Part 2

More than once in my life I have been struck by the beauty of a man’s honest conception and ideal of love and marriage—a conception and ideal which one comes across in unexpected and unlikely persons and which is by no means confined to those whose years are still few in number and whose hearts are still hot within them. Only a few weeks ago I heard an elderly gentleman of scientific attainments talk something which, but for its sincerity, would have seemed to me sheer sentimental balderdash concerning the relations of men and women. And from other equally respectable gentlemen I have heard opinions that were beautiful as well as honest on the relations of the sexes, of a kind that no woman, being alone with another woman, would ever venture to utter. For we see the thing differently. I am not so foolish as to imagine that theory and practice in this or any other matter are in the habit of walking hand in hand; I know that for men the word love has two different meanings, and therefore I should be sorry to have to affirm on oath that the various gentlemen who have, at various times, favoured me with their views on the marriage question have one and all lived up to their convictions; but at least their conception of the love and duty owed by man and woman to each other was a high one, honourable, not wanting in reverence, not wanting in romance. Over and over again I have heard women unreticent enough upon the same subject; but, when they spoke their hearts, the picturesque touch—the flash and fire of romance—was never nearly so strong and sometimes altogether absent.

And I have never seen love—the sheer passionate and personal delight in and worship of a being of the other sex—so vividly and uncontrollably expressed on the face of a woman as on the face of a man. I have with me, as one of the things not to be forgotten, the memory of a cheap foreign hotel where, two or three years back, a little Cockney clerk was making holiday in worshipful attendance on the girl he was engaged to. At table I used to watch him, being very sure that he had no eyes for me; and once or twice I had the impulse that I should like to speak to him and thank him for what he had shown me. I have seen women in love time after time, but none in whom the fire burned as it burned in him—consumedly. I used to hope his Cockney goddess would have understanding at least to reverence the holy thing that passed the love of women....

How should it be otherwise—this difference in the attitude of man and woman in their relations to each other? To make them see and feel more alike in the matter, the conditions under which they live and bargain must be made more alike. With even the average man love and marriage may be something of a high adventure, entered upon whole-heartedly and because he so desires. With the average woman it is not a high adventure—except in so far as adventure means risk—but a destiny or necessity. If not a monetary necessity, then a social. (How many children, I wonder, are born each year merely because their mothers were afraid of being called old maids? One can imagine no more inadequate reason for bringing a human being into the world.) The fact that her destiny, when he arrives, may be all that her heart desires and deserves does not prevent him from being the thing that, from her earliest years, she had, for quite other reasons, regarded as inevitable. Quite consciously and from childhood the “not impossible he” is looked upon, not simply as an end desirable in himself, but as a means of subsistence. The marriageable man may seek his elective affinity until he find her; the task of the marriageable woman is infinitely more complicated, since her elective affinity has usually to be combined with her bread and butter. The two do not always grow in the same place.

What is the real, natural and unbiased attitude of woman towards love and marriage, it is perfectly impossible for even a woman to guess at under present conditions, and it will continue to be impossible for just so long as the natural instincts of her sex are inextricably interwoven with, thwarted and deflected by, commercial considerations. When—if ever—the day of woman’s complete social and economic independence dawns upon her, when she finds herself free and upright in a new world where no artificial pressure is brought to bear upon her natural inclinations or disinclinations, then, and then only, will it be possible to untwist a tangled skein and judge to what extent and what precise degree she is swayed by those impulses, sexual and maternal, which are now, to the exclusion of every other factor, presumed to dominate her existence. And not only to dominate, but to justify it. (A presumption, by the way, which seems to ignore the fact—incompatible, surely, with the theory of “incompleteness”—that celibacy irks the woman less than it does the man.)

What, one wonders, would be the immediate result if the day of independence and freedom from old restrictions were to dawn suddenly and at once? Would it be to produce, at first and for a time, a rapid growth amongst all classes of women of that indifference to, and almost scorn of, marriage which is so marked a characteristic of the—alas, small—class who can support themselves in comfort by work which is congenial to them? Perhaps—for a time, until the revulsion was over and things righted themselves. (I realize, of course, that it is quite impossible for a male reader to accept the assertion that any one woman, much less any class of women, however small its numbers, can be indifferent to or scornful of marriage—which would be tantamount to admitting that she could be indifferent to, or scornful of, himself.—What follows, therefore, can only appear to him as an ineffectual attempt on the part of an embittered spinster to explain that the grapes are sour; and he is courteously requested to skip to the end of the chapter. It would be lost labour on my part to seek to disturb his deep-rooted conviction that all women who earn decent incomes in intelligent and interesting ways are too facially unpleasant to be placed at the head of a dinner-table. I shall not attempt to disturb that conviction; I make it a rule never to attempt the impossible.) This new-born attitude of open indifference and contempt, while perhaps appearing strained and unnatural, is, it seems to me, a natural one enough for women whose daily lives have falsified every tradition in which they were born and bred.

For the tradition handed down from generations to those girl children who now are women grown was, with exceptions few and far between, the one tradition of marriage—marriage as inevitable as lessons and far more inevitable than death. Ordering dinner and keeping house: that we knew well, and from our babyhood was all the future had to give to us. For the boys there would be other things; wherefore our small hearts bore a secret grudge against Almighty God that He had not made us boys—since their long thoughts were our long thoughts, and together we wallowed in cannibals and waxed clamorous over engines. For them, being boys, there might be cannibals and engines in the world beyond; but for us—oh, the flat sameness of it!—was nothing but a husband, ordering dinner and keeping house. Therefore we dreamed of a settler for a husband, and of assisting him to shoot savages with a double-barrelled gun. So might the round of household duties be varied and most pleasantly enlivened.

Perhaps it was the stolid companionship of the doll, perhaps the constant repetition of the formula “when you have children of your own” that precluded any idea of shirking the husband and tackling the savage off our own bat. For I cannot remember that we ever shirked him. We selected his profession with an eye to our own interests; he was at various times a missionary, a sailor and a circus-rider; but from the first we recognized that he was unavoidable. We planned our lives and knew that he was lurking vaguely in the background to upset our best-laid calculations. We were still very young, I think, when we realized that his shadowy personality was an actual, active factor in our lives; that it was because of him and his surmised desires that our turbulent inclinations were thwarted and compressed into narrow channels, and that we were tamed and curbed as the boys were never tamed and curbed. When that which the boys might do with impunity was forbidden to us as a sin of the first water, we knew that it was because he would not like it. The thought was not so consciously expressed, perhaps; but it was there and lived with us. So we grew up under his influence, presuming his wishes, and we learned, because of him, to say, “I can’t,” where our brothers said, “I can,” and to believe, as we had been taught, that all things, save a very few (such as ordering dinner and keeping house) were not for us because we were not men. (Yet we had our long, long thoughts—we had them, too!) That was one thing that he desired we should believe; and another was that only through him could we attain to satisfaction and achievement; that our every desire that was not centred upon him and upon his children would be barren and bitter as Dead Sea ashes in the mouth. We believed that for a long time....

And he was certain to come: the only question was, when? When he came we should fall in love with him, of course—and he would kiss us—and there would be a wedding....

Some of us—and those not a few—started life equipped for it after this fashion; creatures of circumstance who waited to be fallen in love with. That was indeed all; we stood and waited—on approval. And then came life itself and rent our mother’s theories to tatters. For we discovered—those of us, that is, who were driven out to work that we might eat—we discovered very swiftly that what we had been told was the impossible was the thing we had to do. That and no other. So we accomplished it, in fear and trembling, only because we had to; and with that first achievement of the impossible the horizon widened with a rush, and the implanted, hampering faith in our own poor parasitic uselessness began to wither at the root and die. We had learned to say, “I can.” And as we went on, at first with fear and then with joy, from impossibility to impossibility, we looked upon the world with new eyes.

To no man, I think, can the world be quite as wonderful as it is to the woman now alive who has fought free. Those who come after her will enter by right of birth upon what she attains by right of conquest; therefore, neither to them will it be the same. The things that to her brother are common and handed down, to her are new possessions, treasured because she herself has won them and no other for her. It may well be that she attaches undue importance to these; it could scarcely be otherwise. Her traditions have fallen away from her, her standard of values is gone. The old gods have passed away from her, and as yet the new gods have spoken with no very certain voice. The world to her is in the experimental stage. She grew to womanhood weighed down by the conviction that life held only one thing for her; and she stretches out her hands to find that it holds many. She grew to womanhood weighed down by the conviction that her place in the scheme of things was the place of a parasite; and she knows (for necessity has taught her) that she has feet which need no support. She is young in the enjoyment of her new powers and has a pleasure that is childish in the use of them. By force of circumstances her faith has been wrested from her and the articles of her new creed have yet to be tested by experience—her own. Her sphere—whatever it may prove to be—no one but herself can define for her. Authority to her is a broken reed. Has she not heard and read solemn disquisitions by men of science on the essential limitations of woman’s nature and the consequent impossibility of activity in this or that direction?—knowing, all the while, that what they swear to her she cannot do she does, is doing day by day!

Some day, no doubt, the pendulum will adjust itself and swing true; a generation brought up to a wider horizon as a matter of course will look around it with undazzled eyes and set to work to reconstruct the fundamental from the ruins of what was once esteemed so. But in the meantime the new is—new; the independence that was to be as Dead Sea ashes in our mouth tastes very sweet indeed; and the unsheltered life that we were taught to shrink from means the fighting of a good fight....

Selfishness, perhaps—all selfishness—this pleasure in ourselves and in the late growth of that which our training had denied us. But then, from our point of view, the sin and crime of woman in the past has been a selflessness which was ignoble because involuntary. Our creed may be vague as yet, but one article thereof is fixed: there is no merit in a sacrifice which is compulsory, no virtue in a gift which is not a gift but a tribute.

III

I have insisted so strongly upon what I believe to be the attitude towards life of the independent woman mainly with the object of proving my assertion that there are other faculties in our nature besides those which have hitherto been forced under a hothouse system of cultivation—sex and motherhood. It is quite possible that a woman thinking, feeling and living in a manner I have described may be dubbed unsexed; but even if she be what is technically termed unsexed, it does not follow therefore that she is either unnatural or unwomanly. Sex is only one of the ingredients of the natural woman—an ingredient which has assumed undue and exaggerated proportions in her life owing to the fact that it has for many generations furnished her with the means of livelihood.

In sexual matters it would appear that the whole trend and tendency of man’s relations to woman has been to make refusal impossible and to cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire. His motive in concentrating all her energy upon the trade of marriage was to deny it any other outlet. The original motive was doubtless strengthened, as time went on, by an objection to allowing her to come into economic competition with him; but this was probably a secondary or derivative cause of his persistent refusal to allow her new spheres of activity, having its primary root in the consciousness that economic independence would bring with it the power of refusal.

The uncompromising and rather brutal attitude which man has consistently adopted towards the spinster is, to my mind, a confirmation of this theory. (The corresponding attitude of the married woman towards her unmarried sister I take to be merely servile and imitative.) It was not only that the creature was chaste and therefore inhuman. That would have justified neglect and contempt on his part, but not the active dislike he always appears to have entertained for her. That active and somewhat savage dislike must have had its origin in the consciousness that the perpetual virgin was a witness, however reluctantly, to the unpalatable fact that sexual intercourse was not for every woman an absolute necessity; and this uneasy consciousness on his part accounts for the systematic manner in which he placed the spinster outside the pale of a chivalry, upon which, from her unprotected position, one would have expected her to have an especial claim.

If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a trade on the part of woman—the exchange of her person for the means of subsistence—it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which that trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in the matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market. Which brings us at once to the fact—arising from the compulsory nature of the profession—that it is carried on under disadvantages unknown and unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods. For the regulations governing compulsory service—the institution of slavery and the like—are always framed, not in the interests of the worker, but in the interests of those who impose his work upon him. The regulations governing exchange and barter in the marriage market, therefore, are necessarily framed in the interests of the employer—the male.

The position is this. Marriage, with its accompaniments and consequences—the ordering of a man’s house, the bearing and rearing of his children—has, by the long consent of ages, been established as practically the only means whereby woman, with honesty and honour, shall earn her daily bread. Her every attempt to enter any other profession has been greeted at first with scorn and opposition; her sole outlook was to be dependence upon man. Yet the one trade to which she is destined, the one means of earning her bread to which she is confined, she may not openly profess. No other worker stands on the same footing. The man who has his bread to earn, with hands, or brains, or tools, goes out to seek for the work to which he is trained; his livelihood depending on it, he offers his skill and services without shame or thought of reproach. But with woman it is not so; she is expected to express unwillingness for the very work for which she has been taught and trained. She has been brought up in the belief that her profession is marriage and motherhood; yet though poverty may be pressing upon her—though she may be faced with actual lack of the necessities of life—she must not openly express her desire to enter that profession, and earn her bread in the only way for which she is fitted. She must stand aside and wait—indefinitely; and attain to her destined livelihood by appearing to despise it.

That, of course, is the outcome of something more than a convention imposed on her by man; nature, from the beginning, has made her more fastidious and reluctant than the male. But with this natural fastidiousness and reluctance the commercialism imposed upon her by her economic needs is constantly at clash and at conflict, urging her to get her bread as best she can in the only market open to her. Theoretically—since by her wares she lives—she has a perfect right to cry those wares and seek to push them to the best advantage. That is to say, she has a perfect right to seek, with frankness and with openness, the man who, in her judgment, can most fittingly provide her with the means of support.

This freedom of bargaining to the best advantage, permitted as a matter of course to every other worker, is denied to her. It is, of course, claimed and exercised by the prostitute class—a class which has pushed to its logical conclusion the principle that woman exists by virtue of a wage paid her in return for the possession of her person; but it is interesting to note that the “unfortunate” enters the open market with the hand of the law extended threateningly above her head. The fact is curious if inquired into: since the theory that woman should live by physical attraction of the opposite sex has never been seriously denied, but rather insisted upon, by men, upon what principle is solicitation, or open offer of such attraction, made a legal offence? (Not because the woman is a danger to the community, since the male sensualist is an equal source of danger.) Only, apparently, because the advance comes from the wrong side. I speak under correction, but cannot, unaided, light upon any other explanation; and mine seems to be borne out by the fact that, in other ranks of life, custom, like the above-mentioned law, strenuously represses any open advance on the part of the woman. So emphatic, indeed, is this unwritten law, that one cannot help suspecting that it was needful it should be emphatic, lest woman, adapting herself to her economic position, should take the initiative in a matter on which her livelihood depended, and deprive her employer not only of the pleasure of the chase, but of the illusion that their common bargain was as much a matter of romance and volition on her part as on his.

As a matter of fact, that law that the first advances must come from the side of the man is, as was only to be expected, broken and broken every day; sometimes directly, but far more often indirectly. The woman bent on matrimony is constantly on the alert to evade its workings, conscious that in her attempt to do so she can nearly always count on the ready, if unspoken, co-operation of her sisters. This statement is, I know, in flat contravention of the firmly-rooted masculine belief that one woman regards another as an enemy to be depreciated consistently in masculine eyes, and that women spend their lives in one long struggle to gratify an uncontrollable desire for admiration at each other’s expense. (I have myself been told by a man that he would never be so foolishly discourteous as to praise one woman in another’s hearing. I, on my part, desirous also of being wisely courteous, did not attempt to shake the magnificent belief in his own importance to me which the statement betrayed.) Admiration is a very real passion in some women, as it is a very real passion in some men; but what, in women, is often mistaken for it is ambition, a desire to get on and achieve success in life in the only way in which it is open to a woman to achieve it—through the favour of man. Which is only another way of saying what I have insisted on before—that a good many feminine actions which are commonly and superficially attributed to sexual impulse have their root in the commercial instinct.

It is because women, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the commercial nature of the undertaking that they interest themselves so strongly in the business of match-making, other than their own. Men have admitted that interest, of course—the thing is too self-evident to be denied—and, as their manner is, attributed it to an exuberant sexuality which overflows on to its surroundings; steadfastly declining to take into account the “professional” element in its composition, since that would necessarily imply the existence of an _esprit de corps_ amongst women.