Part 4

“These sacred rights of the father were, it will be observed, in the eyes of the law so _exclusive_ and paramount as to justify and demand the refusal to a young girl, at the most critical period of early womanhood, of the solace of a few weeks’ intercourse with a blameless and beloved mother; and this although the gratification of the daughter’s wish would have involved no denial to the father of the solace of his daughter’s company, since she was not actually, but only _legally_, in his custody, not having seen him for more than a year.

“It will be seen from this that the father alone has the absolute legal right to deal with his child or children, to the extent of separating them, at his own sole pleasure, from their mother, and of giving them into the care and custody of any person whom he may think fit. The mother has, as such, no legal status, no choice, voice, lot, or part in the matter.”—Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy (“The Infants’ Act, 1886,” p. 2).

It is consolatory to learn that a palliation of some part of the above unjust conditions has been achieved; yet how often has our presumedly happy land witnessed scenes of child misery and helpless mother-love, to which was denied even the poor consolation, so pathetically depicted by Mrs. Browning, in a scene which, as Moir truly says, “weighs on the heart like a nightmare”;—

“Do you hear the children weeping, oh! my brothers! Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And _that_ cannot stop their tears.”

XVI.

4.—“... _single basis_ ...”

First written “disproportioned basis,” but altered, with good reason, in the face of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s arrogant male thesis:—“Only that mental energy is normally feminine which can co-exist with the production and nursing of the due (!) number of healthy children.”—(“Study of Sociology,” Chap. XV., note 5.)

But Professor Huxley speaks, more humanly, of “... such a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, and with mind bent only on her home; but yet, without effort and without thought, knitting for her children. Now stockings are good and comfortable things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the better for them, but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother as a mere stocking-machine—a mere provider of physical comforts.”—(“On Improving Natural Knowledge.”)

Yet, if it be—as truly it is—a senseless and disgraceful depreciation of woman to look upon her as “a mere machine for the making of stockings,” is it not equally unworthy and unwise to consider her as—primarily and essentially—a mere machine for the making of a “due” number of stocking-wearers?

5.—“... _quicker fire_.”

In even so sedate and usually dispassionate a physiologist and philosopher as Charles Darwin, the masculine sex-bias is so ingrained and so ingenuous that he strives to disparage and contemn the notorious mental quickness or intuition of woman by saying:—“It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.”—(“The Descent of Man,” Chap. XIX.).

His unconscious sex-bias apparently overlooked the pregnant and very pertinent caution which he had himself uttered in a previous work:—“Useful organs, however little they may be developed, unless we have reason to suppose that they were formerly more highly developed, ought not to be considered as rudimentary. They may be in a nascent condition, and in progress towards further development. Rudimentary organs, on the other hand, are either quite useless, such as teeth which never cut through the gums, or, almost useless, such as the wings of an ostrich, which serve merely as sails.... It is, however, often difficult to distinguish between rudimentary and nascent organs, for we can judge only by analogy whether a part is capable of further development, in which case alone it deserves to be called nascent.”—(“Origin of Species,” Chap. XIV.).

But surely Darwin would admit that experiment in capacity of education and development was as worthy evidence as “analogy,” and would further acknowledge how little effort in this direction had ever been made with woman. Buckle would seem to be far nearer the truth in ascribing to woman an unconscious deductive form of reasoning, as against the slow and studied inductive process to which man is so generally trained to be a slave.—(See Buckle’s Essay on the “Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge,” as quoted from in Note XIII., 8.)

7.—“... _one permitted end_ ...”

“The function of child-bearing has been exaggerated to an utterly disproportionate degree in her life; it has been made her almost sole claim to existence. Yet it is not the true purpose of any intellectual organism to live solely to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty is also to live for its own happiness and well-being.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).

_Id._ ... “... not a moth with vain desire Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another’s gain.” —Tennyson (“In Memoriam,” LIV.).

XVII.

5.—“... _aspirations crushed_ ...”

“I have found life a series of hopes unfulfilled and wishes ungratified.”—(Dying words of a talented woman.)

6.—“... _purblind pride_ ...”

“Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense.” —Pope.

7.—“_Her every wish made subject_ ...”

For a somewhat modern exemplification may be taken the instance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Paris with her husband, in 1852. She writes of Georges Sand:—“She received us in a room with a bed in it, the only room she has to occupy, I suppose, during her short stay in Paris.... Ah, but I didn’t see her smoke; I was unfortunate. I could only go with Robert three times to her house, and once she was out. He was really very good and kind to let me go at all after he found the sort of society rampant around her. He didn’t like it extremely, but, being the prince of husbands, he was lenient to my desires, and yielded the point.”—(“Life of Robert Browning,” by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, 1891.)

8.—“... _her God_.”

_Conf._ Milton (“Paradise Lost,” Book IV., 299):—

“He for God only, she for God in him.”

See Note XXXV., 5. Compare also the Code of Manu, v. 154, as quoted by Letourneau:—“Although the conduct of her husband may be blameworthy, and he may give himself up to other amours, and be devoid of good qualities, a virtuous woman ought constantly to revere him as a God.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIII.)

_Id._... Here may fittingly be appended some masculine concepts of feminine duty in other races.

The STATUS OF WOMAN, according to the CHINESE Classics:—

In a periodical published in Shanghai, Dr. Faber, a well-known scholar, writes (1891) a paper on the status of women in China. He refers especially to the theoretical position assigned to women by the Chinese Classics. These lay down the different dogmas on the subject:

“1.—Women are as different in nature from man as earth is from heaven.

“2.—Dualism, not only in body form, but in the very essence of nature, is indicated and proclaimed by Chinese moralists of all times and creed. The male belongs to _yang_, the female to _yin_.

“3.—Death and all other evils have their origin in the _yin_, or female principle; life and prosperity come from its subjection to the _yang_ or male principle; and it is therefore regarded as a law of nature that women should be kept under the control of men, and not be allowed any will of their own.

“4.—Women, indeed, are human beings, (!) but they are of a lower state than men, and can never attain to full equality with them.

“5.—The aim of female education, therefore, is perfect submission, not cultivation and development of mind.

“6.—Women cannot have any happiness of their own; they have to live and work for men.

“7.—Only as the mother of a son, as the continuator of the direct line of a family, can a woman escape from her degradation and become to a certain degree her husband’s equal; but then only in household affairs, especially the female department, and in the ancestral hall.

“8.—In the other world, woman’s condition remains exactly the same, for the same laws of existence apply. She is not the equal of her husband; she belongs to him, and is dependent for her happiness on the sacrifice offered by her descendants.

“These are the doctrines taught by Confucius, Mencius, and the ancient sages, whose memory has been revered in China for thousands of years.”

And now, what wonder that Chinese civilisation and progress is, and remains, fossilised, inert, dead?

JAPAN.

“There is one supreme maxim upon which the conduct of a well-bred woman is made to turn, and this is ‘obedience.’ Life, the Japanese girl is taught, divides itself into three stages of obedience. In youth she is to obey her father; in marriage her husband; in widowhood her eldest son. Hence her preparation for life is always preparation for service. The marriage of the Japanese girl usually takes place when she is about seventeen. It is contrary to all custom that she should have any voice in it. Once married, she passes from her father’s household into the household of her husband, and her period of self-abnegation begins. Her own family is to be as nothing to her. Her duty is to charm the existence of her husband, and to please his relations. Custom demands that she shall always smile upon him, and that she shall carefully hide from him any signs of bad humour, jealousy, or physical pain.”—Tinseau (quoted in _Review of Reviews_, Vol. IV., p. 282.)

Note well the last two words of the above quotation; they have a bearing on much that will have to be said presently. Meanwhile, we read from another writer: “The expression, _res angusta domi_, might have been invented for Japan, so narrow of necessity is the wife’s home life. The husband mixes with the world, the wife does not; the husband has been somewhat inspired, and his thoughts widened by his intercourse with foreigners, the wife has not met them. The husband has more or less acquaintance with western learning; the wife has none. Affection between the two, within the limits which unequal intellectuality ruthlessly prescribes, there well may be, but the love which comes of a perfect intimacy, of mutual knowledge and common aspiration, there can rarely be. The very vocabulary of romantic love does not exist in Japanese; _a fortiori_, there is little of the fact.” Yet, under the influence of western civilisation, these things are changing rapidly, and Mr. Norman, the commissioner of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, further relates that “The generation that is now growing up will be very different. Not only will the men of it be more western, but the women also. As girls they will have been to schools like our schools at home, and they will have learned English, and history, and geography, and science, and foreign music; perhaps, even, something of politics and political economy. They will know something of ‘society,’ as we now use the term, and will both seek it and make it. The old home life will become unbearable to the woman, and she will demand the right of choosing her husband just as much as he chooses her. Then the rest will be easy.”

The harsh and restrained position, both of Japanese and Chinese women, is frequently attributed to Confucianism; yet the matter does not seem to be of any one creed, but rather of every religious creed. Thus Mrs. Reichardt tells us, concerning Mahommedan women and Mahommedan married life, that—

“A Mahommedan girl is brought up with the idea that she has nothing to do with love. It is _ayib_ (shame) for her to love her husband. She dare not do it if she would. What he asks and expects of her is to tremble before him, and yield him unquestioning obedience. I have _seen_ a husband look pleased and complacent when his wife looked afraid to lift up her eyes, even when visitors were present.”—(_Nineteenth Century_, June, 1891.)

Nor is Confucius alone, or the simple contagion of his teaching, rightly to be blamed for the following condition of things in our own dependency of

INDIA.

The _Bombay Guardian_ calls attention to an extraordinary book which is being circulated (early in 1891) broadcast, as a prize-book in the Government Girls’ School in the Bombay Presidency. The following quotations are given as specimens of the teachings set forth in the book:—

“If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of good or bad disposition, diseased, fiendish, irascible, or a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind, deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, cowardly, perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she ought to worship him as God, with mind, speech, and person.

“The wife who gives an angry answer to her husband will become a village pariah dog; she will also become a jackal, and live in an uninhabited desert.

“The woman who eats sweetmeats without sharing them with her husband will become a hen-owl, living in a hollow tree.—(Conf. Note VI., 8.)

“The woman who walks alone without her husband will become a filth-eating village sow.

“The woman who speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb in the next incarnation.

“The woman who hates her husband’s relations will become from birth to birth a musk-rat, living in filth.

“She who is always jealous of her husband’s concubine will be childless in the next incarnation.”

To illustrate the blessed result of a wife’s subserviency, a story is told of “the great reward that came to the wife of an ill-tempered, diseased, and wicked Brahmin, who served her husband with a slavish obedience, and even went the length of carrying him on her own shoulders to visit his mistress.”

So quotes the _Woman’s Journal_ of Boston, Mass., and says in comment thereon:—“The British Government in India has bound itself not to interfere with the religion of the natives, but it certainly ought not to inculcate in Government schools the worst doctrines of heathenism.”

Yet, again, are these Hindoo, or Japanese, or Chinese doctrines simply the precepts of “heathenism” alone? Buckle quotes for us the following passage from the Nonconformist “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p. 242:—“There is not any husband to whom this honour of submission is not due. No personal infirmity, frowardness of nature, no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it.”

Much the same teaching is continued a century later in the noted Dr. Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters”; and again, hideously true is the picture which Mill has to draw, in 1869:—“Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to, though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him, he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.... No amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.”—(“The Subjection of Women,” pp. 57, 59.)

As to how far public feeling, if not law, has amended some of these conditions, see Note XXXVI., 6. Meanwhile, as an evidence of what is the “orthodox” opinion and sentiment at this present day, it may be noted that Cardinal Manning wrote in the _Dublin Review_, July, 1891:—“A woman enters for life into a sacred contract with a man before God at the altar to fulfil to him the duties of wife, mother, and head of his home. Is it lawful for her, even with his consent, to make afterwards a second contract for so many shillings a week with a millowner whereby she becomes unable to provide her husband’s food, train up her children, or do the duties of her home? It is no question of the lawfulness of gaining a few more shillings for the expenses of a family, but of the lawfulness of breaking a prior contract, the most solemn between man and woman. No arguments of expediency can be admitted. It is an obligation of conscience to which all things must give way. The duties of home must first be done” (by the woman) “then other questions may be entertained.”

Are not these English injunctions to womanly and wifely slavery as trenchant and merciless as any ascribed to so-called “heathenism”? And is it not the fuller truth that the spirit of the male teaching against woman is the same all the world over, and no mere matter of creed—which is nevertheless made the convenient vehicle for such teaching; and that, in brief, the precepts of womanly and wifely servitude are blind, brutal, and universal?

See also Note XXXIV., 8.

XVIII.

8.—“_To compass power unknown in body and in mind_.”

“We need a new ethic of the sexes, and this not merely, or even mainly, as an intellectual construction, but as a discipline of life, and we need more. We need an increasing education and civism of women.”—P. Geddes and J. A. Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” p. 297).

Newnham and Girton, Vassar and Zurich, are already rendering account of woman’s scope of mental power; while the circus, the gymnasium, swimming and mountaineering are showing what she might do corporeally, apart from her hideous and literally impeding style of clothing. As for some other forms of utilitarian occupation, read the following concerning certain of the Lancashire women:—

“Mr. Edgar L. Wakeman, an observant American author, is at present on a visit to this country, and is giving his countrymen the benefit of his impressions of English life and social conditions.

“The ‘pit-brow’ lasses of the Wigan district will not need to complain, for he writes of them not only in a kindly spirit, but even with enthusiasm for their healthy looks, graceful figures, and good conduct. We need not follow his description of the processes in which the women of the colliery are employed, but we may say in passing that Mr. Wakeman was astonished by the ‘wonderful quickness of eye and movement’ shown by the ‘screeners,’ and by the ‘superb physical development’ and agility of the ‘fillers.’ He had expected to find them ‘the most forlorn creatures bearing the image of women,’ and he found them strong, healthy, good-natured, and thoroughly respectable. ‘English roses glow from English cheeks. You cannot find plumper figures, prettier forms, more shapely necks, or daintier feet, despite the ugly clogs, in all of dreamful Andalusia. The “broo gear” is laid aside on the return home from work, and then the “pit-brow” lass is arrayed as becomingly as any of her class in England, and in the village street, or at church of a Sunday, you could not pick her out from among her companions, unless for her fine colour, form, and a positively classic poise and grace of carriage possessed by no other working women of England. Altogether,’ he says, ‘I should seriously regard the pit-brow lasses as the handsomest, healthiest, happiest, and most respectable working women in England.’—(_Manchester Guardian_, Aug. 28, 1891.)

_Id._... Concerning the question of male and female dress, evidence as to how far woman has been hindered and “handicapped” by her conventional attire, and not by her want of physical strength or courage, is reported from time to time in the public prints, as witness the following, published generally in the English newspapers of 14th Oct., 1891:—

“Not long since a well-known European courier, having grown grey in his occupation, fell ill, and like others similarly afflicted, was compelled to call in a doctor. This gentleman was completely taken by surprise on discovering that his patient was a female. Then the sick woman—who had piloted numerous English and American families through the land of the Latin, the Turk, and others, and led timid tourists safely through many imaginary dangers—confessed that she had worn men’s clothes for forty years. She stated that her reasons for this masquerade were that having, at the age of thirteen, been left a friendless orphan, she had become convinced, after futile struggling for employment, that many of the obstacles in her path could be swept away by discarding her proper garments and assuming the _rôle_ and attire of masculine youth. This she did. She closely cut her hair, bought boy’s clothes, put them on, and sallied forth in the world to seek her fortune. With the change of dress seems to have come a change of luck, for she quickly found employment, and being an apt scholar, and facile at learning languages, was enabled after a time to obtain a position as courier, and, but for her unfortunate illness, it is tolerably certain that the truth would never have been revealed during her lifetime.”

In the early days of April, 1892, the Vienna correspondent of the _Standard_ reported that—

“On the 30th ult., there died in Hungary, at about the same hour, two ladies who served in 1848 in the Revolutionary Army, and fought in several of the fiercest battles, dressed in military uniform. One of them was several times promoted, and, under the name of Karl, attained the rank of First Lieutenant of Hussars. At this point, however, an artillery major stopped her military career by marrying her. The other fought under the name of Josef, and was decorated for valour in the field. She married long after the campaign. A Hungarian paper, referring to the two cases, says that about a dozen women fought in 1848 in the insurrectionary ranks.”

Somewhat more detailed particulars concerning “Lieutenant Karl” were afterwards given by the _Manchester Guardian_ (June 6, 1892), as follows:—

“The Austrian _Volkszeitung_ announces the death of Frau Marie Hoche, who has had a most singular and romantic career. Her maiden name was Lepstuk. In the momentous year of 1848 Marie Lepstuk, who was then eighteen years of age, joined the German legion at Vienna; then, returning home, she adopted the name of Karl and joined the Tyroler Jager Regiment of the revolutionary army. She showed great bravery in the battlefield, received the medallion, and was raised to the rank of lieutenant. A wound compelled her to go into hospital, but after her recovery she joined the Hussars. As a reward for exceeding bravery she was next made oberlieutenant on the field. Soon after this her sex was discovered, but a major fell in love with her, and they were married. At Vilagos both were taken prisoners, and while in the fortress she gave birth to her first child. After the major’s death she was remarried to Oberlieutenant Hoche. For the past few years Frau Hoche has been in needy circumstances, but an appeal from Jokai brought relief.”

All of which goes far to discredit M. Michelet’s theory that women are “born invalids,” an assertion which Dr. Julia Mitchell “stigmatises naturally enough as ‘all nonsense,’” and is thus approved—with a strange magnanimity—by the _British Medical Journal_.—(See _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 29, 1892.)