Part 6

To take another instance. In most civilized countries the rougher branches of agriculture are looked upon as work which is unsuited to women, because making too heavy demands upon their strength. Amongst primitive and semicivilized peoples, on the other hand, the tilling of the soil is often left entirely to women; while the dweller in towns—who usually has most to say about these matters—would probably be astonished if he realized how largely women’s work is employed, even in Europe, in the rougher processes of agriculture. (Within less than a twenty-four hours’ journey from London I have seen a woman yoked to a plough.) In certain small communities on the Breton coast I understand that the work of agriculture is carried on entirely by the women of the community; the men—fishermen by trade—occupying themselves during the long periods of enforced idleness between the fishing seasons by dressmaking for the household, and other forms of sewing. I have before me, as I write, a specimen of the needlework of one of these Breton fishermen: a penwiper, neatly cut and sewn, and quaintly ornamented with a design in yellow thread—the sort of trifle that we should regard as an essentially feminine production. To me such a division of labour does not seem in the least “unnatural.” Having regard to the circumstances, I can well understand that the man who took needle and scissors to produce my penwiper—and who had his fill of stormy and open air toil at other times—should prefer to set his hand to a restful occupation which would keep him in his home, rather than to the plough or the spade, which would take him out of it.

In the beginning of things, labour seems to have been divided between the sexes on a fairly simple plan. Man did most of the hunting and most of the fighting; and woman, only joining in the hunting and fighting if necessity arose, did all the rest. In savage tribes which have suddenly come under the domination of a civilized race—a domination which usually means not only the cessation of tribal warfare, but a rapid decrease in the raw material of the chase—the male, debarred from the exercise of his former avocations, frequently refuses to do anything at all. Deprived of the only work proper to man, and disinclined, at first, to undertake the work he considers proper to woman, he is apt to fold his hands and exist in idleness on what is, to all intents and purposes, the slave-labour of his female belongings. The distaste of certain South African races for what we esteem men’s work is well known, and has had political consequences before now; and it is said that in some primitive American tribes a man would consider that he demeaned himself by undertaking such strictly feminine work as the hewing and carrying of wood. (One is led to the conclusion that the idea of woman as a wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else must be of comparatively modern growth. “Natural” man did not think of her in that light at all; he had so many other uses for her. Or, perhaps, one might put it that his definition of the duties of a wife and mother was comprehensive.)

The early arts and the first processes of manufacture are supposed to have originated with that half of the human race which is now denied invention and initiative—arising naturally out of her more complicated duties and more settled habits of living. Woman was certainly, and all unknown to herself, the civilizing agent in the primitive community. The hut, clearing, or cave where she tended the hearth and carried on her rude industries, and whither her man returned from his roaming expeditions, was the germ and nucleus of the city where her descendants now dwell.

It was not until the world grew more crowded, less of a place to fight in, less of a place to hunt in, that man began to consider other means and take to other ways of earning his living—to dig and to engage in manufactures. In other words, he began to invade the sphere of woman (it is as well to remember this), and to parcel out and divide the industries hitherto monopolized by her. This process of parcelling out and division was carried out in accordance with the principle already mentioned—that woman was to keep those trades which men did not care to embark upon; and, roughly speaking, his preference in the matter has always been for those callings and professions which ensured him, in addition to his livelihood, and, if possible, a prospect of advancement, a certain amount of variety in his existence, and a certain amount of intercourse with his fellows. His tendency, therefore, has been to annex those trades which afforded him the desired amount of variety, intercourse, and prospect of advancement, and to leave to woman the monotonous, prospectless, and isolated callings—callings which were usually connected with the home; and that tendency seems to have continued with very little check until the beginning of the revolution in our social and industrial system which was brought about by the introduction of machinery—a revolution which, incidentally and amongst other things, is changing almost beyond recognition the institution known as the home, modifying the relations of the sexes, and completely altering the position of woman by forcing her, whether she likes it or not, to stand on her own feet.

I have dwelt at some length upon this tendency in the dominant sex—the outcome of no deliberate selfishness, but of the natural and instinctive human impulse to take the line of least resistance and get what one wants in the easiest way—because it seems to me to afford the only reasonable explanation of the customary hard and fast division of labour between an ordinary man and an ordinary wife. Fundamentally, I can see no reason why it should be the duty of the wife, rather than of the husband, to clean doorsteps, scrub floors, and do the family cooking. Men are just as capable as women of performing all these duties. They can clean doorsteps and scrub floors just as well as women; they can cook just as well as women, sometimes better. Why, then, should it be assumed that it is the natural thing for a married woman to take over these particular departments of work, and that when a bride undertakes to love, honour, and obey her husband, she also undertakes to scrub his floors and fry his steaks? The answer to that question seems to be, not that it is natural for a woman to like a form of labour which is usually monotonous and without prospect, but that it is quite natural for a man to dislike it—and therefore leave it to some one else.

One of the best examples, in a small way, of the tendency I have been speaking of I got not long ago from a friend of mine, a woman of the working-class. I happened to be one of an audience she was addressing, when she suddenly put to it the unexpected question—“Why does the father carve the joint in rich people’s houses, when in poor people’s houses it is the mother who carves it?” One, at least, of her audience was entirely at a loss for an answer to the conundrum until it was duly furnished by the speaker—running as follows: “In rich people’s houses the father carves the joint, because there is always enough to go round and the carver can help himself to the tit-bits. In poor people’s houses the mother carves the joint, because there mayn’t be always enough to go round and the carver gets the last helping.” I have no doubt that her explanation of the two customs is correct. Where the labour of carving is a pleasant duty, likely to bring its reward, it is performed by the head of the household; where it is an unpleasant duty, incurring penalty in the place of reward, the head of the household decides to pass it on to some one else. I do not mean that he decides it after due and selfish deliberation—he simply obeys a natural unthinking impulse.

It will be urged, of course, that motherhood and the care of children being the central point and fundamental interest in a woman’s life, the domestic duties and arts spring naturally from that central point and group themselves around it; and that this, and not any question of masculine likes and dislikes in the matter, is the real reason why, all over the world, certain forms of labour, some of them of a drudging and unpleasant nature, are thrust upon her—by the decree of Providence, and not by the will of her husband.

I am always suspicious of those decrees of Providence which run parallel to the interests of persons who have taken it upon themselves to expound Providential wisdom; and, as I have already explained, I am inclined to doubt that there exists in every woman an overpowering maternal instinct which swamps all other interests and desires. But even if, for the sake of argument, the universality of an overpowering maternal instinct be admitted, it is legitimate to point out that housework and its unpaid drudgery is not only performed in the interests of children. It is performed in childless households; it is expected, as a matter of course, by fathers from their daughters, by brothers from their sisters. It is performed, in short, in the interests of the man quite as much as in the interests of the child—perhaps more, since, in a busy household, the child, so far from being the central point and pivot of an establishment, is often attended to only incidentally, and in the time that can be snatched from other duties. Further, in the numerous households where husband and wife alike go out to work—perhaps at the same form of labour, as is the case in many factory districts—the woman on returning home (after working all day, just as her husband does, to contribute her share to the weekly expenses necessary for the support of household and children) has to cook, clean, sew, etc., in the time which her husband can employ as he chooses. In such instances the wife has taken her share in what are usually considered the typical duties of a husband, and it would be only reasonable to suppose that, in the consequent rearrangement of the domestic economy, the husband, as a matter of course, would take his share in the typical duties of a wife. In some cases, no doubt, he does; but as a general rule the household duties are left to the woman, in exactly the same manner as they would be left to her if she did not leave her house to work for a wage. And they are left to her simply because her husband considers them tiresome or unpleasant, and therefore declines to perform them.

I have laid stress on the conditions under which woman’s work as a wife, mother, and housekeeper is usually carried on, because it seems to me that the influence of those conditions has extended far beyond that narrow circle of the home to which, until comparatively lately, her energies have been confined. It was within the four walls of the home that man learned to look upon her as a being whose share of work was always the unpleasant share, and whose wages were the lowest wages that could possibly be given. And—which is far worse—she learned to look upon herself in the same light, as a creature from whom much must be demanded and to whom little must be given. Small wonder, then, with that age-long tradition behind her, that when she is forced out into the world, unorganized and unprepared, she finds it hard to get even a living wage for the work of her head and hands—and that when you speak of a sweated you mean a woman’s trade.

There is, so far as I can see, only one way in which woman can make herself more valued, and free herself from the necessity of performing duties for which she gets neither thanks nor payment. She must do as men have always done in such a situation—shirk the duties.

IX

There is one element in the relations between man and wife to which, as yet, I have hardly referred. I mean that element which is known as the exercise of protection by the stronger over the weaker—by the man over the woman. In considering the rewards of wifehood, great or small, it cannot, of course, be passed over without examination, since it seems to be assumed that a man pays his wife for services unpaid in other ways by defending her against perils, physical or otherwise.

Now there can be no doubt that in former ages and all over the world—as in certain regions of the world to-day—this physical protection of the weaker by the stronger, of the woman by the man, was a thing that really counted in marriage. The women of a savage tribe which was constantly at war with surrounding savage tribes, would have to rely on the strength and skill in warfare of their men to deliver them from capture or death. In such a primitive state of affairs every man might be called upon at any moment to exercise in his own person duties of defence and protection which the average man now delegates to the paid soldier and the paid policeman. In the beginning of things the head of every family possessed the right of private war and private justice, and it was on his success in both these fields of activity that the lives and the welfare of his womenfolk and children would very largely depend. It was only by virtue of his strength that he could maintain possession of his property in goods or in human flesh. It was by virtue of his superior strength that he reduced woman to subjection, and in return, and as a form of payment for her toil, defended her from the attacks of others. So arose and originated the idea of the physical protection necessarily meted out by husband to wife; an idea real enough in the beginning. Circumstances alter cases; but they often take a long time to alter ideas, and this particular one continues to flourish luxuriantly in places where the order of things that gave it birth has passed into the forgotten. One still hears people talk as if a clerk or a greengrocer’s assistant, married in a suburban chapel and going to Cliftonville for his honeymoon, undertook thereby to shelter his better half from heaven knows what of vague and mysterious peril. From other times and other manners, beginning with the days when a stone axe formed a necessary part of a bridegroom’s wedding garment, into places where moral force has fought the worst of its bitter battle with physical force, into days when private war is called murder and the streets are policed, there has come down the superstition that the ordinary civilized man performs doughty feats of protection for the benefit of the ordinary civilized wife. And it seems to be accepted that that element of protection is a natural and unavoidable element in the relations of married man and woman—even of married man and woman living in a suburban flat.

Once upon a time it was a natural and unavoidable element in the relations of every married couple; just as it was natural and unavoidable, once upon a time, that the unwarlike and commercially-minded burghers of a mediæval city should bargain with a neighbouring and predatory baron to keep at bay—for a consideration—other barons no less predatory but a little less neighbouring. That sort of arrangement, I believe, was fairly common in the Middle Ages when predatory barons were in a position which enabled them to bend the law to their own liking, and when the obvious thing for honest and peaceable men to do was to set a thief to catch a thief. A recognized institution in its day, this particular form of protection passed with the growth of a central authority, with the suppression of private warfare and the substitution of a national for a tribal ideal. Instead of paying blackmail to a brigand, the city, in its later days, organized a police force of its own and contributed its share towards the upkeep of a national army. And the overlord vanished because, his duties having been taken away from him, there was nothing left for him to do. Much the same sort of thing has happened in other directions; increasing civilization has left other than barons without the duties that formerly appertained to their position. Like the protective functions of the overlord, the protective functions of the husband have been centralized and nationalized, regulated by the community and delegated to the soldier and the policeman. Where stable government exists the number of men who offer up their lives each year in actual defence of their own hearths and their own wives is, I imagine, small; so small that I do not suppose the insurance companies take much account of it in estimating their risks. I have not the least intention of casting any reflection upon the courage of the average civilized husband or inferring that he is not willing to offer up his life in defence of his better half if called upon to do so; I merely state the obvious fact that he is not very often called upon to make the sacrifice. Even in those countries where universal military service is established, the duty of defending the national (not the individual) hearth and home falls last upon men who are married and have a family to support; it is the young, unmarried men who are called upon to form the first line of defence and defiance. And in ordinary every-day life it is the strong arm of the law and not the strong arm of the individual husband which secures a woman from hurt and molestation. If it were not so the unprotected spinster would be in a truly piteous plight. As a matter of fact, she usually finds that the ordinary constable is quite adequate for all her requirements in the protective line.

Closely allied to this idea of individual masculine protection is that other, and still more vaguely nebulous, idea of chivalry or preferential treatment of women in general by men in general. Which necessitates an inquiry into what the average modern man really means when he talks of chivalry in this connection.

Frankly, it does not seem to me that he means very much. My own experience leads me to define chivalry—not the real thing, but the term as it is commonly used, say, in the public press—to define chivalry as a form, not of respect for an equal, but of condescension to an inferior; a condescension which expresses itself in certain rules of behaviour where non-essentials are involved. In very few really essential matters between man and woman is the chivalric principle allowed to get so much as a hearing; in practically all such matters it is, as I have already pointed out, an understood thing that woman gets the worst of the bargain, does the unpleasant work in the common division of labour, and, when blame is in question, sits down under the lion’s share of it. In return for this attitude on her part—which, if voluntary, would be really chivalrous, but being involuntary is merely servile—man undertakes to regulate his conduct towards her by certain particular forms of outward deference. His attitude, so far as one can gather is something like this: as long as you refrain from coming into competition with us, as long as you will allow us to look down upon you, as long as you are content to regard yourselves not only as our dependents, but as persons sent into the world to minister to our comforts and our pleasures, so long shall our outward behaviour towards you be framed in a particular code of manners which secures you preferential treatment in unimportant matters. But, in order to secure this preferential treatment in unimportant matters, you must put no strain upon our courtesy, and you must defer to our wishes in more important things; you must not trespass upon the domain that we have reserved for our own use, you must not infringe the rules which have been laid down for your guidance and whose aim is to secure our own comfort.

In other words what is commonly known as “chivalry” is not a spontaneous virtue or impulse on the part of modern man, but the form in which he pays his debt for value received from woman. Directly she fails to fulfil her own important share of the bargain, he considers himself at liberty to refuse payment; at least, one must conclude so from the frequency with which the “independent” woman of to-day is threatened with the extinction of chivalry if she continued to assert herself in a manner which may be consistent with her own desires, but which is not consistent with the desires of average male humanity. Looked at in that light, the preferential code of manners, which is all that is usually understood by chivalry, bears distinct resemblance to the sugar that attempts to veil the flavour of a pill or the jam that does its best to conceal the noxiousness of a lurking powder. By a simple process of exchange and barter outward deference on the one side is given in payment for real deference and subjection on the other; and, that being the case, it is quite open to woman to look into the terms of her bargain, reconsider them, and ask herself whether she is not paying too high a price for value received. For, with every respect for courtesy, the opening of a door and the lifting of a hat, however reverential, are among the small things of life.

It will no doubt be objected that chivalry is something infinitely greater than what I have called outward forms of deference. I agree that that is not the true meaning of the word; but I maintain that, in general practice, the virtue of chivalry, in so far as it enters into the daily lives of most women, amounts to outward forms of deference and little more. As soon as we come to essentials, we realize that the counteracting principle will inevitably be brought into play—the principle that the woman must always be sacrificed to the interests of the man.

There are, of course, exceptions to that rule—and noble ones. It is written that in common danger of death the stronger must think first, not of his own life, but of the lives of those weaker and dependent upon him; and whatever other laws a man might break with impudence and impunity, he would very certainly be ashamed to confess to a breach of this particular commandment. One respects such habitual obedience as fine and finely disciplined; but it is not decrying it to point out that not every man is called upon to exercise it and that the form of chivalry cultivated by most is necessarily of a less strenuous type. And into chivalry of the less strenuous type the idea of self-sacrifice in essentials does not as a rule enter, since it is, as I have already shown, in the nature of a reward or payment for self-sacrifice in others.

I am quite aware that there are a great many women of the upper and middle classes—women, for the most part, who lead a leisured and comfortable existence—who attach an inordinately high value to outward forms of deference from the men with whom they come in contact. Considering their training and education, and the trend of their whole lives, it is perhaps only natural that they should. The aim of that training and education has been, as I have shown, not to develop their individuality and capacities, but to make themselves and their actions pleasing to the men with whom they may happen to come in contact; and, that being so, approval from the men with whom they may happen to come in contact is naturally a thing of the utmost importance to them. To lack it is to lack the whole reward of a well-spent life. By women with this narrow outlook on the world superficial courtesies and superficial deference are interpreted to mean approval and, therefore, success in pleasing—almost the only form of success open to them. Further, the lives of such women are usually sheltered, and thus they do not have very much opportunity of realizing that the meed of ceremony to which they are accustomed is largely a tribute paid, not to themselves or to their womanhood, but to the particular leisured class to which they happen to belong.