Part 9

As in marriage, so in other departments of the labour market, the result of this tendency to appraise a woman on the strength of externals alone has been the intellectual deterioration of the good-looking girl. I should be very sorry to have to maintain that the good-looking girl is necessarily born less intelligent than her plainer sister; but I do not think that it can be denied that it is made extremely easy for her to become so. The conspicuously attractive girl who enters a trade or business usually takes a very short time to find out that her advancement depends more on her conspicuous personal attractions than on the steady work and strict attendance to business which has to be rendered by the woman less bountifully endowed by nature. Hence she has every inducement to be less thorough in her work, less intelligent, less reliable, and less trustworthy. The deep-rooted masculine conviction that brains and repulsiveness invariably go together in woman has this much justification in fact—the unattractive girl has to rely on her work and intelligence for advancement and livelihood, and, therefore, is not exposed to the temptation to allow her brains to run to seed as unnecessary. There is plenty of proof that the temptation is often resisted by the woman born beautiful; but she is exposed to it all the same, and is not to be over blamed when she succumbs.

There is one other disadvantage under which women’s work in the paid labour market is apt to suffer—a disadvantage from which men’s work is exempt, and which is directly traceable to the idea that marriage is woman’s only trade. I alluded to it in an earlier chapter when I spoke of the common masculine attitude on the subject of feminine competition and the common masculine conviction that woman can somehow manage to exist without the means of supporting existence. One result of the assumption that every woman is provided with the necessaries of life by a husband, father, or other male relative is that the atmosphere which surrounds the working-woman is considerably more chilling than that which surrounds the working-man. His right to work is recognized; hers is not. He is more or less helped, stimulated, and encouraged to work; she is not. On the contrary, her entry into the paid labour market is often discouraged and resented. The difference is, perhaps, most clearly marked in those middle-class families where sons and daughters alike have no expectation of independence by inheritance, but where money, time, and energy are spent in the anxious endeavour to train and find suitable openings for the sons, and the daughters left to shift for themselves and find openings as they can. The young man begins his life in an atmosphere of encouragement and help; the young woman in one of discouragement, or, at best, of indifference. Her brother’s work is recognized as something essentially important; hers despised as something essentially unimportant—even although it brings her in her bread. Efforts are made to stimulate his energy, his desire to succeed; no such efforts are made to stimulate hers.... And it is something, in starting work, to feel that you are engaged on work that matters.

XIV

There is one field for the activities of women upon which as yet I have not touched. It is a field where they come into direct competition with the activities of men; from which, moreover, they have not always been so completely and so jealously excluded as they have been from other spheres of the world’s work. I mean the field of art and literature.

Let it be admitted, at once and without hesitation, that women have not made much of a mark in art and literature; that whatever we may achieve in the future we have given little of achievement to the past. Women artists of the first rank in whatever medium—in words, in music, in colour, in form—there have been none; and of the second rank and of the third rank but few—a very few. Let it be admitted that there has come down to us a goodly heritage of the wisdom, the aspiration and inspiration of our fathers, and that of the wisdom, the aspiration and the inspiration of our mothers (for some they must have had) there has come down to us practically nothing. Art, as we know it, is a masculine product, wrought by the hands and conceived by the brains of men; the works of art that have forced themselves into the enduring life of the world have been shaped, written, builded, painted by men. They have achieved and we have imitated—on the whole, pitifully. Let that be admitted; and then let it also be admitted that it could hardly have been otherwise, and that the wonder is that woman has wrought in art not so little, but so much.

For when one comes to consider the conditions under which successive generations of women have lived such narrow life as was permitted to them, have realized such narrow ambitions as they were permitted to entertain, one begins to understand that it would have been something of a miracle if there had arisen amongst them thinkers and artists worthy to walk with the giants who have left their impress on the race. One begins to understand that it would be difficult to devise a better means of crushing out of the human system the individuality, the sincerity and the freedom of thought and expression, which is the very breath and inspiration of art, than the age-long training of woman for compulsory marriage and the compulsory duties thereof. For the qualities man has hitherto demanded and obtained in the woman he delights to honour (and incidentally to subdue) have been qualities incompatible with success in, or even with understanding of, art.

It is better, perhaps, to pause here and explain; since one is always liable to misinterpretation, and in the minds of many the term “artist” is synonymous with a person having a tendency towards what is called free love. Let me explain, then, that by marriage, in this connection, I mean not only the estate of matrimony, but its unlegalized equivalent. As far as art is concerned, the deadening influences brought to bear upon the mistress are practically the same as those brought to bear upon the wife. (Both, for instance, are required to be attractive rather than sincere.) It is not, of course, actual sexual intercourse, legalized or the reverse, which renders a woman incapable of great creative art; it is the servile attitude of mind and soul induced in her by the influences brought to bear on her in order to fit her for the compulsory trade of marriage or its unsanctified equivalent.

In earlier chapters I have dealt with these influences at considerable length, striven to show exactly what they are and pointed out that their aim was to induce the girl who would eventually become a woman to conform to one particular and uniform type—the type admired and sought after by the largest number of men. Hence the crushing out of individuality, the elimination of the characteristics that make for variety and the development of the imitative at the expense of the creative qualities. From generation to generation the imperative necessity of earning her livelihood in the only trade that was not barred to her—of making for herself a place in the world not by the grace of God but by the favour of man—has been a ceaseless and unrelenting factor in the process of weeding out the artistic products of woman’s nature. The deliberate stunting and repression of her intellectual faculties, the setting up for her admiration and imitation of the ideal of the “silly angel,” have all contributed to make of her not only a domestic animal, more or less sleek and ornamental, but a Philistine as well. Silly angels may, from the male point of view, be desirable and even adorable creatures; but one would not entrust them with the building of temples or the writing of great books. (Personally, I would not entrust them with the bringing up of children; but that is another matter.)

Art that is vital demands freedom of thought and expression, wide liberty of outlook and unhampered liberty of communication. And what freedom of thought and expression can be expected from a section of humanity which has not even a moral standard of its own, and adds to every “thou shalt not” in its law the saving and unspoken clause, “unless my master shall desire it of me.” A man’s body may be enslaved and subdued and the faculties of the thinker and the artist still be left alive in him; but they have never been known to survive when once his mind has been subdued and brought down to utter subjection. Epictetus came of a race that had known freedom; and the nameless man who, by the waters of Babylon, poured out his passion in a torrent of hatred and desire, wore no chains on his soul when he remembered Zion.

It is the systematic concentration of woman’s energies upon the acquirement of the particular qualities which are to procure her a means of livelihood by procuring her the favour of man that has deprived her, steadily and systematically, of the power of creation and artistic achievement; so much so that the commonly accepted ideals of what is known as a womanly woman are about as compatible with the ideals of an artist as oil is compatible with water. The methods of the one are repressive of self-development, calculated to ingratiate, bound by convention, servile; the methods of the other are self-assertive, experimental and untrammelled. The perfected type of wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else sees life only through another’s eyes; the artist through his own. Of a system designed to foster and encourage the creative instinct in human beings one might safely predict that it would have to be the exact opposite of the system still in force for the conversion of the natural woman into the conventional wife and mother.

For the first and fundamental quality which such a system would aim at cultivating would be sincerity; which is not in itself art, but the foundation whereon art is laid. Without it, greatness in art or literature is impossible; and for this reason greatness in art or literature has hitherto been impossible to woman. The tendency and purpose of her whole training has been the repression of individuality and the inducement of artificiality; and even in the comparatively few instances where she recognizes what her training has done for her, when she realizes the poor thing it has made of her, and sets to work, deliberately and of firm resolve, to counteract its effects upon her life and character, it may take her the best part of a lifetime to struggle free of her chains. She does not know what she really needs, since from childhood upwards the natural bent of her inclinations has been twisted and thwarted; her only guide is what she has been told she ought to need. And thus she may waste years in attempting to draw inspiration from a form of love which it is not in her to feel, or from a passion for maternity which has no power to stir her to achievement.

This, at least, can safely be said: that any woman who has attained to even a small measure of success in literature or art has done so by discarding, consciously or unconsciously, the traditions in which she was reared, by turning her back upon the conventional ideals of dependence that were held up for her admiration in her youth.

XV

In dealing with this problem of the inferior place hitherto occupied by woman in literature and art, let me admit, frankly and at once, that I have none of the qualifications of a critic. Of the technique of any branch of creative art I know practically nothing; nor can I say that I have any great measure of curiosity concerning it. I must confess to being one of that large mass of unenlightened persons who judge of works of art simply and solely by the effect such works of art produce upon themselves, who, where they are stirred to pleasure, to reverence, or to laughter, are content to enjoy, to be reverent, or to laugh, without too close inquiry as to the means whereby their emotions are produced, with still less inquiry as to whether such means be legitimate or the reverse. I speak, therefore, not from the standpoint of the instructed critic, but from that of the public, more or less impressionable, more or less uneducated, upon whom the artist works; and it follows that when I speak of woman’s inferiority to man in creative art I mean, not her inferiority in technique (whereon I am not competent to express opinion), but her incapacity to arouse in the ordinary human being such emotions of wonder, delight, and sorrow as men who have the requisite skill in creative art have power to arouse. I have thought it necessary to explain thus much lest my point of view be misunderstood, and I be credited with an attempt to usurp the functions of the trained critic.

Speaking, then, as one of the common herd—the public—I ask myself why it is that as a rule woman’s art leaves me cold, woman’s literature unconvinced, dissatisfied, and even irritated? And the only answer I can find is that they are artificial; that they are not a representation of life or beauty seen by a woman’s eyes, but an attempt to render life or beauty as man desires that a woman should see and render it. The attempt is unconscious, no doubt; but it is there—thwarting, destroying, and annulling.

Perhaps it is necessary to be a woman oneself in order to understand how weak, false, and insincere is the customary feminine attempt at creative art. I do not think that a man can understand how bad most of our work in art and literature really is, for the simple reason that he cannot see the lie in it. He believes, for instance, that we are such creatures as we represent ourselves to be in most of the books we write; we only try to believe it. Wherein is all the difference between a blunder and a lie. We cannot even draw ourselves, our passions and emotions—because we are accustomed to look at ourselves, our passions and emotions, not with our own eyes, but through the spectacles with which he has provided us. When we come to portray our own hearts, it would seem that they are almost as much of a mystery to ourselves as they are to him; but then we are not striving to portray our own hearts, but to describe beings who shall be something like what we have been taught women ought to be (and to account for their actions by motives which we have been told ought to actuate them). Because we have been told that we are creatures existing only for love and maternity, we draw creatures existing only for love and maternity—and call them women. It is perfectly natural that men should draw such creatures; they could not very well draw anything else, for they see them like that. Their portraits are honest, if lop-sided; ours are lop-sided without being honest—the result of an attempt to see ourselves through another’s eyes.

The point of view is everything. An artist is not to be blamed for his natural limitations, for his inability to see beyond his range of vision; but I am inclined to think that he ought to be execrated when he proceeds to stunt his powers by imposing unnatural limitations on himself. A man afflicted with a colour-blindness which leads him to turn out a portrait of me resplendent in beetroot hair and eyes of a vivid green cannot help himself. As he sees me, so he paints me; the effect may be curious, but the thing itself is sincere. But that is no reason why artists endowed with normal vision should bind themselves down to slavish imitation of his peculiar colour-scheme. In the same way a person who is convinced that woman is a form of animated doll whereof the mechanism, when pressed on the right spot, squeaks out the two ejaculations of, “I love you,” and “Oh, my dear baby,” has a perfect right to describe her in those terms; but no woman has the right so to describe herself.

For countless generations the thoughts, the energies, and aspirations of woman have been concentrated upon love and maternity; yet how many are the works of art in which she has immortalized either passion which have endured because they were stamped with the impress of her own individuality and experience? For all that love is her whole existence, no woman has ever sung of love as man has sung of it, has painted it, has embodied it in drama. And of her attitude towards maternity what has she told us in her art? Practically nothing that is illuminating, that is not obvious, that has not been already said for her—usually much better than she herself can say it. As a matter of fact, her description of her emotions when she is in love or bears children is not, as a rule, a first-hand description; it is a more or less careful, more or less intelligent copy of the masculine conception of her emotions under those particular circumstances. Thus the business-like aspect of love in woman, the social or commercial necessity for sexual intercourse is usually ignored by an imitative feminine art—because it is lacking in man, and is, therefore, not really grasped by him. When he becomes aware of it he dislikes it—and draws a Becky Sharp (who has the secret sympathy of every woman not an heiress in her own right—if also the openly-expressed contempt).

Women who have treated of maternity in books or pictures have usually handled it in exactly the same spirit in which it is commonly handled by men—from what may be termed the conventional or Raphaelesque point of view. That is to say, they treat it from the superficial point of view of the outsider, the person who has no actual experience of the subject; yet even the most acid and confirmed of spinsters has an inside view of maternity unattainable by the most sympathetic and intuitive of men—since it has once been a possibility in her life. Yet from woman’s art and woman’s literature what does one learn of the essential difference between the masculine and feminine fashion of regarding that closest of all relations—the relation of mother and child?

I do not feel that I myself am qualified to define and describe that difference. It will have to be defined and described by a woman who has had experience of maternity; but at least I know that the difference exists. Men are capable of being both reverent and ribald on the subject of maternity; I have never met a woman who was either. (I have, of course, met one or two women who adopted the reverent pose; but in all such cases which have come within my experience it has been an undoubted pose, a more or less unconscious imitation of the reverent attitude in the men—usually husbands—with whom they came in contact.) For us the bearing of children is a matter far too serious to be treated with ribaldry; while as regards the lack of extreme reverence, it seems to me that it is impossible for any human being to revere—in the proper sense of the word—the performance by him or herself of a physical function. No doubt it will be objected that maternity has not only a physical aspect; to which I can only reply that it appears to be the purely physical aspect thereof which calls forth reverence and admiration in man. The typical duties of a mother to her children are often performed, as efficiently and as tenderly as any mother could perform them, by an aunt or a nurse; but they have never, when so performed, called forth the flood of idealism and admiration which has been lavished upon the purely physical relationship of mother and child as typified by a woman suckling her offspring. The sight of a mother so engaged has meant inspiration to a good many men; I may be wrong, but I do not imagine that it will ever mean real inspiration to any woman.

My own opinion—which I put forth in all diffidence, as one of the uninitiated—is, that while women, left to themselves, have considerably less reverence than men have for the physical aspect of maternity, they have a good deal more respect for its other aspects. Thus I have several times asked women whom I knew from the circumstances of their lives to have been exposed to temptation whether the thought that they might some day bear a child had not been a conscious and not merely an instinctive factor in their resistance to temptation and the restraint they had put upon their passions and emotions; and the reply has usually been in the affirmative. I do not know whether such a deliberate attitude towards the responsibilities of motherhood is general, but it seems to me essentially feminine, implying, as it does, the consciousness that it is not enough to bear a child, but that the child must be born of a clean body and come in contact with a clean mind—that the actual bringing of a new life into the world is only a small part of motherhood. It is the circumstances under which the child is born and the circumstances under which it is reared to which women attach infinitely more importance than men are apt to do; but, of course, where child-bearing is compulsory—and until very lately it has been practically compulsory upon all classes of wives—such an instinct does not get free play.

A good many times in my life I have heard the practice of passing the death sentence for the common crime of infanticide discussed by women, sometimes in an assemblage convened for the purpose, but more often where the subject has come up by chance. And I have always been struck by the attitude of the women who have discussed it—an attitude which, judged by the conventional or Raphaelesque standard, might be described as typically unfeminine and unmaternal—since their sympathies were invariably and unreservedly on the side of the erring mother, and I cannot remember having heard a single woman’s voice raised in defence of the right to its life of the unwanted child. On the contrary, mothers of families, devoted to their own children and discharging their duties to them in a manner beyond reproach, have, in my hearing, not only pitied, but justified, the unfortunate creatures who, goaded by fear of shame and want of money, destroy the little life they themselves have given. That attitude seems to me to show that women recognize the comparative slightness of the mere physical tie, and that to them it is the other factors in the relationship of mother and child which really count—factors which have practically no chance of being brought into play in the case of the unwanted child.

It is eminently characteristic of the servile, and therefore imitative, quality of women’s literature that the unwanted child—other than the illegitimate—has played practically no part in it. As long as child-bearing was an involuntary consequence of a compulsory trade—as, to a great extent, it still is—there must have been innumerable women who, year after year, bore children whom they did not desire to bear; who suffered the discomforts of pregnancy and the pangs of childbirth not that they might rejoice when a man was born into the world, but that a fresh and unwelcome burden might be added to their lives. And how unwelcome was that burden in many cases is proved by the voluntary and deliberate restriction of the modern family! Yet no woman, so far as I know, has ever taken up pen to write with truth and insight of this, the really tragic element in the life of countless wives—simply because man, not understanding, has never treated of it, because, in his ignorance, he has laid it down that woman finds instinctive and unending joy in the involuntary reproduction of her kind. One sees the advantage of such a comfortable belief to a husband disinclined to self-control.

XVI