The Truth About Woman Part 1

The Truth About Woman.

by C. Gasquoine Hartley.

PREFACE

It is very difficult to write a preface to a work which is expressly intended as a revelation of the faith of the writer. The successive stages of thought and emotion that have been pa.s.sed through are still too near, and one feels too deeply. I have made several futile attempts to concentrate into a short note the Truths about Woman that I have tried to convey in my book. I find it impossible to do this.

The explanation of one's own book would really require the writing of another book, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has proved to us in his delightful prefaces. But to do this one must be freed altogether from the limits of length and time. The fragments of what I wish to say would be of no service to any one.

I then tried to place myself, as it were, outside the book, and to look at it as a stranger might. But the difficulties here were even greater. I grew so interested in criticising my own opinions that my notes soon outran the possibilities of a preface. In this spirit of genuine discrimination, I became aware how easy it would be for any one who does not share my faith to find apparent contradictions of statement and errors in thought--much that is feeble here, extravagant there; to notice some salient fault and to take it as decisive of the writer's incompetence. I am tempted to point these out myself to guide and protect the reader.

Now that my book is done I feel that I have touched only the veriest fringe of a vast subject. But one thing I may say, I have tried to express the truth as I have come to see it. The conception I have of Woman is not new; it is very old. And for that reason it will be rejected by many women to-day. At present the inspiration towards freedom in the Woman's Movement has involved a tendency to follow individual paths, without waiting to consider to what end they lead.

There has arisen a sort of glamour about freedom. No one of us can be free, for no one of us stands alone; we are all members one of another. And woman's destiny is rooted in the race. This, rightly considered, is the most vital of all vital facts. I appeal to women to realise more clearly their true place and gifts, as representing that original racial motherhood, out of which the masculine and feminine characters have arisen.

My book is a statement of my faith in Woman as the predominant and responsible partner in the relations of the s.e.xes. To such a belief my opinion was driven, as it were, not deliberately set from the beginning. The time when the resolve to write a book upon Woman first took a place in my thoughts goes back for many years. The child of a Puritan father, who died for the faith in which he believed, the desire to teach was born in my blood. Our character is forged in the past, we cannot escape our inheritance. I began my work as the head-mistress of a school for girls. I was young in experience and very ignorant of life. In my enthusiasm I was quite unconscious of my own limitations, I believed that I was able to train up a new type of free woman. Of course I failed. Looking back now I wonder if I ever taught my pupils one-hundredth part of what they taught me. Perhaps if any of them, separated from me by time and circ.u.mstances, chance to read my book, they may be glad to know that it was largely due to them and what I learnt from them that it has come to be written. Certainly it was in those days, when saddened by my own failures, that the purpose came to me, dimly but insistently, to seek out the Truth about Woman and the relations of the s.e.xes. I began to read and to collect material at first for my own guidance and instruction, and as a necessary preparation for my work. I needed it: I must have been slow to learn. For a long time I wandered in the wrong path. My desire was to find proofs that would enable me to ignore all those facts of woman's organic const.i.tution which makes her unlike man. I stumbled blindly into the fatal error of following masculine ideals. I desired freedom for women to enable them to live the same lives that men live and to do the same work that men do. I did not understand that this was a wastage of the force of womanhood; that no freedom can be of service to a woman unless it is a freedom to follow her own nature. I am very glad that the book that is now finished was not written in that period of my belief. I have waited and I have lived.

Five years ago I took up definitely the task of writing the book. At that time the plan of the work was made and the first Introductory chapter written. Circ.u.mstances into which I need not enter caused the work again to be put aside. I am glad: I have learnt much in these last years.

There is little more that I need to say.

The book is divided into three parts--the first biological, the second historical. These two parts are preliminary to the third part, which deals with the present-day aspects of the Woman Problem, the differences between woman and man, and the relations of the s.e.xes.

This arrangement of my inquiry into three parts was necessary. It may seem to some that I should have done better to confine my investigations to the present. But the claim of woman for freedom is rooted deep in the past. This fact had to be established. I have tried to give the earlier sections such lighter qualities and interest as would commend them to my readers. It is hardly necessary for me to say I can make no claim to personal scientific knowledge. Probably I have made many mistakes.

It is perhaps foolish to make apologies for work that one has done.

But the inclusion of so wide a field has had a disadvantage. My investigations may be objected to as in certain points not being supported by sufficient proof. I know this. My stacks of unused notes remind me of how much I have had to leave out. This is especially the case in the final part. The subject of every chapter treated here could easily form a volume in itself. I hope that at least I have opened up suggestions of many questions on which I could not dwell at length.

Some remarks may be necessary as to the nature of my material. It has been drawn from a variety of sources. I have tried to acknowledge in footnotes the great amount of help I have received. But my notes have been taken during many years, and if any acknowledgment has been forgotten, it is my memory that is at fault, and not my grat.i.tude. The Bibliography (which has been drawn up chiefly from the works I have consulted, and is merely representative) will show how many fields there are from which the student may glean. In particular I am indebted to the works of Havelock Ellis, of Iwan Bloch and Ellen Key.

To these writers I would express my warmest thanks for the help and guidance I have gained from their work.

The opinions expressed are in all cases my own. I say this without any apology of modesty. I hold that the one justification of writing a book at all is to state those truths one has learnt from one's own experience of life. For we can give to others only what we have received ourselves; the vision rising in our own eyes, the pa.s.sion born in our own hearts.

C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY.

_7, Carlton Terrace, Child's Hill, N.W.

March, 1913._

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION--THE STARTING-POINT OF THE INQUIRY

"The method of investigating truth commonly pursued at this time, therefore, is to be held erroneous and almost foolish, in which so many inquire what others have said, and omit to ask whether the things themselves be actually so or not."--WILLIAM HARVEY.

The twentieth century will, we may well believe, be stamped in the records of the future as "the age of hurrying change." In certain directions this change has resulted in a profounder transformation of thought than has been effected by all the preceding centuries. Never, probably, in the history of the world were the meanings and ambitions of progress so prevalent as they are to-day. An energy of inquiry and an endless curiosity is sweeping away the complacent Victorian att.i.tude, which in its secure faith and tranquil self-confidence accepted the conditions of living without question and without emotion. Stripped of its masks, this phase of individual egoism was perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history; yet, with strange confidence, it regarded itself as the very summit of civilisation. It may be that such a phase was necessary before the awakening of a social conscience could arise. Old conceptions have become foolish in a New Age. A great motive, an enlarging dream, a quickening understanding of social responsibility, these are what we have gained.

Above all, this common Faith of Progress has brought a new birth to women. Many are feeling this force. There are two, says Professor Karl Pearson,[1] and it might almost be said only two great problems of modern social life--they are the problem of woman and the problem of labour. Regarded with fear by many, they are for the younger generation the sole motors in life, and the only party cries which in the present can arouse enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and a genuine freemasonry of cla.s.s and s.e.x.

There is something almost staggering in the range and greatness of the changes in belief and feeling, in intellectual conclusions and social habits, which are now disturbing the female part of humankind. How complete is the divorce between the att.i.tude of the woman of this generation towards society and herself, and that of the generation that has pa.s.sed--yes, pa.s.sed as completely as if hundreds and not units represent the years that separate it from the present.

It is instructive to note in pa.s.sing what was written about woman at the time immediately preceding the present revolt of the s.e.x. The virtue upon which most stress was laid was that of "delicacy," a word which occurs with nauseous frequency in the books written both by women and men in the two last centuries.[2] "Propriety," wrote Mrs.

Hannah More, "is to a woman what the great Roman citizen said action is to an orator: it is the first, the second, and the third requisite."[3]

"This delicacy or propriety," it has been well said,[4] "implied not only modesty, but ignorance; and not only decency of conduct, but false decency of mind. Nothing was to be thoroughly known, nothing to be frankly expressed. The vicious concealment was not confined to physical facts, but pervaded all forms of knowledge. Not only must the girl be kept ignorant of the principles of physiology, but she must also abstain from penetrating thoroughly into the mysteries of history, of politics, of science, and of philosophy. Even her special province of religion must be lightly surveyed. She was not required to think for herself, therefore she was deprived of all training which would enable her to think at all. The girl must appear to be dependent upon the mental strength of a man, as well as upon his physical strength."

It is necessary to remember this att.i.tude if we are to understand the direction that woman's emanc.i.p.ation has largely--and, as some of us think, mistakenly--taken in this country. It explains the demand for equality of opportunity with men, which has become the watch-cry of so many women, thinking that here was the way to solve the problem. A cry good and right in itself, but one which is a starting-point only for woman's freedom, and can never be its end.

Little more than fifty years have pa.s.sed since Miss Jex-Blake undertook her memorable fight to obtain medical training for herself and her colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.[5] At about the same time arose women's demand for the right of higher education, and colleges for women were opened at Oxford and Cambridge. These were the practical results which followed the revolt of Mary Wollstonecraft, and later, the great revival due to the publication of John Stuart Mill's epoch-marking book, the _Subjection of Women_.

During the first period of the woman's movement the centre of restlessness was amongst unmarried women, who rebelled at the old restrictions, eager for self-development and a more intellectually active life. These women undertook their own cause, insisting that their humanity came before their s.e.x. They were picked women, much above the average woman, and to a certain extent abnormal in so far as they denied the important factor of s.e.x. To them the average male was not a subject of overwhelming interest, and marriage and motherhood were not of prominent importance in their thought. For them "equality of opportunity for women with men" seemed to solve the problem of woman's emanc.i.p.ation. The constructive result of their campaign was the winning of the higher education of woman, the right to work, and the rush of women into the professions. Much, indeed, was gained, though it may be said with equal truth that much was lost. With this solution--the increased power of self-realisation in a narrow cla.s.s of picked women, chiefly unmarried women of the middle-cla.s.s--the woman's movement might well begin, but in this alone it can never end. The movement was incomplete as far as woman's emanc.i.p.ation went, because it was won by ignoring s.e.x. In spite of the great advance in freedom and in scope of activity of life, the stigma attached to woman was not removed. To-day we have arrived at a point where instead of ignoring s.e.x we must affirm it, and claim emanc.i.p.ation on the ground of our s.e.x alone. Our mothers taught acceptance, and asked for privileges; the pioneers of revolt raised the cry "acceptance is a sin and all privilege evil"; we, the blood in our veins beating more strongly and understanding at last the true inwardness of our power, found our claim for complete emanc.i.p.ation upon that special work in the world and for the State which our differentiation from men imposes upon us.

This differentiation is our potentiality for motherhood, and is the endowment of every woman, whether realised or not. We claim as our glory what our mothers accepted as their burden of shame.

No sudden causeless changes ever happen, or ever have happened. And the question, Why? arises. What is this dynamic force which has been, and is still sweeping in a great wave of emanc.i.p.ation across the civilised world, joining women in one common purpose? On the outside the revolutionary character of women's modern thought and modern practice means nothing more than that they claim the rights of adult human beings--political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, the right of education and freedom to work. But the facts are far too complex to enable us thus to rush hastily to an answer. There is a pitiful monotony in much that is written and spoken about women's emanc.i.p.ation. The real causes are deep to seek, and not infrequently they have been missed even by those who have been most instrumental in bringing a new hope to women. The most advanced women champions, the martyrs of revolt, show no greater sense of the meanings and issues of the struggle in which they are engaged than the complaisant supporters of the worn-out customs they combat. They exhibit only the energies of an admirable impulse, without the control of a guiding law. Speculation, which should be carried to a comprehension of general facts, is concentrated upon the immediate gain of the hour. The tendency is to trifle with truth, and to disguise its reach and consequences. We have read, and spoken, and thought so much about the special character of woman that we have become almost wearied of the subject. Like Narcissus, we stand in some danger of falling in love with our own image. Perhaps the truth is we speculate too much instead of trying to find out the facts. The woman question is as old as s.e.x itself and as young as mankind.

The future position of woman in society is a question that carries with it biological and psychological, as well as social and practical, issues of the widest significance, and further, it is bound up intimately with the profoundest riddles of existence. The problems remain to a great extent unsolved. But the conviction forces itself that the emanc.i.p.ation of woman will ultimately involve a revolution in many of our social inst.i.tutions. It is this that brings fear to many.

Yet we must remember that woman's emanc.i.p.ation is no new movement, but has always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. In the past, civilisations have fallen, in part at least, because they failed to develop in equal freedom their women with their men. It is also certain that no civilisation in the future can remain the highest if another civilisation adds to the intelligence of its male population the intelligence of its women.

This in itself is enough to condemn all ideas of s.e.x inequality.

The struggle for the Suffrage has intensified many problems which it will take all the intellectual and emotional energy of both men and women to solve. Up till now there has been little more than a fight for mere rights against male monopolies. In the near future this struggle must lead to a realisation of the duties of woman, founded on a level-headed facing of the physiological realities of her nature. It is a complete disregard of s.e.xualogical difficulties which renders so superficial and unconvincing much of the talk which proceeds from the "Woman's Rights" platform. All efforts made to understand the s.e.x problem, which is the woman question, must be based on the full knowledge of the physical capacity of woman and the effect that her emanc.i.p.ation will have on her function of race production. All effort ought to be directed towards the future welfare and happiness of the children who are to follow us. This is the goal of woman's struggle for progress, it is the sole end worthy of it.

To a.s.sume as Schopenhauer and so many others have done, down to Sir Almroth Wright's recent hysterical wail in _The Times_, that woman, on account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual or social development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for children, is really to state a belief in decay for humankind. Any stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with the emanc.i.p.ation of the actual mother. No sharp cleavage can be made between qualities that are good and masculine on the one side, and all that is feminine on the other. The view is entirely erroneous. How, for instance, can ignorance and weakness const.i.tute at once the perfection of womankind, and the imperfection of mankind? The matter is not so simple. Man must fall with woman, and rise with her.

My first purpose is to make this clear.

To-day we are faced with the question whether the predominance of man over woman is to be regarded as a natural, and therefore inviolable, law of the male and female. Some will deny this mastery of the male.

It may be said that woman sways man more than he rules her. This is true. The influence of woman is important--fearfully important. Yet the fitting answer to such glossing--if it be necessary really to point out that s.e.xual privilege is not personal power--is that such government is exercised in one direction alone, and arises not from woman's strength, but out of her subjection. Women have rendered back to men the ill that this long s.e.x domination has wrought upon them.

None the less have we to reckon with the despotism of the male side of life. "The softening influence of woman!" ... It is a pretty phrase; but all the same women and men have been doing their best to degrade each other to a pitiful mediocrity. It is not the purifying influence of women--the theory of chivalrous moralists--but an unguided and therefore deteriorating s.e.xual tyranny that regulates society. Let us have done with this absurd catch-phrase of "Woman's Influence." No influence worth naming as such can be exercised but by an independent mind. Women need better fields for the exercise of their love of power. The s.e.xual sphere, which has shaped an impalpable prison around them, has barred them from that part of life which is social and broadly human; the falsely feminine has been developed to the loss of the womanhood in them. It is only in obedience to man that woman has gained her power of life. She has borne children at his will and for his pleasure. She has received her very consciousness from man: this has been her womanhood, to feel herself under another's will.

There is no possible hiding of the truth; if women influence men, men command life.

But is it possible, looking forward to new conditions of society, now approaching like a long-delayed spring, to foresee a remedy? Can the woman of the future belong to herself? What are her natural disabilities, and to what extent are they modifiable by new arrangements of social and domestic life? Must she be content for the future with that dependence on the individual man which has been her fate in the past; or, on the other hand, can she take up her economic and social position in society and work therein for her own maintenance as free from considerations of her s.e.x as a man can? These are the questions which must be faced when united womanhood begins to formulate their wants and to realise their power. It is almost idle in the present transition to speculate as to what women should or should not be, or the work they should or should not do. Women do not yet know what they want. All that can be done is to note the changes that are taking place, for we cannot, even do we wish, now change the revolutionary forces. We must seek to understand their causes, so that we may be able to direct them in the future in such ways as will tend to the greater solidarity and happiness of women and men.

In the everlasting controversy as to woman's place in Nature the majority of arguments have been based on an a.s.sumed inferiority of the female s.e.x. Appeal has been made to anatomy to establish the difference between the natural endowment of men and women in the hope of fixing by means of anatomical measurements and tests those characters of males and females that are unalterable, because inborn, and those that are acquired, and therefore modifiable. But the obstacles in the way of anatomical investigations are very great, if only on account of the complexity of the material. Often and often it has happened that old conclusions have been overthrown by new knowledge. Indeed, it may be said that such appeal has resulted in uncertainty, and in many instances in confusion. The chief source of error has been the careless acceptance of female inferiority, which has maimed most investigations and seriously r.e.t.a.r.ded the attainment of useful results. And though it is very far from my purpose to wish to deny the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine character, it is still true that a blank separation of human qualities into male qualities and female qualities is no longer possible. In no instance have the anatomists succeeded in determining with absolute distinction between the characters that belong separately to the s.e.xes. Moreover, it has been shown that there is no such thing as a _fixed woman character_, but that women differ according to the circ.u.mstances under which they live, just as men differ. This brings us directly against the old problem, inferiority cannot be accepted as the sole reason of woman's present restricted position in society. Other causes must be sought for.

Many features of the social and psychic as well as the physical phenomena of human life have what we may call an organismal mainspring, and become more intelligible when traced back to these. No one, for instance, can appreciate the social significance of s.e.x, or account for the existing s.e.xual relationships in human societies, who does not know something of their biological antecedents. Take again the s.e.x differences, which attain to such complexity and importance in the human civilised races, these can be explained only if their origin is recognisable. To comprehend the higher forms of life we must gain an acquaintance with the lower and more formative types. In this way we shall begin to see something of that continual upward change under the action of love's-selection that has developed the female and the male. Many problems that have brought sorrow and perplexity to us to-day will become recognisable as we ascertain their causes, and then we can do much to remove them. Thus the problem of woman must first be considered from a biological point of view. Explorations must be made into the remote and obscure beginnings of s.e.x. We must carry our investigations back beyond the cycle of man, and trace the growth and uses of the differentiation of the s.e.xes from the lowest forms of life.

Biology, a science hardly more than a century old, is still in the descriptive and comparative stage; it is the scientific study of the present and past history of animal life for the purpose of understanding its future history. It is of vital importance to human welfare in the future that we should learn by this comparative study of origins and of the potent past what are the lines along which progress is to be expected.

This, then, will be the first path of our discovery. We shall have to traverse many past ages of life and to consider certain humble organisms, before we shall be able really to understand woman in her true position in the s.e.xual relationship as we find it to-day.

But the possibility of applying biological results to sociology with any hope of enlightenment depends on an understanding of the questions, How? and Why? It is important to know what the phenomena are, but it is yet more important to know how? and for what reason?

they have come about. Thus we are led forward always from facts to their efficient causes. Women are found to differ from men in this or that respect. But this in itself decides nothing. As soon as we are informed as to any one difference, we must seek out its cause; and this we must do over and over again. Hundreds of women must be interrogated, observed and reported upon--and then what? Shall we know the answer to our problem? Certainly not. In each case we must ask: Is this difference we have found between the s.e.xes a natural inborn quality of woman, whether it be physical or psychical, that must be regarded as a right and unalterable part of her woman character, or is it an acquired, and therefore changeable, modification that has been superimposed upon her through the artificial s.e.xual, social and economic circ.u.mstances of her environment? The mere asking of this question will give many new discoveries.

Life is a relation between two forces: on the one hand the organism and on the other the external conditions that form the environment.

These two processes are known as Nature and Nurture, they are complementary and inseparable, and they act together. Thus the organism modifies its surroundings, and is in turn modified by them.

But every life possesses in great degree the power of self-adaptation, and, broadly speaking, it is true that no matter under what conditions it may be compelled to live, it will mould its own life into harmony with those conditions and thus continue its existence, and this whether it is compelled to adopt a more perfect or a less perfect character. It becomes evident that an appropriate environment is necessary if the Nature is to be expressed, or expressed fully; otherwise life cannot realise development. The environment is constantly checking and modifying the inheritance. Nurture supplies the liberating stimulus to the inheritance, and growth is limited, in exact measurement by the Nurture stimuli available. Human advancement is, of course, widely different from the slow progress in the lower forms of life, but it is fundamentally the same. Experience is continually spreading over new fields and bringing about a more wide and exact relation between the individual and the external world. It follows that any change in the environment will cause a change in the individual. To live differently from what one had been living is to be different from what one has been. These are simple biological facts.