Part 3

_Id._... And Lady Florence Dixie has written:—“Nature gives strength and beauty to man, and Nature gives strength and beauty to woman. In this latter instance man flies in the face of Nature, and declares that she must be artificially restrained. Woman must not be allowed to grow up strong like man, because if she did the fact would establish her equality with him, and this cannot be tolerated. So the boy and man are allowed freedom of body, and are trained up to become muscular and strong, while the woman, by artificial, not natural, laws, is bidden to remain inactive and passive, and, in consequence, weak and undeveloped. Mentally it is the same. Nature has unmistakably given to woman a greater amount of brain power. This is at once perceivable in childhood. For instance, on the stage, girls are always employed in preference to boys, for they are considered brighter and sharper in intellect and brain power. Yet man deliberately sets himself to stunt that early evidence of mental capacity by laying down the law that woman’s education shall be on a lower level than that of man’s; that natural truths, which all women should early learn, should be hidden from her; and that while men may be taught everything, women must only acquire a narrow and imperfect knowledge both of life and of Nature’s laws. I maintain that this procedure is arbitrary and cruel, and false to Nature. I characterise it by the strong word of infamous. It has been the means of sending to their graves, unknown, unknelled, and unnamed, thousands of women whose high intellects have been wasted, and whose powers for good have been paralysed and undeveloped.”—(“Gloriana: or, the Revolution of 1900,” p. 130.)

_Id._... Buckle gives numerous instances which support the foregoing assertions, saying himself on the point:—“That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker than men, is a proposition which some persons will not relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed, nothing could prevent its being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity with which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous system called their education, in which valuable things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are irreparably injured.”—(“Miscellaneous Works,” Vol. I., p. 8, “On the influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge.”)

_Id._... As a man of straightforward common-sense, Sydney Smith has left a name unsurpassed in our literary history. Here is something of what he says on this question of woman’s intellect and its waste:—“As the matter stands at present, half the talent in the universe runs to waste, and is totally unprofitable. It would have been almost as well for the world, hitherto, that women, instead of possessing the capacities they do at present, should have been born wholly destitute of wit, genius, and every other attribute of mind of which men make so eminent a use; and the ideas of use and possession are so united together that, because it has been the custom in almost all countries to give to women a different and worse education than to men, the notion has obtained that they do not possess faculties which they do not cultivate.”—(“Essay on Female Education.”)

_Id._... Hear also John Ruskin on the relative intellect or capacity of women:—“Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea (and it must be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with respect to man’s; and how their relations, rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigour, and honour, and authority of both.... Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in anywise on this point.... And first let us take Shakespeare; ... there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose.... Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare’s testimony to the position and character of women in human life. He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, incorruptibly just and pure examples, strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.... I ask you next to receive the witness of Walter Scott.... So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over or educates his mistress.

“Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you, if I had time. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people, how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver’s shuttle; and how the name and form of that spirit adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm and cloudy shield, to whose faith you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue.

“But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I will only ask you to give the legitimate value to the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, consistent as you see it is on this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious and idle view of the relations between man and woman; nay, worse than fictitious or idle, for a thing may be imaginary yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of women, is, according to our common idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide nor even to think for herself. The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as in power. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter? Are Shakespeare and Æschylus, Dante and Homer merely dressing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realisation of which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all households, and ruin into all affections? Are all these great men mistaken, or, are we?”—(“Sesame and Lilies,” p. 125, _et seq._)

Truly, in the face of these things, Tennyson had reason concerning his fellow men, when he wrote:—

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers....” (“Locksley Hall.”)

XIV.

3.—“... _lostling_ ...”

Between the most cultured _hetairai_ and the poor outcast as here shown, were many intervening or coalescing grades. Instance, as one of the phases, the following sketch of an Indian courtesan:—“Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmama, and that was before the days of Eve, as everyone knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young people, in order that morality may be preserved. In the East, where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice.”—Rudyard Kipling (“On the City Wall”).

_Id._—“... _worse than brutal woes_ ...”

Dumas fils, who knew well whereof he wrote, tells of “Les femmes du peuple et de la campagne, suant du matin au soir pour gagner le pain quotidien, le dos courbé, domptées par la misère:” of whom some of the daughters “sortent du groupe par le chemin tentant et facile de la prostitution, mais où le labeur est encore plus rude.”—(“Les Femmes qui Tuent et les Femmes qui Votent,” p. 101.) As historical instance of depth of wretched degradation, _conf._ mediæval privilege of “_scortum ante mortem_,” conceded to some of even the vilest and lowest of criminals condemned to capital punishment. Though such a condition is barely more than parallel to the pitch of infamy of modern times, as instanced in a quotation reproduced by John Ruskin, in “Sesame and Lilies,” p. 91, first ed.:—

“The salons of Mme. C., who did the honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, in fact, with the same _male_ company as one meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor the supper-tables were loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian _demi-monde_, I copy the _menu_ of the supper which was served to all the guests (about 200) seated, at four o’clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Lafitte, Tokay, and Champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout the morning. After supper dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the ball terminated with a _chaine diabolique_ and a _cancan d’enfer_ at seven in the morning.”—(_Morning Post_, March 10th, 1865.)

To which perhaps the most fitting comment is certain words of Letourneau’s:—“It is important to make a distinction. The resemblance between the moral coarseness of the savage and the depravation of the civilised man is quite superficial.... The brutality of the savage has nothing in common with the moral retrogression of the civilised man, struck with decay.... The posterity of the savage may, with the aid of time and culture, attain to great moral elevation, for there are vital forces within him which are fresh and intact. The primitive man is still young, and he possesses many latent energies susceptible of development. In short, the savage is a child, while the civilised man, whose moral nature is corrupt, presents to us rather the picture of decrepit old age.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. V.)

If M. Letourneau will apply his strictures as to senility and decay to so-called “Society” and its system, rather than to the individual, he will find many thinkers, both of his own and other nationalities, agree with his conclusion. Yet not death, but reform, is the righter event to indicate. And by what means that reform may be ensured is, at least in part, clearly set forth in the following passage from a paper recently published by the Women’s Printing Society:—

“My positive belief is that women, and women alone, will be able to reverse the world’s verdict, but they must change their method of reform in two important matters.

“First and foremost, every mother must teach her daughters the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the relations of the sexes, the condition of social opinion, the historical, physiological, ethical aspects of the question. She must train herself so as to be able to teach the young minds these solemn, serious aspects of life, in such a way that the world may learn that the innocence of ignorance is inferior to the purity of right-minded, fearless knowledge. She must strengthen the minds and form the judgment of her daughters, so that they may demand reciprocal purity in those whom they would espouse.

“I fully understand the difficulty of teaching our pure-minded, delicately-nurtured daughters the terrible lessons of this seamy side of life. I am a mother of daughters myself, and I know the cost at which the courage has to be obtained, but in this matter each mother must help another. What a mighty force is influence! What help is conveyed by pressure of opinion! How often do I remember with gratitude the words which I once read as quoted of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, who taught her little daughter to have the courage to hear what other little girls had to bear. How gladly I acknowledge the stimulus of that example to myself, and therefore I would urge all women to SPEAK OUT. Do not be afraid. You will not lose your womanliness. You will not lose your purity. You will not have your sensibilities blunted by such rough use. No, “To the pure all things are pure.” We must reach the mass through the unit, it is the individual who helps to move the world.

“We must teach and train the mind of every woman with whom we come in contact, for we have mighty work to do. A no less deed than to reverse the judgment of the whole world on the subject of purity. I do not believe it is possible for men to accomplish any radical reform in this matter. It belongs to women—I was going to say exclusively—but I will modify my assertion; and if women do not speak out more courageously in the future than they have done in the past, I believe there is but slight chance of any further amelioration in the condition of society than those which are such an inadequate return at the present time, for all the love and money expended on them.”

And the same writer says, on a still more recent occasion: “I find no words strong enough to denounce the sin of silence amongst women on these social evils; and I have come to feel that the best proof of the subjection and degradation of my sex lies in the opinions often expressed by so-called Christian and pure women _about other women_. If their judgments were not perverted, if their wills were not broken, if their consciences were not asleep, and if their souls were not enslaved, they would not, they could not, hold their peace and let the havoc go on with women and children as it does.”—Mrs. Laura E. Morgan-Browne (“_Woman’s Herald_”, 27th Feb., 1892).

Mrs. Morgan-Browne is, perhaps, not more than needfully severe on the almost criminal reticence of women; yet man must certainly take the greater share of blame for the social “double morality” which condemns irrevocably a woman, and leaves practically unscathed a man, for the same act. It is male-made laws and rules that have resulted in the perverted judgments, broken wills, sleeping consciences, and enslaved souls, which both sexes may deplore. Charles Kingsley pointed a cogent truth when he said that “Women will never obtain moral equity until they have civil equality.” (See also Note XXXV., 6.)

XV.

2.—“... _woman’s griefs with man of barbarous breed_.”

“In all barbarous societies the subjection of woman is more or less severe; customs or coarse laws have regulated the savagery of the first anarchic ages; they have doubtless set up a barrier against primitive ferocity, they have interdicted certain absolutely terrible abuses of force, but they have only replaced these by a servitude which is still very heavy, is often iniquitous, and no longer permits to legally-possessed women those escapes, or capriciously accorded liberties, which were tolerated in savage life.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIV.).

4.—“_Crippled and crushed by cruelty and toil_.”

Some of this crippling has been of set purpose, as well as the simple result of brutal male recklessness. Instance the distortion of the feet of high-born female children in China, the tradition concerning which is that the practice was initiated and enjoined by an emperor of old, one of whose wives had (literally) “run away” from him. A somewhat similar precaution would seem to be indicated as a very probable source of the persistent and almost universal incommodity and incumbrance of the dress of woman as compared with that of man.

Dr. Thomas Inman, in his “Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names,” Vol. I., p. 53, seems to indicate a different, yet closely allied, origin and motive for the impeding form of woman’s clothing, the subordinate status of woman being always the purpose in view.

_Id._... “Even supposing a woman to give no encouragement to her admirers, many plots are always laid to carry her off. In the encounters which result from these, she is almost certain to receive some violent injury, for each of the combatants orders her to follow him, and, in the event of her refusing, throws a spear at her. The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivities to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wandering in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought, a stranger, by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off successively to distant and more distant points.”—Sir George Grey (“Travels in North-Western Australia,” 1841, Vol. II., p. 249; quoted in M’Lennan on “Primitive Marriage,” p. 75).

5.—“... _her heart a gentle mien essayed_.”

“Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in greater tenderness and less selfishness, and this holds good even with savages, as shown by a well-known passage in “Mungo Park’s Travels,” and by statements made by other travellers. Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she should often extend them towards her fellow creatures.”... “Mungo Park heard the negro women teaching their young children to love the truth.”—Darwin (“The Descent of Man,” Chaps. IX., III.).

6.—“_By deeper passion, holier impulse, swayed_.”

Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham well says:—“Woman has accepted her subordinate lot, and lived in it with comparatively little moral harm, as the only truly superior and noble being could have done. The masculine spirit, enslaved and imprisoned, becomes diabolic or broken; the feminine, only warped, weakened, or distorted, is ready, whenever the pressure upon it is removed, to assume its true attitude.”—(“Woman and Her Era,” Part IV.)

_Id._... Perhaps as appositely here, as elsewhere, may be recorded the following:—“An American writer says: ‘While I lived among the Choctaw Indians, I held a consultation with one of their chiefs respecting the successive stages of their progress in the arts of civilised life, and, among other things, he informed me that at their start they made a great mistake, they only sent boys to school. Their boys came home intelligent men, but they married uneducated and uncivilised wives, and the uniform result was that the children were all like their mothers. The father soon lost all his interest both in wife and children. And now,’ said he, ‘if we could educate but one class of our children, we should choose the girls, for, when they become mothers, they educate their sons.’ This is the point, and it is true.”—(_Manchester Examiner and Times_, Sept., 1870.)

8.—“... _mother-love alone the infant oft preserved_.”

In Polynesia, “if a child was born, the husband was free to kill the infant, which was done by applying a piece of wet stuff to the mouth and nose, or to let it live; but, in the latter case, he generally kept the wife for the whole of her life. If the union was sterile, or the children put to death, the man had always the right to abandon the woman when and how it seemed good to him.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” p. 113).

_Id._... An Arab legend tells of a chief of Tamin, who became a constant practitioner of infanticide in consequence of a wound given to his pride ... and from that moment he interred alive all his daughters, according to the ancient custom. But one day, during his absence, a daughter was born to him, whom the mother secretly sent to a relative to save her, and then declared to her husband that she had been delivered of a still-born child.—(R. Smith, on “Kinship,” p. 282; quoted by Letourneau, “Evolution of Marriage,” p. 83.)

_Id._... Charles Darwin writes of Tierra del Fuego:—“The husband is to the wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed ever perpetrated than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding, dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs!”—(“Voyage of the _Beagle_,” Chap. X.)

_Id._... Mrs. Reichardt tells of a certain Moslem, of high standing in the society of Damascus, who “married a young girl of ten, and, after she had born him two sons, he drove her almost mad with such cruelty and unkindness that she escaped, and went back to her father. Her husband sent for her to return, and, as she was hidden out of his sight, he wrung the necks of both his sons, and sent their bodies to his wife to show her what he had in store for her. The young mother, not yet twenty, died in a few days.”—(See _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1891.)

_Id._... It will not be forgotten that, in more than one of the older civilisations, the father had the power of life and death over the members of the family, even past adult age.

And, to come to quite recent times, and this our England, Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, to whose unflagging energy, during some fifteen years of labour, was mainly attributable (as the Parliamentary sponsors of the measures know) the amelioration in the English law concerning wives and mothers, embodied in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, together with the later and beneficent Guardianship of Infants Act, 1886, relates, in her record of the history of this latter Act:—

“It will be remembered that so recently as 1883, a young lady petitioned that she might be allowed to spend her summer holidays with her own mother, from whom she was separated for no fault of her own or of her mother’s, but in virtue of the supreme legal rights of her father. The Court refused her petition, natural and proper as it seems to everyone of human feelings; and the words of the Master of the Rolls in giving judgment, on the 24th of July, 1883, are more significant and instructive as to the actual state of the law than the words of any non-professional writer can be:—‘The law of England _recognises the rights of the father_, not as the guardian, but _because he is the father of his children_.... _The rights of the father are recognised because he is the father_; his duties as a father are recognised because they are natural duties. The natural duties of a father are to treat his children with the utmost affection, and with infinite tenderness.... The law recognises these duties, from which if a father breaks he breaks from everything which nature calls upon him to do; and, although the law may not be able to insist upon their performance, it is because the law recognises them, and knows that in almost every case the natural feelings of a father will prevail. The law trusts that the father will perform his natural duties, and does not, and, indeed, cannot, inquire how they have been performed.... I am not prepared to say whether _when the child is a ward of Court, and the conduct of the father is such as to exhaust all patience—such, for instance, as cruelty, or pitiless spitefulness carried to a great extent—the Court might not interfere. But such interference will be exercised_ ONLY IN THE UTMOST NEED, AND IN MOST EXTREME CASES. It is impossible to lay down the rule of the Court more clearly than has been done by Vice-Chancellor Bacon in the recent case of “_Re._ Plowley” (47 “L.T.,” N.S., 283). In saying that this Court, “whatever be its authority or jurisdiction, _has no authority to interfere with the sacred right of a father over his own children_,” the learned Vice-Chancellor has summed up all that I intended to say. _The rights of a father are sacred rights, because his duties are sacred._...’