CHAPTER I.

IS THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMAN THE PRICE OF EMPIRE?

THE distinct aim which emboldened the author to add one more essay to the large class of works that deal with woman's position throughout the ages was twofold. It seemed, in the first place, that there was a lack of connecting principle in the series of detached sketches that usually make up a work of the kind; that a continuous, panoramic view of human history would reveal such a principle, and one of very great importance for the proper appreciation of the present woman-movement. It has been possible to trace the action of a consistent law through all the historic spasms of feminist agitation, and to show that that law has reached a stage of final and irresistible pressure in our time. The underlying principles of the present movement are too rarely noticed, and a clear enunciation of them may contribute a little to the proper understanding of the struggle.

The second aim was to meet a serious concern that is expressed by thoughtful observers, when they note that the woman-movement is one of a score of agitations that ruffle the whole surface, and even stir the depths, of modern life. We have passed through a century of revolutions, yet we seem as far as ever from the peace that each one had promised to bring. Nations that had slept undisturbed through the political storms that shook Europe during three generations are now waking to revolt; classes that had witnessed the upheavals of the nineteenth century with dull indifference or shrinking apprehension now take up the world-cry of change with the energy of pioneers. The routine of daily life is distracted with the flash of a dozen new ideals. Placidity has fallen from the rank of virtues. What is the meaning of it all? What is likely to be the issue?

Those who read history shake their heads in concern. They say that they are familiar with the symptoms, and can recognise the malady. Through such spluttering of energy and iridescence of dreams every great nation passed as it neared the end. Such scenes were witnessed, and just such cries were heard, in the marble porticoes of Greece when its glorious life began to sink. The same cries rang through the _fora_ of Imperial Rome, and were heard again in the _piasse_ of medieval Italy, when the long-drawn shadows fell on their exhausted citizens. Do not nations run the cycle of birth and lusty manhood and decay, like individuals? And is not this restlessness the familiar token that the heart is slowing down and the frame failing to control the worn and hypersensitive nerves? Do not the fevered dreams, the ceaseless irritation, the rebellion of parts that had served so well in silence, warn us that the dissolution, of which we have read so often, is setting in? Can we do other than knit the frame close in its old fabric, repress the impatient elements, and close our eyes resolutely to the disordered dreams?

In this light many regard the agitation for a revision of woman's place in the social order. "The subordination of woman is invariably one of the prices of Empire," says Dr. Emil Reich, who has lately set out to correct our _chinoiserie d'idées_ with the breadth of his historical lore. The British or the German Empire grew to its height when--if we can forget Elizabeth--woman tended the cradle and the home, while man wrought its industries, shaped its policy, and bore its defence. With the same sharing of labour among their men and women all earlier empires had grown to power, and it was only in the years of decay that woman impatiently clamoured for an enlargement of her sphere. This agitation, they conclude, is the mere play of distempered nerves in an enfeebled system. It must be cured by a sermon on self-sacrifice, a return to virility, a stern refusal of the demand in the interest of the race. They who listen to it cannot have scanned the memorial pages in which history has written the fate of even greater empires than ours.

I propose to show that this conservative attitude is inspired by an entirely false reading of history. True it is that the recent course of woman's development recalls a drama that has been played on the planet's stage time after time. In the first act we have the "womanly woman," absorbed in the cradle and the distaff, clothed in quiet matronly virtues, content to hear news of the great world without from her stronger mate. In the second act new and disturbing types come on, women impatient of child-bearing, women that chafe at the barriers and cry for freedom and justice, women that would go out with man into the battle of life. The third act--the act in which men begin to listen--has so constantly ended in tragedy that many confidently look for the same issue now, if we dally with the demands of the women as those others did. It is a plausible anxiety, yet it arises solely from a superficial and perverse reading of history.

In the first place, this assumption that nations run through a life-curve like individuals needs serious qualification. There is no inner law that nations shall be born and die, like the men and women who compose them. To the student of science or history a law is but a description of the way in which things have invariably acted, and will presumably act again in the same circumstances. But the circumstances in this case are the same no longer. The conditions of national existence are radically different from what they were when the procession of great empires passed over the stage of the world. Then, almost invariably, the situation was that one virile race entrenched itself in a strong capital and flung out its frontiers on every side, while smaller races watched on the bracing hills all round for the softness of muscle that city-life and parasitic habits would bring. Nerve and brain mattered far less in those days of heavy arms and armour. When you shortened your spear and lightened your shield, the vigorous barbarian knew that his hour had come; the frontier-walls crumbled under his pressure, and he took over the heritage of civilisation. That situation has passed away for ever. There is not one world-power to-day, with a chafing surge of barbarians beating on its shores, but a dozen great nations, and a new thing in the world that we call the balance of power. Softness of muscle is of less account, as a regiment of city clerks can annihilate an army of barbarians. Victory goes to intelligence and nerve. A nation may die still, but assuredly there is no inner law demanding that it must. That impressive march across the stage of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, Greece, Rome, and Venice gives no precedent for our time.

Further, even if a modern nation die, the cry of its women will not perish with it, as in those older days. I do not for a moment forget that the balance may be disturbed, and the flood of war devastate a modern kingdom, at any time; or that, if the lips of our guns were sealed and the red rain stopped for ever, commercial rivalry might bring a flagging race to ruin. That is quite possible; but the truth is that every one of these rival nations has the same agitation in its midst. No nation whose women have not yet stirred at the cry of reform has the remotest chance of rising to power. The cry is strong in Japan to-day, and will be heard in China to-morrow. It has loud and eloquent utterance in Russia, Italy, and Spain, and it will assuredly pass on to a renovated Turkey and Persia. Whatever powers rise or fall, civilisation cannot die again, and it is civilisation that faces the demand for change to-day. The cry died away on the lips of the women of Greece and Rome and medieval Italy because their civilisation perished, and a power rose on its ruins that had not yet reached the same height of culture. That, assuredly, will never happen again.

If this is so--and, apart from a few yellow-peril fanatics, I know of no serious observer who doubts it--the comparison of the modern woman-movement with those of former times must lead to a very different conclusion from that of our superficial historical critics. England, or the greatness of England, may die, but this agitation is not a symptom, good or bad, of England's life alone. It is not a special feature of the life of Germany, or the United States, or any nation. It is a general feature of civilisation, and civilisation will never again evade the settlement of its moral problems by dying. Culture will go on, and the demand grows with culture. We cannot possibly see a third act to the drama as it was played on the earlier stage of history. There will be no fall of the curtain now on an unsolved problem.

The fallacy of those, like Dr. Reich, who read the story otherwise is the familiar historical mistake of regarding things as connected because they chanced to occur at the same time. We may allow that men were stronger at the time when women were subject; but it is a poor fallacy to forget that the men then had a fresh heritage of strength from barbaric days, as yet untouched by luxury, and to assign their triumph in any measure to the silence of their women. We may grant that the rebellion of the women generally came when the nation was nearing decay; but, again, it is a poor fallacy to erect this coincidence into a principle. The truth is that the revolt of the women in earlier civilisations coincided with two things--with a high state of culture and with a beginning of decay; and an unprejudiced study of the agitation in any era will show plainly that it was due to the former, and merely coincided with the latter. It sprang from the culture, the social conscience, the strength--not the weakness--of a nation. It was an ironic feature of the older world that high and general culture and the triumph of justice over ancient conventions were only reached when death was approaching. The new order promises a totally different development, because all nations of power are at the same stage of culture. And in our own day the movement is due quite unmistakably to the renascence of culture and the advance of moral principle.

Civilisation has now to face the problem candidly, and settle it. The agitation is no bubble rising out of the effervescence of the time, to burst, like a score of others that shone in the sun for a moment, and give place to new. It is an essential element in the evolution of culture. No nation ever reached the point of culture that we have reached but its women rose with a moral challenge of the justice of their position. Every nation had inherited from its barbaric ancestry the practice of excluding women from the corporate life, and there was good ground to demand a reconsideration of the practice when the sense of social justice developed. To regard the demand of our women as due to a temporary fit of nerves is to ignore one of the most salient features of the course of human history. Wherever civilisation grew out of barbarism the demand arose; it died away only because a fresh barbarism broke the thread of civilisation. As that thread will never more be broken, the demand will increase with our culture, and it can afford to smile at these fallacious lessons or warnings from a widely different past. When, in addition, we consider the development of political life itself, when we see that it concerns itself increasingly with the affairs of women in a way that it never did before, we are forced to admit that the demand for a reconsideration of woman's position has a solid base in the actual evolution of life.

I propose, therefore, to run rapidly over the known phases of human development, and show how the attitude of women has varied in proportion to the growth of enlightenment and moral feeling. We will catch what glimpse we can of the first human pair that wandered over a strange earth in the faintest dawn of humanity. We will learn, from races that have lingered in primitive ways for untold ages, how, as the family grew into the race (or the rough social group into the clan),[1] the issues of the corporate life were naturally appropriated by the men. We will see how, as savagery rises to barbarism, as the social life grows larger and more varied, the warriors and their chief keep control of it, save where some exceptional circumstance disposes them to take account of the woman's will. We shall find the woman still patient and laborious in the early years of civilisation, and will note how, as the corporate life begins to look to other things than the mere defence of the State, as social construction is studied, the woman, awakened by the light of culture that breaks through the narrow windows of her home, comes forth to claim her share in the control of that larger national life, with which she must prosper or suffer no less than the man. We shall see how the division of labour handed down from the barbaric ages breaks down, how the law comes to invade every corner of the little territory in which she had held sway, how she demands that her knowledge and feeling be consulted in the framing of such laws, and how she builds up a larger ideal of womanhood that will add dignity and worth to maternity by a recognition of her essential humanity.