on the head, not thumped—but still patronized. While he is yet unmated his dream of the coming affinity still takes the shape of some one smaller than himself who asks him questions while he strokes her hair. On the whole, therefore, he tends to avoid marriage with those women who are not fit subjects for patronage—who, be it noted, also tend to avoid marriage with him; and thus, in the natural order of things, the average wife is the person who is willing to submit to be patronized. I do not mean that there are not many exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. And it is obvious that human beings, men, or women, who consider themselves fit subjects for patronage are not those who make for progress or possess any very great power of improving their own status.
Myself I have not the least doubt that such improvement as has already been affected in the status of the wife and mother has originated outside herself, and is, to a great extent, the work of the formerly contemned spinster. I do not mean that the spinster has always laboured to that end intentionally; I mean, rather, that as she improves her own position, as she takes advantage of its greater freedom, its less restricted opportunities, its possibilities of pleasing herself and directing her own life, she inevitably, by awaking her envy, drags after her the married woman who once despised her and whose eyes she has opened to the disadvantages of her own dependent situation. It is the independent woman with an income, earned or unearned, at her own disposal, with the right to turn her energies into whatever channel may seem good to her, who is steadily destroying the prestige of marriage; and the prestige of marriage has hitherto been an important factor in the eagerness of women for matrimony. Once it has gone, once it makes absolutely no difference to the esteem in which a woman is held, whether she is called Mrs. or whether she is called Miss, a new inducement will have to be found, at any rate for the woman who is not obliged to look upon marriage as a means of providing her with bread and butter. Such women will require some additional advantage to replace the social prestige to which they no longer attach any value—that is to say, as a condition of becoming wives and mothers, they will require their status to be raised; and their action in raising their own status will tend to raise the status of married women in general.
Not very long ago, in one of the columns which a daily paper was devoting to animated correspondence dealing with the rights and wrongs of an agitation carried on by women, I came across a brief contribution to the discussion which furnished me with considerable food for thought. It was a letter written by a palpably infuriated gentleman, who denounced the agitation in question as the outcome of the unmarried woman’s jealousy of the privileges of her married sister. This very masculine view of the controversy had never struck me before; and, being a new idea to me, I sat down to consider whether it was in any way justified by facts.
The first step, naturally, was to ascertain what were the special privileges which were supposed to arouse in those deprived of them a sense of maddened envy. On this point I did not rely solely on my own conclusions; I consulted, at various times, interested friends, married and unmarried; with the result that I have ascertained the privileges of the married woman to be, at the outside, three in number. (About two of them there is no doubt; the third is already being invaded, and can no longer be esteemed the exclusive property of the matron.) They are as follows—
1. The right to wear on the third finger of the left hand a gold ring of approved but somewhat monotonous pattern.
2. The right to walk in to dinner in advance of women unfurnished with a gold ring of the approved, monotonous pattern.
3. The right of the wife and mother to peruse openly and in the drawing-room certain forms of literature—such as French novels of an erotic type—which the ordinary unmarried woman is supposed to read only in the seclusion of her bedroom.
I cannot honestly say that any one of these blessings arouses in me a spasm of uncontrollable envy, a mad desire to share in it at any cost. As a matter of fact, I have—like many of my unmarried friends—annexed one of the above matrimonial privileges, if not in deed, at any rate potentially and in thought. I have never yet felt the desire to study French novels of an erotic type; but if I ever do feel it, I shall have no hesitation whatever in perusing them in public—even on the top of a ’bus.
One does not imagine that the mere wearing of a plain gold ring would in itself awaken perfervid enthusiasm in any woman of ordinary intelligence; nor does one imagine that any woman of ordinary intelligence would be greatly elated or abashed by entering a dining-room first or seventh—provided, of course, that the table was furnished with enough food to go round. One feels that these temptations are hardly glittering enough to entice reluctant woman into marriage. That there has been a social pressure which has impelled her into it I have not denied! on the contrary, I have affirmed it. But that social pressure has not taken the form of a passionate desire for one or two small and formal distinctions, but of a fear of spinsterhood with its accompaniments, scorn and confession of failure in your trade. And as spinsterhood grows more enviable, so does the fear of it grow less.
It may be objected that in my brief list of the matron’s privileges I have omitted the most important of them all—motherhood. I have done so deliberately and for two reasons—because under any system of more or less compulsory marriage there must always be an appreciable number of wives who look upon motherhood rather as a burden than as a privilege; and because motherhood does not appertain exclusively to the married state. There is such a thing as an illegitimate birth-rate.
I myself am far from desiring that the wife and mother should not possess privileges; it seems to me that the work of a woman who brings up children decently, creditably, and honourably is of such immense importance that it ought to be suitably rewarded. (That, of course, is a very different thing from admitting that a person who has gone through a ceremony which entitles her to hold sexual intercourse with another person is thereby entitled to consider herself my superior.) But I am very certain that it never will be suitably rewarded until it is undertaken freely and without pressure, and until the wife and mother herself summons up courage to insist on adequate payment for her services. It may not be necessary that that payment should be made in actual money; but, in whatever form it is made, it must be of a more satisfactory and substantial nature than the present so-called privileges of the married woman, involving an all-round improvement in her status. And that all-round improvement she will demand—and get—only when it is borne in upon her that her unmarried sisters have placed themselves in a position to get out of life a great deal more than she is permitted to get out of it. When she realizes that fact to the full she will go on strike—and good luck to her!
Meanwhile, it seems to me that there is something more than a little pathetic in the small airs of superiority which are still affected by the average unintelligent matron towards her husbandless sister. Personally I always feel tender towards these little manifestations of the right to look down on the “incomplete,” the unconsciously servile imitation of the masculine attitude in this respect. You watch the dull lives that so many of these married women lead, you realize the artificial limitations placed upon their powers, you pity them for the sapping of individuality which is the inevitable result of repression of their own and unquestioning acceptance of other people’s opinions, for the cramping of their interests, perhaps for the necessity of cultivating the animal side of their natures—and you do not grudge them such small compensations as comes their way. It will be better for them and for their children when they realize in what this fancied superiority of the married woman consists; but meanwhile let them enjoy it.
Only a little while past I met a perfect example of this tendency on the part of a married woman to plume herself on marriage as a virtue—or rather, I met her again. She had been my friend once—several years ago—and I had liked her for her intelligence, her humour, her individual outlook on life. We knew each other well for some months; then we were separated, and she wrote to me that she was getting married; and with her marriage she gave up professional work and passed out of my life. I heard little and saw nothing of her for years, until she wrote that she was staying near me and would like us to meet again. I went, and she told me what her life had been since she married. It was a story that I can only call foul—of insult, brutality, and degradation. What sickened me about it was the part that remained unspoken—the thought that the woman I once knew, clean, high-minded, and self-respecting, should have consented to stand for so long in the relation of wife to such a man as she described. One could see what contact with him had done for her; it had dragged her down morally and spiritually; the pitch had defiled her. She had, I knew, a small income of her own—sufficient to live upon without having recourse to her husband—so I urged her bluntly to leave him. She refused, crying feebly; made the usual rejoinder of weak-minded married women run into a corner—that I was not married myself and could not understand; and spent another hour bewailing her lot with tears. I saw that her courage and character had been sapped out of her, that it was no use appealing to what she no longer possessed, and that all she asked was sympathy of the type that listens with an occasional pat on the shoulder or soothing stroke on the arm; so I gave of it, in silence, as well as I could. At the end of a good hour she dried her tears, and declared that she was selfish to talk about nothing but herself, that she must hear my news and what I had been doing. I did not like to refuse, for I thought it better to turn her thoughts away from her troubles, if only for a little; besides, she had liked me genuinely once, and I think her interest in me was still genuine. But as I complied and talked to her about myself, I felt miserably ashamed. For, as it happened, I was very happy then—happier, in some ways, than I had ever been in my life, since, almost for the first time in my life, I had learned the meaning of good luck. I thought of all the kindness, the friendliness, the consideration that was being shown to me—I thought of my work and my pleasure in it—of my interest in work done with others and the sense of comradeship it brings. And I thought how the poor soul who had wept her handkerchief into a rag must realize the contrast of our two lives, must feel how unjust it was that one woman should have so little and another have so much. So, as I say, I felt ashamed, and talked on, conscious of mental discomfort, until I saw her looking at me thoughtfully, as if she were about to speak. I stopped to hear what she had to say; and it was this—
“I suppose you will never marry now?”
For a moment I did not see the real purport of the question, and I dare say I looked astonished as I answered that it was most unlikely, and I had no thought of it. She surveyed me steadily, to make sure that I was speaking the truth; then, having apparently convinced herself that I was, she sighed.