The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage Part 9

I

PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN

What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and Physiological Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.

Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suffrage with its programme of feminism is barred as leading to social disaster, any palliative or corrective that can be applied to the present discontents of woman?

If such is to be found, it is to be found only by placing clearly before us the suffragist's grievances.

These grievances are, _first,_ the economic difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her living by work other than unskilled manual labour; _secondly_, the difficult physiological conditions in which woman is placed by the excess of the female over the male population and by her diminished chances of marriage [1]; and _thirdly,_ the tedium which obsesses the life of the woman who is not forced, and cannot force herself, to work. On the top of these grievances comes the fact that the suffragist conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly treated by man. This last is the fire which sets a light to all the inflammable material.

[1] _Vide_ footnote, p. 138.

It would be quite out of question to discuss here the economic and physiological difficulties of woman. Only this may be said: it is impossible, in view of the procession of starved and frustrated lives which is continuously filing past, to close one's eyes to the urgency of this woman's problem.

After all, the primary object of all civilisation is to provide for every member of the community food and shelter and fulfilment of natural cravings. And when, in what pa.s.ses as a civilised community, a whole cla.s.s is called upon to go without any one of these our human requirements, it is little wonder that it should break out.

But when a way of escape stands open revolt is not morally justified.

Thus, for example, a man who is born into, but cannot support himself in, a superior cla.s.s of society is not, as long as he can find a livelihood abroad in a humbler walk in life, ent.i.tled to revolt.

No more is the woman who is in economic or physiological difficulties.

For, if only she has the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands open to her.

She can emigrate; she can go out from the social cla.s.s in which she is not self-supporting into a humbler social cla.s.s in which she could earn a living; and she can forsake conditions in which she must remain a spinster for conditions in which she may perhaps become a mother.

Only in this way can the problem of finding work, and relief of tedium, for the woman who now goes idle be resolved.

If women were to avail themselves of these ways of escape out of unphysiological conditions, the woman agitator would probably find it as difficult to keep alive a pa.s.sionate agitation for woman suffrage as the Irish Nationalist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement of the land question and the grant of old age pensions, a pa.s.sionate agitation for a separate Parliament for Ireland.

For the happy wife and mother is never pa.s.sionately concerned about the suffrage. It is always the woman who is galled either by physiological hardships, or by the fact that she has not the same amount of money as man, or by the fact that man does not desire her as a co-partner in work, and withholds the homage which she thinks he ought to pay to her intellect.

For this cla.s.s of grievances the present education of woman is responsible. The girl who is growing up to woman's estate is never taught where she stands relatively to man. She is not taught anything about woman's physical disabilities. She is not told--she is left to discover it for herself when too late--that child and husband are to woman physiological requirements. She is not taught the defects and limitations of the feminine mind. One might almost think there were no such defects and limitations; and that woman was not always overestimating her intellectual power. And the ordinary girl is not made to realise woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning capacity.

She is not made to realise that the woman who cannot work with her hands is generally hard put to earn enough to keep herself alive in the incomplete condition of a spinster.

As a result of such education, when, influenced by the feminist movement, woman comes to inst.i.tute a comparison between herself and man, she brings into that comparison all those qualities in which she is substantially his equal, and leaves out of account all those in which she is his inferior.

The failure to recognise that man is the master, and why he is the master, lies at the root of the suffrage movement. By disregarding man's superior physical force, the power of compulsion upon which all government is based is disregarded. By leaving out of account those powers of the mind in which man is the superior, woman falls into the error of thinking that she can really compete with him, and that she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste. Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior money-earning capacity, the power of the purse is ignored.

Uninstructed woman commits also another fundamental error in her comparison. Instead of comparing together the average man and the average woman, she sets herself to establish that there is no defect in woman which cannot be discovered also in man; and that there is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which cannot be discovered also in woman. Which having been established to her satisfaction, she is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing whatever to choose between the s.e.xes. And from this there is only a step to the position that human beings ought to be a.s.signed, without distinction of s.e.x, to each and every function which would come within the range of their individual capacities, instead of being a.s.signed as they are at present: men to one function, and women to another.

Here again women ought to have been safeguarded by education. She ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification which attaches to a difference of s.e.x. Nor yet--as every one who recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by generalisations will see--does it abrogate the disqualification of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.

The present system of feminine education is blameworthy not only in the respect that it fails to draw attention to these disqualifications and to teach woman where she stands; it is even more blameworthy in that it fails to convey to the girl who is growing up any conception of that absolutely elementary form of morality which consists in distinguishing _meum_ and _tuum_ [_that which is mine_ and _that which is yours_].

Instead of her educators encouraging every girl to a.s.sert "rights" as against man, and put forward claims, they ought to teach her with respect to him those lessons of behaviour which are driven home once for all into every boy at a public school.

Just as there you learn that you may not make unwarranted demands upon your fellow, and just as in the larger world every nation has got to learn that it cannot with impunity lay claim to the possessions of its neighbours, so woman will have to learn that when things are not offered to her, and she has not the power to take them by force, she has got to make the best of things as they are.

One would wish for every girl who is growing up to womanhood that it might be brought home to her by some refined and ethically-minded member of her own s.e.x how insufferable a person woman becomes when, like a spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of man; when she proclaims that it is his duty to serve her and to share with her his power and possessions; when she makes an outcry when he refuses to part with what is his own; and when she insists upon thrusting her society upon men everywhere.

And every girl ought to be warned that to embark upon a policy of recrimination when you do not get what you want, and to proclaim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you are hit back, is the way to get yourself thoroughly disliked.

Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the example of the militant suffragist, how revolt and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess oneself of what belongs to others, effects the complete disorganisation of moral character.

No one would wish that in the education of girls these quite unlovely things should be insisted upon more than was absolutely necessary. But one would wish that the educators of the rising generation of women should, basing themselves upon these foundations, point out to every girl how great is woman's debt to civilisation; in other words, how much is under civilisation done for woman by man.

And one would wish that, in a world which is rendered unwholesome by feminism, every girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the great outstanding fact of the world: the fact that, turn where you will, you find individual man showering upon individual woman--one man in tribute to her enchantment, another out of a sense of grat.i.tude, and another just because she is something that is his--every good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she never could have procured for herself.

APPENDIX

LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA

Reprinted by permission from _The Times_ (London), March 28, 1912.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

SIR,--For man the physiological psychology of woman is full of difficulties.

He is not a little mystified when he encounters in her periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of the sense of proportion.

He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete alteration of character in a woman who is child-bearing.

When he is a witness of the "tendency of woman to morally warp when nervously ill," and of the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is appalled.

And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he sees serious and long-continued mental disorders developing in connexion with the approaching extinction of a woman's reproductive faculty.

No man can close his eyes to these things; but he does not feel at liberty to speak of them.

"For the woman that G.o.d gave him is not his to give away."[1]

[1 From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]

As for woman herself, she makes very light of any of these mental upsettings.

She perhaps smiles a little at them... .[1]

[1] In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].

None the less, these upsettings of her mental equilibrium are the things that a woman has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.

It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.

The recruiting field for the militant suffragists is the million of our excess female population--that million which had better long ago have gone out to mate with its complement of men beyond the sea.

Among them there are the following different types of women:--

(_a_) First--let us put them first--come a cla.s.s of women who hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that they may, whenever it is to their advantage, lawfully resort to physical violence.