In Defense of Women Part 7

But as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressively bitterer compet.i.tion, the rising masculine distrust and fear of them will be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and the husband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to reveal a new jealousy of those that remain, and particularly of the right to a fair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shake off their ancient disabilities they will also shake off some of their ancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a soberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of the suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it from the reluctant male the women of the western world have planted dragons' teeth, the which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now that women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, but as free compet.i.tors in a harsh world. When that reconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of the relations between the s.e.xes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone.

45. Effects of the War

The present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty or thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was inconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the peace finally reached--a peace so artificial and dishonest that the signing of it was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. At least three new contests in the grand manner are plainly insight--one between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak and incompetent nation over a strong and enterprising nation, one between j.a.pan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and one between England and the United States for the control of the sea. To these must be added various minor struggles, and perhaps one or two of almost major character: the effort of Russia to regain her old unity and power, the effort of the Turks to put down the slave rebellion (of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.)which now menaces them, the effort of the Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint effort of Russia and Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to get rid of such international nuisances as the insane Polish republic, the petty states of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan states. I pa.s.s over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the rising of China against the j.a.panese, and of a general struggle for a new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great and small, are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty years of age.

As a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and as a second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare than the men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy means will be pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of women, as now, but by whole battalions and brigades of them, and he will be driven in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the end the state will have to interfere in the business, to prevent the potential husband going to waste in the turmoil of opportunity.

Just what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appeared clearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization of children born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been a clamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not meet the main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost.

A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the position of the monogamous husband, now rendered increasingly uncomfortable by the laws of most Christian states. I do not think that the more intelligent sort of women, faced by a perilous shortage of men, would object seriously to that amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, if it is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against their best interests, if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to marriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of true discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man, even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf and prisoner at one stroke.

The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it.

The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman who pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims, should be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it--a service surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that reward may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of statutes giving her t.i.tle to a large share of his real property and requiring him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her from all obedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in order. But the woman who aspires to higher game should be quite willing, it seems to me, to resign some of these advantages in compensation for the greater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a man of merit, and mother to his children. All that is needed is laws allowing her, if she will, to resign her right of dower, her right to maintenance and her immunity from discipline, and to make any other terms that she may be led to regard as equitable. At present women are unable to make most of these concessions even if they would: the laws of the majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an Englishwoman should agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit herself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the elder common law, which allowed a husband to correct his wife corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the agreement at naught by haling her husband before a magistrate for carrying it out, and it is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him.

This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation.

Many a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt, makes more or less disguised surrenders of certain of the rights and immunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example, even in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competence and diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be visited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow external trades and professions, contributing a share to the family exchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even against their best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who wink discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the oath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace, indeed, that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part. There would be more of them if there were more women with enough serenity of mind to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The trouble with such triangulations is not primarily that they involve perjury or that they offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she avoids ba.n.a.l theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of augmenting the husband's devotion to her and respect for her, if only as the fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men among us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine mind is readily taken in by specious values; the average married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succ.u.mbs at all, succ.u.mbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here is where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to the sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he would think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The result is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by women there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite the fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours were carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their marriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and his mind was never distracted from his work.

46. The Eternal Romance

But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottom of all transactions between the s.e.xes. Women may emanc.i.p.ate themselves, they may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks, and they may cure themselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of marriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they are women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today lies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace vastly greater than that of acts of G.o.d and the public enemy--and they will be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.

They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened of them have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche who called them the recreation of the warrior--not of the poltroon, remember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite capacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable companions when the serious business of the day is done, and the time has come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.

Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what const.i.tutes perfect peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the fundamental conflict of the s.e.xes, revolve around women. As for me--and I hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my own personality--I reject the two commonest of them: pa.s.sion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic to have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me try to describe it to you.

It is the close of a busy and vexatious day--say half past five or six o'clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a c.o.c.ktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed--above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks--of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious--but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eye-brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep--but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again--slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams.

And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.

I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The sensation of falling asleep is to me The most exquisite in the world.

I delight in it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match this situation against any that you ran think of. It is not only enchanting; it is also, in a very true sense, enn.o.bling. In the end, when the girl grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.

47. Apologia in Conclusion

At the end I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for the imperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here set down--imperfections not only due to incomplete information and fallible logic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamental weaknesses of the s.e.x to which I have the honour to belong. A man is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he says and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her actual presence, so he puts on apathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the laboratory. There is no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are but two books that show even a superficial desire to be honest--"The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage," by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright made a gallant attempt to tell the truth, but before he got half way through his task his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his scientific frenzy as a psychologist, and so he hastily washed his hands of the business, and affronted the judicious with a half baked and preposterous book.

Perhaps I have failed too, and even more ingloriously. If so, I am full of sincere and indescribable regret.