Part 7

Whatever the reason, it is certain that many women of the “comfortable” class do cling desperately and rather pathetically to the idea of their little privileges in this respect; I have over and over again heard such women oppose efforts to better their own position and that of others simply on the ground that “men would not treat us in the same way—there would be no chivalry, they would not be polite to us any longer.” Apparently the good souls are under the impression that no man is ever polite to a person he does not despise; and this sort of argument shows how completely those who use it have learned to substitute the shadow for the reality and dissociate what is commonly called chivalry from respect. To them masculine courtesy is an expression not of reverence for women, but of more or less kindly contempt for them—and they are quite content that it should be so. Personally, this attitude—an attitude of voluntary abasement assumed in order that man may know the pleasure of condescension—is the only thing that ever makes me ashamed of being a woman; since it is the outward and visible expression of an inward servility that has eaten and destroyed a soul.

X

Modern chivalry, then, has been narrowed down, if not in theory, at any rate in practice, to a code of deferential behaviour affecting such matters and contingencies as the opening of doors, the lifting of hats, and the handing of teacups; but not touching or affecting the pre-eminence and predominance of man in the more important interests of life. At its best, such a code of behaviour is a meritorious attempt to atone for advantage in essentials by self-abnegation in non-essentials; at its worst, it is simply an expression of condescension.

That there is a chivalry which means something other and more than this—which is based upon the idea, not of condescension, but of real respect for women—I shall not deny; but it is comparatively rare—for the simple reason that the qualities encouraged and fostered in the ordinary woman are not the sort of qualities which command respect. They may have other merits, but that one they lack. For, be it noted, respect is a tribute to be commanded; not a reward to be won by supplication, by abasement, or compliance with the wishes of others. We do not necessarily like what we respect—for instance, the strength, the skill, and the resources of an enemy; and we do not necessarily respect in other people qualities which, in our own interests, we should like them to possess—qualities of subservience, submission, and timidity, which we are quite willing to make use of even while we despise them.

This latter attitude, it seems to me, is the attitude of man to woman. For generations the training of woman has been directed towards the encouragement in her of certain qualities and characteristics—such as subservience, narrowness of mind, stupidity—all of them designed to promote the comfort and well-being of her owner, but none of them calculated to arouse in him a sensation of esteem. One may be kind to a person who is subservient, narrow-minded, and stupid; but one does not respect that person. It is no reproach whatever to a man to say that he does not respect women so long as he believes (and is encouraged to believe) that their only interests in life are the interests represented in a newspaper by the page entitled, _Woman’s World_, or the _Sphere of Woman_—a page dealing with face-powder, frilled nightgowns, and anchovy toast. No sane and intelligent man could feel any real respect for a woman whose world was summed up in these things. If the face-powder were applied with discretion and the directions on the subject of anchovy toast carried out with caution, he might find her an ornament as well as a convenience in his home; but it would be impossible for him to respect her, because she would not be, in the proper sense of the word, respectable. If he encourages the type, it is not because he respects it.

It may, of course, be urged that woman’s claim to reverence and respect is based on far higher and surer ground than mere intelligence, or even character—on the fulfilment of her duties as wife and mother. Personally, I fail to see that any very great measure of respect or reverence is dealt out to her on this or any other ground—except, perhaps, now and again on paper; and even if it were, I should not, under present conditions, consider it justified. As long as the fulfilment of those duties is not a purely voluntary action on the part of woman, it gives her no claim upon any one’s respect. Heroism under pressure is not heroism at all; and there is, to my mind, nothing the least exalted or noble in bringing up children, cooking chops, and cleaning doorsteps merely because very few other ways of earning a decent living happen to be open to you. And so long as marriage and motherhood are not matters of perfectly free choice on the part of the majority of women, so long will the performance of the duties incurred by marriage and motherhood, however onerous and however important, constitute no particular title to respect.

In so far as men do respect women, and not despise them, it seems to me that they respect them for exactly those qualities which they esteem in each other—and which, paradoxically enough, are for the most part exactly those qualities which they have done their best to erase and eradicate from the feminine character. The characteristics which make a man or a woman “respectable” are not the characteristics of subserviency and servility; on the contrary, those particular characteristics, even when encouraged for interested reasons, are rightly and naturally regarded with contempt. They may be more comfortable to live with—man evidently thinks so—but, comfortable or not, they are despised instinctively. They have their reward, no doubt; but that reward is not reverence and respect—since reverence and respect must be commanded, not coaxed or cringed for. A woman who insists on flinging aside the traditions of her early training, standing on her own feet, fighting her own battle, and doing that which is right in her own eyes, may not get from man anything more than respect, but, in the long run, she will certainly get that. It may be given grudgingly, but it will be given, all the same; since courage and independence of thought are qualities respectable in themselves. And, on the other hand, and however much he may desire to do so, it is, I should say, quite impossible for any thinking man to entertain a real reverence and esteem for a section of humanity which he believes to exist solely in order to perform certain animal functions connected with, and necessary to, the reproduction of the race. After all, it is not upon the performance of a purely animal function that a human being should found his or her title to respect; if woman is reverenced only because she reproduces her kind, a still higher meed of reverence is due to the rabbit.

And in this connection it is interesting to note that the mediæval institution of chivalry, with its exalted, if narrow, ideal of reverence for, and service of, womanhood, took its rise and flourished in times when the housekeeping and child-bearing trade was not the only occupation open to women; when, on the contrary, they had, in the religious life, an alternative career, equally honoured with, if not more honoured than, marriage; and when it was not considered essential to the happiness and well-being of every individual woman to pair off, after the fashion of the animals going into the ark. Whatever the defects and drawbacks of conventual life, it stood for the principle, denied before and since, that woman had an existence of her own apart from man, a soul to be saved apart from man. It was a flat defiance of the theory that she came into the world only to marry and reproduce her kind; it acknowledged and admitted the importance of her individual life and conduct; in short, it recognized her as something besides a wife and a mother, and gave her other claims to respect than that capacity for reproduction which she shared with the lower animals. Further, by making celibacy an honourable instead of a despised estate, it must have achieved an important result from an economic point of view; it must have lessened the congestion in the marriage market by lessening the number of women who regarded spinsterhood as the last word in failure. It enhanced the value of the wife and mother by making it not only possible, but easy, for her to become something else. It opened up a career to an ambitious woman; since, in the heyday of the Church, the head of a great community of nuns was something more than a recluse—a power in the land, an administrator of estates. None of these things, of course, were in the minds of those who instituted the celibate, conventual life as a refuge from the world; they were its unforeseen results, but none the less real because unforeseen. They followed on the institution of the conventual life for woman because it represented the only organized attempt ever made to free her from the necessity of compulsory marriage and child-bearing.

I have no bias, religious or otherwise, in favour of the conventual life, which, as hitherto practised, is no doubt open to objection on many grounds; but it seems to me that any institution or system which admits or implies a reason for woman’s existence other than sexual intercourse and the reproduction of her kind must tend inevitably to raise the position not only of the celibate woman, but, indirectly, of the wife and mother. In its palmy days, when it was a factor not only in the spiritual life of a religious body, but in the temporal life of the State, the convent, with all its defects, must have stood for the advancement of women; and if it had never come into existence, I very much doubt whether the injunctions laid upon knighthood would have included respect for and service of womanhood.

The upheaval which we term the Reformation, whatever its other merits, was distinctly anti-feminist in its tendencies. Where it did not sweep the convent away altogether, it narrowed its scope and sapped its influence; and, being anti-feminist, evolved no new system to take the place of that which it had swept away. The necessity of replacing the monk by the schoolmaster was recognized, but not the necessity of replacing the nun by the schoolmistress; the purely physical and reproductive idea of woman being once again uppermost, the need for training her mind no longer existed. The masterful women of the Renaissance had few successors; and John Knox, with his _Monstrous Regiment of Women_, but the mouthpiece of an age which was setting vigorously to work to discourage individuality and originality in the weaker sex by condemning deviations from the common type to be burnt as witches.

This favourite pastime of witch-burning has not, I think, been sufficiently taken into account in estimating the reason for the low standard of intelligence attained by women at a time when men were making considerable progress in social and intellectual fields. The general impression appears to be that only old, ugly, and decrepit hags fell victims to popular superstition or the ingenuity of the witch-finder; but, as a matter of fact, when the craze for witch-finding was at its height, any sort of peculiarity, even beauty of an unusual and arresting type, seems to have been sufficient to expose a woman to the suspicion of secret dealings with the Prince of Darkness. At first sight it seems curious (since the religious element in a people is usually the feminine element) that the Prince of Darkness should have confined his dealings almost exclusively to women—it has been estimated that wizards were done to death in the proportion of one to several thousand witches; but on further consideration one inclines to the belief that the fury of witch-burning by which our ancestors were possessed must have been prompted by motives other than purely devotional. In all probability those motives were largely unconscious; but the rage of persecution against the witch has so much in common with the customary masculine policy of repressing, at any cost, all deviations from the type of wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else, that one cannot help the suspicion that it was more or less unconsciously inspired by that policy.

XI

So far as I have treated of the various influences which have been brought to bear upon women with the object of fitting them for the trade to which the male half of humanity desired to confine them; and I have, I hope, made it clear that, to a certain extent, these influences have defeated their own ends by discouraging the intelligence which ought to be a necessary qualification for motherhood, even if it is not a necessary qualification for wifehood. It remains to be considered what effect this peculiar training for one particular and peculiar trade has had upon woman’s activity in those departments of the world’s work which are not connected with marriage and motherhood, how it has acted upon her capacity for wage-earning and bread-winning on her own account, how it has affected her power of achievement in every other direction; what, in short, has been its effect upon woman in the life that she leads apart from man. (I must ask the male reader to be good enough to assume, even if he cannot honestly believe, that woman can, and occasionally does, lead a life apart from man.)

And one notes, to begin with, that the customary training, or lack of training, for marriage tends almost inevitably to induce that habit and attitude of mind which is known as amateurishness. And particularly, I should say, in the large class of society, which we describe roughly as the middle class; where the uncertainty with regard to the position, profession and consequent manner of living of the probable husband is so great as to make a thorough and businesslike training for the future nearly an impossibility. The element of chance—an element which plays such a very large part in the life, at any rate, of the average married woman—may upset all calculations based on the probable occupation and requirements of the husband, render carefully acquired accomplishments useless or unnecessary, and call for the acquirement of others hitherto unwanted and even undreamed of. Two sisters brought up in exactly the same surroundings and educated in exactly the same manner may marry, the one a flourishing professional or city man, who expects her to dress well, talk well, give good dinners and generally entertain his friends; the other a man whose work lies on the frontier of civilization where she will find it necessary to learn something of the management of horses and to manufacture her own soap and candles. While a third sister in the same family may never marry at all, but pass her life in furnished apartments, being waited on by landladies. These may be extreme, but they are not very unusual instances of the large part taken by sheer chance in the direction of a woman’s life and the consequent impossibility of mapping out and preparing for the future. Hence a lack of thoroughness and an attitude towards life of helplessness and what I have called amateurishness. (The corresponding male attitude is found in the unskilled labourer of the “odd job” type.) Hence also the common feminine habit of neglecting more solid attainments in order to concentrate the energies on an endeavour to be outwardly attractive.

This concentration of energy on personal adornment, usually attributed to vanity or overflowing sexuality, is, so far as I can see, largely the outcome of a sound business instinct. For, be it remembered, that the one solid fact upon which an ordinary marriageable girl has to build the edifice of her life is the fact that men are sensitive to, and swayed by, that quality in woman which is called personal charm. What else her future husband will demand of her is more or less guess-work—nothing upon which to raise a solid foundation of preparation for his requirements and her own. He may require her to sit at the head of his table and talk fashionable gossip to his friends; he may require her to saddle horses and boil soap; the only thing she can be fairly certain of is that he will require her to fulfil his idea of personal attractiveness. As a matter of business then, and not purely from vanity, she specializes in personal attractiveness; and the care, the time and the thoroughness which many women devote to their own adornment, the choosing of their dresses and the curling of their hair is thoroughly professional and a complete contrast to their amateurishness in other respects.

The cultivation of personal charm, sometimes to the neglect of more solid and valuable attainments, is the more natural, because, as I have already pointed out, the material rewards of wifehood and motherhood have no connection at all with excellence in the performance of the duties of wifehood and motherhood—the wage paid to a married woman being merely a wage for the possession of her person. That being the case, the one branch of woman’s work which is likely to bring her a material reward in the shape of an economically desirable husband is cultivation of a pleasing exterior and attractive manners; and to this branch of work she usually, when bent on marriage, applies herself in the proper professional spirit. A sensible, middle-class mother may insist on her daughter receiving adequate instruction in the drudgery of household work and cookery; but if the daughter should be fortunate enough to marry well such instruction will be practically wasted, since the scrubbing, the stewing, the frying and the making of beds, will inevitably be deputed to others. And the sensible, middle-class mother is quite aware that her daughter’s chance of marrying well and shirking disagreeable duties does not depend on the excellent manner in which she performs those duties, but on the quality of her personal attractions. The cultivation of her personal attractions, therefore, is really a more important and serious business for the girl who desires to marry than the acquirement of domestic accomplishments, which may, or may not, be useful in her after life, and which in themselves are unlikely to secure her the needful husband. This state of things is frankly recognized in the upper or wealthier ranks of society. There the typical domestic arts find practically no place in a girl’s scheme of training, which is directed solely towards the end of making her personally attractive and therefore desirable. Which means, of course, that those women who are in a position to do so concentrate their energies on the cultivation of those particular outward qualities by which alone they can hope to satisfy their ambition, their need for comfort, luxury, etc., or their desire to bring children into the world. They recognize that however much man may profess to admire the domestic and maternal qualities in woman, it is not that side of her which arouses in him the desire for possession, and that the most effective means of arousing that desire for possession is personal charm. We have been told that every woman is at heart a rake; it would, I think, be more correct to say that every woman who desires to attract some member of the opposite sex so that she may marry and bear children must, whatever she is at heart, be something of a rake on the surface.

With girls of the working-class, of course, a certain amount of training in domestic work is usually gone through, since it is obvious that domestic work will be required of them in after life; but even in the humblest ranks of society the rule holds good that it is personal attractiveness and not skill in the duties required of a wife and mother which make a girl sought after and admired by the opposite sex. Consequently even working-class wives and mothers, women who have no chance of deputing their duties to paid servants, are frequently nothing but amateurs at their trade—which they have only acquired incidentally. In practically all ranks of society the real expert in housekeeping or the care and management of infants is the “unattached” woman who works in other people’s houses and attends to other people’s children. She is the professional who knows her business and earns her living by it; the wife and mother, as often as not, being merely the amateur.

Human nature, and especially male human nature, being what it is, I do not know whether it is possible or even desirable that this state of things should be altered. My object in calling attention to it is not to suggest alteration (I have none to suggest), but simply to point out that women who are brought up in the expectation of marriage and nothing but marriage are almost of necessity imbued with that spirit of amateurishness which makes for inefficiency; and that this spirit has to be taken into account in estimating their difficulties where they have to turn their attention to other trades than marriage.

There are several other respects in which the marriage tradition (by which I mean the practical identification during many generations of womanhood with wifehood and motherhood) acts as a drag and a hindrance to the woman who, married or unmarried and with or against her will, has been swept out of the sacred and narrow sphere of home to compete for a wage in the open market. (Be it remembered that she is now numbered not by hundreds or thousands, but by millions.) As I have already pointed out, the trade of marriage is, by its very nature, an isolated trade, permitting of practically no organization or common action amongst the workers; and consequently the marriage-trained woman (and nearly all women are marriage-trained—or perhaps it would be more correct to say marriage expectant) enters industrial or commercial life with no tradition of such organization and common action behind her.

I do not think that the average man realizes how much the average woman is handicapped by the lack of this tradition, nor does he usually trouble to investigate the causes of his own undoubted superiority in the matter of combination and all that combination implies. In accordance with his usual custom of explaining the shortcomings of womanhood by an inferiority that is inherent and not artificial and induced, he assumes that women cannot combine for industrial and other purposes because it is “natural” for them to be jealous and distrustful of one another. (This assumption is, of course, an indirect compliment to himself, since the jealousy and distrust of women for each other is understood to be inspired solely by their overpowering desire to attract the admiration of the opposite sex.)