Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 24

Men and women are unlike not only in "_the subtlest physical differences_" which "_may have their fine mental correlatives_." They are unlike in the most obvious and basic facts of physical const.i.tution and of biological function. And these must inevitably entail mental and temperamental correlatives more intrinsic and farther reaching even than the subtler physical differences she recognises as being possibly modifying factors in psychical apt.i.tude.

Advocating soldiering even for the s.e.x, Miss Schreiner says: " ...

Undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant-girl of France, who has carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general."

Here is fallacy again. Joan of Arc was, beyond all things, woman. Not the man in her, but the woman in her, and her Supra-conscious womanly attributes it was which (inspiring her by way of mystical voices and visions) impelled her so to transcend her woman-nature that without knowledge of arts military or of strategic science, as, too, without experience, she was able, by intuitive prescience, to lead her compatriots to victory. For the soldiers, perceiving the Light in her face, followed in awed confidence whithersoever she led.

In earlier days of civilisation, this intuitive and visionary faculty of woman was recognised and honoured.

II

In _The Human Woman_, Lady Grove presents a wholly contrary view to Miss Schreiner's.

With her, woman suffers less in being shut out from the labour-market than in having been driven from the home.

"The woman has been driven from her home into the labour-market.

The fact of 82 per cent. of the women of this country working for their living is an ugly rebuff to the pretty plat.i.tudes about the home," she says.

" ... The stupendous mistake that has been made up to now is in supposing that it is men's judgment only that should decide questions, and hence the hopeless state of unravelled misery existing in the world, side by side with all the wealth and wonders of the age.

"If we examine the conditions of the working-cla.s.ses, after years and years of male legislation, what a hideous set of conditions we find. Intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence among the poorer cla.s.ses. And yet we spend over 22,000,000 annually on the education of these people. Surely there is something wrong somewhere. What is it that we, seeing this condition of things at our very door, have, as women, to be so grateful for in male legislation?"

The writer fails wholly to perceive that these factors she deplores as due to defective masculine legislation are effects less of faulty measures than of faulty Humanity. Measures are the gauge of the men who frame them. And men are very much the measure of the mothers who bore them. Those which she properly characterises as the "hideous" conditions of the working-cla.s.ses, "intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence" are circ.u.mstances legislation cannot remedy unless the hearts of legislators are moved to do this, and their hands are empowered, moreover, to do it, by the collective will of those they represent.

Except all are content to subordinate their personal interests to the general welfare, and to improve their personal morale for their own and for the common good, Acts of Parliament can do but little. Drunkenness can be penalised by legislation, difficulties put in the way of obtaining drink. But intemperance can be effectually stamped out only by individual men and women so rising to higher levels of thought and self-control as voluntarily to become sober; or by men and women so improving in brain and const.i.tution that the craving for drink--now recognised as a disease--no longer obsesses them.

Acts of Parliament may condemn insanitary and defective dwellings, may compel landlords to repair them to degrees of decency and comfort; may pull them down and build others in their stead. But none of these measures will eradicate the bad housing of dirty and comfortless, or of demoralised and demoralising homes. The best house possible becomes bad housing for its occupants when the woman at the head of it fails to do her duty therein, in consequence of industrial labour which leaves her neither time nor energy to make a clean, well-ordered, cosy and inspiring home of it; or because her own idleness or ignorance, her drunkenness or worthlessness, results in her neglect of it. Human conditions, like human measures, result from the personalities, good or bad, capable or incapable, of those who create them.

III

The Feminist's faith in the masculine prerogative of Legislation, as being a possible panacea--had _she_ but part in it--for every ill beneath the sun, is one of her gravest disqualifications for taking part therein.

Legislators who are over-confident in the efficacy of The Law express their over-confidence in terms of premature and unduly-coercive legislation. Procedure which, more often than not, frustrates the ends to which it was designed by the methods taken to secure these. Progress is personal, moreover. It is the sum of the advance of individuals.

Legislation is the statutory _formulation_ of public opinion; it is not the _source_ of this. It merely crystallises public opinion. But before crystallisation of thought (as of chemical) sets in, saturation-point must first have been reached throughout the medium wherein it occurs.

Were any other development required to show the utter inadequacy of Legislation to attain its ends--when not reinforced by personal co-operation and initiative--this has been supplied in that latter-day demoralisation of young girls, the consequences whereof will be vastly more baneful and farther-reaching in contributing to national decline than even that other dire factor of the flower of our virile youth struck down before its prime.

Girls are fully protected by law to the age of sixteen. Yet many of the demoralised girls seen consorting freely with Tommy or Reggie, according to their cla.s.s, are well below that age. Legislation is powerless, however, failing parental vigilance and co-operation to invoke its aid.

Nevertheless, with its characteristic blind confidence in the male prerogative of Law, Feminism now advocates raising "the age of consent"

to eighteen. But to do this would no more protect the girl under eighteen than the existing law protects the girl under sixteen--or, for that matter, protects the girl of twelve. Law can do little or nothing unless, as happens so seldom and happens too late, parents requisition its a.s.sistance for menace or for punishment. Mothers themselves should see to it that their little daughters have neither temptation nor opportunity to consent to their own ruin.

IV

We saw lately a militant rising of women against men and their laws; the object being to compel concessions from the male by way of violence. And so short-sighted were the leaders of this Movement that not only did they seek to prove their right to make laws, by breaking them, but they showed themselves ignorant of the first rudiments of combat by electing to fight the enemy with his own weapon--that weapon of Force which is man's especial Fitness and Woman's Unfitness. Woman's Unfitnesses have prevailed, it is true, in the counsels of progress, but, obviously, they have not prevailed, nor can they ever prevail by being pitted directly against masculine strengths. Her way of supremacy is one by far more subtle and sublime.

The leaders of Militancy seem never to have suspected, moreover, that while they were demanding to be liberated from all womanly privileges, they were, nevertheless, waging their deplorable skirmishes from behind a strong wall of such privileges. Men who should have adopted such tactics would have received but short and scant shrift.

Were the s.e.x to be confronted, indeed, with that "Fair field and no favour!" for which some members of it are so clamorous, these would find it a grievously different thing from the privilege they paint it.

Marcel Prevost has said that when men find women competing with them in fields of Labour, to degrees injurious to masculine interests, they will turn and strike them in the face. There are indications to the contrary, however. Among decadent races and savages, the emasculate sons of deteriorate mothers a.s.sert their masculine authority otherwise.

Far from combating their women's right to work, they force them to work--and to work in support of the males!

More and more every day, civilised men, indeed, released by working-wives from their natural obligation to maintain the family, are seen so to have lapsed from their sense of virile responsibility as to be coming further and further to shelve upon such working-wives the burden of the family support. Among the labouring and artisan cla.s.ses, the wife's contribution to the exchequer leaves the husband more money to spend on drink or on gambling; or on both. In superior cla.s.ses, too, it leaves husbands with more money to spend on amus.e.m.e.nt--of one sort or another.

Responsibility and effort are natural spurs to masculine development.

Relieve the male of these and he degenerates. As woman released from child-bearing and the duties entailed by the family, degenerates rapidly. We can no more improve on The Plan than we can improve without each and every appointed factor of it.

V

Another disastrous blunder of Feminism is to make for equal wage for men and women.

The higher wage of men springs, economically, from the fact that the industrial output of women is, normally, less than that of men. But there is a deeper, and a biological significance involved. Which is, that men's greater output of work results from more of their energy of brain and body being available to them for work, because far less of their vital power is locked-up in them for Race-perpetuation and nurture. There is the implication also that man being the natural breadwinner of the family, his wage should suffice for its support.

A system of equal wages for the s.e.xes would press as cruelly upon women as it would be disastrous to the Race. Because it would compel woman, despite the biological disabilities that handicap her economically, to force her powers to masculine standards of work and output. It would, moreover, by qualifying her to support the family, serve as cogent excuse for her husband to shirk his bounden duty.

The crux of the demand for equal pay for equal work is that, because of her natural lesser strength and endurance, when a woman is doing work identical in nature and equal in quantum to that of a man, it means that _she_ is doing _more_ than a woman's work, and is overtaxing and injuring her const.i.tution, therefore; or it means that _he_ is doing _less_ than a man's work, and is "slacking," therefore.

A further important issue is that when rendered too easy by both husband and wife earning wage, marriage is entered upon far too lightly, and at too early and irresponsible ages, than happens when the whole burden of support rests with the man. Moreover, in such case masculine selection makes only too often for economic rather than for human values in the wife. A man upon whom is to fall the whole tax of supporting the home and the family regards marriage more seriously, and delays it until he is more mature of years and of settled position. Moreover, he chooses more carefully. And the Race benefits proportionally.

In manufacturing towns, with opportunity for both husband and wife earning wage, boy-and-girl marriages, f.e.c.kless, discordant homes, and sickly degenerate, neglected children are the rule.

That women should be paid for work they do, a salary enabling them to live honestly and in comfort, goes without saying. Economics should be adjusted on a far higher basis than that mainly of a compet.i.tive struggle which allows the employer to fix wages less according to the value of work done, than by the number of persons at his mercy, who, in their eagerness to live, will undersell their values and thus cheapen labour. Nevertheless economics have, in a degree, adapted to the evolutionary trend. Because, in the main, the more skilled and difficult tasks are more highly remunerated than the less skilled, and are performed by the more fit. And not only are these better qualified to expend such higher remuneration intelligently, and with benefit to themselves and to the community, but they are able to secure thereby those better conditions which are the due and the need of families higher in the scale of humanity, and requiring, therefore, higher conditions of nurture.

The cases of colliers and of other rough-grade humans who earn wage beyond their mental calibre to expend intelligently, show how an income too large for its possessor leads to coa.r.s.e and demoralising extravagances, rather than to personal happiness or elevation. (The like is true of many plutocrats.) War has shown us boys' lives wrecked by the same factor. No greater fallacy exists than that of supposing progress to lie in freeing persons from all disabilities--poverty, and other restrictive conditions.

Wives should be legally ent.i.tled to a just proportion of their husband's income, as a _right_, not merely as dole. This, in recognition of their invaluable work in home-making, and of their invaluable service to the State in producing and rearing worthy citizens for it.

VI

Masculine legislation, making all the while, in the face of economic difficulties, for the ever further release of women and children from the more laborious and debasing tasks, has made compulsory, in their own and in the interests of their unborn infants, a month of respite for expectant mothers, and a further month for mothers after delivery.

Extending thus to these poor victims--beasts of the burden of toil, and beasts of the burden of s.e.x--a mercy and consideration wholly lacking in the Feminist propaganda. For this latter repudiates indignantly all need for concession or privilege to wifehood or to motherhood, equally with womanhood.

To justify the claim for equality in all things, women must be forced, at all cost, to identical standards of work and production. To ask privileges and concessions would be to confess, in the s.e.x, weaknesses and disabilities that must disqualify it from economic ident.i.ty with the other.

Far, indeed, from such vain-glorious and disastrous straining for equality, the leaders of the Woman's Movement should, before all else, have demanded insistently still further industrial concessions and privileges for a s.e.x handicapped for industry, by Nature. First and foremost, they should come into the open and boldly proclaim--what it is useless to deny, indeed--that in the function of parenthood, at all events, men and women are wholly dissimilar. They should reject outright all tinkerings and half-measures for relief of this great human disability, whereof one s.e.x only bears the stress and burden for the benefit of both, and for survival of nations and races.

Not only for the pitiful respite of a month before and a month after the birth of her child, should the mother be prohibited from industrial labour. By that time all the damage will have been done. The power that should have been put into the evolution of her infant will have been put into the revolutions of a lathe. The life-potential that should have gone to build its living bone and brain and muscle will have gone to feed the life of a machine. The breath she will have drawn for it will have been contaminated by the dust and fumes of toil. Its poor nascent brain and faculties will have been dulled and depleted, stupefied and vitiated by the stress and turmoil of its mother's labours. Only the dregs of the maternal powers will have been invested in the Race. The finest and most valuable will have gone to swell the balance-sheets of Capital.

The trumpet-cry of The Woman's Movement should be, indeed, _The Absolute Prohibition of young Wives and Mothers from all Industrial and Professional employment!_