The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage · Chapter 4Preface (4)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
V
ULTERIOR ENDS WHICH THE WOMAN'S SUF- FRAGE MOVEMENT HAS IN VIEW
WE have now sufficiently considered the suffragist's humanitarian schemes, and we may lead up to the consideration of her further projects by contrasting woman's suffrage as it presents itself under colonial conditions--i.e. woman's suffrage without the female legisla- tive reformer and the feminist--with the woman suffrage which is being agitated for in England--i.e. woman suffrage with the fe- male legislative reformer and the feminist. In the colonies and undeveloped countries generally where women are in a minority, and where owing to the fact that practically all have an opportunity of marrying, there are not for woman any difficult economic and physio- logical conditions, there is no woman's ques- 136 tion; and by consequence no female legislative reformer or feminist. The woman voter fol- lows, as the opportunist politicians who en- franchised her intended, the lead of her men- folk--serving only a pawn in the game of pol- itics. Under such conditions woman's suf- frage leaves things as they are, except only that it undermines the logical foundations of the law, and still further debases the standard of public efficiency and public morality. In countries, such as England, where an ex- cess female population 1 has made economic difficulties for woman, and where the severe sexual restrictions, which here obtains, have bred in her sex-hostility, the suffrage move- ment has as its avowed ulterior object the abro- gation of all distinctions which depend upon sex; and the achievement of the economic inde- pendence of woman. To secure this economic independence every post, occupation, and Government service is to
1 In England and Wales there are, in a population of 8,000,- 000 women between the ages of twenty and fifty, 3,000,000 un- married women. 137
be thrown open to woman; she is to receive everywhere the same wages as man; male and female are to work side by side; and they are indiscriminately to be put in command the one over the other. Furthermore, legal rights are to be secured to the wife over her husband's property and earnings. The programme is, in fact, to give to woman an economic inde- pendence out of the earnings and taxes of man. Nor does feminist ambition stop short here. It demands that women shall be included in every advisory committee, every governing board, every jury, every judicial bench, every electorate, every parliament, and every minis- terial cabinet; further, that every masculine foundation, university, school of learning, academy, trade union, professional corpora- tion and scientific society shall be converted into an epicene institution--until we shall have everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show. The proposal to bring man and woman together everywhere into extremely intimate 138 relationships raises very grave questions. It brings up, first, the question of sexual compli- cations; secondly, the question as to whether the tradition of modesty and reticence between the sexes is to be definitely sacrificed; and, most important of all, the question as to whether epicene conditions would place ob- stacles in the way of intellectual work. Of these issues the feminist puts the first two quite out of account. I have already else- where said my say upon these matters.1 With regard to the third, the feminist either fails to realise that purely intellectual intercourse--as distinguished from an intercommunion of men- tal images--with woman is to a large section of men repugnant; or else, perceiving this, she makes up her mind that, this notwithstand- ing, she will get her way by denouncing the man who does not welcome her as selfish; and by insisting that under feminism (the quota- tion is from Mill, the italics which question his sincerity are mine) "the mass of mental facul-
1 Vide Appendix, pp. 169-173. 139
ties available for the higher service of man- kind would be doubled." The matter cannot so lightly be disposed of. It will be necessary for us to find out whether really intimate association with woman on the purely intellectual plane is realisable. And if it is, in fact, unrealisable, it will be necessary to consider whether it is the exclusion of women from masculine corporations; or the perpetual attempt of women to force their way into these, which would deserve to be characterised as selfish. In connexion with the former of these issues, we have to consider here not whether that form of intellectual co-operation in which the man plays the game, and the woman moves the pawns under his orders, is possible. That form of co-operation is of course possible, and it has, doubtless, certain utilities. Nor yet have we to consider whether quite intimate and purely intellectual association on an equal footing between a particular man and a selected woman may or may not be possible. 140 It will suffice to note that the feminist alleges that this also is possible; but everybody knows that the woman very often marries the man. What we have to ask is whether--even if we leave out of regard the whole system of at- tractions or, as the case may be, repulsions which come into operation when the sexes are thrown together--purely intellectual inter- course between man and the typical unselected woman is not barred by the intellectual im- moralities and limitations which appear to be secondary sexual characters of woman. With regard to this issue, there would seem to be very little real difference of opinion among men. But there are great differences in the matter of candour. There are men who speak out, and who enunciate like Nietzsche that "man and woman are alien--never yet has any one conceived how alien." There are men who, from motives of delicacy or policy, do not speak out--averse to saying anything that might be unflattering to woman. And there are men who are by their pro- 141 fession of the feminist faith debarred from speaking out, but who upon occasion give themselves away. Of such is the man who in the House of Commons champions the cause of woman's suffrage, impassionately appealing to Justice; and then betrays himself by announcing that he would shake off from his feet the dust of its purlieus if ever women were admitted as mem- bers--i.e. if ever women were forced upon him as close intellectual associates. Wherever we look we find aversion to com- pulsory intellectual co-operation with woman. We see it in the sullen attitude which the or- dinary male student takes up towards the pres- ence of women students in his classes. We see it in the fact that the older English universi- ties, which have conceded everything else to women, have made a strong stand against mak- ing them actual members of the university; for this would impose them on men as intellec- tual associates. Again we see the aversion in the opposition to the admission of women to 142 the bar. But we need not look so far afield. Practically every man feels that there is in woman--patent, or hidden away--an element of unreason which, when you come upon it, summarily puts an end to purely intellectual intercourse. One may reflect, for example, upon the way the woman's suffrage contro- versy has been conducted. Proceeding now on the assumption that these things are so, and that man feels that he and woman belong to different intellectual castes, we come now to the question as to whether it is man who is selfish when he ex- cludes women from his institutions, or woman when she unceasingly importunes for admit- tance. And we may define as selfish all such conduct as pursues the advantage of the agent at the cost of the happiness and welfare of the general body of mankind. We shall be in a better position to pronounce judgment on this question of ethics when we have considered the following series of analo- gies: 143 When a group of earnest and devout be- lievers meet together for special intercession and worship, we do not tax them with selfish- ness if they exclude unbelievers. Nor do we call people who are really de- voted to music selfish if, coming together for this, they make a special point of excluding the unmusical. Nor again would the imputation of selfish- ness lie against members of a club for black- balling a candidate who would, they feel, be uncongenial. Nor should we regard it as an act of selfish- ness if the members of a family circle, or of the same nation, or of any social circle, desired to come together quite by themselves. Nor yet would the term selfish apply to an East End music hall audience when they eject any one who belongs to a different social class to themselves and wears good clothes. And the like would hold true of servants re- senting their employers intruding upon them in their hours of leisure or entertainments. 144 If we do not characterise such exclusions as selfish, but rather respect and sympathise with them, it is because we recognise that the whole object and raison d' être of association would in each case be nullified by the weak-minded admission of the incompatible intruder. We recognise that if any charge of selfish- ness would lie, it would lie against that in- truder. Now if this holds in the case where the in- terests of religious worship or music, or family, national, or social life, or recreation and relax- ation after labour are in question, it will hold true even more emphatically where the inter- ests of intellectual work are involved. But the feminist will want to argue. She will--taking it as always for granted that woman has a right to all that men's hands or brains have fashioned--argue that it is very important for the intellectual development of woman that she should have exactly the same opportunities as man. And she will, scouting [rejecting with contempt] the idea of any differences between the intelli- 145 gences of man and woman, discourse to you of their intimate affinity. It will, perhaps, be well to clear up these points. The importance of the higher development of woman is unquestionable. But after all it is the intellect of man which really comes into account in connexion with "the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of mankind." The maintenance of the conditions which allow of man's doing his best intellectual work is therefore an interest which is superior to that of the intellectual development of woman. And woman might quite properly be referred for her intellectual development to instruc- tional institutions which should be special to herself. Coming to the question of the intimate re- semblances between the masculine and the feminine intelligence, no man would be ven- turesome enough to dispute these, but he may 146 be pardoned if he thinks--one would hope in no spirit of exaltation--also of the differences. We have an instructive analogy in connexion with the learned societies. It is uncontrovertible that every candidate for election into such a society will have, and will feel that he has, affinities with the members of that association. And he is invited to set these forth in his application. But there may also be differences of which he is not sensible. On that question the electors are the judges; and they are the final court of appeal. There would seem to be here a moral which the feminist would do well to lay to heart. There is also another lesson which she might very profitably consider. A quite small dif- ference will often constitute as effective a bar to a useful and congenial co-operation as a more fundamental difference. In the case of a body of intellectual workers one might at first sight suppose that so small a distinction as that of belonging to a different 147 nationality--sex, of course, is an infinitely pro- founder difference--would not be a bar to un- restricted intellectual co-operation. But in point of fact it is in every country, in every learned society, a uniform rule that when foreign scientists or scholars are admitted they are placed not on the ordinary list of working members, but on a special list. One discerns that there is justification for this in the fact that a foreigner would in cer- tain eventualities be an incompatible person. One may think of the eventuality of the learned society deciding to recognise a national service, or to take part in a national movement. And one is not sure that a foreigner might not be an incompatible person in the eventuality of a scientist or scholar belonging to a national- ity with which the foreigner's country was at feud being brought forward for election. And he would, of course, be an impossible person in a society if he were, in a spirit of chauvinism, to press for a larger representa- tion of his own fellow-countrymen. 148 Now this is precisely the kind of way man feels about woman. He recognises that she is by virtue of her sex for certain purposes an in- compatible person; and that, quite apart from this, her secondary sexual characters might in certain eventualities make her an impossible person. We may note, before passing on, that these considerations would seem to prescribe that woman should be admitted to masculine insti- tutions only when real humanitarian grounds demand it; that she should--following here the analogy of what is done in the learned societies with respect to foreigners--be invited to co- operate with men only when she is quite spe- cially eminent, or beyond all question useful for the particular purpose in hand; and lastly, that when co-opted into any masculine institu- tion woman should always be placed upon a special list, to show that it was proposed to con- fine her co-operation within certain specified limits. From these general questions, which affect 149 only the woman with intellectual aspirations, we pass to consider what would be the effect of feminism upon the rank and file of women if it made of these co-partners with man in work. They would suffer not only because woman's physiological disabilities and the re- strictions which arise out of her sex place her at a great disadvantage when she has to enter into competition with man, but also be- cause under feminism man would be less and less disposed to take off woman's shoulders a part of her burden. And there can be no dispute that the most valuable financial asset of the ordinary woman is the possibility that a man may be willing-- and may, if only woman is disposed to fulfil her part of the bargain, be not only willing but anxious--to support her and to secure for her, if he can, a measure of that freedom which comes from the possession of money. In view of this every one who has a real fel- low-feeling for woman, and who is concerned for her material welfare, as a father is con- 150 cerned for his daughter's, will above every- thing else desire to nurture and encourage in man the sentiment of chivalry, and in woman that disposition of mind that makes chivalry possible. And the woman workers who have to fight the battle of life for themselves would indi- rectly profit from this fostering of chivalry; for those women who are supported by men do not compete in the limited labour market which is open to the woman worker. From every point of view, therefore, except perhaps that of the exceptional woman who would be able to hold her own against mas- culine competition--and men always issue in- formal letters of naturalisation to such an ex- ceptional woman--the woman suffrage which leads up to feminism would be a social disaster. 151
PART III
IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS BARRED, ANY PALLIATIVE OF CORRECTIVE FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN?
I
PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN
What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and Physiological Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.
Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suf- frage with its programme of feminism is barred as leading to social disaster, any pallia- tive or corrective that can be applied to the present discontents of woman? If such is to be found, it is to be found only by placing clearly before us the suffragist's grievances. These grievances are, first, the economic difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her living by work other than unskilled manual labour; secondly, the difficult physiological conditions in which woman is placed by the 155 excess of the female over the male population and by her diminished chances of marriage 1 ; and thirdly, the tedium which obsesses the life of the woman who is not forced, and cannot force herself, to work. On the top of these grievances comes the fact that the suffragist conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly treated by man. This last is the fire which sets a light to all the inflammable material. It would be quite out of question to discuss here the economic and physiological difficulties of woman. Only this may be said: it is impos- sible, in view of the procession of starved and frustrated lives which is continuously filing past, to close one's eyes to the urgency of this woman's problem. After all, the primary object of all civilisa- tion is to provide for every member of the community food and shelter and fulfilment of natural cravings. And when, in what passes as a civilised community, a whole class is called upon to go without any one of these our hu-
1 Vide footnote, p. 138.
man requirements, it is little wonder that it should break out. But when a way of escape stands open revolt is not morally justified. Thus, for example, a man who is born into, but cannot support himself in, a superior class of society is not, as long as he can find a liveli- hood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled to revolt. No more is the woman who is in economic or physiological difficulties. For, if only she has the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands open to her. She can emigrate; she can go out from the social class in which she is not self-supporting into a humbler social class in which she could earn a living; and she can forsake conditions in which she must remain a spinster for con- ditions in which she may perhaps become a mother. Only in this way can the problem of finding work, and relief of tedium, for the woman who now goes idle be resolved. If women were to avail themselves of these 157 ways of escape out of unphysiological condi- tions, the woman agitator would probably find it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agita- tion for woman suffrage as the Irish Nation- alist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement of the land question and the grant of old age pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate Parliament for Ireland. For the happy wife and mother is never pas- sionately concerned about the suffrage. It is always the woman who is galled either by phy- siological hardships, or by the fact that she has not the same amount of money as man, or by the fact that man does not desire her as a co- partner in work, and withholds the homage which she thinks he ought to pay to her intel- lect. For this class of grievances the present edu- cation of woman is responsible. The girl who is growing up to woman's estate is never taught where she stands relatively to man. She is not taught anything about woman's phys- ical disabilities. She is not told--she is left 158 to discover it for herself when too late--that child and husband are to woman physiological requirements. She is not taught the defects and limitations of the feminine mind. One might almost think there were no such defects and limitations; and that woman was not al- ways overestimating her intellectual power. And the ordinary girl is not made to realise woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning capacity. She is not made to realise that the woman who cannot work with her hands is generally hard put to earn enough to keep her- self alive in the incomplete condition of a spinster. As a result of such education, when, influ- enced by the feminist movement, woman comes to institute a comparison between herself and man, she brings into that comparison all those qualities in which she is substantially his equal, and leaves out of account all those in which she is his inferior. The failure to recognise that man is the mas- ter, and why he is the master, lies at the root 159 of the suffrage movement. By disregarding man's superior physical force, the power of compulsion upon which all government is based is disregarded. By leaving out of account those powers of the mind in which man is the superior, woman falls into the error of thinking that she can really compete with him, and that she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste. Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior money-earning capacity, the power of the purse is ignored. Uninstructed woman commits also another fundamental error in her comparison. Instead of comparing together the average man and the average woman, she sets herself to estab- lish that there is no defect in woman which can- not be discovered also in man; and that there is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which cannot be discovered also in woman. Which having been established to her satisfaction, she is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing whatever to choose between the sexes. And from this there is only a step to the posi- 160 tion that human beings ought to be assigned, without distinction of sex, to each and every function which would come within the range of their individual capacities, instead of being assigned as they are at present: men to one function, and women to another. Here again women ought to have been safe- guarded by education. She ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification which attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet--as every one who recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by generalisations will see--does it abrogate the disqualification of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste. The present system of feminine education is blameworthy not only in the respect that it fails to draw attention to these disqualifications and to teach woman where she stands; it is even more blameworthy in that it fails to convey to the girl who is growing up any conception of that absolutely elementary form of morality 161 which consists in distinguishing meum and tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours]. Instead of her educators encouraging every girl to assert "rights" as against man, and put forward claims, they ought to teach her with respect to him those lessons of behaviour which are driven home once for all into every boy at a public school. Just as there you learn that you may not make unwarranted demands upon your fel- low, and just as in the larger world every na- tion has got to learn that it cannot with im- punity lay claim to the possessions of its neigh- bours, so woman will have to learn that when things are not offered to her, and she has not the power to take them by force, she has got to make the best of things as they are. One would wish for every girl who is grow- ing up to womanhood that it might be brought home to her by some refined and ethically- minded member of her own sex how insuffer- able a person woman becomes when, like a spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of 162 man; when she proclaims that it is his duty to serve her and to share with her his power and possessions; when she makes an outcry when he refuses to part with what is his own; and when she insists upon thrusting her society upon men everywhere. And every girl ought to be warned that to embark upon a policy of recrimination when you do not get what you want, and to pro- claim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you are hit back, is the way to get yourself thor- oughly disliked. Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the example of the militant suffragist, how revolt and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess oneself of what belongs to others, effects the complete disorganisation of moral character. No one would wish that in the education of girls these quite unlovely things should be in- sisted upon more than was absolutely neces- sary. But one would wish that the educators of the rising generation of women should, bas- ing themselves upon these foundations, point 163 out to every girl how great is woman's debt to civilisation; in other words, how much is under civilisation done for woman by man. And one would wish that, in a world which is rendered unwholesome by feminism, every girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the great outstanding fact of the world: the fact that, turn where you will, you find individ- ual man showering upon individual woman-- one man in tribute to her enchantment, an- other out of a sense of gratitude, and another just because she is something that is his--every good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she never could have procured for herself. 164
APPENDIX
LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA
Reprinted by permission from The Times (London), March 28, 1912.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES
SIR,--For man the physiological psychology of woman is full of difficulties. He is not a little mystified when he encoun- ters in her periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of the sense of proportion. He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete alteration of character in a woman who is child-bearing. When he is a witness of the "tendency of woman to morally warp when nervously ill," and of the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is appalled. And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he sees serious and long-continued men- tal disorders developing in connexion with the 167 approaching extinction of a woman's repro- ductive faculty. No man can close his eyes to these things; but he does not feel at liberty to speak of them.
For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away. [From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]
As for woman herself, she makes very light of any of these mental upsettings. She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . . 1 None the less, these upsettings of her men- tal equilibrium are the things that a woman has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emer- gencies. It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is
1 In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause]. 168
mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind. The recruiting field for the militant suf- fragists is the million of our excess female population--that million which had better long ago have gone out to mate with its comple- ment of men beyond the sea. Among them there are the following dif- ferent types of women:--(a) First--let us put them first--come a class of women who hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that they may, whenever it is to their advantage, lawfully resort to physical violence. The programme, as distinguished from the methods, of these women is not very different from that of the ordinary suffragist woman. (b) There file past next a class of women who have all their life-long been strangers to joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed have in the end broken into flame. These are the sexually embittered women in whom every- 169 thing has turned into gall and bitterness of heart, and hatred of men. Their legislative programme is license for themselves, or else restrictions for man. (c) Next there file past the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atro- phy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellow men and women. Their programme is to convert the whole world into an epicene institution--an epicene institution in which man and woman shall everywhere work side by side at the selfsame tasks and for the selfsame pay. These wishes can never by any possibility be realised. Even in animals--I say even, be- cause in these at least one of the sexes has periods of complete quiscence--male and fe- male cannot be safely worked side by side, ex- cept when they are incomplete. While in the human species safety can be obtained, it can be obtained only at the price of continual constraint. 170 And even then woman, though she protests that she does not require it, and that she does not receive it, practically always does receive differential treatment at the hands of man. It would be well, I often think, that every woman should be clearly told--and the woman of the world will immediately understand-- that when man sets his face against the pro- posal to bring in an epicene world, he does so because he can do his best work only in sur- roundings where he is perfectly free from sug- gestion and from restraint, and from the onus which all differential treatment imposes. And I may add in connexion with my own profession that when a medical man asks that he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical woman he does so also because he would wish to keep up as between men and women--even when they are doctors--some of the modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up. Now the medical woman is of course never 171 on the side of modesty,1 or in favour of any reticences. Her desire for knowledge does not allow of these. (d) Inextricably mixed up with the types which we have been discussing is the type of woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent letter brought so distinctly before our eyes-- the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced self-esteem; and who flies out at every man who does not pay homage to her intellect. She is the woman who is affronted when a man avers that for him the glory of woman lies in her power of attraction, in her capacity for motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to the ethics which are special to her sex. I have heard such an intellectually embit- tered woman say, though she had been self- denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the whole course of her life had a man ever as much as done her a kindness."