Woman and Labour · Chapter 9Chapter VI. Certain Objections. (3)
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So far from the economic freedom and social independence of the woman exterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the first time fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capture which dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degrading element of seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material good offered to woman in our modern societies, would then give place to the untrammelled action of attraction and affection alone between the sexes, and sexual love, after its long pilgrimage in the deserts, would be enabled to return at last, a king crowned.
But, apart from the two classes of persons whose objection to the entrance of woman to new fields of labour is based more or less instinctively on the fear of personal loss, there is undoubtedly a small, if a very small, number of sincere persons whose fear as to severance between the sexes to result from woman’s entrance into the new field, is based upon a more abstract and impersonal ground.
It is not easy to do full justice in an exact statement to views held generally rather nebulously and vaguely, but we believe we should not mistake this view, by saying that there are a certain class of perfectly sincere and even moderately intelligent folk who hold a view which, expressed exactly, would come to something like this—that the entrance of woman into new fields would necessitate so large a mental culture and such a development of activity, mental and physical, in the woman, that she might ultimately develop into a being so superior to the male and so widely different from the man, that the bond of sympathy between the sexes might ultimately be broken and the man cease to be an object of affection and attraction to the woman, and the woman to the man through mere dissimilarity. The future these persons seem to see, more or less vaguely, is of a social condition, in which, the males of the race remaining precisely as they are today, the corresponding females shall have advanced to undreamed of heights of culture and intelligence; a condition in which the hand-worker, and the ordinary official, and small farmer, shall be confronted with the female astronomer or Greek professor of astonishing learning and gifts as his only possible complementary sex companion; and the vision naturally awakens in these good folk certain misgivings as to sympathy between and suitability for each other, of these two widely dissimilar parts of humanity.
It must of course at once be admitted, that, were the two sexual halves of humanity distinct species, which, having once entered on a course of evolution and differentiation, might continue to develop along those distinct lines for countless ages or even for a number of generations, without reacting through inheritance on each other, the consequences of such development might ultimately almost completely sever them.
The development of distinct branches of humanity has already brought about such a severance between races and classes which are in totally distinct stages of evolution. So wide is the hiatus between them often, that the lowest form of sex attraction can hardly cross it; and the more highly developed mental and emotional sex passion cannot possibly bridge it. In the world of sex, kind seeks kind, and too wide a dissimilarity completely bars the existence of the highest forms of sex emotion, and often even the lower and more purely animal.
Were it possible to place a company of the most highly evolved human females—George Sands, Sophia Kovalevskys, or even the average cultured females of a highly evolved race—on an island where the only males were savages of the Fugean type, who should meet them on the shores with matted hair and prognathous jaws, and with wild shouts, brandishing their implements of death, to greet and welcome them, it is an undoubted fact that, so great would be the horror felt by the females towards them, that not only would the race become extinct, but if it depended for its continuance on any approach to sex affection on the part of the women, that death would certainly be accepted by all, as the lesser of two evils. Hardly less marked would be the sexual division if, in place of cultured and developed females, we imagine males of the same highly evolved class thrown into contact with the lowest form of primitive females. A Darwin, a Schiller, a Keats, though all men capable of the strongest sex emotion and of the most durable sex affections, would probably be untouched by any emotion but horror, cast into the company of a circle of Bushmen females with greased bodies and twinkling eyes, devouring the raw entrails of slaughtered beasts.
But leaving out even such extreme instances of diversity, the mere division in culture and mental habits, dividing individuals of the same race but of different classes, tends largely to exclude the possibility of at least the nobler and more enduring forms of sex emotion. The highly cultured denizen of a modern society, though he may enter into passing and temporary and animal relations with the uncultured peasant or woman of the street, seldom finds awakened within him in such cases the depth of emotion and sympathy which is necessary for the enjoyment of the closer tie of conjugal life; and it may be doubted whether the highest, most permanent, and intimate forms of sexual affection ever exist except among humans very largely identical in tastes, habits of thought, and moral and physical education. (In Greece at a certain period (as we have before noted) there does appear to have been a temporary advance of the male, so far in advance of the female as to make the difference between them almost immeasurable; but he quickly fell back to the level of the woman.) Were it possible that the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour should produce any increased divergence between man and woman in ideals, culture, or tastes, there would undoubtedly be a dangerous responsibility incurred by any who fostered such a movement.
But the most superficial study of human life and the relation of the sexes negates such a conception.
The two sexes are not distinct species but the two halves of one whole, always acting and interacting on each other through inheritance, and reproducing and blending with each other in each generation. The human female is bound organically in two ways to the males of her society: collaterally they are her companions and the co-progenitors with her of the race; but she is also the mother of the males of each succeeding generation, bearing, shaping, and impressing her personality upon them. The males and females of each human society resemble two oxen tethered to one yoke: for a moment one may move slightly forward and the other remain stationary; but they can never move farther from each other than the length of the yoke that binds them; and they must ultimately remain stationary or move forward together. That which the women of one generation are mentally or physically, that by inheritance and education the males of the next tend to be: there can be no movement or change in one sex which will not instantly have its co-ordinating effect upon the other; the males of tomorrow are being cast in the mould of the women of today. If new ideals, new moral conceptions, new methods of action are found permeating the minds of the women of one generation, they will reappear in the ideals, moral conceptions, methods of action of the men of thirty years hence; and the idea that the males of a society can ever become permanently farther removed from its females than the individual man is from the mother who bore and reared him, is at variance with every law of human inheritance.
If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition, and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident.
Not merely is the Woman’s Movement of our age not a sporadic and abnormal growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to the development of the rest of the social organism, but it is essentially but one important phase of a general modification which the whole of modern life is undergoing. Further, careful study of the movement will show that, not only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading to severance and separation between the woman and the man, but that it is essentially a movement of the woman towards the man, of the sexes towards closer union.
Much is said at the present day on the subject of the “New Woman” (who, as we have seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic woman of the remote past, preparing to draw on her new twentieth-century garb): and it cannot truly be said that her attitude finds a lack of social attention. On every hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for her counterfeit, ridiculed, or deified—but nowhere can it be said, that the phenomenon of her existence is overlooked.
But there exists at the present day another body of social phenomena, quite as important, as radical, and if possible more far-reaching in its effects on the present and future, which yet attracts little conscious attention or animadversion, though it makes itself everywhere felt; as the shade of a growing tree may be sat under year after year by persons who never remark its silent growth.
Side by side with the “New Woman,” corresponding to her, as the two sides of a coin cast in one mould, though differing from each other in superficial detail, are yet of one metal, one size, and one value; old in the sense in which she is old, being merely the reincarnation under the pressure of new conditions of the ancient forms of his race; new in the sense in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation to material and social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; more diverse from his immediate progenitors than even the woman is from hers, side by side with her today in every society and in every class in which she is found, stands—the New Man!
If it be asked, How comes it to pass, if, under the pressure of social conditions, man shows an analogous change of attitude toward life, that the change in woman should attract universal attention, while the corresponding change in the man of her society passes almost unnoticed?—it would seem that the explanation lies in the fact that, owing to woman’s less independence of action in the past, any attempt at change or readaptation on her part has had to overcome greater resistance, and it is the noise and friction of resistance, more than the amount of actual change which has taken place, which attracts attention; as when an Alpine stream, after a long winter frost, breaks the ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away the obstructions which have gathered in its bed, all men’s attention is attracted to it, though when later a much larger body of water silently forces its way down, no man observes it. (An interesting practical illustration of this fact is found in the vast attention and uproar created when the first three women in England, some thirty odd years ago, sought to enter the medical profession. At the present day scores of women prepare to enter it yearly without attracting any general attention; not that the change which is going on is not far more in volume and social importance, but that, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless.)
Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and the most typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably not so great a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire Westerns of that day and the most typical of entirely modern men.
The sexual and social ideals which dominated the fox-hunting, hard-drinking, high-playing, recklessly loose-living country squire, clergyman, lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of the past, are at least as distinct from the ideals which dominate thousands of their male descendants holding corresponding positions in the societies of today, as are the ideals of her great-great-grand mother’s remote from those dominating the most modern of New Women.
That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personal study of those sections of modern European societies in which change and adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidly progressing, is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and women are being rapidly modified as to their sexual and social ideals and as to their mode of life, but that this change is strictly complementary.
If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistent with the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexual attributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasingly a fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner and the bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modern man departs quite as strongly from that of his forefathers in the direction of finding in woman active companionship and co-operation rather than passive submission. If the New Woman’s conception of parenthood differs from the old in the greater sense of the gravity and obligation resting on those who are responsible for the production of the individual life, making her attitude toward the production of her race widely unlike the reckless, unreasoning, maternal reproduction of the woman of the past, the most typical male tends to feel in at least the same degree the moral and social obligation entailed by awakening lifehood: if the ideal which the New Woman shapes for herself of a male companion excludes the crudely animal hard-drinking, hard-swearing, licentious, even if materially wealthy gallant of the past; the most typically modern male’s ideal for himself excludes at least equally this type. The brothel, the race-course, the gaming-table, and habits of physical excess among men are still with us; but the most superficial study of our societies will show that these have fallen into a new place in the scale of social institutions and manners. The politician, the clergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or public standing by violent addictions in these directions; to drink his companions under the table, to be known to have the largest number of illicit sex relations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the gambling saloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance his reputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to all success. If the New Woman’s conception of love between the sexes is one more largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical, and wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man’s conception as expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced by typically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed to the same new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelong companionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable than death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the most typical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrified Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch.
If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern woman desires to be—of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong, fearless and tender—it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations; and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.
Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena of our modern world, who see in the Woman’s Movement of our day any emotional movement of the female against the male, of the woman away from the man.
We have called the Woman’s Movement of our age an endeavour on the part of women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as the old slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an inactive dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another side, the Woman’s Movement might not less justly be called a part of a great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards common occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards an emotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and more indestructible than any the world has yet seen.
But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies, and often among the very classes forming our typically advanced sections, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the present day?
The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination, struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist when we regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the individual has reached.
It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid evolution and change. The continually changing material conditions of life, with their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects of human affairs, render our societies the most complex and probably the most mobile and unsettled which the world has ever seen. As the result of this rapidity of change and complexity, there must continually exist a large amount of disco-ordination, and consequently, of suffering.
In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation for hundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no change in the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moral principles of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexual institutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with these conditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity, pervades the society.
In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societies find themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almost day brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is the amount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive, and sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the new conditions, acting at different angles of intensity on the different individual members composing the society, according to their positions and varying intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellous complexity and dissimilarity in the different individual parts, that the intensest rupture and disco-ordination between individuals is inevitable; and sexual ideals and relationships must share in the universal condition.
In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix illustration may be allowed) where for countless generations the conditions of life had remained absolutely unchanged; where for ages it had been necessary that all males should employ themselves in subduing wild beasts and meeting dangerous foes, polygamy might universally have been a necessity, if the race were to exist and its numbers be kept up; and society, recognising this, polygamy would be an institution universally approved and submitted to, however much suffering it entailed. If food were scarce, the destruction of superfluous infants and of the aged might also always have been necessary for the good of the individuals themselves as well as of society, and the whole society would acquiesce in it without any moral doubt. If an eclipse of the sun had once occurred in connection with the appearance of a certain new insect, they mighty universally regard that insect as a god causing it; and ages might pass without anything arising to disprove their belief. There would be no social or religious problem; and the view of one man would be the view of all men; and all would be more or less in harmony with the established institution and customs.
But, supposing the sudden arrival of strangers armed with superior weapons and knowledge, who should exterminate all wild beasts and render war and the consequent loss of male life a thing of the past; not only would the male be driven to encroach on the female’s domain of domestic agriculture and labour generally, but the males, not being so largely destroyed, they would soon equal and surpass in numbers the females; and not only would it then become a moot matter, “a problem,” which labours were or were not to be performed by man and which by woman, but very soon, not the woman alone nor the man alone, but both, would be driven to speculate as to the desirability or necessity of polygamy, which, were men as numerous as women, would leave many males without sex companions. The more intelligent and progressive individuals in the community would almost at once arrive at the conclusion that polygamy was objectionable; the most fearless would seek to carry their theory into action; the most ignorant and unprogressive would determinately stick to the old institutions as inherited from the past, without reason or question; differences of ideal would cause conflict and dissension in all parts of the body social, and suffering would ensue, where all before was fixed and determinate. So also if the strangers introduced new and improved methods of agriculture, and food became abundant, it would then at once strike the most far-seeing and readily adaptable members of the community, both male and female, that there was no necessity for the destruction of their offspring; old men and women would begin seriously to object to being hastened to death when they realised that starvation did not necessarily stare them in the face if they survived to an extreme old age; the most stupid and hide-bound members of the community would still continue to sacrifice parents and offspring long after the necessity had ceased, under the influence of traditional bias; many persons would be in a state of much moral doubt as to which course of action to pursue, the old or the new; and bitter conflict might rage in the community on all these points. Were the strangers to bring with them telescopes, looking through which it might at once clearly be seen that an eclipse of the sun was caused merely by the moon’s passing over its face, the more intelligent members of the community would at once come to the conclusion that the insect was not the cause of eclipses, would cease to regard it as a god, and might even kill it; the more stupid and immobile section of the community might refuse to look through the telescope, or looking might refuse to see that it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and their deep-seated reverence for the insect, which was the growth of ages, would lead them to regard as impious those individuals who denied its godhead, and might even lead to the physical destruction of the first unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions! There might be immense gain in many directions; lives otherwise sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage of existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and religious ideals and institutions.
An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction the human horizon—all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering is inevitable.
If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers taught us to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the samplers our mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are become superfluous through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their social institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and increasingly unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable, especially for the most advanced and modified individuals in our societies. This suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three causes.
Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.
Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the different individuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men and women who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt themselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions of life, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated societies, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be found men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would not constitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the remote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classes lies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development. This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in the interactions of the members of our societies; more especially, as the individuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes and families, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in our societies. (One of the women holding the most advanced and modern view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by the sewing of the uppers of men’s boots.) Persons bound by the closest ties of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptation to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on each other—as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such as that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with Europeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty years ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social problems and social friction such a society can be. It is in studying such societies that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key to half, and more than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition, can be found only in our rapidly changing conditions necessitating equally rapid change in our conceptions, ideals, and institutions.)