The Intelligence of Woman Part 2

Most men, however, have abandoned the case against woman's dishonesty and confine themselves to describing her as a liar, forgetting that they generally dislike the truth when it comes from a woman's lips, and always when it reflects upon their own conduct. For centuries man has asked that woman should flatter, but also that she should tell the truth: such a confusion of demands leads the impartial mind to the conclusion that vanity cannot be a monopoly of the female. But it is quite true that woman does not always cherish truth so well as man. The desire for truth is intellectual, not emotional. Truth is a cold bed-fellow, as might be expected of one who rose from a well. And among women cases of disinterested lying are not uncommon. Here is Case 16:

An elderly woman talked at length about not having received insurance papers, and made a great disturbance. It later appeared that she had not insured. On another occasion she informed the household that her son-in-law had been cabled to from South Africa to come and visit his dying mother. It was proved that no cable had been sent.

I have a number of cases of this kind, but this is the most curious. I suspect that this sort of lying is traceable to a need for romance and drama in a colorless life. It springs from the wish to create a romantic atmosphere round one's self and to increase one's personal importance.

Because men hold out hands less greedy toward drama and romance they are less afflicted, but they do not entirely escape, and we have all observed the new importance of the man whose brother has been photographed in a newspaper or, better still, killed in a railway accident. If he has been burned in a theater, the grief of his male relatives is subtly tinged with excited delight. Romance, the wage of lies, is woman's compensation for a dull life.

5

Vanity is as old as the mammoth. Romantic lying, obviously connected with vanity, is justly alleged to be developed in woman. No doubt woman's chief desire has been to appear beautiful, and it is quite open to question whether the leaves that clothed our earliest ancestress were gathered in a spirit of modesty rather than in response to a desire for adornment.

But it should not be too readily a.s.sumed that vanity is purely a feminine characteristic. It is a human characteristic, and the favor of any male savage can be bought at the price of a necklace of beads or of an admiral's c.o.c.ked hat. The modern man is modish too, as much as he dares. At Newport as at Brighton the dandy is supreme. It would be inaccurate, however, to limit vanity to clothes. Vanity is more subtle, and I would ask the reader which of the three princ.i.p.al motives that animate man--love, ambition, and gold l.u.s.t--is the strongest. The desire to shine in the eyes of one's fellows has produced much in art and political service; it has produced much that is foolish and ign.o.ble. It has led to political compet.i.tion, to a wild race for ill-remunerated offices, governorships, memberships of Parliament. Representatives of the people often wish to serve the people; they also like to be marked out as the people's men. There are no limits to masculine desire for honors; seldom in England does a man refuse a peerage; Frenchmen are martyrs to their love of ribbons, and not a year pa.s.ses without a scandal because an official has been bribed to obtain the Legion d'Honneur for somebody, or, funnier still, because an adventurer has blacked his face, set up in a small flat, impersonated a negro potentate, and distributed for value received grand crosses of fantastic kingdoms. Even democratic Americans have been known to seek t.i.tled husbands for their daughters, and a few have become Papal barons or counts.

Male vanity differs from female, but both are vanity. The two s.e.xes even share that curious form of vanity which in man consists in his calling himself a "plain man", bragging of having come to New York without shoes and with a dime in his pocket; which, in woman, consists in neglecting her appearance. Both s.e.xes convey more or less: "I am what I am, a humble person ... but quite good enough." The arrogance of humility is simply repulsive.

Ideas such as the foregoing may proceed from a certain simplicity. Woman is much less complex than the poets believe. For instance, many men hold that woman's lack of self-consciousness, as exemplified by disturbances in shops, has its roots in some intricate reasoning process. One must not be carried away: the truth is that woman, having so long been dependent upon man, has an exaggerated idea of the importance of small sums. Man has earned money; woman has been taught only to save it. Thus she has been poor, and poverty has caused her to shrink from expenditure; often she has become mean and, paradoxically enough, she has at the same time become extravagant. Poverty has taught her to respect the penny, while it has taught her nothing about the pound. If woman finds it quite easy to spend one tenth of the household income on dress, and even more,[4] it is because her education makes it as difficult for her to conceive a thousand dollars as it is for a man to conceive a million. It is merely a question of familiarity with money.

[4] See "Uniforms for Women," and observe extreme figures and details of feminine expenditure on clothes.

Besides, foolish economy and reckless expenditure are indications of an elementary quality. In that sense woman is still something of a savage.

She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been educated. This may be a very good thing, and it certainly is an agreeable one from the masculine point of view. Whether we consider woman's att.i.tude to the law, to social service, or to war, it is the same thing. In most cases she is lawless; she will obey the law because she is afraid of it, but she will not respect it. For her it is always _sic volo, sic jubeo_. I suspect that if she had had a share in making the law she would not have been like this, for she would have become aware of the relation between law and life. Roughly she tends to look upon the law as tyrannous if she does not like it, as protective if she does like it. Probably there is little relation between her own moral impulse, which is generous, and the law, which is only just. (That is, just in intention.) This is qualified by the moral spirit in woman, which increasingly leads her to the view that certain things should be done and others not be done. But even then it is likely that at heart woman does not respect the law; she may respect what it represents,--strength,--but not what it implies,--equity. She is infinitely more rebellious than man, and where she has power she inflames the world in protest. I do not refer to the militant suffragists, but to woman's general att.i.tude. For instance, when it is proposed to compel women to insure their servants, to pay employer's compensation for accident, to restrict married women's control of their property, to establish laws regulating the social evil, we find female opposition very violent. I do not mean material opposition, although that does occur, but mental hostility. Woman surrenders because she must, man because he ought to.

That is an att.i.tude of barbarism. It is a changing att.i.tude; the ranks of social service have, during the last half-century, been disproportionately swollen by woman. Our most active worker in the causes of factory inspection, child protection, anti-sweating, is to-day woman. Woman is emerging swiftly from the barbarous state in which she was long maintained. She will change yet more,--and further on in this chapter I will attempt to show how,--but to-day it must be granted that there runs in her veins much vigorous barbarian blood. Her att.i.tude to war is significant. During the past months I have met many women who were inflamed by the idea of blood; so long as they were not losing relatives or friends themselves, they tended to look upon the war as the most exciting serial they had ever read. Heat and heroism, what could be more romantic? Every woman to whom I told this said it was untrue, but in no country have the women's unions struck against war; the suffragettes have organized, not only hospitals, but kitchens, recreation rooms, canteens for the use of soldiers; many have clamored to be allowed to make sh.e.l.ls; some, especially in Russia, have carried rifles. In England, thirteen thousand women volunteered to make war material; women filled the German factories. Of course, I recognize that this is partly economic: women must live in wartime even at the price of men's lives, and I am aware that a great many women have done all they could to arrest the spread of war. In England many have prevented their men from volunteering; in America, I am told, women have been solid against war with Germany. But let the reader not be deceived. A subtle point arises which is often ignored. If women went to war instead of men, their att.i.tude might be different. Consider, indeed, these two paragraphs, fict.i.tious descriptions of a battlefield:--

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young men, with torn bodies, their faces pale in the moonlight. The rays lit up the face of one that lay near, made a glitter upon his little golden moustache."

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young girls. The moonlight streamed upon their torn bodies and their fair skins. The rays fell upon one that lay near, drawing a glow from the ma.s.ses of her golden hair."

Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered--how hateful! That girls should be slaughtered--it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her humanitarian att.i.tude. I will not press the point that as a savage she may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a s.e.xual consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed, just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male reader.

Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based their att.i.tude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely claim no greater n.o.bility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price.

To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a G.o.ddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.

6

We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a characteristic of s.e.x; it is merely the exaggeration of a human characteristic. For instance, it is currently said that women make trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to understand an obvious syllogism, their pa.s.sion for side issues, their generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused, make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation.

What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of degree, not of quality.

Where the emotionalism of women grows more p.r.o.nounced is in matters of religion and love. There is a vague correspondence between her att.i.tude to the one and to the other, in outwardly Christian countries, I mean.

She often finds in religion a curious philter, both a sedative and a stimulant. Religion is often for women an allotrope of romance; blind as an earthworm she seeks the stars, and it is curious that religion should make so powerful an appeal to woman, considering how she has been treated by the faiths. The Moslem faith has made of her a toy and a reward; the Jewish, a submissive beast of burden; the Christian, a danger, a vessel of impurity. I mean the actual faiths, not their original theory; one must take a faith as one finds it, not as it is supposed to be, and in the case of woman the Christian religion is but little in accord with the view of Him who forgave the woman taken in adultery. The Christian religion has done everything it could to heap ignominy upon woman: head-coverings in church, practical tolerance of male infidelity, kingly repudiation of queens, compulsory child-bearing, and a multiplicity of other injustices. The Proverbs and the Bible in general are filled with strictures on "a brawling woman", "a contentious woman"; when man is referred to, mankind is really implied.

Yet woman has kissed the religious rods. One might think that indeed she was seduced and held only by cruelty and contempt. She is now, in a measure, turning against the faiths, but still she clings to them more closely than man because she is more capable of making an act of faith, of believing that which she knows to be impossible.

The appeal of religion to woman is the appeal of self-surrender,--that is, ostensibly. In the case of love it is the same appeal, ostensibly; though I suspect that intuition has told many a woman who gave herself to a lover or to a G.o.d that she was absorbing more than she gave: in love using the man for nature whom she represents, in faith performing a pantheistic prodigy, the enclosing of Nirvana within her own bosom.

But speculation as to the impulse of s.e.x in relation to religion, in Greece, in Egypt, in Latin countries, would draw me too far. I can record only that to all appearances a portion of the religious instinct of woman is derived from the love instinct, which many believe to be woman's first and only motive. It is significant that among the sixty-five cases upon which this article is based there are several deeply religious single women, while not one of the married women shows signs of more than conventional devotion. I incline to believe that woman is firstly animal, secondly, intellectual; while man appears to be occasionally animal and primarily intellectual.

Observe indeed the varying age at which paternal and maternal instincts manifest themselves. A woman's pa.s.sion for her child generally awakes at birth, and there are many cases where an unfortunate girl, intending to murder her child, as soon as it is born discovers that she loves it. On the other hand, a great many men are indifferent to their children in infancy and are drawn to them only as they develop intellectual quality.

This is just the time when woman drifts from them. Qualified by civilized custom, the att.i.tude of woman toward her child is very much that of the cat toward her kitten; as soon as the kitten is a few weeks old, the mother neglects it. A few months later she will not know it.

Her part is played. So it is not uncommon to find a woman who has been enthralled by her baby giving it over entirely to hired help: the baby is growing intellectualized; it needs her no more except as a kindly but calm critic. And frequently at that time the father begins to intervene, to control the education, to prepare for the future. Whether in the mental field this means much more than the difference in temperament between red hair and black hair (if that means anything), I do not know; but it is singular that so often the mother should drift away from her child just at the moment when the father thinks of teaching it to ride and shoot and tell the truth. Possibly by that time her critical work is done.

Indicative of the influence of the emotions is the peculiar intensification of love in moments of crisis, such as war, revolution, or accident. Men do not escape this any more than women: the German atrocities, for instance, largely proceed from extreme excitement. But men have but slender bonds to break, being nearly all ready to take their pleasure where they can, while women are more fastidious. Woman needs a more highly charged atmosphere, the whips of fear or grief, the intoxication of glory. When these are given her, her emotions more readily break down her reserves; and it is not remarkable that in times of war there should be an increase in illegitimate births as well as an increase in marriages. Woman's intellect under those pressures gives way. A number of the marriages contracted by British soldiers about to leave for the front are simple manifestations of hysteria.

As for caprice, it has long been regarded as woman's privilege, part of her charm. Man was the hunter, and his prey must run. Only he is annoyed when it runs too fast. He is ever asking woman to charm him by elusiveness and then complaining because she eludes him. There is hardly a man who would not to-day echo Sir Walter Scott's familiar lines,--

"O Woman! in our hours of ease Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made."

It is not woman's fault. The poetry of the world is filled with the words "to win" and "to woo"; one cannot win or woo one who does not baffle; one can only take her, and men are not satisfied to do only that. Man loves sincerity until he finds it; he can live neither with it nor without it; this is true most notably in the lists of love. He is for falsehood, for affectation, lest the prize should too easily be won.

Both s.e.xes are equally guilty, if guilt there be.

More true is it that many women lie and curvet as a policy because they believe thus best to manage men. They generally believe that they can manage men. They look upon them as "poor dears." They honestly believe that the "poor dears" cannot cook, or run houses, or trim hats, ignoring the fact that the "poor dears" do these things better than anybody, in kitchens, in hotels, and in hat shops. Especially they believe that they can outwit them in the game of love. This curious idea is due to woman's consciousness of having been sought after in the past and told that she did not seek man but was sought by him. Centuries of thraldom and centuries of flattery have caused her to believe this--the poor dear!

In ordinary times, when no world-movements stimulate, the chief exasperation of woman resides in jealousy. It differs from male jealousy, for the male is generally possessive, the female compet.i.tive.

I suspect that Euripides was generalizing rashly when he said that woman is woman's natural ally. She is too s.e.x-conscious for that, and many of us have observed the annoyance of a mother when her son weds.

Compet.i.tion is always violent, so much so that woman is generally mocking or angry if a man praises ever so slightly another woman. If she is young and able to make a claim on all men, she tends to be still more virulent because her claim is on _all_ men. This is partly due to the marriage market and its restrictions, but it is also partly natural.

No doubt because it is natural, woman attempts to conceal that jealousy, nature being generally considered ign.o.ble by the civilized world. In this respect we must accept that an a.s.sumption of coldness is considered a means of enticing man. It may well be that, where woman does not exhibit jealousy, she is with masterly skill suggesting to the man a problem: why is she not jealous? On which follows the desire to make her jealous, and entanglement.

Because of these powerful preoccupations, when woman adopts a career she has. .h.i.therto frequently allowed herself to be diverted therefrom by love. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was very common for a woman to abandon the stage, the concert platform, and so forth, when she married. A change has come about, and there is a growing tendency in women, whether or not at the expense of love I do not know, to retain their occupations when they marry. But the tendency of woman still is to revert to the instinctive function. In days to come, when we have developed the individual and broken up the socialized society in which we live, when the home has been swept away and the family destroyed, I do not believe that this factor will operate so powerfully. In the way of change stand the remnants of woman's slavish habit. No longer a slave, she tends to follow, to submit, to adjust her conduct to the wish of man, and it is significant that a powerful man is seldom henpecked.

The henpecked deserve to be henpecked, and I would point out that there is no intention in these notes to attempt to subst.i.tute henpecked husbands for c.o.c.kpecked wives. The tendency is all the other way, for woman tends to mould herself to man.

A number of cases lie before me:

Case 61 married a barrister. Before her marriage she lived in a commercial atmosphere; after marriage she grew violently legal in her conversation. Her husband developed a pa.s.sion for motoring; so did Case 61. Observe that during a previous attachment to a doctor, Case 61 had manifested a growing interest in medicine.

Case 18 comes from a hunting family, married a literary man, and within a few years has ceased to take any exercise and mixes exclusively with literary people.

Case 38, on becoming engaged to a member of the Indian Civil Service, became a sedulous student of Indian literature and religion. On her husband's appointment to a European post, her interest did not diminish.

She has paid a lengthy visit to India.

There are compensating cases among men: I have two. In one case a soldier who married a literary woman has turned into a scholar. In the other a commercial man, who married a popular actress, has been completely absorbed by the theater, and is now writing successful plays.

It would appear from these rather disjointed notes that the emotional quality in woman is more or less at war with her intellectual aims.

Indeed it is sometimes suggested that where woman appears, narrowness follows; that books by women are mostly confined to love, are not cosmic in feeling. This is generally true, for reasons which I hope to indicate a little farther on; but it is not true that books where women are the chief characters are narrow. Such novels as _Anna Karenina_, _Madame Bovary_, _Une Vie_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ make that point obvious. As a rule, books about men, touching as they do, not only upon love, but upon art, politics, business, are more powerful than books about women. But one should not forget that books written round women are mostly written by women. As women are far less powerful in literature than men, we must not conclude that books about women are naturally lesser than books about men. The greatest books about women have been written by men. But few men are sufficiently unprejudiced to grasp women; only a genius can do so, and that is why few books about women exist that deserve the epithet great. It remains to be seen whether an increased understanding of the affairs of the world will develop among women a literary power which, together with the world, will embrace herself.

7

In the attempt to indicate what the future may reserve for woman, it is important to consider what she has done, because she has achieved much in the face of conservatism, of male egotism, of male jealousy, of poverty, of ignorance, and of prejudice. These chains are weaker to-day, and the goodwill that shall not die will break them yet; but many women, a few of whose names follow, gave while enslaved an idea of woman's quality. Examine indeed this short list:[5]

[5] I a.s.sociate the arts with intellectual quality. (See "Woman and the Paintpot.") Broadly, I believe that all achievements, artistic or otherwise, proceed from intellect.

_Painting:_ Angelica Kauffmann, Madame Vigee le Brun, Rosa Bonheur.

_Music and drama:_ Rachel, Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Teresa Carreno, Sadayacco.

_Literature:_ George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Madame de Stael, Madame de Sevigne, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning. More recent, Mrs. Alice Meynell, Miss May Sinclair, "Lucas Malet," Mrs. Edith Wharton, "Vernon Lee."

_Social service and politics:_ Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Jane Addams, Madame Montessori, Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Ennis Richmond, Mrs.