NormalizeHEADmain

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 4995 deletions

diff --git a/old/54704-0.txt b/old/54704-0.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 19a43bd..0000000
--- a/old/54704-0.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,4995 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marriage as a Trade, by Cicely Hamilton
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Marriage as a Trade
-
-Author: Cicely Hamilton
-
-Release Date: May 11, 2017 [EBook #54704]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARRIAGE AS A TRADE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Carlo Traverso, Les Galloway and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-                      Marriage as a Trade
-
-                                  BY
-
-                            CICELY HAMILTON
-
-                     AUTHOR OF “DIANA OF DOBSON’S”
-
-                       [Illustration: Colophon]
-
-                               NEW YORK
-
-                       MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
-
-                                 1909
-
-
-
-
-                          COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
-
-                       MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
-
-                               New York
-
-                         _All Rights Reserved_
-
-                      THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
-                        RAHWAY, N. J., U. S. A.
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-The only excuse for this book is the lack of books on the subject with
-which it deals—the trade aspect of marriage. That is to say, wifehood
-and motherhood considered as a means of livelihood for women.
-
-I shall not deny for an instant that there are aspects of matrimony
-other than the trade aspect; but upon these there is no lack of a very
-plentiful literature—the love of man and woman has been written about
-since humanity acquired the art of writing.
-
-The love of man and woman is, no doubt, a thing of infinite importance;
-but also of infinite importance is the manner in which woman earns her
-bread and the economic conditions under which she enters the family and
-propagates the race. Thus an inquiry into the circumstances under which
-the wife and mother plies her trade seems to me quite as necessary
-and justifiable as an inquiry into the conditions of other and less
-important industries—such as mining or cotton-spinning. It will not be
-disputed that the manner in which a human being earns his livelihood
-tends to mould and influence his character—to warp or to improve it.
-The man who works amidst brutalizing surroundings is apt to become
-brutal; the man from whom intelligence is demanded is apt to exercise
-it. Particular trades tend to develop particular types; the boy who
-becomes a soldier will not turn out in all respects the man he would
-have been had he decided to enter a stockbroker’s office. In the same
-way the trade of marriage tends to produce its own particular type, and
-my contention is that woman, as we know her, is largely the product of
-the conditions imposed upon her by her staple industry.
-
-I am not of those who are entirely satisfied with woman as she is; on
-the contrary, I consider that we are greatly in need of improvement,
-mental, physical and moral. And it is because I desire such
-improvement—not only in our own interests but in that of the race in
-general—that I desire to see an alteration in the conditions of our
-staple industry. I have no intention of attacking the institution of
-marriage in itself—the life companionship of man and woman; I merely
-wish to point out that there are certain grave disadvantages attaching
-to that institution as it exists to-day. These disadvantages I believe
-to be largely unnecessary and avoidable; but at present they are very
-real and the results produced by them are anything but favourable to
-the mental, physical and moral development of women.
-
-
-
-
-MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-
-The sense of curiosity is, as a rule, aroused in us only by the
-unfamiliar and the unexpected. What custom and long usage has made
-familiar we do not trouble to inquire into but accept without comment
-or investigation; confusing the actual with the inevitable, and
-deciding, slothfully enough, that the thing that is, is likewise the
-thing that was and is to be. In nothing is this inert and slothful
-attitude of mind more marked than in the common, unquestioning
-acceptance of the illogical and unsatisfactory position occupied by
-women. And it is the prevalence of that attitude of mind which is
-the only justification for a book which purports to be nothing more
-than the attempt of an unscientific woman to explain, honestly and
-as far as her limitations permit, the why and wherefore of some of
-the disadvantages under which she and her sisters exist—the reason
-why their place in the world into which they were born is often so
-desperately and unnecessarily uncomfortable.
-
-I had better, at the outset, define the word “woman” as I understand
-and use it, since it is apt to convey two distinct and differing
-impressions, according to the sex of the hearer. My conception of woman
-is inevitably the feminine conception; a thing so entirely unlike the
-masculine conception of woman that it is eminently needful to define
-the term and make my meaning clear; lest, when I speak of woman in
-my own tongue, my reader, being male, translate the expression, with
-confusion as the result.
-
-By a woman, then, I understand an individual human being whose life
-is her own concern; whose worth, in my eyes (worth being an entirely
-personal matter) is in no way advanced or detracted from by the
-accident of marriage; who does not rise in my estimation by reason of a
-purely physical capacity for bearing children, or sink in my estimation
-through a lack of that capacity. I am quite aware, of course, that her
-life, in many cases, will have been moulded to a great extent by the
-responsibilities of marriage and the care of children; just as I am
-aware that the lives of most of the men with whom I am acquainted have
-been moulded to a great extent by the trade or profession by which they
-earn their bread. But my judgment of her and appreciation of her are
-a personal judgment and appreciation, having nothing to do with her
-actual or potential relations, sexual or maternal, with other people.
-In short, I never think of her either as a wife or as a mother—I
-separate the woman from her attributes. To me she is an entity in
-herself; and if, on meeting her for the first time, I inquire whether
-or no she is married, it is only because I wish to know whether I am to
-address her as Mrs. or Miss.
-
-That, frankly and as nearly as I can define it, is my attitude towards
-my own sex; an attitude which, it is almost needless to say, I should
-not insist upon if I did not believe that it was fairly typical and
-that the majority of women, if they analyzed their feelings on the
-subject, would find that they regarded each other in much the same way.
-
-It is hardly necessary to point out that the mental attitude of the
-average man towards woman is something quite different from this. It
-is a mental attitude reminding one of that of the bewildered person
-who could not see the wood for the trees. To him the accidental factor
-in woman’s life is the all-important and his conception of her has
-never got beyond her attributes—and certain only of these. As far
-as I can make out, he looks upon her as something having a definite
-and necessary physical relation to man; without that definite and
-necessary relation she is, as the cant phrase goes “incomplete.” That
-is to say, she is not woman at all—until man has made her so. Until
-the moment when he takes her in hand she is merely the raw material of
-womanhood—the undeveloped and unfinished article.
-
-Without sharing in the smallest degree this estimate of her own
-destiny, any fair-minded woman must admit its advantages from the point
-of view of the male—must sympathize with the pleasurable sense of
-importance, creative power, even of artistry, which such a conviction
-must impart. To take the imperfect and undeveloped creature and, with
-a kiss upon her lips and a ring upon her finger, to make of her a
-woman, perfect and complete—surely a prerogative almost divine in its
-magnificence, most admirable, most enviable!
-
-It is this consciousness, expressed or unexpressed, (frequently the
-former) of his own supreme importance in her destiny that colours every
-thought and action of man towards woman. Having assumed that she is
-incomplete without him, he draws the quite permissible conclusion that
-she exists only for the purpose of attaining to completeness through
-him—and that where she does not so attain to it, the unfortunate
-creature is, for all practical purposes, non-existent. To him womanhood
-is summed up in one of its attributes—wifehood, or its unlegalized
-equivalent. Language bears the stamp of the idea that woman is a wife,
-actually, or in embryo. To most men—perhaps to all—the girl is some
-man’s wife that is to be; the married woman some man’s wife that is;
-the widow some man’s wife that was; the spinster some man’s wife that
-should have been—a damaged article, unfit for use, unsuitable.
-Therefore a negligible quantity.
-
-I have convinced myself, by personal observation and inquiry, that
-my description of the male attitude in this respect is in no way
-exaggerated. It has, for instance, fallen to my lot, over and over
-again, to discuss with men—most of them distinctly above the average
-in intelligence—questions affecting the welfare and conditions of
-women. And over and over again, after listening to their views for five
-minutes or so, I have broken in upon them and pulled them up with the
-remark that they were narrowing down the subject under discussion—that
-what they were considering was not the claim of women in general, but
-the claim of a particular class—the class of wives and mothers. I may
-add that the remark has invariably been received with an expression of
-extreme astonishment. And is it not on record that Henley once dashed
-across a manuscript the terse pronouncement, “I take no interest in
-childless women”? Comprehensive; and indicating a confusion in the
-author’s mind between the terms woman and breeding-machine. Did it
-occur to him, I wonder, that the poor objects of his scorn might
-venture to take some interest in themselves? Probably he did not credit
-them with so much presumption.
-
-The above has, I hope, explained in how far my idea of woman differs
-from male ideas on the same subject and has also made it clear that I
-do not look upon women as persons whose destiny it is to be married.
-On the contrary, I hold, and hold very strongly, that the narrowing
-down of woman’s hopes and ambitions to the sole pursuit and sphere of
-marriage is one of the principal causes of the various disabilities,
-economic and otherwise, under which she labours to-day. And I hold,
-also, that this concentration of all her hopes and ambitions on the
-one object was, to a great extent, the result of artificial pressure,
-of unsound economic and social conditions—conditions which forced her
-energy into one channel, by the simple expedient of depriving it of
-every other outlet, and made marriage practically compulsory.
-
-To say the least of it, marriage is no more essentially necessary to
-woman than to man—one would imagine that it was rather the other way
-about. There are a good many drawbacks attached to the fulfilment of
-a woman’s destiny; in an unfettered state of existence it is possible
-that they might weigh more heavily with her than they can do at
-present—being balanced, and more than balanced, by artificial means.
-I am inclined to think that they would. The institution of marriage by
-capture, for instance, has puzzled many inquirers into the habits of
-primitive man. It is often, I believe, regarded as symbolic; but why
-should it not point to a real reluctance to be reduced to permanent
-servitude on the part of primitive woman—a reluctance comprehensible
-enough, since, primitive woman’s wants being few and easily supplied by
-herself, there was no need for her to exchange possession of her person
-for the means of existence?
-
-It is Nietzsche, if I remember rightly, who has delivered himself of
-the momentous opinion that everything in woman is a riddle, and that
-the answer to the riddle is child-bearing. Child-bearing certainly
-explains some qualities in woman—for instance, her comparative
-fastidiousness in sexual relations—but not all. If it did, there
-would be no riddle—yet Nietzsche admits that one exists. Nor is
-he alone in his estimate of the “mysterious” nature of woman; her
-unfathomable and erratic character, her peculiar aptitude for appearing
-“uncertain, coy, and hard to please,” has been insisted upon time after
-time—insisted upon alike as a charm and a deficiency. A charm because
-of its unexpected, a deficiency because of its unreasonable, quality.
-Woman, in short, is not only a wife and mother, but a thoroughly
-incomprehensible wife and mother.
-
-Now it seems to me that a very simple explanation of this mystery which
-perpetually envelops our conduct and impulses can be found in the fact
-that the fundamental natural laws which govern them have never been
-ascertained or honestly sought for. Or rather—since the fundamental
-natural laws which govern us are the same large and simple laws which
-govern other animals, man included—though they have been ascertained,
-the masculine intellect has steadfastly and stubbornly refused to admit
-that they can possibly apply to us in the same degree as to every other
-living being. As a substitute for these laws, he suggests explanations
-of his own—for the most part flattering to himself. He believes,
-apparently, that we live in a world apart, governed by curious customs
-and regulations of our own—customs and regulations which “have no
-fellow in the universe.” Once the first principle of natural law was
-recognized as applying to us, we should cease to be so unfathomable,
-erratic, and unexpected to the wiseacres and poets who spend their
-time in judging us by rule of thumb, and expressing amazement at the
-unaccountable and contradictory results.
-
-I do not know whether it is essentially impossible for man to
-approach us in the scientific spirit, but it has not yet been done.
-(To approach motherhood or marriage in the scientific spirit is, of
-course, not in the least the same thing.) His attitude towards us
-has been by turns—and sometimes all at once—adoring, contemptuous,
-sentimental, and savage—anything, in short, but open-minded and
-deductive. The result being that different classes, generations, and
-peoples have worked out their separate and impressionistic estimates
-of woman’s meaning in the scheme of things—the said estimates
-frequently clashing with those of other classes, generations, and
-people. The Mahometan, for instance, after careful observation from
-his point of view, decided that she was flesh without a soul, and to
-be treated accordingly; the troubadour seems to have found in her a
-spiritual incentive to aspiration in deed and song. The early Fathers
-of the Church, who were in the habit of giving troubled and nervous
-consideration to the subject, denounced her, at spasmodic intervals,
-as sin personified. What the modern man understands by woman I have
-already explained; and he further expects his theory to materialize and
-embody itself in a being who combines the divergent qualities of an
-inspiration and a good general servant. He is often disappointed.
-
-All these are rule of thumb definitions, based on insufficient
-knowledge and inquiry, which, each in its turn, has been accepted,
-acted upon, and found wanting. Each of the generations and classes
-mentioned—and many more beside—has worked out its own theory of
-woman’s orbit (round man); and has subsequently found itself in the
-position of the painstaking astronomer who, after having mapped the
-pathway of a newly-discovered heavenly body to his own satisfaction,
-suddenly finds his calculations upset, and the heavenly body swerving
-off through space towards some hitherto unexpected centre of
-attraction. The theory of the early Fathers was upset before it was
-enunciated—for sin personified had wept at the foot of the Cross, and
-men adored her for it. The modern angel with the cookery-book under
-her wing has expressed an open and pronounced dislike to domestic
-service, and cheerfully discards her wings to fight her way into the
-liberal professions. And those who hold fast to the Nietzschean theory
-that motherhood is the secret and justification of woman’s existence,
-must be somewhat bewildered by latter-day episcopal lamentations
-over the unwillingness of woman to undergo the pains and penalties
-of childbirth, and by the reported intention of an American State
-Legislature to stimulate a declining birth-rate by the payment of
-one dollar for each child born. One feels that the strength of an
-instinct that has, in an appreciable number of cases, to be stimulated
-by the offer of four shillings and twopence must have been somewhat
-overestimated. No wonder woman is a mystery in her unreliability; she
-has broken every law of her existence, and does so day by day.
-
-As a matter of fact, the various explanations which have been given
-for woman’s existence can be narrowed down to two—her husband and her
-child. Male humanity has wobbled between two convictions—the one,
-that she exists for the entire benefit of contemporary mankind; the
-other, that she exists for the entire benefit of the next generation.
-The latter is at present the favourite. One consideration only male
-humanity has firmly refused to entertain—that she exists in any degree
-whatsoever for the benefit of herself. In consequence, woman is the
-one animal from whom he demands that it shall deviate from, and act in
-defiance of, the first law of nature—self-preservation.
-
-It seems baldly ridiculous, of course, to state in so many words that
-that first and iron law applies to women as well as to men, birds, and
-beetles. No one in cold blood or cold ink would contradict the obvious
-statement; but all the same, I maintain that I am perfectly justified
-in asserting that the average man does mentally and unconsciously
-except the mass of women from the workings of that universal law.
-
-To give a simple and familiar instance. Year by year there crops up in
-the daily newspapers a grumbling and sometimes acrid correspondence
-on the subject of the incursion of women into a paid labour market
-formerly monopolized by their brothers. (The unpaid labour market, of
-course, has always been open to them.) The tone taken by the objector
-is instructive and always the same. It is pointed out to us that we are
-working for less than a fair wage; that we are taking the bread out
-of the mouths of men; that we are filching the earnings of a possible
-husband and thereby lessening, or totally destroying, our chances of
-matrimony.
-
-The first objection is, of course, legitimate, and is shared by the
-women to whom it applies; from the others one can only infer that it is
-an impertinence in a woman to be hungry, and that, in the opinion of a
-large number of persons who write to the newspapers, the human female
-is a creature capable of living on air and the hopes of a possible
-husband. The principle that it is impolite to mention a certain organ
-of the body which requires to be replenished two or three times a
-day is, in the case of a woman, carried so far that it is considered
-impolite of her even to possess that organ; and as a substitute for the
-wages wherewith she buys food to fill it, she is offered the lifting
-of a hat and the resignation of a seat in a tramcar. She rejects the
-offer, obeys the first law of nature, and is rebuked for it—the human
-male, bred in the conviction that she lives for him alone, standing
-aghast. Some day he will discover that woman does not support life only
-in order to obtain a husband, but frequently obtains a husband only in
-order to support life.
-
-The above is, to my mind, a clear and familiar instance of the manner
-in which man is accustomed to take for granted our exemption from a
-law from which there is no exemption. It matters not whether or no
-he believes, in so many words, that we need not eat in order that we
-may not die; the point is, that he acts as if he believed it. (The
-extreme reluctance of local authorities to spend any of the money at
-their disposal on unemployed women is a case in point. It would be
-ridiculous to ascribe it to animosity towards the women themselves—it
-must arise, therefore, from a conviction that the need of the foodless
-woman is not so pressing as the need of the foodless man.) And it is
-because I have so often come in contact with the state of mind that
-makes such delusions possible, that I have thought it necessary to
-insist on the fact that self-preservation is the first law of our
-being. The purpose of race-preservation, which is commonly supposed
-to be the excuse for our existence, is, and must be, secondary and
-derivative; it is quite impossible for a woman to bring children into
-the world unless she has first obtained the means of supporting her own
-life. How to eat, how to maintain existence, is the problem that has
-confronted woman, as well as man, since the ages dawned for her. Other
-needs and desires may come later; but the first call of life is for the
-means of supporting it.
-
-To support life it is necessary to have access to the fruits of the
-earth, either directly—as in the case of the agriculturist—or
-indirectly, and through a process of exchange as the price of work
-done in other directions. And in this process of exchange woman,
-as compared with her male fellow-worker, has always been at a
-disadvantage. The latter, even where direct access to the earth was
-denied to him, has usually been granted some measure of choice as to
-the manner in which he would pay for the necessities the earth produced
-for him—that is to say, he was permitted to select the trade by which
-he earned his livelihood. From woman, who has always been far more
-completely excluded from direct access to the necessities of life, who
-has often been barred, both by law and by custom, from the possession
-of property, one form of payment was demanded, and one only. It was
-demanded of her that she should enkindle and satisfy the desire of the
-male, who would thereupon admit her to such share of the property he
-possessed or earned as should seem good to him. In other words, she
-exchanged, by the ordinary process of barter, possession of her person
-for the means of existence.
-
-Whether such a state of things is natural or unnatural I do not pretend
-to say; but it is, I understand, peculiar to women, having no exact
-counterpart amongst the females of other species. Its existence, at
-any rate, justifies us in regarding marriage as essentially (from the
-woman’s point of view) a commercial or trade undertaking. By marriage
-she earned her bread; and as the instinct of self-preservation drove
-man forth to hunt, to till the soil, to dig beneath it—to cultivate
-his muscles and his brain so that he might get the better of nature and
-his rivals—so brute necessity and the instinct of self-preservation
-in woman urged and enjoined on her the cultivation of those narrow and
-particular qualities of mind and body whereby desire might be excited
-and her wage obtained.
-
-A man who was also a poet has thoughtfully explained that
-
-    “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
-      ’Tis woman’s whole existence.”
-
-(It must be very pleasant to be a man and to entertain that
-conviction.) Translated into feminine and vulgar prose, the effusion
-runs something like this—
-
-The housekeeping trade is the only one open to us—so we enter the
-housekeeping trade in order to live. This is not always quite the same
-as entering the housekeeping trade in order to love.
-
-No one can imagine that it is the same who has ever heard one haggard,
-underpaid girl cry to another, in a burst of bitter confidence—
-
-“I would marry any one, to get out of this.”
-
-Which, if one comes to think of it, is hard on “any one.”
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-
-If I am right in my view that marriage for woman has always been not
-only a trade, but a trade that is practically compulsory, I have at
-the same time furnished an explanation of the reason why women, as a
-rule, are so much less romantic than men where sexual attraction is
-concerned. Where the man can be single-hearted, the woman necessarily
-is double-motived. It is, of course, the element of commerce and
-compulsion that accounts for this difference of attitude; an impulse
-that may have to be discouraged, nurtured or simulated to order—that
-is, at any rate, expected, for commercial or social reasons to put
-in an appearance as a matter of course and at the right and proper
-moment—can never have the same vigor, energy and beauty as an impulse
-that is unfettered and unforced.
-
-More than once in my life I have been struck by the beauty of a man’s
-honest conception and ideal of love and marriage—a conception and
-ideal which one comes across in unexpected and unlikely persons and
-which is by no means confined to those whose years are still few in
-number and whose hearts are still hot within them. Only a few weeks ago
-I heard an elderly gentleman of scientific attainments talk something
-which, but for its sincerity, would have seemed to me sheer sentimental
-balderdash concerning the relations of men and women. And from other
-equally respectable gentlemen I have heard opinions that were beautiful
-as well as honest on the relations of the sexes, of a kind that no
-woman, being alone with another woman, would ever venture to utter.
-For we see the thing differently. I am not so foolish as to imagine
-that theory and practice in this or any other matter are in the habit
-of walking hand in hand; I know that for men the word love has two
-different meanings, and therefore I should be sorry to have to affirm
-on oath that the various gentlemen who have, at various times, favoured
-me with their views on the marriage question have one and all lived up
-to their convictions; but at least their conception of the love and
-duty owed by man and woman to each other was a high one, honourable,
-not wanting in reverence, not wanting in romance. Over and over again
-I have heard women unreticent enough upon the same subject; but, when
-they spoke their hearts, the picturesque touch—the flash and fire of
-romance—was never nearly so strong and sometimes altogether absent.
-
-And I have never seen love—the sheer passionate and personal
-delight in and worship of a being of the other sex—so vividly and
-uncontrollably expressed on the face of a woman as on the face of a
-man. I have with me, as one of the things not to be forgotten, the
-memory of a cheap foreign hotel where, two or three years back, a
-little Cockney clerk was making holiday in worshipful attendance on the
-girl he was engaged to. At table I used to watch him, being very sure
-that he had no eyes for me; and once or twice I had the impulse that
-I should like to speak to him and thank him for what he had shown me.
-I have seen women in love time after time, but none in whom the fire
-burned as it burned in him—consumedly. I used to hope his Cockney
-goddess would have understanding at least to reverence the holy thing
-that passed the love of women....
-
-How should it be otherwise—this difference in the attitude of man
-and woman in their relations to each other? To make them see and
-feel more alike in the matter, the conditions under which they live
-and bargain must be made more alike. With even the average man love
-and marriage may be something of a high adventure, entered upon
-whole-heartedly and because he so desires. With the average woman it
-is not a high adventure—except in so far as adventure means risk—but
-a destiny or necessity. If not a monetary necessity, then a social.
-(How many children, I wonder, are born each year merely because their
-mothers were afraid of being called old maids? One can imagine no
-more inadequate reason for bringing a human being into the world.)
-The fact that her destiny, when he arrives, may be all that her heart
-desires and deserves does not prevent him from being the thing that,
-from her earliest years, she had, for quite other reasons, regarded as
-inevitable. Quite consciously and from childhood the “not impossible
-he” is looked upon, not simply as an end desirable in himself, but
-as a means of subsistence. The marriageable man may seek his elective
-affinity until he find her; the task of the marriageable woman is
-infinitely more complicated, since her elective affinity has usually to
-be combined with her bread and butter. The two do not always grow in
-the same place.
-
-What is the real, natural and unbiased attitude of woman towards love
-and marriage, it is perfectly impossible for even a woman to guess
-at under present conditions, and it will continue to be impossible
-for just so long as the natural instincts of her sex are inextricably
-interwoven with, thwarted and deflected by, commercial considerations.
-When—if ever—the day of woman’s complete social and economic
-independence dawns upon her, when she finds herself free and upright
-in a new world where no artificial pressure is brought to bear upon
-her natural inclinations or disinclinations, then, and then only, will
-it be possible to untwist a tangled skein and judge to what extent
-and what precise degree she is swayed by those impulses, sexual and
-maternal, which are now, to the exclusion of every other factor,
-presumed to dominate her existence. And not only to dominate, but to
-justify it. (A presumption, by the way, which seems to ignore the
-fact—incompatible, surely, with the theory of “incompleteness”—that
-celibacy irks the woman less than it does the man.)
-
-What, one wonders, would be the immediate result if the day of
-independence and freedom from old restrictions were to dawn suddenly
-and at once? Would it be to produce, at first and for a time, a
-rapid growth amongst all classes of women of that indifference to,
-and almost scorn of, marriage which is so marked a characteristic of
-the—alas, small—class who can support themselves in comfort by work
-which is congenial to them? Perhaps—for a time, until the revulsion
-was over and things righted themselves. (I realize, of course, that
-it is quite impossible for a male reader to accept the assertion
-that any one woman, much less any class of women, however small its
-numbers, can be indifferent to or scornful of marriage—which would be
-tantamount to admitting that she could be indifferent to, or scornful
-of, himself.—What follows, therefore, can only appear to him as an
-ineffectual attempt on the part of an embittered spinster to explain
-that the grapes are sour; and he is courteously requested to skip to
-the end of the chapter. It would be lost labour on my part to seek
-to disturb his deep-rooted conviction that all women who earn decent
-incomes in intelligent and interesting ways are too facially unpleasant
-to be placed at the head of a dinner-table. I shall not attempt
-to disturb that conviction; I make it a rule never to attempt the
-impossible.) This new-born attitude of open indifference and contempt,
-while perhaps appearing strained and unnatural, is, it seems to me, a
-natural one enough for women whose daily lives have falsified every
-tradition in which they were born and bred.
-
-For the tradition handed down from generations to those girl children
-who now are women grown was, with exceptions few and far between, the
-one tradition of marriage—marriage as inevitable as lessons and far
-more inevitable than death. Ordering dinner and keeping house: that
-we knew well, and from our babyhood was all the future had to give to
-us. For the boys there would be other things; wherefore our small
-hearts bore a secret grudge against Almighty God that He had not
-made us boys—since their long thoughts were our long thoughts, and
-together we wallowed in cannibals and waxed clamorous over engines. For
-them, being boys, there might be cannibals and engines in the world
-beyond; but for us—oh, the flat sameness of it!—was nothing but a
-husband, ordering dinner and keeping house. Therefore we dreamed of a
-settler for a husband, and of assisting him to shoot savages with a
-double-barrelled gun. So might the round of household duties be varied
-and most pleasantly enlivened.
-
-Perhaps it was the stolid companionship of the doll, perhaps the
-constant repetition of the formula “when you have children of your
-own” that precluded any idea of shirking the husband and tackling the
-savage off our own bat. For I cannot remember that we ever shirked
-him. We selected his profession with an eye to our own interests; he
-was at various times a missionary, a sailor and a circus-rider; but
-from the first we recognized that he was unavoidable. We planned our
-lives and knew that he was lurking vaguely in the background to upset
-our best-laid calculations. We were still very young, I think, when we
-realized that his shadowy personality was an actual, active factor in
-our lives; that it was because of him and his surmised desires that
-our turbulent inclinations were thwarted and compressed into narrow
-channels, and that we were tamed and curbed as the boys were never
-tamed and curbed. When that which the boys might do with impunity
-was forbidden to us as a sin of the first water, we knew that it was
-because he would not like it. The thought was not so consciously
-expressed, perhaps; but it was there and lived with us. So we grew up
-under his influence, presuming his wishes, and we learned, because
-of him, to say, “I can’t,” where our brothers said, “I can,” and to
-believe, as we had been taught, that all things, save a very few (such
-as ordering dinner and keeping house) were not for us because we were
-not men. (Yet we had our long, long thoughts—we had them, too!) That
-was one thing that he desired we should believe; and another was that
-only through him could we attain to satisfaction and achievement; that
-our every desire that was not centred upon him and upon his children
-would be barren and bitter as Dead Sea ashes in the mouth. We believed
-that for a long time....
-
-And he was certain to come: the only question was, when? When he came
-we should fall in love with him, of course—and he would kiss us—and
-there would be a wedding....
-
-Some of us—and those not a few—started life equipped for it after
-this fashion; creatures of circumstance who waited to be fallen in
-love with. That was indeed all; we stood and waited—on approval. And
-then came life itself and rent our mother’s theories to tatters. For
-we discovered—those of us, that is, who were driven out to work that
-we might eat—we discovered very swiftly that what we had been told
-was the impossible was the thing we had to do. That and no other. So
-we accomplished it, in fear and trembling, only because we had to; and
-with that first achievement of the impossible the horizon widened with
-a rush, and the implanted, hampering faith in our own poor parasitic
-uselessness began to wither at the root and die. We had learned to say,
-“I can.” And as we went on, at first with fear and then with joy, from
-impossibility to impossibility, we looked upon the world with new eyes.
-
-To no man, I think, can the world be quite as wonderful as it is to
-the woman now alive who has fought free. Those who come after her will
-enter by right of birth upon what she attains by right of conquest;
-therefore, neither to them will it be the same. The things that to
-her brother are common and handed down, to her are new possessions,
-treasured because she herself has won them and no other for her. It may
-well be that she attaches undue importance to these; it could scarcely
-be otherwise. Her traditions have fallen away from her, her standard
-of values is gone. The old gods have passed away from her, and as yet
-the new gods have spoken with no very certain voice. The world to her
-is in the experimental stage. She grew to womanhood weighed down by the
-conviction that life held only one thing for her; and she stretches out
-her hands to find that it holds many. She grew to womanhood weighed
-down by the conviction that her place in the scheme of things was the
-place of a parasite; and she knows (for necessity has taught her) that
-she has feet which need no support. She is young in the enjoyment of
-her new powers and has a pleasure that is childish in the use of them.
-By force of circumstances her faith has been wrested from her and the
-articles of her new creed have yet to be tested by experience—her own.
-Her sphere—whatever it may prove to be—no one but herself can define
-for her. Authority to her is a broken reed. Has she not heard and read
-solemn disquisitions by men of science on the essential limitations of
-woman’s nature and the consequent impossibility of activity in this or
-that direction?—knowing, all the while, that what they swear to her
-she cannot do she does, is doing day by day!
-
-Some day, no doubt, the pendulum will adjust itself and swing true; a
-generation brought up to a wider horizon as a matter of course will
-look around it with undazzled eyes and set to work to reconstruct the
-fundamental from the ruins of what was once esteemed so. But in the
-meantime the new is—new; the independence that was to be as Dead Sea
-ashes in our mouth tastes very sweet indeed; and the unsheltered
-life that we were taught to shrink from means the fighting of a good
-fight....
-
-Selfishness, perhaps—all selfishness—this pleasure in ourselves and
-in the late growth of that which our training had denied us. But then,
-from our point of view, the sin and crime of woman in the past has been
-a selflessness which was ignoble because involuntary. Our creed may be
-vague as yet, but one article thereof is fixed: there is no merit in a
-sacrifice which is compulsory, no virtue in a gift which is not a gift
-but a tribute.
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-
-I have insisted so strongly upon what I believe to be the attitude
-towards life of the independent woman mainly with the object of
-proving my assertion that there are other faculties in our nature
-besides those which have hitherto been forced under a hothouse system
-of cultivation—sex and motherhood. It is quite possible that a woman
-thinking, feeling and living in a manner I have described may be dubbed
-unsexed; but even if she be what is technically termed unsexed, it does
-not follow therefore that she is either unnatural or unwomanly. Sex is
-only one of the ingredients of the natural woman—an ingredient which
-has assumed undue and exaggerated proportions in her life owing to the
-fact that it has for many generations furnished her with the means of
-livelihood.
-
-In sexual matters it would appear that the whole trend and tendency of
-man’s relations to woman has been to make refusal impossible and to
-cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire.
-His motive in concentrating all her energy upon the trade of marriage
-was to deny it any other outlet. The original motive was doubtless
-strengthened, as time went on, by an objection to allowing her to come
-into economic competition with him; but this was probably a secondary
-or derivative cause of his persistent refusal to allow her new spheres
-of activity, having its primary root in the consciousness that economic
-independence would bring with it the power of refusal.
-
-The uncompromising and rather brutal attitude which man has
-consistently adopted towards the spinster is, to my mind, a
-confirmation of this theory. (The corresponding attitude of the married
-woman towards her unmarried sister I take to be merely servile and
-imitative.) It was not only that the creature was chaste and therefore
-inhuman. That would have justified neglect and contempt on his part,
-but not the active dislike he always appears to have entertained for
-her. That active and somewhat savage dislike must have had its origin
-in the consciousness that the perpetual virgin was a witness, however
-reluctantly, to the unpalatable fact that sexual intercourse was not
-for every woman an absolute necessity; and this uneasy consciousness
-on his part accounts for the systematic manner in which he placed
-the spinster outside the pale of a chivalry, upon which, from her
-unprotected position, one would have expected her to have an especial
-claim.
-
-If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a
-trade on the part of woman—the exchange of her person for the means
-of subsistence—it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which
-that trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in
-the matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market.
-Which brings us at once to the fact—arising from the compulsory
-nature of the profession—that it is carried on under disadvantages
-unknown and unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods.
-For the regulations governing compulsory service—the institution of
-slavery and the like—are always framed, not in the interests of the
-worker, but in the interests of those who impose his work upon him.
-The regulations governing exchange and barter in the marriage market,
-therefore, are necessarily framed in the interests of the employer—the
-male.
-
-The position is this. Marriage, with its accompaniments and
-consequences—the ordering of a man’s house, the bearing and rearing
-of his children—has, by the long consent of ages, been established
-as practically the only means whereby woman, with honesty and honour,
-shall earn her daily bread. Her every attempt to enter any other
-profession has been greeted at first with scorn and opposition; her
-sole outlook was to be dependence upon man. Yet the one trade to which
-she is destined, the one means of earning her bread to which she is
-confined, she may not openly profess. No other worker stands on the
-same footing. The man who has his bread to earn, with hands, or brains,
-or tools, goes out to seek for the work to which he is trained; his
-livelihood depending on it, he offers his skill and services without
-shame or thought of reproach. But with woman it is not so; she is
-expected to express unwillingness for the very work for which she has
-been taught and trained. She has been brought up in the belief that
-her profession is marriage and motherhood; yet though poverty may be
-pressing upon her—though she may be faced with actual lack of the
-necessities of life—she must not openly express her desire to enter
-that profession, and earn her bread in the only way for which she is
-fitted. She must stand aside and wait—indefinitely; and attain to her
-destined livelihood by appearing to despise it.
-
-That, of course, is the outcome of something more than a convention
-imposed on her by man; nature, from the beginning, has made her
-more fastidious and reluctant than the male. But with this natural
-fastidiousness and reluctance the commercialism imposed upon her by
-her economic needs is constantly at clash and at conflict, urging
-her to get her bread as best she can in the only market open to her.
-Theoretically—since by her wares she lives—she has a perfect right to
-cry those wares and seek to push them to the best advantage. That is to
-say, she has a perfect right to seek, with frankness and with openness,
-the man who, in her judgment, can most fittingly provide her with the
-means of support.
-
-This freedom of bargaining to the best advantage, permitted as a matter
-of course to every other worker, is denied to her. It is, of course,
-claimed and exercised by the prostitute class—a class which has pushed
-to its logical conclusion the principle that woman exists by virtue of
-a wage paid her in return for the possession of her person; but it is
-interesting to note that the “unfortunate” enters the open market with
-the hand of the law extended threateningly above her head. The fact
-is curious if inquired into: since the theory that woman should live
-by physical attraction of the opposite sex has never been seriously
-denied, but rather insisted upon, by men, upon what principle is
-solicitation, or open offer of such attraction, made a legal offence?
-(Not because the woman is a danger to the community, since the male
-sensualist is an equal source of danger.) Only, apparently, because
-the advance comes from the wrong side. I speak under correction, but
-cannot, unaided, light upon any other explanation; and mine seems to
-be borne out by the fact that, in other ranks of life, custom, like
-the above-mentioned law, strenuously represses any open advance on the
-part of the woman. So emphatic, indeed, is this unwritten law, that
-one cannot help suspecting that it was needful it should be emphatic,
-lest woman, adapting herself to her economic position, should take the
-initiative in a matter on which her livelihood depended, and deprive
-her employer not only of the pleasure of the chase, but of the illusion
-that their common bargain was as much a matter of romance and volition
-on her part as on his.
-
-As a matter of fact, that law that the first advances must come from
-the side of the man is, as was only to be expected, broken and broken
-every day; sometimes directly, but far more often indirectly. The woman
-bent on matrimony is constantly on the alert to evade its workings,
-conscious that in her attempt to do so she can nearly always count on
-the ready, if unspoken, co-operation of her sisters. This statement
-is, I know, in flat contravention of the firmly-rooted masculine
-belief that one woman regards another as an enemy to be depreciated
-consistently in masculine eyes, and that women spend their lives in
-one long struggle to gratify an uncontrollable desire for admiration at
-each other’s expense. (I have myself been told by a man that he would
-never be so foolishly discourteous as to praise one woman in another’s
-hearing. I, on my part, desirous also of being wisely courteous, did
-not attempt to shake the magnificent belief in his own importance to
-me which the statement betrayed.) Admiration is a very real passion
-in some women, as it is a very real passion in some men; but what, in
-women, is often mistaken for it is ambition, a desire to get on and
-achieve success in life in the only way in which it is open to a woman
-to achieve it—through the favour of man. Which is only another way
-of saying what I have insisted on before—that a good many feminine
-actions which are commonly and superficially attributed to sexual
-impulse have their root in the commercial instinct.
-
-It is because women, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the
-commercial nature of the undertaking that they interest themselves so
-strongly in the business of match-making, other than their own. Men
-have admitted that interest, of course—the thing is too self-evident
-to be denied—and, as their manner is, attributed it to an exuberant
-sexuality which overflows on to its surroundings; steadfastly declining
-to take into account the “professional” element in its composition,
-since that would necessarily imply the existence of an _esprit de
-corps_ amongst women.
-
-I myself cannot doubt that there does exist a spirit of practical, if
-largely unconscious, trade unionism in a class engaged in extracting,
-under many difficulties and by devious ways, its livelihood from
-the employer, man. (I need scarcely point out that man, like every
-other wage-payer, has done his level best and utmost to suppress the
-spirit of combination, and encourage distrust and division, amongst
-the wage-earners in the matrimonial market; and that the trade of
-marriage, owing to the isolation of the workers, has offered unexampled
-opportunities for such suppression of unity and encouragement of
-distrust and division.) But, in spite of this, women in general
-recognize the economic necessity of marriage for each other, and in
-a spirit of instinctive comradeship seek to forward it by every
-means in their power. There must be something extraordinarily and
-unnaturally contemptible about a woman who, her own bargain made and
-means of livelihood secured, will not help another to secure hers; and
-it is that motive, and not a rapturous content in their own unclouded
-destiny, not an unhesitating conviction that their lot has fallen in
-a fair ground, which makes of so many married women industrious and
-confirmed match-makers. What has been termed the “huge conspiracy
-of married women” is, in fact, nothing but a huge trade union whose
-members recognize the right of others to their bread. To my mind,
-one of the best proofs of the reality of this spirit of unconscious
-trade unionism among women is the existence of that other feminine
-conspiracy of silence which surrounds the man at whom a woman, for
-purely mercenary reasons, is making a “dead set.” In such a case, the
-only women who will interfere and warn the intended victim will be his
-own relatives—a mother or a sister; others, while under no delusions
-as to the interested nature of the motives by which the pursuer is
-actuated, will hold their tongues, and even go so far as to offer
-facilities for the chase. They realize that their fellow has a right to
-her chance—that she must follow her trade as best she can, and would
-no more dream of giving her away than the average decent workman would
-dream of going to an employer and informing him that one of his mates
-was not up to his job and should, therefore, be discharged. In these
-emergencies a man must look to a man for help; the sympathies of the
-practical and unromantic sex will be on the other side.
-
-I shall not deny, of course, that there is active and bitter
-competition amongst women for the favour not only of particular men,
-but of men in general; but, from what I have said already, it will
-be gathered that I consider that competition to be largely economic
-and artificial. Where it is economic, it is produced by the same
-cause which produces active and bitter competition in other branches
-of industry—the overcrowding of the labour market. Where it is
-artificial, as distinct from purely economic, it is produced by the
-compulsory concentration of energy on one particular object, and the
-lack of facilities for dispersing that energy in other directions. It
-is not the woman with an interest in life who spends her whole time in
-competing with her otherwise unoccupied sisters for the smiles of a
-man.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-
-Marriage being to them not only a trade, but a necessity, it
-must follow as the night the day that the acquirement of certain
-characteristics—the characteristics required by an average man in an
-average wife—has been rendered inevitable for women in general. There
-have, of course, always been certain exceptional men who have admired
-and desired certain exceptional and eccentric qualities in their wives;
-but in estimating a girl’s chances of pleasing—on which depended
-her chances of success or a comfortable livelihood—these exceptions
-naturally, were taken into but small account, and no specialization in
-their tastes and desires was allowed for in her training. The aim and
-object of that training was to make her approximate to the standard of
-womanhood set up by the largest number of men; since the more widely
-she was admired the better were her chances of striking a satisfactory
-bargain. The taste and requirements of the average man of her class
-having been definitely ascertained, her training and education was
-carried on on the principle of cultivating those qualities which he
-was likely to admire, and repressing with an iron hand those qualities
-to which he was likely to take objection; in short, she was fitted for
-her trade by the discouragement of individuality and eccentricity and
-the persistent moulding of her whole nature into the form which the
-ordinary husband would desire it to take. Her education, unlike her
-brothers’, was not directed towards self-development and the bringing
-out of natural capabilities, but towards pleasing some one else—was
-not for her own benefit, but for that of another person.
-
-No one has better expressed the essential difference between the
-education of men and women than Mr. John Burns in a speech delivered
-to the “Children of the State” at the North Surrey District School
-on February 13, 1909. Addressing the boys the President of the Local
-Government Board said, “I want you to be happy craftsmen, because you
-are trained to be healthy men.” Addressing the girls he is reported to
-have used the following words—
-
-“To keep house, cook, nurse and delight in making others happy is your
-mission, duty and livelihood.”
-
-The boys are to be happy themselves; the girls are to make others
-happy. No doubt Mr. Burns spoke sincerely; but is he not one of the
-“others”? And it is well to note that the “making of others happy”
-is not put before the girls as an ideal, but as a duty and means of
-livelihood. They are to be self-sacrificing as a matter of business—a
-commercial necessity. It is because man realizes that self-sacrifice in
-woman is not a matter of free-will, but of necessity, that he gives her
-so little thanks for it. Her duty and means of livelihood is to make
-others happy—in other words, to please him.
-
-Whether she was trained to be useful or useless that was the object of
-her up-bringing. Men in one class of society would be likely to require
-wives able to do rough house or field work; so to do rough house or
-field work she was trained. Men in another class of society would be
-likely to require of their wives an appearance of helpless fragility;
-and girls in that particular class were educated to be incapable of
-sustained bodily effort.
-
-It is this fact—that their training was a training not in their own,
-but in some one else’s requirements—which, to my thinking, makes
-women so infinitely more interesting to watch and to analyze than men.
-Interesting, I mean, in the sense of exciting. Practically every woman
-I know has two distinct natures: a real and an acquired; that which she
-has by right of birth and heritage, and that which she has been taught
-she ought to have—and often thinks that she has attained to. And it is
-quite impossible even for another woman, conscious of the same division
-of forces in herself, to forecast which of these two conflicting
-temperaments will come uppermost at a given moment.
-
-The average man is a straightforward and simple-minded creature
-compared to the average woman, merely because he has been allowed to
-develop much more on his own natural lines. He has only one centre of
-gravity; the woman has two. To put it in plain English, he usually
-knows what he wants; she, much more often than not, does not know
-anything of the kind. She is under the impression that she wants
-certain things which she has been told from her earliest childhood,
-and is being told all the time, are the things she ought to want. That
-is as far as she can go with certainty. This also can be said with
-certainty: that her first requirement, whether she knows it or not, is
-the liberty to discover what she really does require.
-
-Once a man’s character is known and understood it can usually be
-predicted with a fair degree of accuracy how he will act in any
-particular crisis or emergency—say, under stress of strong emotion or
-temptation. With his sister on the other hand you can never foresee
-at what point artificiality will break down and nature take command;
-which makes it infinitely more difficult, however well you know
-her, to predict her course of action under the same circumstances.
-The woman whose whole existence, from early dawn to dewy eve, is
-regulated by a standard of manners imposed upon her from without, by
-a standard of morals imposed upon her from without, whose ideals are
-purely artificial and equally reflected, will suddenly, and at an
-unexpected moment, reveal another and fundamental side of her nature
-of which she herself has probably lived in entire ignorance. And on
-the other hand—so ingrained in us all has artificiality become—a
-woman of the independent type, with a moral standard and ideals of
-her own setting up, may, when the current of her life is swept out of
-its ordinary course by emergency or strong emotion, take refuge, just
-as suddenly and unexpectedly, in words and actions that are palpably
-unnatural to her and inspired by an instilled idea of what, under the
-circumstances, a properly constituted woman ought to say or do. Faced
-with a difficulty through which her own experience does not serve to
-guide her, she falls back on convention and expresses the thoughts of
-others in the stilted language that convention has put into her mouth.
-I have known this happen more than once, and seen a real human being
-of flesh and blood suddenly and unconsciously transformed into one of
-those curious creatures, invented by male writers and called women for
-lack of any other name, whose sins and whose virtues alike are the
-sins and virtues considered by male writers to be suitable and becoming
-to the opposite sex.
-
-For generation after generation the lives of women of even the
-slightest intelligence and individuality must have been one long and
-constant struggle between the forces of nature endeavouring to induce
-in them that variety which is another word for progress and their own
-enforced strivings to approximate to a single monotonous type—the
-type of the standard and ideal set up for them by man, which was the
-standard and ideal of his own comfort and enjoyment. However squarely
-uncompromising the characteristics of any given woman, the only vacant
-space for her occupation was round, and into the round hole she had to
-go. Were her soul the soul of a pirate, it had to be encased in a body
-which pursued the peaceful avocation of a cook. Even when she kicked
-over the traces and gave respectability the go-by, she could only do so
-after one particular and foregone fashion—a fashion encouraged if not
-openly approved by man. The male sinner might go to the devil in any
-way he chose; for her there was only one road to the nethermost hell,
-and, dependent even in this, she needed a man to set her feet upon the
-path. Her vices, like her virtues, were forced and stereotyped. They
-sprang from the same root; vice, with her, was simply an excess of
-virtue. Vicious or virtuous, matron or outcast, she was made and not
-born.
-
-There must be many attributes and characteristics of the general run of
-women which are not really the attributes and characteristics of their
-sex, but of their class—a class persistently set apart for the duties
-of sexual attraction, house-ordering and the bearing of children. And
-the particular qualities that, in the eyes of man, fitted them for the
-fulfilment of these particular duties, generation after generation of
-women, whatever their natural temperament and inclination, have sought
-to acquire—or if not the actual qualities themselves, at least an
-outward semblance of them. Without some semblance of those qualities
-life would be barred to them.
-
-There are very few women in whom one cannot, now and again, trace
-the line of cleavage between real and acquired, natural and class,
-characteristics. The same thing, of course, holds good of men, but
-in a far less degree since, many vocations being open to them, they
-tend naturally and on the whole to fall into the class for which
-temperament and inclinations fit them. A man with a taste for an open
-air life does not as a rule become a chartered accountant, a student
-does not take up deep-sea fishing as a suitable profession. But with
-women the endeavour to approximate to a single type has always been
-compulsory. It is ridiculous to suppose that nature, who never makes
-two blades of grass alike, desired to turn out indefinite millions of
-women all cut to the regulation pattern of wifehood: that is to say,
-all home-loving, charming, submissive, industrious, unintelligent,
-tidy, possessed with a desire to please, well-dressed, jealous of their
-own sex, self-sacrificing, cowardly, filled with a burning desire for
-maternity, endowed with a talent for cooking, narrowly uninterested in
-the world outside their own gates, and capable of sinking their own
-identity and interests in the interests and identity of a husband. I
-imagine that very few women naturally unite in their single persons
-these characteristics of the class wife; but, having been relegated
-from birth upwards to the class wife, they had to set to work, with or
-against the grain, to acquire some semblance of those that they knew
-were lacking.
-
-There being no question of a line of least resistance for woman, it
-is fairly obvious that the necessity (in many instances) of making a
-silk purse out of a sow’s ear and instilling the qualities of tidiness,
-love of home, cowardice, unintelligence, etc., etc., into persons who
-were born with quite other capacities and defects must have resulted
-in a pitiable waste of good material, sacrificed upon the altar of a
-domesticity arranged in the interests of the husband. But infinitely
-worse in its effect upon womanhood in general was the insincerity
-which, in many cases, was the prime lesson and result of a girl’s
-education and upbringing. I do not mean, of course, that the generality
-of girls were consciously, of set purpose, and in so many words taught
-to be insincere; but it seems fairly certain to me that generations of
-mothers have tacitly instructed their daughters to assume virtues (or
-the reverse) which they had not.
-
-It could not be otherwise. Success in the marriage-market demanded
-certain qualifications; and, as a matter of economic and social
-necessity, if those qualifications were lacking, their counterfeit
-presentment was assumed. When helplessness and fragility were the
-fashion amongst wives, the girl child who was naturally as plucky as
-her brothers was schooled into an affected and false timidity. Men were
-understood to admire and reverence the maternal instinct in women; so
-the girl who had no especial interest in children affected a mechanical
-delight in, petted, fondled and made much of them. (I myself have seen
-this done on more than one occasion; of course in the presence of men.)
-And—worst and most treacherous insincerity of all—since men were
-understood to dislike clever women, the girl who had brains, capacity,
-intellect, sought to conceal, denied possession of them, so that her
-future husband might enjoy, unchallenged, the pleasurable conviction of
-her mental inferiority to himself.
-
-Of all the wrongs that have been inflicted upon woman there has been
-none like unto this—the enforced arrest of her mental growth—and none
-which bears more bitter and eloquent testimony to the complete and
-essential servility of her position. For her the eleventh commandment
-was an insult—“Thou shalt not think”; and the most iniquitous
-condition of her marriage bargain this—that her husband, from the
-height of his self-satisfaction, should be permitted to esteem her a
-fool.
-
-It was not only that, from one generation to another, woman was without
-encouragement to use her higher mental qualities—that her life was
-lacking in the stimulus of emulation so far as they were concerned,
-that her own particular trade made very few demands upon them. As if
-these things in themselves were not discouragement enough, she was
-directly forbidden to cultivate the small share of intellect she was
-understood to possess. Science was closed to her and art degraded to
-a series of “parlor tricks.” It was not enough that she should be
-debarred from material possessions; from possessions that were not
-material, from the things of the spirit, she must be debarred as well.
-Nothing more plainly illustrates the fact that man has always regarded
-her as existing not for herself and for her own benefit, but for his
-use and pleasure solely. His use for her was the gratification of his
-own desire, the menial services she rendered without payment; his
-pleasure was in her flesh, not in her spirit; therefore the things of
-the spirit were not for her.
-
-One wonders what it has meant for the race—this persistent desire of
-the man to despise his wife, this economic need of countless women
-to arrest their mental growth? It has amounted to this—that one of
-the principal qualifications for motherhood has been a low standard
-of intelligence. We hear a very great deal about the beauty and
-sanctity of motherhood; we might, for a change, hear something about
-the degradation thereof—which has been very real. To stunt one’s
-brain in order that one may bear a son does not seem to me a process
-essentially sacred or noble in itself; yet millions of mothers have
-instructed their daughters in foolishness so that they, in their turn,
-might please, marry and bear children. Most of those daughters, no
-doubt—humanity being in the main slothful and indifferent—endured the
-process with equanimity; but there must always have been some, and
-those not the least worthy, who suffered piteously under the systematic
-thwarting of definite instincts and vague ambitions. In every
-generation there must have been women who desired life at first hand,
-and in whom the crushing of initiative and inquiry and the substitution
-of servile for independent qualities, must have caused infinite misery.
-In every generation there must have been women who had something to
-give to those who lived outside the narrowing walls of their home; and
-who were not permitted to give it. They soured and stifled; but they
-were not permitted to give it.
-
-But, after all, the suffering of individual women under the law of
-imposed stupidity is a very small thing compared with the effect of
-that law upon humanity as a whole. The sex which reserved to itself
-the luxury of thinking appears to have been somewhat neglectful of
-its advantages in that respect, since it failed to draw the obvious
-conclusion that sons were the sons of their mothers as well as of
-their fathers. Yet it is a commonplace that exceptional men are born
-of exceptional women—that is to say, of women in whom the natural
-instinct towards self-expansion and self-expression is too strong to be
-crushed and thwarted out of existence by the law of imposed stupidity.
-
-That law has reacted inevitably upon those who framed and imposed it;
-since it is truth and not a jest that the mission in life of many women
-has been to suckle fools—of both sexes. Women have been trained to be
-unintelligent breeding-machines until they have become unintelligent
-breeding-machines—how unintelligent witness the infant death-rate
-from improper feeding. Judging by that and other things, the process
-of transforming the natural woman into flesh without informing spirit
-would appear, in a good many instance, to have been attended by a fair
-amount of success. In some classes she still breeds brainlessly. That
-is what she is there for, not to think of the consequences. Has she
-not been expressly forbidden to think? If she is a failure as a wife
-and mother, it is because she is nothing else. And those of us who are
-now alive might be better men and women, seeing more light where now
-we strive and slip in darkness, if our fathers had not insisted so
-strongly and so steadfastly upon their right to despise the women they
-made their wives—who were our mothers.
-
-I have said that this condemnation to intellectual barrenness is the
-strongest proof of the essential servility of woman’s position in the
-eyes of man, and I repeat that statement. It cannot be repeated too
-often. So long as you deprive a human being of the right to make use
-of its own mental property, so long do you keep that human being in
-a state of serfdom. You may disguise the fact even from yourself by
-an outward show of deference and respect, the lifting of a hat or the
-ceding of a pathway; but the fact remains. Wherever and whenever man
-has desired to degrade his fellow and tread him under foot, he has
-denied him, first of all, the right to think, the means of education
-and inquiry. Every despotism since the world began has recognized
-that it can only work in secret—that its ways must not be known. No
-material tyranny can hope to establish itself firmly and for long
-unless it has at its disposal the means to establish also a tyranny
-that is spiritual and intellectual. When you hold a man’s mind in
-thrall you can do what you will with his body; you possess it and not
-he. Always those who desired power over their fellows have found it a
-sheer necessity to possess their bodies through their souls; and for
-this reason, when you have stripped a man of everything except his
-soul, you have to go on and strip him of that too, lest, having it
-left to him, he ask questions, ponder the answers and revolt. In all
-ages the aim of despotism, small or great, material or intellectual,
-has been to keep its subjects in ignorance and darkness; since, in all
-ages, discontent and rebellion have come with the spread of knowledge,
-light and understanding. So soon as a human being is intelligent enough
-to doubt, and frame the question, “Why is this?” he can no longer be
-satisfied with the answer, “Because I wish it.” That is an answer which
-inevitably provokes the rejoinder, “But I do not”—which is the essence
-and foundation of heresy and high treason.
-
-Those in high places—that is to say, those who desired power over
-others—have, as a condition of their existence in high places, fought
-steadfastly against the spread of the means of enlightenment. No
-right has been more bitterly denied than the right of a man to think
-honestly and to communicate his thoughts to his fellows. Persons who
-claimed that right have been at various times (and for the edification
-of other persons who might be tempted to go and do likewise) stoned,
-devoured by wild beasts, excommunicated, shut up in dungeons, burned at
-the stake and hanged, drawn, and quartered. In spite, however, of these
-drastic penalties—and other lesser ones too numerous to mention—there
-has always been a section of humanity which has stubbornly persisted,
-even at the risk of roasting or dismemberment, in thinking its own
-thoughts on some particular subject and saying what they were. To
-persons of this frame of mind it probably did not much matter how soon
-they had done with an existence which they had to look at through other
-people’s eyes and talk about in suitable phrases arranged for them by
-other people. So they risked the penalty and said what they wanted to.
-The history of the world has been a succession of demands, more or less
-spasmodic, more or less insistent, on the part of subjected classes,
-nations and sects, to be allowed to see things in their own way and
-with an eye to their own interests, spiritual or material. Which is why
-a free press and a free pulpit have often seemed worth dying for.
-
-Wherever civilization exists various classes, sects and nations of men
-have, one by one, claimed the right to that examination of things for
-themselves which is called education. They have never attained to it
-without opposition; and one of the most frequent and specious forms
-of that opposition is embodied in the argument that education would
-not only be useless to them, but would unfit them for their duties.
-No doubt this argument was often put forward in all honesty as the
-outcome of a conviction that was none the less sincere because it was
-prompted by self-interest. That conviction had its roots in the common
-and widespread inability to realize the actual human identity of other
-persons—in the habit of summing them up and estimating them in the
-light only of the salient (and often superficial) characteristics which
-affect ourselves. I can best explain what I mean by saying that to many
-of us the word “clerk” does not summon up the mental representation of
-an actual man who spends some of his time writing, but of something in
-the shape of a man that is continuously occupied in driving a pen. In
-other words, we lose sight of the man himself in one of his attributes;
-and the same with a miner, a sailor, etc. Thus to the persons in high
-places who opposed the education of the agricultural labourer, the
-agricultural labourer was not an actual man, but a hoe or a harrow in
-human shape; and they were quite honestly and logically unable to see
-what this animated implement of agricultural toil could want with the
-inside of a book. Practically, however, they were denying humanity to
-the labourer and sinking his identity in one particular quality—the
-physical capacity for field-work.
-
-This, as I have explained elsewhere, is the manner in which woman, as a
-rule, is still regarded—not as a human being with certain physical and
-mental qualities which enable her to bring children into the world and
-cook a dinner, but as a breeding-machine and the necessary adjunct to a
-frying-pan. So regarded, independence of thought and anything beyond a
-very limited degree of mental cultivation are unnecessary to her, even
-harmful, since they might possibly result in the acquirement of other
-attributes quite out of place in the adjunct to a frying-pan.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-
-With the advance of civilization one subject class after another has
-risen in revolt, more or less violent, more or less peaceful, and
-asserted its right to inquire, to think in its own way—that is to
-say, it has asserted its humanity. But it is a proof of my statement
-that woman has never been regarded as fully human, that the successive
-classes of men who have, in turn, asserted their own humanity have
-totally forgotten to assert hers, have left her, whatever her rank, in
-a class apart, and continued to treat her as a domestic animal whose
-needs were only the needs of a domestic animal.
-
-The aristocratic instinct is by no means confined to those born in
-the purple. (Some of the most startlingly aristocratic sentiments I
-have ever heard came from the lips of persons believed by themselves
-to entertain ultra-democratic ideas.) The sense of power over others
-is just as attractive to the many as it is to the few; and thus it
-has happened that men, in every class, have taken a pleasure in the
-dependence and subjection of their womenfolk, and, lest their power
-over them should be undermined, have refused to their womenfolk
-the right to think for themselves. The essential cruelty of that
-refusal they disguised from themselves by explaining that women could
-not think even if they tried. We have all heard the definition of
-woman—episcopal, I think—as a creature who cannot reason and pokes
-the fire from the top.
-
-This disbelief in the existence of reasoning powers in woman is still,
-it seems to me, a very real thing—at least, I have run up against it
-a good many times in the course of my life, and I do not suppose that
-I am an exception in that respect. And the really interesting thing
-about this contemptuous attitude of mind is that it has led to the
-adoption, by those who maintain it, of a very curious subterfuge. It
-is, of course, quite impossible to deny that a woman’s mind does go
-through certain processes which control and inspire her actions and
-conclusions— sometimes very swiftly and effectively; but to these
-mental processes, which in men are called reason, they give, in woman,
-the title of intuition.
-
-Now the word “intuition,” when used in connection with woman, conveys
-to the average male mind a meaning closely akin to that of the word
-instinct—as opposed to reason. (In this insistence on the instinctive
-character of our mental processes the average man is, of course,
-quite consistent; since he imagines that we exist only for the
-gratification of two instincts, the sexual and the maternal, it does
-not seem unreasonable on his part to conclude that we also think by
-instinct.) I am certain that I am right as to this masculine habit of
-confusing intuition with instinct; since on every occasion on which I
-have been more or less politely—but always firmly—informed that I
-had no intellect, but could console myself for the deficiency by the
-reflection that I possessed the usual feminine quality of intuition, I
-have made a point of bringing the person who made the remark to book by
-insisting upon an exact definition of the term. In every single case
-within my own experience the exact definition—as I have been careful
-to point out—has been not insight, but instinct. Our mental processes,
-in short, are supposed to be on the same level as the mental process
-which starts the newly-hatched gosling on its waddle to the nearest
-pond. We are supposed to know what we want without knowing why we want
-it—just like the gosling, which does not make a bee-line for the
-water because it has carefully examined its feet, discovered that they
-are webbed, and drawn the inference that webbed feet are suitable for
-progress in water.
-
-This question of the intuitive or instinctive powers of woman is one
-that has always interested me extremely; and as soon as I realized
-that my mind was supposed to work in a different way from a man’s
-mind, and that I was supposed to arrive at conclusions by a series of
-disconnected and frog-like jumps, I promptly set to work to discover
-if that was really the case by the simple expedient of examining the
-manner in which I did arrive at conclusions. I believe that (on certain
-subjects, at any rate) I think more rapidly than most people—which
-does not mean, of course, that I think more correctly. It does mean,
-however, that I very often have to explain to other people the process
-by which I have arrived at my conclusions (which might otherwise appear
-intuitive); therefore I may be called a good subject for investigation.
-I can honestly say that I have never been at a loss for such an
-explanation. I can trace the progress of my thought, step by step, just
-as a man can trace his. I may reason wrongly, but I do not reason in
-hops. And I have yet to meet the woman who does. I have met many women
-who were in the habit of coming to conclusions that were altogether
-ridiculous and illogical; but they were conclusions—drawn from
-insufficient data—and not guesses. No sane human being regulates—or
-does not regulate—its life, as we are supposed to do, by a series of
-vague and uncontrolled guesses.
-
-I imagine that the idea that women do so control their lives must
-have had its origin in the fact that men and women usually turn their
-mental energy into entirely different channels. On subjects that are
-familiar to us we think quickly, and acquire a mental dexterity akin
-to the manual dexterity of a skilled artisan. But the subjects upon
-which women exercise this mental dexterity are not, as a rule, the same
-as those upon which men exercise theirs; the latter have usually left
-narrow social and domestic matters alone, and it is in narrow social
-and domestic matters that we are accustomed to think quickly. We are
-swifter than they are, of course, at drawing the small inferences
-from which we judge what a man will like or dislike; but then, for
-generations the business of our lives has been to find out what a man
-will like or dislike, and it would be rather extraordinary if we had
-not, in the course of ages, acquired in it a measure of that rapid
-skill which in any other business would be called mechanical, but in
-ours is called intuitive.
-
-This theory of intuition or instinct, then, I take, as I have already
-said, to be in the nature of a subterfuge on the part of the male—a
-sop to his conscience, and a plausible excuse for assuming that we have
-not the intelligence which (if it were once admitted that we possessed
-it) we should have the right to cultivate by independent thinking. But
-to admit the right of a human being to independent thinking is also to
-admit something else far more important and unpleasant—his right to
-sit in judgment upon you. That right every despotism that ever existed
-has steadily denied to its subjects; therefore, there is nothing
-extraordinary in the fact that man has steadily denied it to woman.
-He has always preferred that she should be too ignorant to sit in
-judgment upon him, punishing her with ostracism if she was rash enough
-to attempt to dispel her own ignorance. One of her highest virtues, in
-his eyes, was a childish and undeveloped quality about which he threw
-a halo of romance when he called it by the name of innocence. So far
-has this insistence on ignorance or innocence in a wife been carried,
-that even in these days many women who marry young have but a very
-vague idea of what they are doing; while certain risks attaching to the
-estate of marriage are, in some ranks of life at any rate, sedulously
-concealed from them as things which it is unfit for them to know.
-
-It is a subject that is both difficult and unpleasant to touch upon;
-but while it will always be unpleasant, it ought not to be difficult,
-and I should be false to my beliefs if I apologized for touching upon
-it. Women, like men, when they enter upon a calling, have a perfect
-right to know exactly what are the dangers and drawbacks attached
-to their calling; you do not, when you turn a man into a pottery or
-a dynamite factory, sedulously conceal from him the fact that there
-are such things as lead-poisoning or combustion. On the contrary, you
-warn him—as women are seldom warned. I have been astonished at the
-number of women I have met who seem to have hardly more than a vague
-inkling—and some not even that—of the tangible, physical consequence
-of loose living.
-
-I have not the faintest intention of inditing a sermon on masculine
-morals. If the average man chooses to dispense with morals as
-we understand them, that is his affair and a matter for his own
-conscience; if he is so constituted physically that he cannot live
-as we do, and has practically no choice in the matter, that is his
-misfortune. But I do say this: that the average woman has a perfect
-right to know what are the results of loose living in so far as those
-results may affect her and her children. If marriage is a trade we
-ought to know its risks—concerning which there exists a conspiracy of
-silence. Is the cause to which I have alluded ever mentioned, except in
-technical publications, in connection with the infant death-rate?
-
-Those of us who have discovered that there are risks attaching to the
-profession of marriage other than the natural ones of childbirth, have
-very often made the discovery by accident—which ought not to be. I
-made the discovery in that way myself while I was still very young—by
-the idle opening of a book which, because it was a book, was a thing
-to be opened and looked into. I was puzzled at first, and then the
-thing stared me in the face—a simple matter of bald statement and
-statistics. I remember the thought which flashed into my mind—we are
-told we have got to be married, but we are never told _that_! It was my
-first conscious revolt against the compulsory nature of the trade of
-marriage.
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-
-This insistent and deliberate stunting of woman’s intellectual growth
-is, as I have already stated, the best proof of her essentially
-servile position in the household; and that being the case, it is not
-to be wondered at that her code of honour and morals is essentially
-a servile code. That is to say, its origin and guiding motive is the
-well-being, moral and material, of some one else. Like her stupidity
-woman’s morality has been imposed on her, and to a great extent is not
-morality at all, in the proper sense of the word, but a code of manners
-formulated in the interests of her master.
-
-I wish to make it clear that when I speak of morality in this
-connection I am not using the word in the narrow sense in which it is
-sometimes employed. By a standard of morality I mean a rule of life
-which we adopt as a guide to our conduct, and endeavour, more or less
-successfully, to apply to every action—to our dealings with others as
-well as to our dealings with our own hearts.
-
-I cannot better explain what I mean by the essential servility of
-woman’s code of morals than by quoting Milton’s well-known line—
-
-  “He for God only; she for God in him.”
-
-That one brief verse condenses into a nutshell the difference in
-the moral position of the two sexes—expresses boldly, simply,
-straightforwardly, the man’s belief that he had the right to divert
-and distort the moral impulse and growth in woman to serve his own
-convenience. No priesthood has ever made a claim more arrogant than
-this claim of man to stand between woman and her God, and divert the
-spiritual forces of her nature into the channel that served him best.
-The real superiority of man consists in this: that he is free to obey
-his conscience and to serve his God—if it be in him so to do. Woman
-is not. She can serve Him only at second hand—can obey His commands
-not directly but only by obeying the will of the man who stands between
-her and the Highest, and who has arrogated to himself not merely the
-material control of her person and her property, but the spiritual
-control of her conscience.
-
-This is no fanciful piece of imagery. There are laws still in
-existence—laws of an earlier age—which prove how complete has been
-this moral control which we are only now shaking off, since they
-presume a man’s entire responsibility for the actions of his wife,
-be those actions good or ill. That a woman at her husband’s bidding
-should bend her conscience to his will as a reed bends; that, because
-he desired it of her, she should break and defy every commandment
-of God and man; this seemed to our forefathers a natural thing, and
-a course of action befitting her station and place in life. So far
-from blaming, they condoned it in her and have expressed that view
-of the matter in their law—sometimes with awkward and annoying
-results for a later generation. Woman, until she began to feel in
-herself the stirrings of independence—woman, when she was just the
-wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else, the domestic animal—seems to me to
-have been a creature whom you could not have described as being either
-moral or immoral. She was just unmoral. Whether she did good or evil
-was not, as far as her own individuality went, of very much account
-since the standard set up for her was not of her own setting up; it had
-been erected for the comfort and well-being of her master. Her virtues
-were second-hand virtues, instilled into her for the convenience of
-another; and she did what was right in his eyes, not in her own, after
-the manner of a child. Therefore she was neither moral nor immoral, but
-servile. The motive which guided and impelled her from childhood was
-a low one—the desire (disinterestedly or for her own advantage) of
-pleasing some one else. (To make others happy, as Mr. Burns expresses
-it.) The desire to please being the motive power of her existence,
-her code of honour and ethics was founded not on thought, conviction
-or even natural impulse, but on observation of the likes and dislikes
-of those she had to please. Hence its extraordinary and inconsistent
-character, its obvious artificiality and the manifest traces it bears
-of having been imposed upon her from without. For instance, no natural
-ethical code emanating from within could have summed up woman’s virtue
-in _a_ virtue—physical purity. That confusion of one virtue with
-virtue in general was certainly of masculine origin arising from the
-masculine habit of thinking of woman only in connection with her
-relations to himself. To other aspects of her life and character man
-was indifferent—they hardly existed for him. And of masculine origin,
-too, was that extraordinary article of the code by which it was laid
-down that a woman’s “honour” was, to all intents and purposes, a matter
-of chance—a thing which she only possessed because no unkind fate had
-thrown her in the way of a man sufficiently brutal to deprive her of it
-by force. Her honour, in short, was not a moral but a physical quality.
-
-One sees, of course, the advantage from the male point of view, of
-this peculiar provision of the code. In a world where the pickpocket
-class had the upper hand a somewhat similar regulation would, no doubt,
-be in force; and it would be enacted, by a custom stronger than law,
-that to have one’s pocket picked was in itself a disgrace which must
-on no account be cried aloud upon the housetops or communicated to
-the police. To reveal and publish the fact that your purse had been
-snatched from you by force would be to make yourself a mark of scorn
-and for hissing, to bring upon yourself an obloquy far greater than
-that accorded to the active partner in the transaction, whose doings
-would be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and the explanation
-that pickpockets are pickpockets, and will never be anything but what
-nature has made them; and, after all, you must have dangled the purse
-temptingly before his eyes. Under these circumstances, with the thief
-at liberty to ply his trade, the fact that you had money in your pocket
-would be, strictly speaking, an accident; and, to make the parallel
-complete, the lack of your money—the fact that it had been taken
-from you even against your will—would have to be accounted a black
-disgrace, leaving a lasting smear upon your whole life. That, it seems
-to me, is the exact position with regard to what is commonly termed a
-woman’s “honour.” I should prefer to put it that a woman has no honour;
-only an accident.
-
-In such a world as I have described—a world run in the interest of the
-light-fingered class—the average and decent man would find it just as
-easy and just as difficult to take legal proceedings against the person
-who had violently deprived him of his purse as the average and decent
-woman would now find it were she to take legal proceedings against the
-man who had violently deprived her of her honour. Nominally, of course,
-justice would afford him a fair hearing and the process of law would be
-at his disposal; actually he would make himself a target for contempt
-and scorn, and the very men who tried his case, with every desire to be
-unbiassed, would be prejudiced against him because he had not hidden
-his disgrace in silence. In most cases the effect of such a public
-opinion would be to make him hold his tongue, and practically by his
-silence become an abettor and accomplice in the offence wrought upon
-himself and by which he himself had suffered. He might, if his mould
-were sensitive, choose the river rather than exposure—as women have
-done before now.
-
-Honour, as I understand it, is not physical or accidental; is not even
-reputation, which is a species of reflection of honour in the minds of
-others; it is a state of mind resulting from a voluntary and conscious
-adherence to certain rules of life and conduct. As such it is entirely
-your own possession and a creation, a thing of which no one can rob
-you but yourself; it is at no man’s mercy but your own. It is because
-woman, as a rule, has not possessed the power of giving voluntary and
-conscious adherence to rules of life and conduct, because the rules of
-life and conduct which she follows have been framed in the interests
-of others and forced upon her in the interests of others—that she has
-been denied any other than a purely physical and accidental “honour.”
-
-One’s mind goes back to two children in the school-room pondering
-seriously and in the light of their own unaided logic the puzzling
-story of Lucrece—much expurgated and newly acquired during the course
-of a Roman history lesson. The expurgated Roman history book had made
-it clear that she was a woman greatly to be admired; we sat with
-knitted brows and argued why. Something had been done to her—we were
-vague as to the nature of the something, but had gathered from the
-hurried manner of our instructress that here was a subject on which
-you must not ask for precise information. Our ignorance baffled and
-aggrieved us since fuller knowledge might have thrown light upon an
-otherwise incomprehensible case. Something had been done to her by a
-wicked man and against her will—so much we knew. She had tried all
-she could to prevent it, but he was the stronger—the expurgated Roman
-history had said, “By force.” Therefore, whatever had happened was not
-her fault. Yet the next morning she had sent posthaste for her husband
-and her father, told them all about it and stabbed herself to the heart
-before their eyes! Try as we would to sympathize with this paragon of
-Roman virtue, the action seemed inconsequent. It implied remorse where
-remorse was not only unnecessary but impossible. If she had stabbed
-Sextus Tarquinius, or if Sextus Tarquinius had stabbed himself in a fit
-of repentance for his own mysterious ill-doing.... But why needlessly
-distress your family by descending into an early grave because some one
-else had been mysteriously wicked while you yourself had done no harm
-at all? Our sense of logic and justice was shaken to its foundations.
-The verdict of admiration recorded in the history book stared us in the
-face, conflicting with our own conclusions; and it was our reverence
-for the written word alone that prevented the open and outspoken
-judgment, “She was silly.”
-
-So two small persons, to whom sex was still a matter of garments,
-seriously troubled by their own inability to appreciate a virtue held
-up to them for reverence, with views as yet level and unwarped on the
-subject of justice, and still in complete ignorance of the “economic”
-law that the cost of sin, like the cost of taxation, is always shifted
-on to the shoulders of those least able to bear or to resent it.
-
-The key to the curious and inferior position of woman with regard
-to breaches, voluntary or involuntary, of the moral law is to be
-found in this right of the strongest to avoid payment. It is a right
-that is recognized and openly acted upon in the world of business
-and of property, that has to be considered and taken into account
-by financiers and statesmen in the collection of revenue and the
-imposition of taxes. It is the general exercise of this right that
-makes the incidence of taxation a study for experts. Roughly its result
-is, the weakest pays. Tax the business man and he will set to work to
-send up prices, collecting his additional toll in farthings, pence and
-shillings from his customers, or to save it by cutting down the wages
-of his employees. Tax the landlord, and he sends up rents—perhaps in
-the slums. The stronger the position of the capitalist, the more easily
-does he avoid payment. If his position is so strong that he is an
-actual monopolist he can avoid it with complete ease, simply taking the
-amount required from the pockets of those who are unable to refuse his
-demands, handing it over to the powers that be and paying himself for
-his trouble in doing so.
-
-The incidence of blame in offences against the code which regulates
-the sexual relations of men and women is governed by laws similar to
-those which govern the incidence of taxation. The stronger party to
-the offence, taking advantage of his strength, has refused to pay;
-has simply and squarely declined to take his share of the mutual
-punishment, and has shifted a double portion thereof on the shoulders
-of the weaker party. So far as I can see that is the real and only
-reason for the preferential treatment of man under the moral code—a
-preferential treatment insisted upon by Adam in the garden of Eden
-when he anxiously explained to the Deity that the woman was to blame,
-and insisted upon ever since by his descendants. Is it not Adam who
-sniggers over spicy stories at his club, retails them to the wife of
-his bosom and then gives vent to manly and generous indignation at
-the expense of the spinster who repeats them at third hand? while
-the extreme reluctance of a purely male electorate to raise what is
-termed the age of consent in girls is perhaps the most striking example
-of this tendency of the stronger to shift the responsibility of his
-misdeeds on to any shoulders but his own,—even on to the shoulders of
-a child.
-
-Palpable and obvious hardship dealt out by men to women is usually
-defended, if not explained, by that more or less vague reference to
-natural law, which is again an attempt to shift responsibility; and
-I have heard the position of woman as scapegoat for the sins of the
-man justified by her greater importance to the race as the mother of
-the next generation. This position of trust and responsibility, it is
-urged, makes her fall more blameworthy in itself, since her offence
-is not only an offence against her own person. One would feel more
-inclined to give ear to this explanation if it could be proved that
-it was only in the case of actual infractions of the moral code that
-the male was in the habit of availing himself of his opportunities of
-shifting the blame that should be his on to the back of the weaker
-vessel. But it is not. Why, for instance, when a man who has been
-engaged to a woman changes his mind and throws her over against her
-will should the woman be regarded as to some extent humiliated and
-disgraced by the action of another person, an action over which she
-has had no control whatever, which has, in fact, been performed
-against her express desire? Yet in such circumstances the woman who
-has been left in the lurch is supposed to suffer, quite apart from
-the damage to her affection, a sort of moral damage and disgrace from
-the heartlessness or fickleness of another person—the man to whom
-she has been engaged; and this moral damage is, I believe, taken into
-account in actions for breach of promise of marriage (where there is
-no question of seduction). In these instances of fickleness on the
-side of the one party to the engagement, there is no suggestion of
-guilt or offence in the other party—the woman; yet the consequences
-of guilt and offence have been transferred to her shoulders, simply,
-it seems to me, because the guilty and offending party, being the
-stronger, declined to bear them himself. And woman’s code of honour and
-morals being essentially a servile code, designed for the benefit of
-those in authority over her, she accepts the position without protest
-and takes shame to herself for the fault of another person. The first
-provision of a wider code—a code drawn up by herself—must be that
-she will only accept responsibility for her own actions. Until she
-has taken her stand on that principle she cannot hope for a freedom
-that is real, even a material freedom. At present her position, in
-this respect, is analogous to that of the mediæval whipping-boy or
-those slaves of antiquity who were liable to be put to death for the
-sins of their masters—a position entirely incompatible with the most
-elementary ideas of liberty and justice. The chaste and virtuous
-Lucrece whose untimely fate so distraught our youthful brains was not
-so much the victim of one man’s evil passions and wrong-doing as of
-her own servile code of morals; she was (if she ever existed) a slave
-of undoubted and heroic virtue—but certainly a slave and not a free
-woman, accountable for her own acts and her own acts alone.
-
-As a matter of fact, if we come to look into them closely, we find
-that the virtues that have been enjoined upon woman for generations
-are practically all servile virtues—the virtues a man desires in and
-enjoins upon those whom he wishes to hold in subjection. Honour, in the
-proper sense of the word, truth-telling, independence of thought and
-action, self-reliance and courage are the qualities of a free people;
-and, because they are the qualities of a free people, they have not
-been required of her. Submission, suppleness, coaxing manners, a desire
-to please and ingratiate, tact and a capacity for hard work for which
-no definite return is to be expected are the qualities encouraged in
-a servile or subject race by those in authority over them; and it
-is precisely these qualities which have been required of woman. The
-ordinary male ideal of a mother is a servile ideal—a person who waits
-on others, gives way to others, drudges for others, and only lives
-for the convenience of others. The ordinary male ideal of a wife is a
-servile ideal—a person with less brains than himself, who is pleasant
-to look at, makes him comfortable at home and respects his authority.
-And it is the unfortunate fact that she is expected to live down to
-this ideal—and very often does—which accounts for that frequent
-phenomenon, the rapid mental deterioration of the woman who has
-fulfilled her destiny and attained to a completeness that is synonymous
-with stagnation.
-
-It is obvious that marriage—the companionship of two reasonable human
-beings—ought not, under natural conditions, to have a stupefying
-effect upon one of the parties to the arrangement; and, as far as I
-can see, where the woman is recognized as a responsible human being
-with an individuality and interests of her own, and with a right to her
-own opinion, it does not have that effect. The professional woman—a
-class which I know fairly well—is not, as a rule, less interesting
-and individual after marriage than before it, simply because she
-does not usually marry the type of man who would expect her to swamp
-her own ideas and personality in his; and the working woman of
-another class, who, as the manager and financier of the household,
-is obliged to keep her wits sharp, is often an extremely interesting
-person with a shrewd and characteristic outlook on life. It is the
-woman of the “comfortable” class, with narrow duties and a few petty
-responsibilities, who now-a-days most readily conforms to the servile
-type of manners and morals set up for her admiration and imitation,
-sinks into a nonentity or a busybody, and does her best to gratify and
-justify her husband’s predilection for regarding her mental capacity
-with contempt.
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-
-One peculiarity of the trade at which so many women earn their
-livelihood I have, as yet, hardly touched upon. It is this: that
-however arduous and exacting the labour that trade entails—and the
-rough manual work of most households is done by women—it is not
-paid except by a wage of subsistence. There may be exceptions, of
-course, but, as a general rule, the work done by the wife and mother
-in the home is paid for merely by supplying her with the necessaries
-of existence—food, lodging, and clothing. She is fed and lodged on
-the same principle as a horse is fed and lodged—so that she may do
-her work, her cooking, her cleaning, her sewing, and the tending and
-rearing of her children. She may do it very well or she may do it very
-badly; but beyond food, lodging, and a certain amount of clothing,
-she can claim no wage for it. In short, her work in the home is not
-recognized either by the State or by the individual citizen (except in
-occasional instances) as work which has any commercial value.
-
-There must, of course, be some reason why such intrinsically important
-work as the rearing of children and ministering to the comfort of the
-community should be held in such poor esteem that it is paid for at the
-lowest possible rate—subsistence rate. (Which means, of course, that
-wages in that particular branch of work have been forced just as low
-as they can go, since human beings cannot continue to exist without
-the means of supporting life.) And the principal reason for this state
-of things I take to be the compulsory nature of the trade. Given a
-sufficiently large number of persons destined and educated from birth
-for one particular calling, with no choice at all in the matter, and
-with every other calling and means of livelihood sternly barred to
-them, and you have all the conditions necessary for the forcing down of
-wages to the lowest possible point to which they will go—subsistence
-point. In that calling labour will be as cheap as the heart of the
-employer could desire; and incidentally it will tend to become what
-ill-paid labour always tends to become—inefficient. Exactly the
-same condition of affairs would prevail in any other trade—mining or
-boiler-making, for instance—if immense numbers of boys were brought
-up to be miners or boiler-makers, and informed that whatever their
-needs or desires, or whatever the state of the labour market in these
-particular callings, they could not turn their abilities into any other
-direction. Under those circumstances miners and boiler-makers would
-probably work for their keep and nothing more, as the ordinary wife has
-to do.
-
-I shall be told, of course, that the position of a husband is not that
-of an ordinary employer of labour, and that the financial relations
-of a man and his wife are complicated by considerations of affection
-and mutual interest which make it quite impossible to estimate the
-exact wage-earning value of the wife’s services in the household, or
-the price which she receives for them in other things than money. Even
-if, for the sake of argument, this be admitted as a general rule, it
-does not invalidate my point, which is that the compulsory nature of
-woman’s principal trade is quite sufficient, in itself, to account
-for the fact that the workers in that trade are not deemed worthy of
-anything more than a wage of subsistence. Considerations of sentiment
-and affection may help to keep her direct monetary remuneration down;
-but to bring it down in the first instance nothing more was needed than
-compulsory overcrowding of the “domestic service” market.
-
-That the wage of subsistence—the board, lodging, and clothing—dealt
-out to a married woman is often board, lodging, and clothing on a
-very liberal and comfortable scale, does not alter the fact that it
-is essentially a wage of subsistence, regulated by the idea of what
-is necessary for subsistence in the particular class to which she may
-happen to belong. The plutocrat who wishes his wife to entertain cannot
-habitually feed her on fish and chips from round the corner, or renew
-her wardrobe in an old-clothes shop. But she does not get twelve-course
-dinners and dresses from the Rue de la Paix because she has earned them
-by extra attention to her duties as a wife and mother, but because
-they are necessary qualifications for the place in his household which
-her husband wishes her to take—because, without them, she could not
-fulfil the duties that he requires of her. The monetary reward of
-wifehood and motherhood depends entirely on the life, the good luck
-and the good nature of another person; the strictest attention to duty
-on the part of a wife and mother is of no avail without that. The
-really hard labour of housework and rearing children is done in those
-households where the wage of subsistence is lowest; and the women who
-receive most money from their husbands are precisely those who pass on
-the typical duties of a wife and mother to other persons—housekeepers,
-cooks, nurses, and governesses. Excellence in the trade is no guarantee
-of reward, which is purely a matter of luck; work, however hard, will
-not bring about that measure of independence, more or less comparative,
-which is attained by successful work in other trades. Dependence,
-in short, is the essence of wifehood as generally understood by the
-masculine mind.
-
-Under normal and favourable conditions, then, a married woman without
-private means of her own obtains a wage of subsistence for the
-fulfilment of the duties required of her in her husband’s household.
-Under unfavourable (but not very abnormal) conditions she does not
-even obtain that. In the case of the large army of married women who
-support idle or invalid husbands by paid labour outside the home, the
-additional work inside the home is carried on gratis, and without a
-suggestion of payment of any kind.
-
-I am inclined to believe that the principle that payment should be
-made for domestic service rendered does not really enter into the
-question of a wife’s wages; that those wages (of subsistence) are paid
-simply for the possession of her person, and that the other arts and
-accomplishments she may possess are not supposed to have any exchange
-value. At any rate, a mistress, from whom the domestic arts are not
-expected, is often just as expensively kept as a wife—which seems to
-point to my conclusion. What Mr. John Burns has called a woman’s “duty
-and livelihood” is, in the strict sense of the term, not her livelihood
-at all. Her livelihood, as an ordinary wife, is a precarious dependence
-upon another person’s life; should that other person die, she could
-not support herself and her children by remaining in “woman’s
-sphere”—cooking, tending the house, and looking after her young
-family. That sort of work having no commercial value, she and her young
-family would very shortly starve. The profession of the prostitute is a
-livelihood; the profession of the wife and mother is not. A woman can
-support her children by prostitution; she cannot do so by performing
-the duties ordinarily associated with motherhood.
-
-That marriage has another side than the economic I should be the last
-to deny, as I should be the last to deny that there are many households
-in which subjection and dependence in the wife are not desired by her
-husband—households in which there is a sharing of material, as well
-as of intellectual, interests. But that does not alter the fact that
-the position of a great many other married women is simply that of an
-unpaid domestic servant on the premises of a husband. The services
-that, rendered by another, would command payment, or at least thanks,
-from her are expected as a matter of course. They are supposed to be
-natural to her; she is no more to be paid for them than she is to be
-paid for breathing or feeling hungry. (One wonders why it should be
-“natural” in woman to do so many disagreeable things. Does the average
-man really believe that she has an instinctive and unquenchable craving
-for all the unpleasant and unremunerative jobs? Or is that only a
-polite way of expressing his deeply-rooted conviction that when once
-she has got a husband she ought to be so thoroughly happy that a little
-dirty work more or less really cannot matter to her?)
-
-It may be argued that in the greater number of cases marriage, for
-the husband, means the additional labour and expense of supporting a
-wife and children; and that this added labour and expense is expected
-from him as a matter of course, and that neither does he receive any
-thanks for it. Quite so; but, as I pointed out at the beginning of
-this book, marriage is a voluntary matter on the part of a man. He
-does not earn his living by it; he is under no necessity to undertake
-its duties and responsibilities should he prefer not to do so. He has
-other interests in life and no social stigma attaches to him if he does
-not take to himself a wife and beget children. He enters the marriage
-state because he wishes to enter it, and is prepared to make certain
-necessary sacrifices in order to maintain a wife and family; whereas
-the position of the woman is very different. She very often enters the
-married state because she has to—because more lucrative trades are
-barred to her, because to remain unmarried will be to confess failure.
-This state of things in itself gives the man an advantage, and enables
-him to ensure (not necessarily consciously) that his share of the
-bargain shall be advantageous to himself—to ensure, in short, that he
-gets his money’s worth. With his wife, on the other hand, it has often
-been a case of take it or leave it; since she knows that, if she does
-leave it, she will not be able to strike any more advantageous bargain
-elsewhere.
-
-These being the conditions under which, consciously or unconsciously,
-the average wife strikes her bargain, it follows that in the ensuing
-division of labour she generally gets the worst of the transaction, the
-duties assigned to her being those which her husband would prefer not
-to perform. They are handed over to her as a matter of course, and
-on the assumption that they enter into what is commonly known as her
-“sphere.” And it is this principle—that woman’s work is the kind of
-work which man prefers not to do—which regulates and defines not only
-the labour of a woman in her own household, but the labour of women
-generally.
-
-I am quite aware that this principle is not openly admitted in
-assigning to woman her share of the world’s work—that, on the
-contrary, the results of its application are explained away on the
-theory that there is a “natural” division of labour between the two
-sexes. But when one comes to examine that theory, dispassionately
-and without prejudice, one finds that it does not hold water—or
-very little—since the estimate of woman’s “natural” work is such
-an exceedingly variable quantity. One nation, people, or class,
-will esteem it “natural” in woman to perform certain duties which,
-in another nation, people, or class, are entirely left to men—so
-much so, that woman’s sphere, like morality, seems to be defined by
-considerations “purely geographical.” Unless we grasp the underlying
-principle that woman’s “natural” labour in any given community is
-the form of labour which the men of that community do not care to
-undertake, her share in the world’s work must appear to be regulated by
-sheer and arbitrary chance.
-
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-
-As soon as one comes to examine this subject of the “natural” sphere
-of woman and woman’s work with anything like an open mind, one
-discovers that in at least nine cases out of ten the word “suitable” or
-“artificial” must be substituted for the word “natural.” There are only
-two kinds of work natural to any human being: the labour by which, in
-fulfilment of the curse laid upon Adam, he needs to earn his bread; and
-what may be called the artistic or spontaneous labour which he puts of
-his own free will into his hobbies, his pleasures, and his interests.
-In some cases the two kinds—the bread-winning and the artistic or
-spontaneous form of labour—can be combined; and those who can so
-combine them, be they rich or poor, are the fortunate ones of the
-earth. To a person in actual need of the means of supporting existence
-any form of labour by which he or she can earn or obtain those means
-of existence is a perfectly natural one. A sufficiently hungry
-coal-heaver would do his best to hemstitch a silk pocket-handkerchief
-for the price of a meal, and a sufficiently hungry woman would wrestle
-with a coal-heaver’s job for the same consideration. In neither case
-could the action of the sufficiently hungry person be called unnatural;
-on the contrary, it would be prompted by the first and most urgent of
-natural laws—the law of self-preservation, which would over-ride any
-considerations of unsuitability. It does not, of course, follow from
-this example that certain forms of labour are not more suitable to
-women in general, and others not more suitable to men in general; all I
-wish to insist on is that suitable and natural are not interchangeable
-terms, and that what may be suitable at one place and under one set of
-conditions may not be suitable in another place and under another set
-of conditions.
-
-The care of young children seems to be a department of labour so
-suitable to women that one may venture to assume that it is natural
-to a good many of them, though not by any means to all. (Not the
-least serious result of compulsory marriage has been the compulsory
-motherhood of women in whom the maternal instinct is slight—of whom
-there are many.) I do not mean that men should necessarily be excluded
-altogether from the tending of children; in many men the sense of
-fatherhood is very strong, in spite of the discouragement it receives
-under present conditions. If that discouragement were removed the
-paternal instinct might manifest itself in a more personal care of
-children; but on the whole one imagines that such personal care of
-children will always come more easily to woman. On the other hand,
-as most men are stronger muscularly than women, those departments of
-labour which require the exertion of considerable muscular strength
-must, under ordinary circumstances, naturally be monopolized by man.
-But between these two extremes there lies what may be called a neutral
-or debatable ground of labour requiring the exercise of qualities
-which are the exclusive property of neither sex. It is in this
-neutral field that the law to which I have alluded above comes into
-operation—the law under which the activities of women are confined
-to those departments of the labour market into which men do not
-care, or actively object, to enter. Thus, if there were no question
-of economic competition, it seems to me that the invasion by woman of
-these departments of the labour market which were formerly monopolized
-by men would be bound to awaken a certain amount of opposition; since
-her consequent desertion of the dull, unpleasant, and monotonous tasks
-assigned to her, might mean that these tasks would have to be performed
-by those who had hitherto escaped the necessity by shifting it on to
-her shoulders. Hence a natural and comprehensible resentment.
-
-The average and unthinking man who passes his existence in a modern
-civilized town, if he were asked upon what principle the work of
-the world were shared between the men and the women who inhabit it,
-would very probably reply, in his average and unthinking way, that
-the idea underlying the division of labour between the sexes was the
-idea of sparing woman the hard bodily toil for which she was unfitted
-by her lack of physical strength. If that really were the principle
-upon which the division of labour was made, it is clear that the
-ordinary male clerk ought at once to change places with the ordinary
-housemaid or charwoman, the ordinary ticket-collector with the
-ordinary laundress. The physical labour of holding a pen or collecting
-tickets is infinitely less than the physical labour of carrying coals
-upstairs, scrubbing a floor, or wringing out a dirty garment. There
-is no particular or inevitable reason why such changes should not be
-made—and no further away than France housemaid’s duties are very
-commonly performed by men. Clerking, the duties of a ticket-collector,
-laundry-work and housework are all situated upon that neutral ground
-of labour to which I have alluded above; they are forms of work which
-do not call for the exercise of qualities peculiar to either sex, and
-which, therefore, can be equally well performed by persons of either
-sex.
-
-To take another instance. In most civilized countries the rougher
-branches of agriculture are looked upon as work which is unsuited to
-women, because making too heavy demands upon their strength. Amongst
-primitive and semicivilized peoples, on the other hand, the tilling
-of the soil is often left entirely to women; while the dweller in
-towns—who usually has most to say about these matters—would probably
-be astonished if he realized how largely women’s work is employed, even
-in Europe, in the rougher processes of agriculture. (Within less than a
-twenty-four hours’ journey from London I have seen a woman yoked to a
-plough.) In certain small communities on the Breton coast I understand
-that the work of agriculture is carried on entirely by the women of the
-community; the men—fishermen by trade—occupying themselves during
-the long periods of enforced idleness between the fishing seasons by
-dressmaking for the household, and other forms of sewing. I have before
-me, as I write, a specimen of the needlework of one of these Breton
-fishermen: a penwiper, neatly cut and sewn, and quaintly ornamented
-with a design in yellow thread—the sort of trifle that we should
-regard as an essentially feminine production. To me such a division
-of labour does not seem in the least “unnatural.” Having regard to
-the circumstances, I can well understand that the man who took needle
-and scissors to produce my penwiper—and who had his fill of stormy
-and open air toil at other times—should prefer to set his hand to a
-restful occupation which would keep him in his home, rather than to the
-plough or the spade, which would take him out of it.
-
-In the beginning of things, labour seems to have been divided between
-the sexes on a fairly simple plan. Man did most of the hunting and most
-of the fighting; and woman, only joining in the hunting and fighting
-if necessity arose, did all the rest. In savage tribes which have
-suddenly come under the domination of a civilized race—a domination
-which usually means not only the cessation of tribal warfare, but a
-rapid decrease in the raw material of the chase—the male, debarred
-from the exercise of his former avocations, frequently refuses to
-do anything at all. Deprived of the only work proper to man, and
-disinclined, at first, to undertake the work he considers proper to
-woman, he is apt to fold his hands and exist in idleness on what is, to
-all intents and purposes, the slave-labour of his female belongings.
-The distaste of certain South African races for what we esteem men’s
-work is well known, and has had political consequences before now;
-and it is said that in some primitive American tribes a man would
-consider that he demeaned himself by undertaking such strictly feminine
-work as the hewing and carrying of wood. (One is led to the conclusion
-that the idea of woman as a wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else must be
-of comparatively modern growth. “Natural” man did not think of her in
-that light at all; he had so many other uses for her. Or, perhaps, one
-might put it that his definition of the duties of a wife and mother was
-comprehensive.)
-
-The early arts and the first processes of manufacture are supposed to
-have originated with that half of the human race which is now denied
-invention and initiative—arising naturally out of her more complicated
-duties and more settled habits of living. Woman was certainly, and all
-unknown to herself, the civilizing agent in the primitive community.
-The hut, clearing, or cave where she tended the hearth and carried on
-her rude industries, and whither her man returned from his roaming
-expeditions, was the germ and nucleus of the city where her descendants
-now dwell.
-
-It was not until the world grew more crowded, less of a place to
-fight in, less of a place to hunt in, that man began to consider
-other means and take to other ways of earning his living—to dig and
-to engage in manufactures. In other words, he began to invade the
-sphere of woman (it is as well to remember this), and to parcel out
-and divide the industries hitherto monopolized by her. This process
-of parcelling out and division was carried out in accordance with the
-principle already mentioned—that woman was to keep those trades which
-men did not care to embark upon; and, roughly speaking, his preference
-in the matter has always been for those callings and professions
-which ensured him, in addition to his livelihood, and, if possible, a
-prospect of advancement, a certain amount of variety in his existence,
-and a certain amount of intercourse with his fellows. His tendency,
-therefore, has been to annex those trades which afforded him the
-desired amount of variety, intercourse, and prospect of advancement,
-and to leave to woman the monotonous, prospectless, and isolated
-callings—callings which were usually connected with the home; and
-that tendency seems to have continued with very little check until
-the beginning of the revolution in our social and industrial system
-which was brought about by the introduction of machinery—a revolution
-which, incidentally and amongst other things, is changing almost beyond
-recognition the institution known as the home, modifying the relations
-of the sexes, and completely altering the position of woman by forcing
-her, whether she likes it or not, to stand on her own feet.
-
-I have dwelt at some length upon this tendency in the dominant
-sex—the outcome of no deliberate selfishness, but of the natural and
-instinctive human impulse to take the line of least resistance and get
-what one wants in the easiest way—because it seems to me to afford the
-only reasonable explanation of the customary hard and fast division of
-labour between an ordinary man and an ordinary wife. Fundamentally, I
-can see no reason why it should be the duty of the wife, rather than
-of the husband, to clean doorsteps, scrub floors, and do the family
-cooking. Men are just as capable as women of performing all these
-duties. They can clean doorsteps and scrub floors just as well as
-women; they can cook just as well as women, sometimes better. Why,
-then, should it be assumed that it is the natural thing for a married
-woman to take over these particular departments of work, and that when
-a bride undertakes to love, honour, and obey her husband, she also
-undertakes to scrub his floors and fry his steaks? The answer to that
-question seems to be, not that it is natural for a woman to like a form
-of labour which is usually monotonous and without prospect, but that
-it is quite natural for a man to dislike it—and therefore leave it to
-some one else.
-
-One of the best examples, in a small way, of the tendency I have been
-speaking of I got not long ago from a friend of mine, a woman of the
-working-class. I happened to be one of an audience she was addressing,
-when she suddenly put to it the unexpected question—“Why does the
-father carve the joint in rich people’s houses, when in poor people’s
-houses it is the mother who carves it?” One, at least, of her audience
-was entirely at a loss for an answer to the conundrum until it was
-duly furnished by the speaker—running as follows: “In rich people’s
-houses the father carves the joint, because there is always enough
-to go round and the carver can help himself to the tit-bits. In poor
-people’s houses the mother carves the joint, because there mayn’t be
-always enough to go round and the carver gets the last helping.” I have
-no doubt that her explanation of the two customs is correct. Where the
-labour of carving is a pleasant duty, likely to bring its reward, it is
-performed by the head of the household; where it is an unpleasant duty,
-incurring penalty in the place of reward, the head of the household
-decides to pass it on to some one else. I do not mean that he decides
-it after due and selfish deliberation—he simply obeys a natural
-unthinking impulse.
-
-It will be urged, of course, that motherhood and the care of children
-being the central point and fundamental interest in a woman’s life,
-the domestic duties and arts spring naturally from that central point
-and group themselves around it; and that this, and not any question of
-masculine likes and dislikes in the matter, is the real reason why, all
-over the world, certain forms of labour, some of them of a drudging and
-unpleasant nature, are thrust upon her—by the decree of Providence,
-and not by the will of her husband.
-
-I am always suspicious of those decrees of Providence which run
-parallel to the interests of persons who have taken it upon themselves
-to expound Providential wisdom; and, as I have already explained, I
-am inclined to doubt that there exists in every woman an overpowering
-maternal instinct which swamps all other interests and desires. But
-even if, for the sake of argument, the universality of an overpowering
-maternal instinct be admitted, it is legitimate to point out that
-housework and its unpaid drudgery is not only performed in the
-interests of children. It is performed in childless households; it
-is expected, as a matter of course, by fathers from their daughters,
-by brothers from their sisters. It is performed, in short, in the
-interests of the man quite as much as in the interests of the
-child—perhaps more, since, in a busy household, the child, so far
-from being the central point and pivot of an establishment, is often
-attended to only incidentally, and in the time that can be snatched
-from other duties. Further, in the numerous households where husband
-and wife alike go out to work—perhaps at the same form of labour, as
-is the case in many factory districts—the woman on returning home
-(after working all day, just as her husband does, to contribute her
-share to the weekly expenses necessary for the support of household and
-children) has to cook, clean, sew, etc., in the time which her husband
-can employ as he chooses. In such instances the wife has taken her
-share in what are usually considered the typical duties of a husband,
-and it would be only reasonable to suppose that, in the consequent
-rearrangement of the domestic economy, the husband, as a matter of
-course, would take his share in the typical duties of a wife. In some
-cases, no doubt, he does; but as a general rule the household duties
-are left to the woman, in exactly the same manner as they would be left
-to her if she did not leave her house to work for a wage. And they
-are left to her simply because her husband considers them tiresome or
-unpleasant, and therefore declines to perform them.
-
-I have laid stress on the conditions under which woman’s work as a
-wife, mother, and housekeeper is usually carried on, because it seems
-to me that the influence of those conditions has extended far beyond
-that narrow circle of the home to which, until comparatively lately,
-her energies have been confined. It was within the four walls of the
-home that man learned to look upon her as a being whose share of work
-was always the unpleasant share, and whose wages were the lowest wages
-that could possibly be given. And—which is far worse—she learned to
-look upon herself in the same light, as a creature from whom much must
-be demanded and to whom little must be given. Small wonder, then, with
-that age-long tradition behind her, that when she is forced out into
-the world, unorganized and unprepared, she finds it hard to get even a
-living wage for the work of her head and hands—and that when you speak
-of a sweated you mean a woman’s trade.
-
-There is, so far as I can see, only one way in which woman can make
-herself more valued, and free herself from the necessity of performing
-duties for which she gets neither thanks nor payment. She must do as
-men have always done in such a situation—shirk the duties.
-
-
-
-
-IX
-
-
-There is one element in the relations between man and wife to which, as
-yet, I have hardly referred. I mean that element which is known as the
-exercise of protection by the stronger over the weaker—by the man over
-the woman. In considering the rewards of wifehood, great or small, it
-cannot, of course, be passed over without examination, since it seems
-to be assumed that a man pays his wife for services unpaid in other
-ways by defending her against perils, physical or otherwise.
-
-Now there can be no doubt that in former ages and all over the
-world—as in certain regions of the world to-day—this physical
-protection of the weaker by the stronger, of the woman by the man, was
-a thing that really counted in marriage. The women of a savage tribe
-which was constantly at war with surrounding savage tribes, would have
-to rely on the strength and skill in warfare of their men to deliver
-them from capture or death. In such a primitive state of affairs every
-man might be called upon at any moment to exercise in his own person
-duties of defence and protection which the average man now delegates
-to the paid soldier and the paid policeman. In the beginning of things
-the head of every family possessed the right of private war and private
-justice, and it was on his success in both these fields of activity
-that the lives and the welfare of his womenfolk and children would very
-largely depend. It was only by virtue of his strength that he could
-maintain possession of his property in goods or in human flesh. It was
-by virtue of his superior strength that he reduced woman to subjection,
-and in return, and as a form of payment for her toil, defended her
-from the attacks of others. So arose and originated the idea of the
-physical protection necessarily meted out by husband to wife; an idea
-real enough in the beginning. Circumstances alter cases; but they often
-take a long time to alter ideas, and this particular one continues to
-flourish luxuriantly in places where the order of things that gave it
-birth has passed into the forgotten. One still hears people talk as if
-a clerk or a greengrocer’s assistant, married in a suburban chapel and
-going to Cliftonville for his honeymoon, undertook thereby to shelter
-his better half from heaven knows what of vague and mysterious peril.
-From other times and other manners, beginning with the days when a
-stone axe formed a necessary part of a bridegroom’s wedding garment,
-into places where moral force has fought the worst of its bitter battle
-with physical force, into days when private war is called murder and
-the streets are policed, there has come down the superstition that the
-ordinary civilized man performs doughty feats of protection for the
-benefit of the ordinary civilized wife. And it seems to be accepted
-that that element of protection is a natural and unavoidable element in
-the relations of married man and woman—even of married man and woman
-living in a suburban flat.
-
-Once upon a time it was a natural and unavoidable element in
-the relations of every married couple; just as it was natural
-and unavoidable, once upon a time, that the unwarlike and
-commercially-minded burghers of a mediæval city should bargain
-with a neighbouring and predatory baron to keep at bay—for a
-consideration—other barons no less predatory but a little less
-neighbouring. That sort of arrangement, I believe, was fairly common
-in the Middle Ages when predatory barons were in a position which
-enabled them to bend the law to their own liking, and when the obvious
-thing for honest and peaceable men to do was to set a thief to catch
-a thief. A recognized institution in its day, this particular form of
-protection passed with the growth of a central authority, with the
-suppression of private warfare and the substitution of a national for
-a tribal ideal. Instead of paying blackmail to a brigand, the city, in
-its later days, organized a police force of its own and contributed
-its share towards the upkeep of a national army. And the overlord
-vanished because, his duties having been taken away from him, there was
-nothing left for him to do. Much the same sort of thing has happened in
-other directions; increasing civilization has left other than barons
-without the duties that formerly appertained to their position. Like
-the protective functions of the overlord, the protective functions of
-the husband have been centralized and nationalized, regulated by the
-community and delegated to the soldier and the policeman. Where stable
-government exists the number of men who offer up their lives each
-year in actual defence of their own hearths and their own wives is, I
-imagine, small; so small that I do not suppose the insurance companies
-take much account of it in estimating their risks. I have not the least
-intention of casting any reflection upon the courage of the average
-civilized husband or inferring that he is not willing to offer up his
-life in defence of his better half if called upon to do so; I merely
-state the obvious fact that he is not very often called upon to make
-the sacrifice. Even in those countries where universal military service
-is established, the duty of defending the national (not the individual)
-hearth and home falls last upon men who are married and have a family
-to support; it is the young, unmarried men who are called upon to form
-the first line of defence and defiance. And in ordinary every-day
-life it is the strong arm of the law and not the strong arm of the
-individual husband which secures a woman from hurt and molestation.
-If it were not so the unprotected spinster would be in a truly piteous
-plight. As a matter of fact, she usually finds that the ordinary
-constable is quite adequate for all her requirements in the protective
-line.
-
-Closely allied to this idea of individual masculine protection is
-that other, and still more vaguely nebulous, idea of chivalry or
-preferential treatment of women in general by men in general. Which
-necessitates an inquiry into what the average modern man really means
-when he talks of chivalry in this connection.
-
-Frankly, it does not seem to me that he means very much. My own
-experience leads me to define chivalry—not the real thing, but the
-term as it is commonly used, say, in the public press—to define
-chivalry as a form, not of respect for an equal, but of condescension
-to an inferior; a condescension which expresses itself in certain rules
-of behaviour where non-essentials are involved. In very few really
-essential matters between man and woman is the chivalric principle
-allowed to get so much as a hearing; in practically all such matters
-it is, as I have already pointed out, an understood thing that woman
-gets the worst of the bargain, does the unpleasant work in the common
-division of labour, and, when blame is in question, sits down under the
-lion’s share of it. In return for this attitude on her part—which,
-if voluntary, would be really chivalrous, but being involuntary is
-merely servile—man undertakes to regulate his conduct towards her by
-certain particular forms of outward deference. His attitude, so far
-as one can gather is something like this: as long as you refrain from
-coming into competition with us, as long as you will allow us to look
-down upon you, as long as you are content to regard yourselves not only
-as our dependents, but as persons sent into the world to minister to
-our comforts and our pleasures, so long shall our outward behaviour
-towards you be framed in a particular code of manners which secures
-you preferential treatment in unimportant matters. But, in order to
-secure this preferential treatment in unimportant matters, you must put
-no strain upon our courtesy, and you must defer to our wishes in more
-important things; you must not trespass upon the domain that we have
-reserved for our own use, you must not infringe the rules which have
-been laid down for your guidance and whose aim is to secure our own
-comfort.
-
-In other words what is commonly known as “chivalry” is not a
-spontaneous virtue or impulse on the part of modern man, but the form
-in which he pays his debt for value received from woman. Directly she
-fails to fulfil her own important share of the bargain, he considers
-himself at liberty to refuse payment; at least, one must conclude so
-from the frequency with which the “independent” woman of to-day is
-threatened with the extinction of chivalry if she continued to assert
-herself in a manner which may be consistent with her own desires, but
-which is not consistent with the desires of average male humanity.
-Looked at in that light, the preferential code of manners, which is all
-that is usually understood by chivalry, bears distinct resemblance to
-the sugar that attempts to veil the flavour of a pill or the jam that
-does its best to conceal the noxiousness of a lurking powder. By a
-simple process of exchange and barter outward deference on the one side
-is given in payment for real deference and subjection on the other;
-and, that being the case, it is quite open to woman to look into the
-terms of her bargain, reconsider them, and ask herself whether she is
-not paying too high a price for value received. For, with every respect
-for courtesy, the opening of a door and the lifting of a hat, however
-reverential, are among the small things of life.
-
-It will no doubt be objected that chivalry is something infinitely
-greater than what I have called outward forms of deference. I agree
-that that is not the true meaning of the word; but I maintain that, in
-general practice, the virtue of chivalry, in so far as it enters into
-the daily lives of most women, amounts to outward forms of deference
-and little more. As soon as we come to essentials, we realize that
-the counteracting principle will inevitably be brought into play—the
-principle that the woman must always be sacrificed to the interests of
-the man.
-
-There are, of course, exceptions to that rule—and noble ones. It is
-written that in common danger of death the stronger must think first,
-not of his own life, but of the lives of those weaker and dependent
-upon him; and whatever other laws a man might break with impudence and
-impunity, he would very certainly be ashamed to confess to a breach of
-this particular commandment. One respects such habitual obedience as
-fine and finely disciplined; but it is not decrying it to point out
-that not every man is called upon to exercise it and that the form of
-chivalry cultivated by most is necessarily of a less strenuous type.
-And into chivalry of the less strenuous type the idea of self-sacrifice
-in essentials does not as a rule enter, since it is, as I have already
-shown, in the nature of a reward or payment for self-sacrifice in
-others.
-
-I am quite aware that there are a great many women of the upper and
-middle classes—women, for the most part, who lead a leisured and
-comfortable existence—who attach an inordinately high value to outward
-forms of deference from the men with whom they come in contact.
-Considering their training and education, and the trend of their whole
-lives, it is perhaps only natural that they should. The aim of that
-training and education has been, as I have shown, not to develop their
-individuality and capacities, but to make themselves and their actions
-pleasing to the men with whom they may happen to come in contact; and,
-that being so, approval from the men with whom they may happen to come
-in contact is naturally a thing of the utmost importance to them. To
-lack it is to lack the whole reward of a well-spent life. By women with
-this narrow outlook on the world superficial courtesies and superficial
-deference are interpreted to mean approval and, therefore, success in
-pleasing—almost the only form of success open to them. Further, the
-lives of such women are usually sheltered, and thus they do not have
-very much opportunity of realizing that the meed of ceremony to which
-they are accustomed is largely a tribute paid, not to themselves or to
-their womanhood, but to the particular leisured class to which they
-happen to belong.
-
-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.)
-
-This simple and—to man—flattering explanation of woman’s inferiority
-in this respect completely fails to take into account the fact that
-the art of combination for a common purpose has been induced in one
-half of humanity by influences which have not been brought to bear
-upon the other half. I do not suppose that even the firmest and most
-hardened believer in woman’s essential disloyalty, treachery and
-incapacity for common action, would venture to maintain that if all
-the men of past generations had been compelled to earn their living at
-isolated forms of labour—say, as lighthouse-keepers or shepherds in
-mountainous districts— the faculty of united action for common ends
-would be very highly developed amongst them. As I have already tried to
-show, in the division of labour between the two sexes man has almost
-invariably reserved for himself (having the power to do so, and because
-he considered them preferable) those particular occupations which
-brought him into frequent contact with his fellows, which entailed
-meeting others and working side by side with them; and this frequent
-contact with his fellows was, in itself, a form of education which has
-been largely denied to the other half of humanity. Woman’s intercourse
-with her kind has been much more limited in extent, and very often
-purely and narrowly social in character. Until comparatively recent
-years it was unusual for women to form one of a large body of persons
-working under similar conditions and conscious of similar interests. It
-is scarcely to be wondered at that the modern system of industrialism
-with its imperative need for co-operation and common effort should
-have found her—thanks to her training—unprepared and entirely at a
-disadvantage.
-
-It must be remembered also that the generality and mass of women have
-never come under the direct influence of two of the most potent factors
-in the social education and evolution of man as we know him—war and
-politics. However de-civilizing an agency war may appear to-day, it
-has not been without its civilizing influence, since it was through
-the necessity of standing side by side for purposes of offence and
-defence that man first learned the art of combining for a common end,
-and acquired the virtues, at first purely military, that, in course
-of time and under different circumstances, were to develop into civic
-virtues. The camp was the state in embryo, the soldier the citizen in
-embryo, and the military tradition the collective and social tradition
-of organization for a common purpose and common interests. In the face
-of a common peril, such as war, men readily forget their differences
-and work shoulder to shoulder. Hence an appeal to the fears or the
-warlike spirit of a discontented people is the instinctive refuge of
-a government in difficulties, since there is no means so effective
-for producing at least a passing phase of unity amongst the jarring
-elements of a nation.
-
-Woman, so far as one can judge, is, when occasion arises, just as much
-influenced by that necessity of common action in a common danger which
-first produced unity of effort and public spirit in man; but for her,
-as a rule, occasion has not arisen. Now and again under exceptional
-circumstances, such as a desperate and hard-fought siege, she has shown
-that the sense of peril acts upon her in exactly the same way as it
-acts upon her brethren; but the actual waging of battle has not often,
-even in the most turbulent of ages, entered into her life to teach her
-(along with other and less desirable lessons) the lesson of united
-effort and subordination of individual interest to the common weal.
-
-The exclusion of woman from the arena of politics has barred to
-her another method of acquiring the art of combination and the
-strength that inevitably springs from it; an exclusion based upon
-the deep-rooted masculine conviction that she exists not for her own
-benefit and advantage, but for the comfort and convenience of man.
-Granted that she came into the world for that purpose only, the right
-of effective combination in her own interests is clearly unnecessary
-and undesirable, since it might possibly lead to results not altogether
-conducive to the comfort and convenience of man. The masculine attitude
-in this matter seems quite logical.
-
-
-
-
-XII
-
-
-The above are not the only respects in which the peculiar training
-for, or expectation of, marriage acts disadvantageously upon woman
-as soon as she steps outside the walls of the home to earn her bread
-by other means than household work and the bearing and rearing of
-children. I have already pointed out that the wage she receives for
-her work as a wife and mother is the lowest that she can receive—a
-wage of subsistence only; and I believe that the exceedingly low rate
-at which her services inside the home are valued has had a great deal
-to do with the exceedingly low value placed upon her services outside
-the home. Because her work as a wife and mother was rewarded only by
-a wage of subsistence, it was assumed that no other form of work she
-undertook was worthy of a higher reward; because the only trade that
-was at one time open to her was paid at the lowest possible rate, it
-was assumed that in every other trade into which she gradually forced
-her way she must also be paid at the lowest possible rate. The custom
-of considering her work as worthless (from an economic point of view)
-originated in the home, but it has followed her out into the world.
-Since the important painful and laborious toil incurred by marriage and
-motherhood was not deemed worthy of any but the lowest possible wage,
-it was only natural that other duties, often far less toilsome and
-important, should also be deemed unworthy of anything much in the way
-of remuneration.
-
-It is very commonly assumed, of course, that the far higher rate of
-wage paid to a man is based on the idea that he has, or probably will
-have, a wife and children for whom he is bound to make provision.
-If this were really the case, a widow left with a young family to
-support by her labour, or even the mother of an illegitimate child,
-would be paid for her work on the same basis as a man is paid for
-performing similar duties. It is hardly needful to state that the
-mother of fatherless children is not, as a rule, paid more highly than
-her unmarried sister. Nor is the theory that the “unattached” woman
-has only herself to support, and does not contribute to the needs of
-others, borne out by facts. I believe that in all ranks of society
-there is a pronounced disposition on the part of the family to regard
-the income, earned or unearned, of its female members as something in
-the nature of common property—the income, earned or unearned, of its
-male members as much more of an individual possession. Wives who work
-for a wage in factories, workshops, etc., usually devote the whole of
-their earnings to the upkeep of the home; their husbands very commonly
-only a part. Where sons and daughters of the same family go out to
-work and live under one roof, it is customary for the girls to put
-practically the entire amount of their wage into the common domestic
-fund, while their brothers, from quite early years, pay a fixed sum to
-cover the expenses of their board and lodging, retaining, as a matter
-of course, the rest of their earnings for their own individual use.
-And, so far as my observation goes, the same rule holds good in the
-upper and middle classes. In the case of any monetary difficulty, any
-need of financial help, the appeal, in the first instance, is nearly
-always made to those women of the family who are understood to be in
-a position to respond to it; it is tacitly assumed that they must be
-the first to suffer and sacrifice themselves, the men of the family
-being appealed to only when the women are unable or unwilling to meet
-the demand. My experience may be unusual, but I have met very few
-working-women of any class who, earning a decent livelihood at their
-trade or profession, were not called upon to share their livelihood
-with others.
-
-It is not, therefore, on the ground that she has no one but herself
-to support that a woman is almost invariably paid at a rate far lower
-than the wage which would be given to a man for the performance of
-the same work. A good many causes have combined to bring about the
-sweating of women customary in most, if not all, departments of the
-labour market; but it seems to me that not the least of those causes
-is the long-established usage of regarding the work of a wife in the
-home as valueless from the economic point of view—a thing to be
-paid for (if paid for at all) by occasional gushes of sentiment.
-Woman and wife being, according to masculine ideas, interchangeable
-terms, it follows that, since the labour of a wife is valueless from
-the economic point of view, the labour of any woman is valueless.
-Naturally enough, this persistent undervaluing of her services has had
-its effect upon woman herself; having been taught for generations that
-she must expect nothing but the lowest possible wage for her work, she
-finds considerable difficulty in realizing that it is worth more—and
-undersells her male competitor. Thereupon angry objections on the part
-of the male competitor, who fails to realize that cheap female labour
-is one of the inevitable results of the complete acceptance by woman of
-the tradition of her own inferiority to himself.
-
-One wonders what sort of generation of women that would be which grew
-from childhood to maturity unhampered and unhindered by the tradition
-of its own essential inferiority to the male half of humanity. Such
-a generation, at present, is a matter of pure guesswork; at least, I
-have never yet known the woman, however independent, self-reliant,
-indulged, or admired, who was not in some way affected by that
-tradition—consciously or unconsciously. Even those of us who have
-never known what it was to have a man to lean on, who have had to
-fight our way through the world as the average male fights his, and
-(since things are made infinitely easier for him) under disadvantages
-unknown to the average man—even we find ourselves, unaccountably and
-at unexpected moments, acting in accordance with the belief in which
-we were reared, and deferring to the established tradition of inherent
-masculine superiority; deferring to it after a fashion that, being
-realized, is amusing to ourselves.
-
-The effect of this attitude of the two sexes towards each other—an
-attitude of inherent and essential superiority on the one side, of
-inherent and essential inferiority on the other—is nearly always
-apparent when men and women work together at the same trade. (Apparent,
-at least, to the women; the men, one concludes, do not really grasp the
-system by which they benefit.) What I refer to is the ordered, tacit,
-but usually quite conscious endeavour on the part of women who work
-side by side with men to defer to a superiority, real or supposed, on
-the part of their male colleagues. Thus a woman will not only decline
-to call attention to a blunder or oversight on the part of a male
-fellow-worker, but she will, if possible, cover up his mistake, even if
-she suffer by it, and, at any rate, will try to give him the impression
-that it has escaped her notice; and this under circumstances where no
-sort of injury to the blunderer would be involved, and which would not
-prevent her from calling prompt attention to a similar slip if made by
-a colleague of her own sex.
-
-I have not the slightest doubt that this tendency on the part of
-the working or business woman to pass over in silence the errors or
-mistakes of the working or business man is attributed by the latter
-(if, indeed, he notices it at all) to some mysterious operation of
-the sexual instinct; while the lack of a similar palliative attitude
-towards the errors and mistakes of a comrade of her own sex is, I
-should imagine, attributed to the natural, inevitable, and incorrigible
-“cattiness” of one woman towards another—the belief in such a natural,
-inevitable, and incorrigible “cattiness” being a comfortable article
-of the masculine faith.
-
-The practice, it seems to me, can be explained without having recourse
-to the all-pervading sexual instinct (usually understood to regulate
-every action performed by women, from the buttoning of boots to the
-swallowing of cough-drops). A similar practice, which can hardly
-have originated in the sexual instinct, obtains amongst male persons
-conscious of inferiority and desirous of standing well with their
-superiors. Junior clerks are in the habit of preserving a discreet
-silence with regard to errors of judgment traceable to employers,
-managers, and heads of firms; and the understrapper who wishes to get
-on in the world seldom makes a point of calling public attention to
-the shortcomings of foremen and others who are set in authority over
-him. On the contrary, he is usually—and wisely—tender towards their
-failings; and in the same way women are frequently tender towards the
-failings of those who, by virtue of sex and not of position, they
-believe to be set in authority over them. The attitude in this respect
-of working-woman to working-man is, as often as not, the attitude of
-a subordinate, and in itself an acknowledgment of inferiority; it has
-about it that tinge of servility which enjoins the turning of a blind
-eye to the faults of a superior.
-
-I do not mean that the practice of condoning masculine slips is always
-prompted by an unthinking and servile compliance; on the contrary, it
-is very general amongst the increasing class of women who have learned
-to consider themselves as good as their masters—no less general, I
-should say, than amongst those who accept feminine inferiority to
-the male as a decree of nature. In their case the tenderness shown
-to masculine failings, the desire to save the masculine “face,” is
-usually quite conscious—I myself have heard it frankly discussed,
-analyzed, and commented upon, time after time, by women whose
-occupations brought them into daily contact with men. And as the
-result of such frank discussion, analysis, and comment, I am inclined
-to believe that on the whole the motives which, in this particular
-class of women, induce extra consideration for the failings of a male
-fellow-worker are motives which, in man himself, would probably be
-described as chivalrous. Those of us who rub shoulders day after day
-with the ordinary man are perfectly well aware that the ordinary man
-(however much and however kindly he may seek to conceal the fact from
-us) regards us as his inferiors in mental capacity; and that hence he
-feels a peculiar and not unnatural soreness at having his errors and
-failings either exposed to us or exposed by us. To be shown up before
-your inferior brings with it, to most people, a sense of degradation;
-to be shown up by your inferior makes the sense of degradation yet more
-keenly unpleasant.
-
-Most women who have had to pit their brain against the brain of the
-ordinary man have learned to realize—sometimes with amusement,
-sometimes, perhaps, with a measure of exultation—that the ordinary
-man’s very belief in their essential inferiority has placed in their
-hands a weapon whose edge is infinitely keener than any that he
-possesses to use against them. It is just because she is regarded as
-his inferior that it is in the power of a woman to humiliate a man
-by the simple process of getting the better of him or holding his
-weaknesses up to contempt. When we quarrel or argue with an average
-man we know perfectly well that the vantage of the ground is ours; we
-know perfectly well that defeat, for us, will not bring humiliation
-in its train; that our antagonist, imbued with the conviction of his
-own intense and inherent natural superiority, will take his victory
-as a matter of course, and think it no disgrace to us that we have
-been routed by a higher intelligence than our own. We have not much to
-lose by defeat, we are not degraded by it—because we are the weaker
-side. With a man who gets the worst of it in a contest with a woman
-the case is quite different; since he suffers, in addition to actual
-defeat, all the humiliation of the stronger when beaten by the weaker,
-of the superior routed by the inferior force. With him defeat is not
-only defeat, but ignominy; his vanity is wounded and his prestige
-lowered. That being the case, the often expressed dislike of the
-clever woman—that is to say, of the woman who possesses the power to
-humiliate—is comprehensible enough.
-
-It is, I think, because so many women realize how bitterly the ordinary
-man resents and suffers under defeat by an inferior that they humour
-and are tolerant of his somewhat galling attitude of what has been
-called—I think by Mr. Bernard Shaw—intellectual condescension. They
-realize that the punishment which it is in their power to inflict
-on the offender would be out of all proportion to the unintentional
-offence—infinitely harder and sharper than it deserves. It is for this
-reason, I believe, that a woman, unless she is really stirred to strong
-indignation and consequent loss of self-control, will seldom attempt to
-“show up” a man or drive him into a corner with unanswerable argument.
-Under far less provocation she would probably “show up” or corner a
-woman; not because she bears a natural grudge against her own sex, but
-because her victory over one of her own sex is a victory over an equal,
-and does not necessarily involve wounded self-esteem and humiliation on
-the part of the vanquished. The same decent instinct which prevents a
-man from striking her with his clenched fist prevents her from striking
-too hard at his self-esteem.
-
-As far as my experience goes, this need of humouring the belief of
-the average man in his own essential intellectual superiority is—
-though not without its amusing side—a constant source of worry and
-petty hindrance to the woman who has to earn her living by any form
-of brain-work which brings her into contact with men. It means, of
-course, that she puts a drag on her natural capacities, and attempts to
-appear less efficient than she really is; it means that ideas which one
-man would reveal frankly to another, suggestions which one man would
-make openly to another, have by her to be wrapped up, hinted at, and
-brought into operation by devious ways—lest the “predominant partner”
-should take alarm at the possibility of being guided and prompted
-by an inferior intelligence. The only remedy for such a tiresome
-and unnecessary state of things seems to be the recognition by the
-“predominant partner” of the fact that the human female is not entirely
-composed of sex (inferior to his own); that the brain is not a sexual
-organ; and that there is a neutral ground of intelligence (from which
-sex and its considerations are excluded) where man and woman can meet
-and hold intercourse, mutually unhampered by etiquette and respect for
-a vulnerable masculine dignity.
-
-
-
-
-XIII
-
-
-In dealing with the training for marriage, I pointed out that the
-qualities which make for success in the matrimonial market have
-little or no connection with the qualities required for the efficient
-performance of what is supposed to be the life-work of woman—the
-care of home, of husband and of children. I pointed out that the
-characteristics which are likely to obtain for a girl a desirable
-husband are not the same characteristics which will have to be brought
-into play if the husband, when he is obtained, is to find in her a
-desirable wife from the domestic point of view; and that, as a general
-rule, she is promoted to what should be the important and responsible
-position of wife and mother on the strength of attainments which have
-nothing to do with her fitness for the duties of that position.
-
-The habit of judging a woman entirely by externals—appearance, dress,
-and manners—is not confined to the man who is in search of a wife.
-(“Judging” is, perhaps, the wrong phrase to use—it is, rather, a habit
-of resigning judgment so as to fall completely under the influence of
-externals.) It is very general amongst all classes of male employers,
-and its result is, it seems to me, a serious bar to efficiency in
-women’s work. It pays better in the marriage market to be attractive
-than to be efficient, and in a somewhat lesser degree the same rule
-holds good in certain other departments of women’s labour.
-
-To a certain degree, of course, a man’s fitness for any particular work
-is judged by externals; but never to the same degree as a woman’s.
-Further, the judgment passed upon a man who is chosen to fill a
-vacancy because his prospective employer “likes the look of him” has
-some relation to the qualities which will be required of him in the
-execution of the duties he will be called upon to perform—it is not
-biased by irrelevant considerations of sex. A merchant will like the
-looks of a clerk who has the outward appearance of being smart, well
-mannered, well educated, and intelligent; an employer who wishes to
-engage a man for work which involves the carrying of heavy sacks will
-like the looks of a man who is possessed of muscular arms and a pair of
-broad shoulders. In each case he is favourably influenced by the man’s
-externals because they seem to him to indicate the qualities which he
-requires in his prospective employé.
-
-The number of men who could engage a young woman to work under them
-on this purely commercial and unemotional basis is, I should say,
-comparatively limited. I do not mean, of course, that the element of
-sexual attraction enters consciously into the calculations of the
-ordinary male employer when engaging a woman, but it certainly enters
-unconsciously into the calculations of a good many. A man who says
-that he likes the looks of a girl whom he has engaged to fill the
-position of typist or cashier, does not usually mean at all the same
-thing that he means when he says that he likes the looks of his new
-porter or junior clerk: he does not mean that the girl strikes him as
-appearing particularly fitted for the duties of typist or cashier—more
-alert, more intelligent, or more experienced than her unsuccessful
-competitors for the post—but that she has the precise shape of nose,
-the exact shade of hair, or the particular variety of smile or manner
-that he admires and finds pleasing. That is to say, he is influenced in
-engaging her by considerations unconnected with her probable fitness
-for the duties of her post, since a straight nose, auburn hair, or
-an engaging smile have no necessary connection with proficiency in
-typewriting or accounts.
-
-I am not insisting on this intrusion of the sexual element into the
-business relations of men and women in any fault-finding spirit; I
-call attention to it merely in order to show that the conditions
-under which women obtain their bread in the labour market are not
-precisely the same as the conditions under which men obtain theirs.
-The intrusion of the sexual element into commercial relations may be
-not only unavoidable, but defensible and desirable, on other than
-commercial grounds; but it must be admitted that it does not tend to
-encourage efficiency, and the necessary discouragement of efficiency
-should be taken into account in estimating the value of woman’s
-work in many departments of the labour market. I do not know whether
-the consciousness that they are liable to be promoted or degraded
-in business matters for reasons which have nothing to do with their
-business merits or demerits is humiliating or the reverse to the
-majority of women, but I do know that it is humiliating to some. (Not
-only to those who are deficient in good looks; I have frequently
-heard it resented by those whom the system favoured.) There is, too,
-a certain amount of irritating uncertainty about the working of the
-system, one man’s taste in feminine looks varying from that of his
-next-door neighbour.
-
-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
-
-
-If I have dwelt at some length upon woman’s failure to achieve
-greatness in art and literature, it is because its art and literature
-reflect the inward life of a people, and the puny, trammelled and
-almost entirely imitative art of woman is a faithful reflection of the
-artificial habit and attitude of mind induced in her by the training
-for the married state, or its equivalent outside the law. As I have
-already said, the wonder is—when the tendency of that training is
-taken into account—not that she has done so little, but that she has
-done so much; for it must be borne in mind that as long as sexual
-love and maternity are in the slightest degree compulsory upon woman
-they can never prove to her the source of inspiration which they have
-so often proved to man. It is freedom and unfettered desire, not
-inevitable duty or the prospect of monetary gain, which awakens the
-creative instinct in humanity. The commercial element has always been
-incompatible with effective expression in art; no stockbroker, however
-exultant, has burst into lyric rhapsody over a rise in Home Rails, no
-grocer lifted up a psalm of praise because his till was full. It is
-because her love has always been her livelihood that woman has never
-been inspired by it as man has been inspired. And it is just because
-it is so business-like that her interest in love is often so keen.
-For instance, her customary appreciation of a book or a work of art
-dealing with love, and nothing but love, is the outcome of something
-more than sentiment and overpowering consciousness of sex. To her a
-woman in love is not only a woman swayed by emotion, but a human being
-engaged in carving for herself a career or securing for herself a means
-of livelihood. Her interest in a love story is, therefore, much more
-complex than a man’s interest therein, and the appreciation which she
-brings to it is of a very different quality.
-
-Love and maternity, then, have failed because of their compulsory
-character to inspire woman to artistic achievement; and from
-other sources of inspiration she has, as a rule, been debarred
-systematically. One hears, over and over again, of the artist who is
-inspired by the spirit of his time, who gives effective expression to
-the life and ideals of his time; and one remembers that man has always
-desired that woman should be debarred from contact with the life and
-spirit of the world in which she lived and moved and had her being, has
-always desired that she should drift and stagnate in a backwater of
-existence. The inspiration that springs from the sense of community,
-of fellowship, from enthusiasm for great interests shared with others
-was not to be for her; she was denied part or lot or interest in the
-making of contemporary history and to the passions enkindled by it
-she must be a stranger. Art has always responded to the uprush of
-a genuine popular enthusiasm, has embodied, shaped and moulded the
-ideas tossed about from mind to mind, and from man to man in a period
-of national effervescence and progress. The men who have left behind
-them an enduring name in the annals of art and literature were not
-unconscious of the life around them, were often enough caught up in
-the swirl of contemporary interests, and played an eager part in that
-making of contemporary history which we call politics. How many works
-of art do we not owe to the civic consciousness, to a man’s pride in
-his own place, his desire to be worthy of it, his sense of comradeship
-and his glory in communal service? In every city worthy of the name, in
-every city that is anything more than an enlarged manufacturing slum,
-there stands, in brick or stone, some witness to the force and reality
-of the communal impulse in art. It was an impulse that seldom reached
-woman; who stood apart from the communal life, who knew not the service
-that brings with it sense of fellowship, who had not so much as a place
-to be proud of. Even to-day a woman takes her husband’s nationality,
-and the place that was her own is hers no longer. She has drawn no
-inspiration from the thought that she is a citizen of no mean city.
-
-We think of Milton as a poet; but to the men of his time he was
-something else. Twenty years of his life were given to politics and
-statecraft, and his verse is the product not only of his own genius,
-but of the national spirit of Puritanism—which was the desire to
-establish the kingdom of God upon earth. Dante, to us, is the man who
-ascended into heaven and descended into hell and wrote of what he saw;
-but it was not for these things, but for his partisanship of a losing
-cause, that he ate the bread of a stranger and found it salt. Few, if
-any, of the great ones of all time have stood apart in spirit from
-their own world with its hopes and its seething discontents; they spoke
-of it because they lived in it, loved it and wondered at it. It is
-significant that one of the few women whose written words have stood
-the test of centuries—St. Teresa—was one whose aspirations were not
-narrowed to the duties of a husband’s dwelling, who was passionately
-conscious of her part in the life of a great community, who made
-herself a power in the public life of the day—a woman capable of
-organization and able to bend men and systems to an indomitable will.
-
-My meaning, I hope, will not be misinterpreted or narrowed. I do not
-look upon the British House of Commons or the American House of
-Representatives, as at present instituted, as a likely forcing-ground
-for poets or composers; nor do I consider that no human being is
-qualified to produce a decent novel or paint a decent picture until his
-name is included in the electoral register. I have endeavoured to make
-it clear that it is not the letter of political life, but the spirit
-of a conscious communal life which kindles enthusiasm, arouses the
-desire of service and awakens art; that, as far as art is concerned,
-the important point is participation in ideas, not in elections. When
-women are informed that they cannot think publicly, or, as the cant
-phrase goes, think imperially, it should be borne in mind that public
-or imperial ideas have usually been labelled, “For men only.”
-
-There is, so far as I can see, no reason to suppose that the minds
-of women are naturally less accessible than the minds of men to the
-influence of what has been termed the crowd spirit. Such subordinate
-share as they have been permitted to take in the communal life of the
-various sects and churches they have availed themselves of to the
-full; at least they have understood the meaning of the term Communion
-of Saints. And the few women whose high birth has qualified them for
-the responsibilities of practical statesmanship, the guidance and
-governance of nations, have usually grasped their responsibilities with
-capability and understanding. Public spirit has been manifested in
-these exceptions to masculine rule as surely as it was manifested in
-the dreadful, hopeful crowd that once went marching to Versailles; and
-it has been written that if the men of the Paris Commune had espoused
-their cause with the desperate courage of the women, that cause had not
-been lost.
-
-
-
-
-XVII
-
-
-My object in writing so far has been to set forth reasons for my belief
-that woman, as we know her to-day, is largely a manufactured product;
-that the particular qualities which are supposed to be inherent in
-her and characteristic of her sex are often enough nothing more than
-the characteristics of a repressed class and the entirely artificial
-result of her surroundings and training. I have tried to show that,
-given such surroundings and training, the ordinary or womanly woman was
-the kind of development to be expected; that even if it be the will
-of Providence that she should occupy the lower seat, man has actively
-assisted Providence by a resolute discouragement of her attempts
-to move out of it; and that it is impossible to say whether her
-typical virtues and her typical defects are inherent and inevitable,
-or induced and artificial, until she has been placed amidst other
-surroundings and subjected to the influence and test of a different
-system of education. Until such an experiment has been tried no really
-authoritative conclusion is possible; one can only make deductions and
-point to probabilities.
-
-If, after four or five generations of freer choice and wider life,
-woman still persists in confining her steps to the narrow grooves where
-they have hitherto been compelled to walk; if she claims no life of
-her own, if she has no interests outside her home, if love, marriage
-and maternity is still her all in all; if she is still, in spite of
-equal education, of emulation and respect, the inferior of man in
-brain capacity and mental independence; if she still evinces a marked
-preference for disagreeable and monotonous forms of labour, for which
-she is paid at the lowest possible rate; if she still attaches higher
-value to the lifting of a top hat than to the liberty to direct her
-own life; if she is still untouched by public spirit, still unable to
-produce an art and a literature that is individual and sincere; if she
-is still servile, imitative, pliant—then, when those four or five
-generations have passed, the male half of humanity will have a perfect
-right to declare that woman is what he has always believed and desired
-her to be, that she is the chattel, the domestic animal, the matron or
-the mistress, that her subjection is a subjection enjoined by natural
-law, that her inferiority to himself is an ordained and inevitable
-inferiority. Then he will have that right; but not till then.
-
-Some of us believe and hope with confidence that, given such wider life
-and freer choice, he would have to admit himself mistaken, would have
-to confess that the limitations once confining us were, for the most
-part, of his own invention. And we base that belief and very confident
-hope on the knowledge that there are in us, and in our sisters, many
-qualities which we are not supposed to possess and which once were
-unsuspected by ourselves; and on the certainty that the needs and
-circumstances of modern life are encouraging, whether or no we will it,
-the development of a side of our nature which we have heretofore been
-strictly forbidden to develop—the side that comes in contact with the
-world. Economic pressure and the law of self-preservation produced the
-“womanly woman”; now, from the “womanly woman” economic pressure and
-the law of self-preservation are producing a new type. It is no use for
-a bland and fatuous conservatism to repeat the parrot cry anent the
-sphere of woman being the home; we could not listen to its chirpings
-even if we would. For our stomachs are more insistent than any parrot
-cry, and they inform us that the sphere of woman, like the sphere of
-man, is the place where daily bread can be obtained.
-
-There was a certain amount of truth in the formula once, in days when
-our social and industrial system was run on more primitive lines, when
-the factory was not, and the home was a place of trade and business
-as well as a place to live in. But the modern civilized home is, as a
-rule, and to all intents and purposes, only the shell of what it was
-before that revolution in industrial methods which began about the
-middle of the eighteenth century.
-
-The alteration in the status and scope of the home is best and most
-clearly typified by the divided life led by the modern trader,
-manufacturer or man of business; who, in the morning, arises, swallows
-his breakfast and goes forth to his shop, his factory or his office;
-and, his day’s work done, returns to the suburban residence which
-it is the duty of his wife to look after, either personally or by
-superintendence of the labour of servants. His place of business and
-his place of rest and recreation are separate institutions, situated
-miles apart; the only connection between the two is the fact that he
-spends a certain portion of the day in each, and that one provides
-the money for the upkeep of the other. But his ancestor, if in the
-same line of business, had his place of money-making and his place of
-rest under the same roof, and both were comprehended in the meaning
-of the term “home.” The primitive form of shop, though in gradual
-and inevitable process of extinction, is still plentiful enough in
-villages, in country towns and even in the by-streets of cities.
-It takes the shape of a ground-floor apartment in the proprietor’s
-dwelling-house, provided with a counter upon which the customer raps,
-with a more or less patient persistence, with the object of arousing
-the attention of some member of the hitherto invisible household.
-Eventually, in response to the summons, a man, woman or child emerges
-from behind the curtained door which separates the family place of
-business from the family sitting-room, and proceeds to purvey the
-needful string, matches or newspapers. In such an establishment no
-outside labour is engaged, the business is carried on under the same
-roof as the home and forms an integral part of the duties of the
-home; it is a family affair giving a certain amount of employment
-to members of the family. And when, owing to the erection round the
-corner of a plateglass-windowed establishment run on more business-like
-and attractive lines, it fails and has to put up its shutters, those
-members of the family who have been dependent on it for a livelihood
-will have to seek that livelihood elsewhere. The boy who has been
-accustomed to help his parents in looking after the shop, running
-errands and delivering orders, will have to turn to a trade, if he is
-to be sure of his bread; the girl who has been fulfilling duties of the
-same kind will have to enter domestic service, a factory or a shop in
-which she is a paid assistant. In other words, she, like her brother,
-will be driven out of the home because the home can no longer support
-her; and it can no longer support her because its scope has been
-narrowed. Formerly it had its bread-winning as well as its domestic
-side; now, as an inevitable consequence of the growth of collective
-industry, of specialization and centralization, the bread-winning or
-productive side has been absorbed, and nothing remains but the domestic
-or unproductive. And in the event of the failure of such a family
-business as I have described, the head of the household, however firmly
-convinced he might be that the true and only sphere of woman is the
-home, would probably do his level best to obtain for his daughter a
-situation and means of livelihood outside her proper sphere.
-
-As an example of the tendency of the home to split up into departments
-I have instanced the familiar process of the disappearance of a small
-retail business, simply because it is familiar, and a case where we
-can see the tendency at work beneath our own eyes. But, as a matter
-of fact, the division of what was formerly the home into unproductive
-and productive departments, into domestic work and work outside the
-house, has been far less thorough and complete in the retail trade than
-in other spheres of labour. The factory, which has absorbed industry
-after industry formerly carried on in the house, is a comparatively
-modern institution; so is the bake-house. Weaving and spinning were
-once domestic trades; so was brewing. Not so very long ago it was usual
-enough for the housewife, however well-to-do, to have all her washing
-done in her own home; not so very long ago she made her own pickles and
-her own jam. When the average household was largely self-supporting,
-producing food for its own consumption, and linen for its own wearing,
-it gave employment to many more persons than can be employed in it
-to-day. The women’s industries of a former date have, for the most
-part, been swallowed by the factory. They were never industries at
-which she earned much money; so far as the members of a family were
-concerned they were rewarded with nothing more than the customary wage
-of subsistence; but—and this is the real point—they were industries
-at which woman not only earned her wage of subsistence, but indirectly
-a profit for her employer, the head of the household—the husband or
-father.
-
-The displacement of labour which followed the adoption of machinery
-in crafts and manufactures formerly carried on by hand affected the
-conditions of women’s work just as it affected the work of men.
-Factories and workshops took the place of home industries; the small
-trader and the master-craftsman fell under the domination first of the
-big employer and later of the limited liability company. It was cheaper
-to produce goods in large quantities by the aid of machinery than in
-small quantities by hand; so the “little man” who ran his own business
-with the aid of his own family, being without capital to expend on
-the purchase of machinery, was apt to find competition too much for
-him and descend to the position of a wage-earner. For woman the
-serious fact was that under the new system of collective industry and
-production on a large scale her particular sphere, the home, ceased to
-be self-supporting, since its products were under-sold by the products
-of the factory. Jam and pickles could be produced more cheaply in a
-factory furnished with vats than in a kitchen supplied with saucepans;
-it was more economical to buy bread than to bake it, because the most
-economical way of baking was to bake it in the mass. A man might esteem
-the accomplishment of pickle-making or linen-weaving as an excellent
-thing in woman; but unless expense was really no object he would not
-encourage his wife and daughters to excel in these particular arts,
-since it was cheaper to buy sheets and bottled onions round the corner
-than to purchase the raw material and set the female members of his
-family to work upon it. In the redistribution of labour which followed
-upon the new order of things man, not for the first time, had invaded
-the sacred sphere of woman and annexed a share thereof.
-
-The natural and inevitable result of this new and improved state of
-things was that woman deprived of the productive industries at which
-she had formerly earned her keep and something over for her employer,
-was no longer a source of monetary profit to that employer. On the
-contrary, so far as money went and so long as she remained in the
-home, she was often a distinct loss. Instead of baking bread for her
-husband or father, her husband or father had to expend his money on
-buying bread for her to eat; she no longer wove the material for other
-people’s garments; on the contrary the material for her own had to be
-obtained at the draper’s. The position, for man, was a serious one; for
-be it remembered, he could not lower the wages of his domestic animal.
-These had always been fixed, whatever work she did, at the lowest
-possible rate—subsistence rate; so that even when her work ceased to
-be profitable her wages could not be made to go any lower—there was
-nowhere lower for them to go. One’s daughter had to be fed, clothed and
-lodged even if the narrowed scope of the home provided her with no more
-lucrative employment than dusting china dogs on the mantelpiece.
-
-Under these circumstances the daughters of a household found
-themselves, often enough, face to face with a divided duty: the duty of
-earning their keep, which would necessitate emergence from the home,
-and the duty of remaining inside the sacred sphere—and confining
-their energies to china dogs. Left to themselves the more energetic
-and ambitious would naturally adopt the first alternative, the more
-slothful and timid as naturally adopt the second; but they were not
-always left to themselves, nor were their own desires and predilections
-the sole factor in their respective decisions. The views of the head
-of the household, who now got little or no return for the outlay he
-incurred in supporting them, had also to be taken into consideration;
-and his views were usually influenced by the calls made upon his purse.
-Theoretically he might hold fast to the belief that woman’s sphere was
-the home and nothing but the home. Actually he might object to the
-monetary outlay incurred if that belief was acted upon. The father
-of five strapping girls (all hungry several times a day), who might
-or might not succeed in inducing five desirable husbands to bear the
-expense of their support, would probably discover that, even if home
-was the sphere of woman, there were times when she was better out of
-it. It is a curious fact that when women are blamed for intruding into
-departments of the labour market hitherto reserved for men, the abuse
-which is freely showered upon the intruders is in no wise poured forth
-upon the male persons appertaining to the said intruders—who have
-presumably neglected to provide the funds necessary to enable their
-female relations to pass a blameless, if unremunerative, existence
-making cakes for home consumption, or producing masterpieces in
-Berlin wool-work. The different treatment meted out to the guilty
-parties in this respect seems to be another example of the practice
-of apportioning blame only to the person least able to resent it.
-It is quite natural that man should refuse to support healthy and
-able-bodied females; but he must not turn round and be nasty when, as a
-direct consequence of his refusal, the healthy and able-bodied females
-endeavour to support themselves.
-
-For good or for evil a good many millions of us have been forced out of
-the environment which we once believed to be proper to our sex; and to
-our new environment we have to adapt ourselves—if we are to survive.
-Work in the factory or in the office, work which brings us into
-contact with the outside world, calls for the exercise of qualities
-and attainments which we had no need of before, for the abandonment
-of habits and ideas which can only hamper our progress in our changed
-surroundings. Our forefathers—those, at any rate, of the upper and
-middle class—admired fragility of health in woman; and, in order to
-please them, our foremothers fell in with the idea and appealed to
-the masculine sense of chivalry by habitual indulgence in complaints
-known as swoons and vapours. Persons subject to these tiresome and
-inconvenient diseases would stand a very poor chance of regular and
-well-paid employment as teachers, sanitary inspectors, journalists and
-typists; so teachers, sanitary inspectors, journalists and typists
-have repressed the tendency to swoons and vapours. In these classes an
-actual uncertainty prevails as to the nature of vapours, and swooning
-is practically a lost art. Instead of applying their energies to the
-cultivation of these attractive complaints, working and professional
-women are inclined to encourage a condition of rude bodily health which
-stands them in good stead in their work, and is, therefore, a valuable
-commercial asset.
-
-Just as we have been forced by contact with the outside world to
-cultivate not weakness but health, so by the same contact we have been
-forced to cultivate not folly but intelligence. The silly angel may
-be a success in the home; she is not a success in trade or business.
-Man may desire to clasp her and kiss her and call her his own; but
-there are moments when he tires of seeing her make hay of his accounts
-and correspondence. His natural predilection for her type may, and
-often does, induce him to give her the preference over her fellows in
-business matters; but he usually ends by admitting that, for certain
-purposes at least, the human being with brains is preferable to the
-seraph without them. It has been borne in upon the modern woman that
-it pays her to have brains—even although they must be handled very
-cautiously for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of her master.
-She learned that lesson not in her own sphere, but in the world
-outside it; and it is a lesson that has already had far-reaching
-consequences. Having, in the first instance, acquired a modicum of
-intelligence because she had to, she is now acquiring it in larger
-quantities because she likes it. The trades which do not require the
-qualification of stupidity are counteracting the effect upon her of the
-trade which did—the compulsory trade of marriage.
-
-
-
-
-XVIII
-
-
-If the division of the home, and the inevitable consequences that
-followed on that division, had done nothing more than teach some of us
-to value our health and respect our brains we should have very good
-cause to bless the break-up of that over-estimated institution. But,
-as a matter of fact, our contact with the wider world is doing a great
-deal more for us than that. It is testing our powers in new directions;
-it is bringing new interests into our lives; it is teaching us how very
-like we are unto our brothers—given similar environment; and, most
-important of all, it is sweeping away with a steady hand that distrust
-and ignorance of each other which was alike the curse and the natural
-result of age-long isolation in the home and immemorial training in the
-service, not of each other, but only of our masters.
-
-It may be true that women in general once disliked and meanly despised
-each other. At any rate, man has always desired that it should be
-true; so, the aim and object of woman’s life being the gratification of
-his desires, such mutual dislike and contempt was no doubt cultivated
-and affected by her. But if it was true once, it is not true now;
-except, maybe, amongst the silly angel class—a class already growing
-rarer, and soon, one hopes, to be well on the way to extinction. The
-working-woman, the woman with wider interests than her mother’s, in
-learning to respect herself is learning to respect her counterpart—the
-human being, like unto herself, who, under the same disadvantages,
-fights the same battle as her own. And recognizing the heaviness, the
-unfairness of those disadvantages, she recognizes the bond of common
-interest that unites her to her sister. In short, for the first time in
-her history she is becoming actively class-conscious.
-
-We speak best of that which we have seen with our own eyes and heard
-with our own ears; therefore I make no excuse for obtruding my personal
-experiences in this connection. For many years the women who came
-into my life intimately and closely were, with few exceptions, women
-who had to work—journalists, artists, typists, dressmakers, clerks;
-practically all of them dependent on their own work and practically all
-of them poor—some bitterly poor. And that class, because I know it so
-well, I have learned to respect. It is a class which has few pleasures
-in life, because it has so little money to spend on them; which, as a
-rule, works harder than a man would work in the same position, because
-its pay is less; which is not unexposed to temptation, but holds
-temptation as a thing to be resisted; yet which is tolerant to those
-who fail under it, knowing the excuse to be made for them. The woman
-belonging to that class does not turn away from the sinner who walks
-the street with a painted face; likely enough she remembers that she,
-too, was brought up to believe that the awakening of sexual desire must
-be her means of livelihood, and she knows that, if she had not cast
-that belief behind her, she, too, when need pressed upon her, might
-have walked the streets for hire. Wherefore she is more inclined to say
-to herself, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” She has learned to
-know men as the sheltered woman seldom knows them; to know more of
-the good in them, more of the ill; she has met and talked with them
-without compliment and without ceremony; has taken orders from and been
-rebuked by them; has been to them fellow-worker and sometimes friend;
-has sometimes met and fought the brute in them. In the same way she
-has worked with women and learned to know them; and the result of her
-experience is, that she has lost any natural distrust of her own sex
-which she may once have possessed; has come to rely upon her own sex
-for the help which she herself is willing enough to render. The sense
-of a common interest, the realization of common disabilities, have
-forced her into class-consciousness and partisanship of her class.
-I know many women of the type I have described—women who have gone
-through the mill, some married, some unmarried. And of them all I know
-hardly one whose life is not affected, to an appreciable extent, by the
-sense of fellowship with her sisters.
-
-The average man, it seems to me, fails utterly to realize how strong
-this sense of fellowship, of trade unionism, can be in us; he has (as
-I have already pointed out) explained away its manifestations in the
-match-making industry by accounting for them on other grounds. He has
-forgotten that it was a woman who, for the sake, not of a man, but of
-another woman, went out into a strange land, saying: “Whither thou
-goest I will go; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” To
-him, one imagines, that saying must always have been a dark one; to us
-there seems nothing strange in it.
-
-A friend of my own (who will forgive me for repeating her confidence)
-told me the other day of a happening in her life that, to my mind,
-exactly illustrates the awakening of class-consciousness amongst women.
-It was the careless speech of a man, addressed to her while she was
-still a very young girl, to the effect that all women over fifty should
-be shot. The words were lightly spoken, of course, and were probably
-intended half as a compliment to her manifest youth; certainly they
-were not intended as an insult. But their effect was to rouse in her
-a sense of insult and something akin to a passion of resentment that
-she and her like should only be supposed to exist so long as they were
-pleasing, only so long as they possessed the power of awakening sexual
-desire. She took them as an insult to herself because they were an
-insult to women in general; and, lightly spoken as they were they made
-upon her an impression which helped to mould her life.
-
-I give my friend’s experience because it seems to me to be typical;
-because amongst women of my own class I know others who have felt the
-same rush of anger at the revelation of a similar attitude towards the
-sex they belong to; who have raged inwardly as they recognized that
-character, worth, intellect were held valueless in woman, that nothing
-counted in her but the one capacity—the power of awaking desire. That
-is an attitude which we who have become conscious of our class resent
-with all our souls; since we realize that to that attitude on the
-part of man, to compliance with it on the part of woman, we owe the
-degradation of our class.
-
-Most important of all, the knowledge of each other and the custom and
-necessity of working side by side in numbers is bringing with it the
-consciousness of a new power—the power of organization. It is a power
-that we have hitherto lacked, not because we were born without the
-seed of it in our souls, but because our fenced-in, isolated lives
-have given small opportunity for its growth and development. And it
-is a power which we are now acquiring because we have been forced to
-recognize the need of it, because we can no longer do without it. It
-is being borne in on us that if we are to have fair play, if our wages
-are to rise above subsistence point, if we are to be anything more
-than hewers of wood, drawers of water, and unthinking reproducers of
-our kind, we have to stand together; that if we are to have any share
-of our own in the world into which we were born, if our part in it is
-to be anything more than that of the beggar with outstretched hand
-awaiting the crumbs that fall from another’s table, we have to work
-together. And it is work in the mill, the factory, the office that is
-teaching us the lesson of public spirit, of combination for a common
-purpose—a lesson that was never taught us in the home where we once
-lived narrowly apart.
-
-
-
-
-XIX
-
-
-IF what I have written has any truth in it, I have shown that we have
-good grounds for believing that the degradation of woman’s position and
-the inferiority of woman’s capacities are chiefly due to the compulsory
-restriction of her energies and ambitions to the uncertain livelihood
-and ill-paid trade of marriage. I have shown that the trade is ill
-paid simply because it is largely compulsory; that, in accordance with
-economic law, the wife and mother will be held cheap for just so long
-as she is a drug in the market. I have shown how the unsatisfactory
-position of the wife and mother, the unsatisfactory training to which
-she has been subjected from her childhood up, affects the earning and
-productive powers of woman in those other occupations which the change
-in social and industrial conditions has forced her to adopt; and I
-have shown how the new influences engendered by her new surroundings
-are gradually and inevitably counteracting the peculiar habit of
-mind acquired in the narrow precincts of the home. It remains to be
-considered how far these influences are reaching and affecting the life
-of the home itself—how far they are likely to improve the position not
-only of the woman who earns her own wage and directs her own life, but
-of the woman who has no means of augmenting the low remuneration which
-is at present considered sufficient for the duties of a wife and mother.
-
-I suppose that in the recent history of woman nothing is more striking
-than the enormous improvement that has taken place in the social
-position of the spinster. In many ranks of life the lack of a husband
-is no longer a reproach; and some of us are even proud of the fact
-that we have fought our way in the world without aid from any man’s
-arm. At any rate, we no longer feel it necessary to apologize for our
-existence; and when we are assured that we have lost the best that
-life has to offer us, we are not unduly cast down. (I am speaking,
-of course, of the independent woman with an interest in life and
-in herself; not of the poor, mateless product of tradition that
-we exist only to awaken desire in man. There are still many such,
-no doubt—the victims of a servile training. On whom may God have
-mercy—man having no use for them and they none for themselves!) By
-sheer force of self-assertion we have lifted ourselves from the dust
-where we once crawled as worms and not women; we no longer wither on
-the virgin thorn—we flourish on it; and ungarnished though we be with
-olive-boughs, we are not ashamed when we meet with our enemies in the
-gate.
-
-So far as I can see, nothing like the same improvement has taken place
-in recent years in the position of the average married woman. So far
-as I can see, the average husband, actual or to be, still entertains
-the conviction that the word helpmeet, being interpreted, means second
-fiddle; and acts in accordance with that honest conviction. He still
-feels that it is the duty of his wife to respect him on the ground
-that he did not happen to be born a woman; he still considers it
-desirable that the mother of his children should not be over wise. He
-still clings to the idea that a wife is a creature to be patronized;
-with kindness, of course—patted on the head, not thumped—but still
-patronized. While he is yet unmated his dream of the coming affinity
-still takes the shape of some one smaller than himself who asks him
-questions while he strokes her hair. On the whole, therefore, he
-tends to avoid marriage with those women who are not fit subjects for
-patronage—who, be it noted, also tend to avoid marriage with him; and
-thus, in the natural order of things, the average wife is the person
-who is willing to submit to be patronized. I do not mean that there are
-not many exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. And it is
-obvious that human beings, men, or women, who consider themselves fit
-subjects for patronage are not those who make for progress or possess
-any very great power of improving their own status.
-
-Myself I have not the least doubt that such improvement as has already
-been affected in the status of the wife and mother has originated
-outside herself, and is, to a great extent, the work of the formerly
-contemned spinster. I do not mean that the spinster has always laboured
-to that end intentionally; I mean, rather, that as she improves her
-own position, as she takes advantage of its greater freedom, its less
-restricted opportunities, its possibilities of pleasing herself and
-directing her own life, she inevitably, by awaking her envy, drags
-after her the married woman who once despised her and whose eyes she
-has opened to the disadvantages of her own dependent situation. It is
-the independent woman with an income, earned or unearned, at her own
-disposal, with the right to turn her energies into whatever channel
-may seem good to her, who is steadily destroying the prestige of
-marriage; and the prestige of marriage has hitherto been an important
-factor in the eagerness of women for matrimony. Once it has gone,
-once it makes absolutely no difference to the esteem in which a woman
-is held, whether she is called Mrs. or whether she is called Miss, a
-new inducement will have to be found, at any rate for the woman who
-is not obliged to look upon marriage as a means of providing her with
-bread and butter. Such women will require some additional advantage
-to replace the social prestige to which they no longer attach any
-value—that is to say, as a condition of becoming wives and mothers,
-they will require their status to be raised; and their action in
-raising their own status will tend to raise the status of married women
-in general.
-
-Not very long ago, in one of the columns which a daily paper was
-devoting to animated correspondence dealing with the rights and wrongs
-of an agitation carried on by women, I came across a brief contribution
-to the discussion which furnished me with considerable food for
-thought. It was a letter written by a palpably infuriated gentleman,
-who denounced the agitation in question as the outcome of the unmarried
-woman’s jealousy of the privileges of her married sister. This very
-masculine view of the controversy had never struck me before; and,
-being a new idea to me, I sat down to consider whether it was in any
-way justified by facts.
-
-The first step, naturally, was to ascertain what were the special
-privileges which were supposed to arouse in those deprived of them a
-sense of maddened envy. On this point I did not rely solely on my own
-conclusions; I consulted, at various times, interested friends, married
-and unmarried; with the result that I have ascertained the privileges
-of the married woman to be, at the outside, three in number. (About two
-of them there is no doubt; the third is already being invaded, and can
-no longer be esteemed the exclusive property of the matron.) They are
-as follows—
-
-1. The right to wear on the third finger of the left hand a gold ring
-of approved but somewhat monotonous pattern.
-
-2. The right to walk in to dinner in advance of women unfurnished with
-a gold ring of the approved, monotonous pattern.
-
-3. The right of the wife and mother to peruse openly and in the
-drawing-room certain forms of literature—such as French novels of an
-erotic type—which the ordinary unmarried woman is supposed to read
-only in the seclusion of her bedroom.
-
-I cannot honestly say that any one of these blessings arouses in me a
-spasm of uncontrollable envy, a mad desire to share in it at any cost.
-As a matter of fact, I have—like many of my unmarried friends—annexed
-one of the above matrimonial privileges, if not in deed, at any rate
-potentially and in thought. I have never yet felt the desire to study
-French novels of an erotic type; but if I ever do feel it, I shall have
-no hesitation whatever in perusing them in public—even on the top of a
-’bus.
-
-One does not imagine that the mere wearing of a plain gold ring
-would in itself awaken perfervid enthusiasm in any woman of ordinary
-intelligence; nor does one imagine that any woman of ordinary
-intelligence would be greatly elated or abashed by entering a
-dining-room first or seventh—provided, of course, that the table
-was furnished with enough food to go round. One feels that these
-temptations are hardly glittering enough to entice reluctant woman into
-marriage. That there has been a social pressure which has impelled her
-into it I have not denied! on the contrary, I have affirmed it. But
-that social pressure has not taken the form of a passionate desire for
-one or two small and formal distinctions, but of a fear of spinsterhood
-with its accompaniments, scorn and confession of failure in your trade.
-And as spinsterhood grows more enviable, so does the fear of it grow
-less.
-
-It may be objected that in my brief list of the matron’s privileges
-I have omitted the most important of them all—motherhood. I have
-done so deliberately and for two reasons—because under any system of
-more or less compulsory marriage there must always be an appreciable
-number of wives who look upon motherhood rather as a burden than as a
-privilege; and because motherhood does not appertain exclusively to the
-married state. There is such a thing as an illegitimate birth-rate.
-
-I myself am far from desiring that the wife and mother should not
-possess privileges; it seems to me that the work of a woman who brings
-up children decently, creditably, and honourably is of such immense
-importance that it ought to be suitably rewarded. (That, of course,
-is a very different thing from admitting that a person who has gone
-through a ceremony which entitles her to hold sexual intercourse with
-another person is thereby entitled to consider herself my superior.)
-But I am very certain that it never will be suitably rewarded until
-it is undertaken freely and without pressure, and until the wife and
-mother herself summons up courage to insist on adequate payment for
-her services. It may not be necessary that that payment should be
-made in actual money; but, in whatever form it is made, it must be of
-a more satisfactory and substantial nature than the present so-called
-privileges of the married woman, involving an all-round improvement
-in her status. And that all-round improvement she will demand—and
-get—only when it is borne in upon her that her unmarried sisters have
-placed themselves in a position to get out of life a great deal more
-than she is permitted to get out of it. When she realizes that fact to
-the full she will go on strike—and good luck to her!
-
-Meanwhile, it seems to me that there is something more than a little
-pathetic in the small airs of superiority which are still affected
-by the average unintelligent matron towards her husbandless sister.
-Personally I always feel tender towards these little manifestations of
-the right to look down on the “incomplete,” the unconsciously servile
-imitation of the masculine attitude in this respect. You watch the
-dull lives that so many of these married women lead, you realize the
-artificial limitations placed upon their powers, you pity them for the
-sapping of individuality which is the inevitable result of repression
-of their own and unquestioning acceptance of other people’s opinions,
-for the cramping of their interests, perhaps for the necessity of
-cultivating the animal side of their natures—and you do not grudge
-them such small compensations as comes their way. It will be better
-for them and for their children when they realize in what this fancied
-superiority of the married woman consists; but meanwhile let them enjoy
-it.
-
-Only a little while past I met a perfect example of this tendency
-on the part of a married woman to plume herself on marriage as
-a virtue—or rather, I met her again. She had been my friend
-once—several years ago—and I had liked her for her intelligence, her
-humour, her individual outlook on life. We knew each other well for
-some months; then we were separated, and she wrote to me that she was
-getting married; and with her marriage she gave up professional work
-and passed out of my life. I heard little and saw nothing of her for
-years, until she wrote that she was staying near me and would like us
-to meet again. I went, and she told me what her life had been since
-she married. It was a story that I can only call foul—of insult,
-brutality, and degradation. What sickened me about it was the part
-that remained unspoken—the thought that the woman I once knew, clean,
-high-minded, and self-respecting, should have consented to stand for
-so long in the relation of wife to such a man as she described. One
-could see what contact with him had done for her; it had dragged her
-down morally and spiritually; the pitch had defiled her. She had,
-I knew, a small income of her own—sufficient to live upon without
-having recourse to her husband—so I urged her bluntly to leave him.
-She refused, crying feebly; made the usual rejoinder of weak-minded
-married women run into a corner—that I was not married myself and
-could not understand; and spent another hour bewailing her lot with
-tears. I saw that her courage and character had been sapped out of her,
-that it was no use appealing to what she no longer possessed, and that
-all she asked was sympathy of the type that listens with an occasional
-pat on the shoulder or soothing stroke on the arm; so I gave of it, in
-silence, as well as I could. At the end of a good hour she dried her
-tears, and declared that she was selfish to talk about nothing but
-herself, that she must hear my news and what I had been doing. I did
-not like to refuse, for I thought it better to turn her thoughts away
-from her troubles, if only for a little; besides, she had liked me
-genuinely once, and I think her interest in me was still genuine. But
-as I complied and talked to her about myself, I felt miserably ashamed.
-For, as it happened, I was very happy then—happier, in some ways,
-than I had ever been in my life, since, almost for the first time in
-my life, I had learned the meaning of good luck. I thought of all the
-kindness, the friendliness, the consideration that was being shown to
-me—I thought of my work and my pleasure in it—of my interest in work
-done with others and the sense of comradeship it brings. And I thought
-how the poor soul who had wept her handkerchief into a rag must realize
-the contrast of our two lives, must feel how unjust it was that one
-woman should have so little and another have so much. So, as I say, I
-felt ashamed, and talked on, conscious of mental discomfort, until I
-saw her looking at me thoughtfully, as if she were about to speak. I
-stopped to hear what she had to say; and it was this—
-
-“I suppose you will never marry now?”
-
-For a moment I did not see the real purport of the question, and I dare
-say I looked astonished as I answered that it was most unlikely, and I
-had no thought of it. She surveyed me steadily, to make sure that I was
-speaking the truth; then, having apparently convinced herself that I
-was, she sighed.
-
-“It is a pity. Every woman ought to get married. Your life isn’t
-complete without it. It is an experience....”
-
-Those, as far as I remember, were the exact words she used. (There
-is no danger that she will ever read them.) They left me dumb; their
-unconscious irony was so pathetic and so dreadful. Marriage an
-experience—it had been one for her! And “your life isn’t complete
-without it.” This from a woman whose husband had threatened to knock
-pieces out of her with a poker! The situation seemed to me beyond
-tears and beyond laughter—the poor, insulted, bullied thing, finding
-her one source of pride in the fact that she had experienced sexual
-intercourse. If there had been a child I could have understood; but
-there had, I think, never been a child—at any rate, there was not one
-living. If there had been, I believe I should have said to her what
-was in my mind—for the child’s sake; I should have hated to think of
-it growing up in that atmosphere, in its mother’s squalid faith in
-the essential glory of animalism. But as there was no child, and as
-she was so dulled, so broken, I said nothing. It was all she had—the
-consciousness that she, from her vantage-ground of completeness and
-experience, had the right to look down on me—on one of the unmarried,
-a woman who “could not understand.” It was her one ewe-lamb of petty
-consolation; and I had not the heart to try and take it from her.
-
-
-
-
-XX
-
-
-My intention in writing this book has not been to inveigh against the
-institution of marriage, the life companionship of man and woman; all
-that I have inveighed against has been the largely compulsory character
-of that institution—as far as one-half of humanity is concerned—the
-sweated trade element in it, and the glorification of certain qualities
-and certain episodes and experiences of life at the expense of all the
-others. I believe—because I have seen it in the working—that the
-companionship in marriage of self-respecting man and self-respecting
-woman is a very perfect thing; but I also believe that, under present
-conditions, it is not easy for self-respecting woman to find a mate
-with whom she can live on the terms demanded by her self-respect.
-Hence a distinct tendency on her part to avoid marriage. Those women
-who look at the matter in this light are those who, while not denying
-that matrimony may be an excellent thing in itself, realize that there
-are some excellent things which may be bought too dear. That is the
-position of a good many of us in these latter days. If we are more or
-less politely incredulous when we are informed that we are leading an
-unnatural existence, it is not because we have no passions, but because
-life to us means a great deal more than one of its possible episodes.
-If we decline to listen with becoming reverence to disquisitions on the
-broadening effect of motherhood upon our lives, the deep and miraculous
-understanding that it brings into our hearts, it is not because we
-are contemptuous of maternity, but because we have met so many silly
-persons who brought babies into the world and remained just as silly
-as they were before. We are quite aware, too, that it is, for the most
-part, women of our own unmated class, and, likely enough, of our own
-way of thinking, who spend their days in teaching bungling mothers how
-to rear the children who would otherwise only come into the world in
-order to afford employment to the undertaker by going out of it. (A
-considerable proportion of the infant population of this country would
-be in a parlous state if the “superfluous women” thereof were suddenly
-caught up into the air and dumped _en bloc_ in the Sahara.)
-
-And in this connection I feel it necessary to state that I have
-hitherto sought in vain in real life for that familiar figure in
-fiction—the unmarried woman whose withered existence is passed in
-ceaseless and embittered craving for the possession of a child of
-her own. The sufferings of this unfortunate creature, as depicted
-by masculine writers, have several times brought me to the verge of
-tears; it is difficult to believe that they are entirely the result of
-vivid masculine imagination; but honesty compels me to admit that I
-have never discovered their counterpart in life, in spite of the fact
-that my way has led me amongst spinsters of all ages. Young unmarried
-women have told me frankly that they would like to bear a child; a
-very few elderly unmarried women have told me that they would have
-preferred to marry; and quite a number of married women have told me
-that they should have done better for themselves by remaining single.
-I have known wives who desired maternity as anxiously as others
-desired to avoid it; but the spinster whose days are passed in gloomy
-contemplation of her lack of olive-branches I have not yet met. I
-started by believing in her, just as I started by believing that the
-world held nothing for me but marriage and reproduction of my kind.
-Later on I discovered that there were more things in heaven and earth
-than marriage and reproduction of my kind, and I have no reason to
-suppose that I am the only woman who has made that discovery.
-
-The women I have known who lamented their single state as a real evil
-have been actuated in their dislike of it by mixed motives. A desire to
-bear children has, perhaps, been one; but it has always been interwoven
-with the desire to improve their position socially or commercially, and
-the corresponding fear of failure or poverty implied by spinsterhood.
-So far as my experience goes, the only women who fret passionately at
-the lack of children of their own are married women whose husbands are
-desirous of children.
-
-I should be the last to deny that many unmarried women have the sense
-of maternity strongly developed; but the sense of maternity, as I see
-it, is not completely dependent on the accidents of marriage and
-child-birth. As I have already said, I believe it is not the physical
-side of maternity—the side which appeals so strongly to men—which
-appeals most strongly to women; and from the other, and, to me,
-infinitely more beautiful side, no unmarried woman is necessarily
-debarred. The spinster who devotes herself to permanent lamentation
-over her lack of descendants must (if she exists) be a person who has
-never risen above the male conception of motherhood as a physical and
-instinctive process. Some of the best mothers I have met have never
-borne a child; but one does not imagine that it will be counted to them
-for unrighteousness that the children who rise up and call them blessed
-are not their own. Nor is it childhood alone which enkindles the sense
-of maternity in women; the truest mother I know is one who enwraps with
-her love a “child” who came into the world before she was thought of.
-
-After all, there is a kinship that is not that of the flesh, and
-some of us are very little the children of our parents. The people
-who have framed and influenced the conditions under which we live,
-whose thoughts have moulded our lives, have also had a share in
-our making. It is possible that descendants of Homer walk the earth
-to-day—very worthy persons whose existence is of no particular moment
-to any but themselves. Shakespeare was married I know, and I believe
-he was the father of a family; but of how many that family consisted,
-what were their names and what became of them all, I have never even
-troubled to inquire. Did Goethe leave descendants, or did he not? I
-frankly confess that I don’t know, simply because I have never had
-the slightest curiosity on the subject. But Faust has been part of my
-life. It matters very little to the world at large what became of the
-children whom Jean Jacques Rousseau handed over to the tender mercies
-of a foundling hospital; but there are very few people alive to-day to
-whom it does not matter that the current of the world’s striving was
-turned into a new channel by the spiritual sons of Rousseau—the men
-who made the French Revolution. Reproduction is not everything; the
-men and women who have striven to shorten the hours of child-labour
-have often been possessed of a keener sense of responsibility and
-tenderness, a keener sense of fatherhood and motherhood, than the
-parents whose children they sought to protect. If I were one of those
-who have so striven, I should consider that the help I had given to the
-world was no less worthy of honour and commendation than that of the
-paterfamilias who marches a family of fourteen to church on Sundays.
-If humanity had only been created in order to reproduce its kind, we
-might still be dodging cave-bears in the intervals of grubbing up roots
-with our nails. It is not only the children who matter: there is the
-world into which they are born. Every human being who influences for
-the better, however slightly, the conditions under which he lives is
-doing something for those who come after; and thus, it seems to me,
-that those women who are proving by their lives that marriage is not
-a necessity for them, that maternity is not a necessity for them,
-are preparing a heritage of fuller humanity for the daughters of
-others—who will be daughters of their own in the spirit, if not in
-the flesh. The home of the future will be more of an abiding-place and
-less of a prison because they have made it obvious that, so far as many
-women are concerned, the home can be done without; and if the marriage
-of the future is what it ought to be—a voluntary contract on both
-sides—it will be because they have proved the right of every woman to
-refuse it if she will, by demonstrating that there are other means of
-earning a livelihood than bearing children and keeping house. It is
-the woman without a husband to support her, the woman who has no home
-but such as she makes for herself by her own efforts, who is forcing a
-reluctant masculine generation to realize that she is something more
-than the breeding factor of the race. By her very existence she is
-altering the male conception of her sex.
-
-According to latter-day notions, to speak in praise of celibacy in
-man or in woman is tantamount to committing the crime of high treason
-against the race. Other centuries—some of them with social systems
-quite as scientific as our own—have not been of that way of thinking;
-and one is half inclined to suspect that the modern dislike of the
-celibate has its root in the natural annoyance of an over-sexed and
-mentally lax generation at receiving ocular demonstration of the fact
-that the animal passions can be kept under control. It saves such
-a lot of trouble to assume at once that they cannot be kept under
-control; so, in place of the priest, we have the medicine man, whose
-business it is to make pathological excuses for original sin. Myself
-I have a good deal of respect for the celibate; not because he has no
-children, but because he is capable of self-control—which is a thing
-respectable in itself.
-
-At the same time, I do not advocate celibacy except for persons whom it
-suits; but I do not see why persons whom it does suit should be ashamed
-of acknowledging the fact. I am inclined to think that they are more
-numerous than is commonly supposed, and I will admit frankly that I am
-exceedingly glad that it seems, in these latter days, to suit so many
-women. I am glad, not because the single life appears to me essentially
-better than the married, but because I believe that the conditions of
-marriage, as they affect women, can only be improved by the women who
-do without marriage—and do without it gladly. Other generations have
-realized that particular duties could best be performed by persons
-without engrossing domestic interests; and I believe that the wives
-and mothers of this generation require the aid of women unhampered by
-such interests—women who will eventually raise the value of the wife
-and mother in the eyes of the husband and father by making it clear
-to him that she did not enter the married state solely because there
-was nothing else for her to do, and that his child was not born simply
-because its mother had no other way of earning a living. There are
-women married every day, there are children born every day, for no
-better reasons than these.
-
-
-
-
-XXI
-
-
-And the husband and father? What does he stand to gain or lose by that
-gradual readjustment of the conditions inside the home which must
-inevitably follow on the improvement of woman’s position outside the
-home, the recognition of her right to an alternative career and the
-consequent discovery that she can be put to other uses than sexual
-attraction and maternity? How will he be affected by the fact that
-marriage has become a voluntary trade?
-
-So far as one can see, he stands to lose something of his comfortable
-pride in his sex, his aristocratic pleasure in the accident of his
-birth, his aristocratic consciousness that deference is due to him
-merely because he was born in the masculine purple. The woman who has
-established her claim to humanity will no longer submit herself to
-the law of imposed stupidity; so the belief in her inherent idiocy
-will have to go, along with the belief in his own inherent wisdom.
-No longer will he take his daily enjoyment in despising the wife of
-his bosom—because nature has decreed that she shall be the wife of
-his bosom and not the husband of some one else’s. There will be a
-readjustment of the wage-scale, too—a readjustment of the conditions
-of labour. With better conditions available outside the home, the
-wife and mother—no longer under the impression that it is a sin to
-think and a shame to be single—will decline to work inside the home
-for a wage that can go no lower, will decline to take all the dirty,
-monotonous and unpleasant work merely because her husband prefers to
-get out of it. She will agree that it is quite natural that he should
-dislike such dirty, monotonous or unpleasant toil; but she will point
-out to him that it is also quite natural that she should dislike it.
-And one imagines that they will come to a compromise. So far, under
-a non-compulsory marriage system, he would stand to lose; but on the
-other hand he would stand to gain—greatly.
-
-He could be reasonably sure that his wife married him because she
-wanted to marry him, not because no other trade was open to her, not
-because she was afraid of being jeered and sneered at as an old maid.
-That in itself would be an advantage substantial enough to outweigh
-some loss of sex dignity. For it would be only his sense of sex dignity
-that would be impaired; his sense of personal dignity would be enhanced
-by the knowledge that he was a matter not of necessity but of choice.
-His wife’s attitude towards him would be a good deal less complimentary
-to his class, but a good deal more complimentary to himself. The
-attitude of the girl who would “marry any one to get out of this” is by
-no means complimentary to her future husband.
-
-The fact that, under a voluntary system of marriage, he would have to
-pay, either in money or some equivalent of money, for work which he now
-gets done for nothing—and despises accordingly—would also bring with
-it a compensatory advantage. Woman’s work in the home is often enough
-inefficient simply because it is sweated; there is a point at which
-cheap labour tends to become inefficient, and therefore the reverse
-of cheap; and that point appears to have been reached in a good many
-existing homes.
-
-There is, it seems to me, another respect in which man, as well as
-woman, would eventually be the gainer by the recognition of woman’s
-right to humanity on her own account. The custom of regarding one
-half of the race as sent into the world to excite desire in the other
-half does not appear to be of real advantage to either moiety, in
-that it has produced the over-sexed man and the over-sexed woman, the
-attitude of mind which sneers at self-control. Such an attitude the
-establishment of marriage for woman upon a purely voluntary basis ought
-to go far to correct; since it is hardly conceivable that women, who
-have other careers open to them and by whom ignorance is no longer
-esteemed as a merit, will consent to run quite unnecessary risks from
-which their unmarried sisters are exempt. When the intending wife and
-mother no longer considers it her duty to be innocent and complacent,
-the intending husband and father will learn, from sheer necessity,
-to see more virtue in self-restraint. With results beneficial to the
-race—and incidentally to himself. Humanity would seem to have paid
-rather a heavy price for the feminine habit of turning a blind eye to
-evil which it dignifies by the name of innocence.
-
-I have sufficient faith in my brethren to be in no wise alarmed
-by dismal prophecies of their rapid moral deterioration when our
-helplessness and general silliness no longer make a pathetic appeal
-to their sense of pity and authority. No doubt the consciousness of
-superiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain virtues—the
-virtues of the patron; just as the consciousness of inferiority is
-favourable to the cultivation of certain other virtues—the virtues of
-the patronized. But I will not do my brother the injustice of believing
-that the virtues of the patron are the only ones he possesses; on the
-contrary, I have found him to be possessed of many others, have seen
-him just to an equal, courteous and considerate to those whom he had
-no reason to pity or despise. When the ordinary man and the ordinary
-wife no longer stand towards each other in the attitude of patron and
-patronized the virtues of both will need overhauling—that is all.
-
-Nor does one see how the advancement of marriage to the position of a
-voluntary trade can work for anything but good upon the children born
-of marriage. Motherhood can be sacred only when it is voluntary, when
-the child is desired by a woman who feels herself fit to bear and to
-rear it; the child who is born because of his mother’s inability to
-earn her bread by any trade but marriage, because of his mother’s fear
-of the social disgrace of spinsterhood, has no real place in the world.
-He comes into it simply because the woman who gives him life was less
-capable or less courageous than her sisters; and it is not for such
-reasons that a man should be born.
-
-And I fail to see that a future generation will be in any way injured
-because the mothers of that generation are no longer required to please
-their husbands by stunting and narrowing such brains as they were
-born with, because ignorance and silliness are no longer considered
-essential qualifications for the duties of wifehood and motherhood. The
-recognition of woman’s complete humanity, apart from husband or lover,
-must mean inevitably the recognition of her right to develop every side
-of that humanity, the mental and moral as well as the physical and
-sexual; and inevitably and insensibly the old aristocratic masculine
-cruelty which, because she was an inferior, imposed stupidity upon her
-and made lack of intelligence a preliminary condition of motherhood,
-will become a thing of the past. Nor will a man be less fitted to fight
-the battle of life with honour and advantage to himself, because he was
-not born the son of a fool.
-
-The male half of creation is still apt to talk (if not quite so
-confidently as of yore) as if the instinct and desire for maternity
-were the one overpowering factor in our lives. It may be so as regards
-the majority of us, though the shrinkage of the birth-rate in so far as
-it is attributable to women would seem to point the other way; but as
-I have shown it is impossible to be certain on the point until other
-instincts and desires have been given fair play. Under a voluntary
-system of marriage they would be given fair play; in a world where a
-woman might make what she would of her own life, might interest herself
-in what seemed good to her, she would hardly bear a child unless she
-desired to bear it. That is to say she would bear a child not just
-because it was the right thing for her to do—since there would be a
-great many other right things for her to do—but because the maternal
-instinct was so strong in her that it overpowered other interests,
-desires or ambitions, because she felt in her the longing to give birth
-to a son of whom she had need. And such a son would come into a world
-where his place was made ready for him; being welcome, and a hundred
-times welcome, because he was loved before he was conceived.
-
-Nor does one imagine that such a son, when he grew of an age to
-understand, would think the less of his mother because he knew that
-he was no accident in her life, but a choice; because he learned that
-his birth was something more than a necessary and inevitable incident
-in her compulsory trade. One does not imagine that he would reverence
-her the less because he saw in her not only the breeding factor in
-the family, but a being in all respects as human as himself, who had
-suffered for him and suffered of her own free will; nor that he would
-be less grateful to her because she, having the unquestioned right to
-hold life from him, had chosen instead to give it.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Transcriber's Notes
-
-Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
-in hyphenation, spelling and punctuation remain unchanged.
-
-In the Preface “largely unnecessary and unavoidable” has been changed
-to “largely unnecessary and avoidable”
-
-The multiple repeats of the title before the title page have been
-removed.
-
-Italics are represented thus _italic_.
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marriage as a Trade, by Cicely Hamilton
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARRIAGE AS A TRADE ***
-
-***** This file should be named 54704-0.txt or 54704-0.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/4/7/0/54704/
-
-Produced by Carlo Traverso, Les Galloway and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive)
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
-be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
-States without permission and without paying copyright
-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
-
-START: FULL LICENSE
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
-1.E.8.
-
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
-you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
-country outside the United States.
-
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
-  are located before using this ebook.
-
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
-beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-provided that
-
-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
-  Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
-  works.
-
-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
-  receipt of the work.
-
-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
-cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
-without further opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
-remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
-Defect you cause.
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
-from people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
-www.gutenberg.org Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-
-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-    Chief Executive and Director
-    gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
-volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
-edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
-facility: www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-