Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 26

Wagner said, "Music is a Woman."

Dr. Havelock Ellis, himself a zealous Feminist, has said, that, in their ardour for emanc.i.p.ation, women sometimes seem anxious to be emanc.i.p.ated from their s.e.x. While Ellen Key, most impartial of critics, observes:

"But full of insight as they are into the _ars amandi_, have modern women, indeed, learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers--on a much lower plane of woman's erotic idealism--knew of only one object; that of making their husbands happy.... But what watchful tenderness, what dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these spiritually-ignored women develop! The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another, it frequently results that two highly-developed brains together a.n.a.lyse love; or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love.... Of love's double heart-beat--the finding one's self, and the forgetting one's self in another--the first is now considerably more advanced than the second."

The reason why the New man and the New woman, having found one another, find no more inspiration or sweetness each in the other than to "fight out a disintegrating battle" is because both are male of brain and bent--one normally so, the other abnormally.

And when two males meet, their nature is--to fight!

Into every clause of this book must be read the many inspiring exceptions to be found among those modern men and women and children who are advancing normally along evolutionary lines. Such are so fine of type, in body and in mind, that they blind not a few to facts of racial deterioration. We point to these and say: One cannot speak with truth of the degeneracy of nations which produce such n.o.ble specimens!

These exceptions prove the principle I am endeavouring to impress, however. That were we to apply ourselves to correction of our biological and social errors, we have with us stock of the n.o.blest Race conceivable, and the n.o.blest possible future for that Race.

CHAPTER VIII

DANGEROUS SEPARATION OF WOMEN INTO TWO ORDERS: FEMINISTS AND FEMININISTS

"_Every child comes with the message that G.o.d is not yet discouraged of Man._"

I

Since women possess native gifts of highly-differentiated faculties and apt.i.tudes, not only their greatest effectiveness, but, too, their well-being and happiness lie in finding highly-specialised and selective application for these, in Life, in Art, in Science, and in Industry.

Their role in every field of operation should be recognised as being wholly different from that of man, however; and their own natural view-points and special abilities should be fostered, accordingly, by suitable training; in order to fit them for the special departments for which they are essentially suited.

The charming artistry and fancies, spontaneous and full of delicate insight, feeling, and sense of line, which a woman puts into her ill.u.s.trations of a child's Fairy-story, are art as true, for example, and if less great of achievement, are nevertheless as intrinsically valuable in The Scheme of Things as are the virile masterpieces of a Michael Angelo or Turner.

Few men attain the exquisite artistry in colour that even indifferent women-painters show. It is an expression, in mentality, of the biological fact that the colour-sense is naturally so highly developed in woman that Colour-blindness--comparatively common among men--is rare indeed in her.

On the other hand, woman is inherently weak in drawing. When she is trained, however, to draw with masculine strength and precision, she loses her natural freedom and delicacy of touch, her sensitive feeling for line, her exquisite colour-sense, her fertile fancy. Rosa Bonheur's horses are as strong in drawing as they are baldly deficient in sentiment. Men have painted horses bolder still in line, but nevertheless n.o.ble and beautiful in feeling.

The same is true of Literature. Mrs. Browning would have been a great poet had she not taken her husband for model. Some of her delicate woman-fancies, tricked out in Robert Browning's over-virile style, are like charming women masquerading in fustian trousers.

George Eliot, too, affected the masculine both in viewpoint and method--a bad habit which so grew upon her that her later novels are ponderous as political treatises, and devoid of human interest.

Far different, Charlotte Bronte. True to herself and to her s.e.x, she wrote and has written for all time--as those others did not--as a woman, and as only a woman could have written. Jane Austen, likewise.

The woman point-of-view and method are regarded, for the most part, however, as mark of the amateur--the model aimed at being the eternal masculine in mode and trend.

If the demand, "_We take all labour for our province!_" be safeguarded by recognising and differentiating the province into two distinct and separate--supplementary and complementary--departments, for the respective labours of the two widely differing s.e.xes, the claim comes first within the range of reason and discretion.

As woman was the first doctor, so she was the first artist. Man inherits from her not only his artistic faculty, but he derives from her his faculty of creative inspiration. Applying his native intelligence, his executive ability and power of sustained effort, to this end, he has so developed The Arts as to have carried these to their modern realisations. And though woman, in her turn, may learn of him, it by no means follows that his standards or technique are best adapted to her modes of inspiration, to her ideals or attainments.

Trained along the lines of natural inherences, and trained, accordingly, without injury or warp to health or faculty by straining after standards not their own, women would not be disqualified, as so many are now by avocational specialisation, for wife and motherhood. They would, on the contrary, be the better adapted. And health and charm and emotion not having been sacrificed in them by de-s.e.xing pursuits, such would be eagerly sought. Thus Racial advance would be secured by its wives and mothers having been drawn from the best orders of women; the women naturally endowed with faculty and character; self-reliant, but unspoiled by abnormal training.

A number of latter-day women being unfitted, alike by nature and by inclination, for marriage, two orders of the s.e.x should be clearly distinguished and administered for; as being wholly different types, for whom wholly different creeds and employments are indicated.

Those whose aims and talents incline them to public careers should be content with the lot to which they are best suited; and content to accept the privileges thereof, and the disabilities thereof. They should not be greedy, and demand, at the same time, the liberty of the free-lance and the privileges of the wife and the mother.

So with the wife and mother. She, for her part, must forgo the liberty of the free-lance. Because, with her privileges, she has undertaken functions and duties which, for their complete fulfilment, demand her best powers and activities.

Men who marry are similarly restricted. The bachelor lacks the interests and happiness of the husband and father. The husband and father lacks the personal liberty and the freedom from responsibility enjoyed by the bachelor.

It is women, mainly, who demand both the prerogatives of the married and of the unmarried states. Notwithstanding that it is wholly impossible for them to fulfil the functions of both, because it is impossible for them to possess either the apt.i.tudes or the energies for both.

In view of all that men have attained by devotion of their lives to the civilised achievements which now dignify existence and enn.o.ble faculty, when one sees women more clamorously confident in their bounden right to inherit lightly all that the other s.e.x has so laboriously won than they are reverently grateful for the inestimable human privileges and the treasuries of Art and Mind-wealth available to them by way of these surrendered masculine lives, it seems cause for indignation equal to that aroused by the phlegmatic calm wherewith most men accept as matter-of-course--instead of as matter for reverent grat.i.tude--the gifts of Life and Faculty, to evolve and to transmit which to them, their mothers and all the generations of mothers before them surrendered their lives and their powers.

Recognition of the intrinsic differences, in trend and in function, between the s.e.xes, should go far to dispel misconceptions and points of variance between them. The prevailing notion that the one s.e.x is a sort of muddled version of the other--and not a highly-specialised presentment of an invaluable order of qualities, with inevitable shortcomings in the complementary order of qualities--is greatly to blame for s.e.x-misapprehensions and antagonisms.

II

Feminists antic.i.p.ate that War-experiences will further and finally eliminate all economic s.e.x-distinctions, by having supplied convincing object-lessons that their s.e.x is able to do, and to do efficiently, all that the other s.e.x can do.

Far from object-lessons in the suitabilities, however, the experience has furnished terrible examples pointing the contrary way. Because although women have shown themselves both willing and efficient in these new capacities, results have proved at what cost to themselves and to life they have done men's work. Apart from a deplorable deterioration in morale, showing both in coa.r.s.eness and in viciousness, the blight of age which has swooped upon both young and old, as direct consequence of the hardship and strain of masculine employments, robbing them of youth and health and joy and beauty, of repose and higher appeal, and transforming them into the grim, drab, hara.s.sed spectres many have become, should be warning enough, in all conscience, of whither Feminism is leading us.

Many of our young women have become so de-s.e.xed and masculinised, indeed, and the neuter state so patent in them, that the individual is described (unkindly) no longer as "She" but as "It."

Dire have been the disillusionment and bitterness among our fighting men, upon returning to the homes and wives or loves they had long dreamed of--to find the wife or love a shattered wreck, or a strenuous, graceless, half-male creature; the home a place of nerve-racking unrest.

It is consoling to know that a number of those who have been de-s.e.xed merely, and not disabled, will continue to find useful and contented outlet for their masculine developments in filling still the places of our fallen heroes. Cruelty lies in the fact, however, that the womanhood of many will have been wrecked quite needlessly; by strain of superfluously strenuous drill and marchings, scoutings, signallings, and other such vain and fruitless imitations of the male.

The greatest care should have been exercised to have selected the strong and able-bodied, the older women and the women of the characteristic worker-type (corresponding to the sterile female-worker of the bee-hive), for the rougher and the more exhausting tasks. The young wives and mothers and the young girls should have been rigorously excluded from such.

Of all human prerogatives, the greatest is that of being preserved, by cla.s.s, by ability, by means, or by privilege, from gravitating to levels of work that coa.r.s.en and debase; or that, at all events, do not exercise and foster the development of higher tastes and faculty. And this human privilege is, in proportion to their degrees of civilisation, accorded to women by all civilised peoples. As men have stood between them and the perils of battle and shipwreck, the slaying of wild beasts, pioneering, exploring, and the like, so they have stood between them and the coa.r.s.est, ugliest, and most debasing industrial functions.

Nevertheless, Feminist anger at restriction whatsoever in the matter of employment ignores all cause for grat.i.tude on the part of the s.e.x, that, being at man's mercy as she is, civilised woman is no longer (as the woman of inferior civilisations is still) a beast of heavy burden. Far otherwise, indeed, Feminism aims at nothing so much as to repudiate her established privileges, abolish all distinctions, and to make woman once again that beast of burden the chivalry of man--at first instinctive, later magnanimous--has progressively rescued her from being.

And yet the degree to which s.e.x is defined in Labour (as in Life) is at the same time the gauge and the cause of human development. Wheresoever are found low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress, there the women are employed in men's work. Wheresoever women are employed in men's work, there are low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress.

"Thank Heaven for the War!" Feminists have said, however, "because it has enabled our s.e.x to prove its worth--by enabling us to quit ourselves like men. The world knows now that women can conduct omnibuses, drive ploughs, clean stables, kill chickens, ring and slaughter pigs, quite as well as men can."

It is as painful as it is amazing to find intelligent and cultured persons so blinded by the obsessions of their creed as to suppose that in ploughing and hoeing and making munitions, women are doing finer and more valuable work than they had been doing previously; that the woman bus-conductor is a more important person than the children's nurse; that to drive a cab or clean a boiler is a n.o.bler occupation than the teaching of music or the cleansing of clothes; that to spread manure is more dignifying than to make beds; to amputate the limbs of wounded soldiers is superior to the subtler, far more difficult art of medically treating the complex ills of women and children.

That these other employments have been demanded by the times, is undeniable; as, too, that honour and credit are due to those who well and capably responded to the exigencies of the hour. But this does not, in the least degree, lessen the illogic of the claim that such response to the cruder and less-civilised demands of War proved woman's value more than did the devotion and efficiency she was previously showing in the far more complex and progressive arts of Peace. The main value of her War-work was that it fitted the times. But the times have been woefully out of joint!

III

At a recent Feminist Meeting, one of the leaders of Militancy detailed to an audience of fierce-eyed, sombre-visaged members of her own s.e.x, and sundry meek-browed persons of the other, her latest exploits in the matters of arranging Labour disputes and averting strikes of working-men; of sending Governmental male officials to the right-about, and of disposing, in general, of masculine concerns.