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 attitude, 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, 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 class
and sex.
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 attitude of the woman of this generation towards
society and herself, and that of the generation that
has passed-yes, passed as completely as
if hundreds and not units represent the years that
separate it from the present.
It is instructive to note in passing
what was written about woman at the time immediately
preceding the present revolt of the sex. 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. “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."
“This delicacy or propriety,”
it has been well said, “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 attitude
if we are to understand the direction that woman’s
emancipation 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
passed since Miss Jex-Blake undertook her memorable
fight to obtain medical training for herself and her
colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. 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 sex. 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 sex. 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 emancipation. 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 class
of picked women, chiefly unmarried women of the middle-class-the
woman’s movement might well begin, but in this
alone it can never end. The movement was incomplete
as far as woman’s emancipation went, because
it was won by ignoring sex. 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 sex we must affirm it, and claim emancipation
on the ground of our sex 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 emancipation 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 emancipation
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 enfranchisement,
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 emancipation. 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 sex 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 emancipation
of woman will ultimately involve a revolution in many
of our social institutions. It is this that brings
fear to many. Yet we must remember that woman’s
emancipation 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 sex 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 sexualogical 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 sex problem, which is the woman question, must
be based on the full knowledge of the physical capacity
of woman and the effect that her emancipation 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 assume 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 emancipation 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 constitute 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 sexual 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 sex 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 sexual 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
sexual 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 sex 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 assumed inferiority of the female
sex. 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 retarded 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 sexes. Moreover, it
has been shown that there is no such thing as a fixed
woman character, but that women differ according
to the circumstances 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 sex, or account for the existing sexual relationships
in human societies, who does not know something of
their biological antecedents. Take again the
sex 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 sex. We must carry our investigations back
beyond the cycle of man, and trace the growth and
uses of the differentiation of the sexes 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 sexual 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 sexes
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
sexual, social and economic circumstances 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.
Now, how does woman stand in this
respect? No one can deny the difference of environment
that in the past has acted on women and on men.
Speaking from a biological standpoint, it would seem
that any present inferiority of woman is mainly social,
due to her adaptation to an arbitrary environment.
It has been truly said that “man, in supporting
woman, has become her economic environment.”
By her position of economic dependence in the sex
relation, sex distinction has become with her “not
only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures,
but a means of gaining her livelihood, as is the case
with no other creature under heaven.” Can
we wonder that the differences between the sexes assume
such great and, in certain directions, such unnatural
importance? Woman to a far greater extent than
man is in process of evolution; her powers dormant
for want of liberating Nurture stimuli. We know
that Alpine plants brought from their natural soil
change their character and become hardly recognisable,
and these marked modifications will reappear in many
generations of plants, but as soon as the plants are
taken back to grow in their natural environment they
are transformed to their original Alpine forms.
May we not then entertain as a possibility that woman’s
modern character, with all its acknowledged faults-all
its separation from the human qualities of man-is
a veneer imposed by an unnatural environment on succeeding
generations of women? If the larger social virtues
are wanting in her, may it not be because they have
not been called for in a parasitic life? How splendid
a hope for women rests here! There is a biological
truth, not usually suspected by those who quote it,
in the popular saying: “Man is the creature
of circumstance.” And this is even more
true of women, who are less emancipated from their
surroundings than are men-more saturated
with the influences and prejudices of their narrowed
environment.
It would seem, then, that Nurture
is more important than Nature in seeking to explain
the character of woman to-day. Yet, let me not
be mistaken, nor let it be thought for one moment
that I do not realise the importance of Nature.
The first right of every human being is the right
of being well-born. This is the goal of all our
struggles for progress-it is the sole end
worthy of them.
Let me try to make this clearer.
Reproduction carries life beyond the
individual. Haeckel has said that the process
is nothing more than the growth of the organism beyond
its individual mass. But this process in the
higher forms of life has become exceedingly complex.
All living beings are individual in one respect and
composite in another, for the inheritance of each
individual is a mosaic of ancestral contributions.
Galton’s Law of Inheritance makes this
abundantly clear. Briefly stated, the law is
as follows: The two parents of each living being
contribute on the average one-half of each
inherited quality, each of them contributing one-quarter
of it. The four grand-parents furnish between
them one-quarter, or each of them one-sixteenth; and
so on backwards through past generations of ancestors.
Now, though, of course, these numbers are purely arbitrary,
applying only to averages, and rarely true exactly
of individual cases, where the prepotency of any one
ancestor may, and often does, upset the balance of
the contributions made by the other ancestors, it
may certainly be accepted as the most probable theory
that biology has given us to explain the difficult
problem of Nature-that is the inheritance
we receive from our ancestors.
We see that the heredity relation
is an extremely complex affair. It is not merely
dual from the parents; but it is multiple, through
them reaching back to the grand-parents, great-grand-parents,
great-great-grand-parents, and so on backwards indefinitely.
It is, indeed, a mosaic of many, yes, of uncountable,
contributions. The Life Force gathering within
itself these multiple sets of heredity contributions
is like capital ever growing at compound interest.
The importance of this is abundantly clear. For
as we come to understand the continuity of our inheritance
from generation to generation we realise more vividly
how the past has a living hand on and in the present,
and how that present will be carried on to the future.
We are all links in the one mighty Chain of Life,
and on us, and upon women especially, rests a high
responsibility. We must hand on our past inheritance
unimpaired, so that the new link forged by us may
strengthen and not weaken the chain. It is the
duty of every woman as a potential mother of men to
choose a fitting father for her children, having first
educated herself for a freer and more capable maternity.
In the past she has done this blindly, following the
Life Force without understanding, or hindered from
her purpose by the artificial conditions of society.
In the future such blindness and such failure of her
powers will alike be regarded as sin. With full
knowledge, woman will fulfil her great central purpose
of breeding the race-ay, breeding it to
heights now deemed impossible, not dreamt of even by
those of us who look forward through the darkness to
the clear sunlight of that time when the sex relation
shall be freed from economic pressure and from all
coercion of a false morality, and the universal creative
energy, no longer finding gratification alone in personal
ends, shall at last reach its goal and give birth to
a race of new women and new men.
But to come back from this dream of the future.
Certain facts now become evident.
In the inheritance of each individual are many latent
qualities that do not find expression. It is
as if in every life the separate heredity qualities,
or groups of qualities, wait in competition, and those
that succeed and find an expression in each life owe
their success to an incalculable number of small and
mostly unknown circumstances. One is tempted to
speculate as to a possible direction in the future
of women that may arise from the liberating of these
unknown forces; but as yet we have not a sufficient
basis of facts. But one truth must not be lost
sight of; the unsuccessful qualities that do not find
their expression in an individual life may remain
to be handed on for new competition to a new generation.
No one of the forces of our inheritance, be it for
good or for evil, is dead; rather it sleeps till that
time when the liberating powers of Nurture call it
into active expression. There is real biological
truth in the saying, “Every man is a potential
criminal”; but it is equally true that every
one is a possible saint. And there is one point
further; we know that those qualities which do succeed
in the competition of the inheritance, and which form
at birth the character of the individual, are very
different from their actual expression in the development
of life, where perforce such qualities are modified
to the environment. What we are is no certain
criterion of what we are capable of becoming.
For every item of our inheritance requires an appropriate
growth-soil if it is actively to live. Each life
is an adjustment of internal character to external
conditions. A garden that has been choked with
weeds may remain flowerless for many succeeding years,
but dig that garden, and sleeping flowers, not known
to live within the memory of man, may spring to life.
May it not be that in the garden of woman’s
inheritance there are buried seeds, lying dormant,
which at the liberating touch of opportunity may reawaken
and assert themselves as forgotten flowers? Yes,
to-day this seems a practical fact that already is
being accomplished, and not a futile speculation.
The re-birth of woman is no dream. At last she
is realising the arrest in her development that has
followed the acceptance of a position which forces
her to be a parasite and a prostitute.
Every one admits the differences of
function that separate the female from the male half
of humankind. But to assume that the physical,
mental, and moral disabilities of women, of which we
hear so much, are a necessary part of their inheritance-the
debt they pay for being the mothers of the race-is
an absurdity it would be difficult to explain except
for that strange sex bias, which seems always to colour
all opinions as to women, their character and their
place in society. Havelock Ellis, who in his
admirable work Man and Woman has made an exhaustive
examination of all the known facts with regard to the
real and supposed secondary sexual differences between
women and men, comes to this conclusion in his final
summary-
“We have not succeeded,”
he says, “in determining the radical and
essential character of men and women uninfluenced by
external modifying conditions. We have to
recognise that our present knowledge cannot tell
us what they might be, but what they actually
are, under the conditions of civilisation....
The facts are so numerous that even when we have
ascertained the precise significance of some one
fact, we cannot be sure that it is not contradicted
by other facts. And so many of the facts are
modifiable under a changing environment that in
the absence of experience we cannot pronounce
definitely regarding the behaviour of either the
male or female organism under different conditions.”
Only a knowledge of the multifarious
and complex environmental forces, which in the past
have moulded women into what to-day they are, will
lead us to our goal. We may examine woman’s
present character, both physical and mental, with
every precision of detail, but the knowledge gained
will not settle her inborn Nature. We shall discover
what she is, not what she might be. No, rather
to do this we must go back through many generations
to primitive woman. We must study, in particular,
that period known as the Mother-Age, when we find an
early civilisation largely built up by woman’s
activity and developed by her skill. We must
find out every fact that we can of woman’s physical
and mental life in this first period of social growth;
we must examine the causes which led to the change
from this Mother-rule to that of the Father-rule,
or the patriarchate, which succeeded it. Insight
into the civilisations of the past is of special value
to us in trying to solve our problems of woman’s
true place in the social life. For one thing,
we shall learn that morality and sexual customs and
institutions are not fixed, but are peculiar to each
age, and are good only in so far as they fulfil the
needs of any special period of a people’s growth.
We must note, in particular, the contributions made
by woman to early civilisation, and then seek the reasons
why she has lost her former position of power.
The savage woman is nearer to Nature than we ourselves
are, and in learning of her life we shall come to
an understanding of many of the problems of our lives.
This, then, must be the second path
of our discovery, and, following it, we shall gain
further knowledge of what is artificial and what is
real in the character of woman and in the present relations
of the sexes.
We find that the external surroundings
that influence life are referable to one of two classes:
those which tend to increase destructive processes,
and find their active expression in expenditure of
energy, and those which tend to increase constructive
processes, and are passive instead of active, storing
energy, not expending it. These two classes of
external forces, disruptive and constructive, are
called katabolic and anabolic. Looking back on
the early natural lives of men and women, we find
there has been a very sharp separation in the play
of these opposite sets of influences. A hasty
survey of the facts suffices to prove that the work
of the world was divided into two great parts, the
men had the share of killing life, whether that of
man or of animals, their attention was given to fighting
and hunting; while the women’s share was the
continuing and nourishing life, their attention being
given to the domestic arts-to agriculture
and the attendant stationary industries. Woman’s
position during the matriarchate was largely the result
of the need in primitive society of woman’s
constructive energy, and her power arose from an unfettered
use of her special functions. But this divergence
of the paths of women from the paths of men continued,
and during the patriarchal period became arbitrary
with the withdrawal of women from initiative labour,
an unnatural arrangement which arose out of later social
conditions. The militant side of social activities
has belonged to men, the passive to women; and men
have been goaded into growth by the conditions and
struggles of their lives. They have gathered around
themselves a special man-formed environment of institutions
and laws, of activities and inventions, of art and
literature, of male sentiments, and male systems of
opinions, to which they are connected in subtle and
numerous relations, and this complex heritage of influences
has been reimposed on men generation by generation.
In this social working-life women have not had an
equal part-and a drag in their development
has arisen as the result of this passivity. At
a certain period in civilisation women became an inferior
class because men with their greater range of opportunities,
which brought them within a wider and more variable
circle of influences, developed a superior fitness
on the motor side. Another contrast is very evident,
men’s work being performed under more striking
circumstances and with more apparent effort and danger,
drew to itself prestige, which women’s work
did not receive; their work, on the contrary, was held
in contempt.
Yet, in this connection, it is necessary
to say emphatically that, in its origin, there was
nothing arbitrary in this division between the sexes.
It was, in itself, a natural outcome of natural causes,
arising out of the needs of primitive societies.
There is nothing derogatory to woman in accepting
the passive or, more truly, the constructive power
of her nature; rather it is her chief claim for the
regaining of her true position in society. I
wish at once to say how far it is from my desire to
judge woman from a male standpoint. The power
and nature that are woman’s are not secondary
to man’s; they are equal, but different, being
co-existent and complementary-in fact, just
the completion of his.
There is another point that must be made clear.
The separation in the social activities
of women and men was not brought about, as is stated
so frequently, by men’s injustice to women.
There is an unfortunate tendency to regard the subjection
of woman as wholly due to male selfishness and tyranny.
Many leaders of woman’s freedom hold to this
view as their broad exposition of principle.
Such belief is illogical and untrue. It cannot
be too often repeated that sex-hatred means retrogression
and not progress. I do not mean to say that women
have not suffered at men’s hands. They
have, but not more than men have suffered at their
hands. No woman who faces facts can deny this
truth. Neither sex can afford to bring railing
accusations against the other. The old doctrine
of blame is insufficient. Women’s disabilities
are not, in their origin at least, due to any form
of male tyranny. I believe, moreover, that any
solution of the woman problem, and of woman’s
rights, is of ridiculous impotence that attempts to
see in man woman’s perpetual oppressor.
The enemy, if enemy there is, of woman’s emancipation,
is woman herself.
But, on the other side, it is certain
that the long-held opinion-what we may
call “the male view of women”-which
believes that the position woman occupies in society
and the duties she performs are, in the main, what
they should be, she being what she is, is equally false.
Such theorists throw upon Nature the responsibility
of the evils consequent on the deviations from equality
of opportunity in the past lives of women. Truly
we credit Nature with an absurd blunder do we accept
this inferiority of the female half of life. Woman
is what she is because she has lived as she has.
And no estimate of her character, no effort to fix
the limit of her activities, can carry weight that
ignores the totally different relations towards society
that have artificially grown up, dividing so sharply
the life of woman from that of man.
I am brought back to the object of this book.
What are the conditions that have
brought woman to her position of dependence upon man?
How far is her state of physical and mental inferiority
the result of this position? To what extent is
she justified in her present revolt? What result
will her freedom have on the sexual relationships?
Will the change be likely to work for the benefit
of the future? In a word, how far are the new
claims woman is making consistent with race permanence?
It is not one, but a whole group of questions that
have to be answered when once the ideal of the right
of the present position of the sexes is shaken.
The subject is so entangled that a straightforward
step-by-step inquiry will not always be possible.
Dogmatic conclusions, and the bringing forward of
too hasty remedies must alike be avoided. The
past must lead us to the present, and thence we must
look to the future. The first need is to find
out every fact that we can that will help us in our
search for the truth. Most writers on the subject,
in their desire to fix on a cause of the evil, have
selected one factor, or group of factors, and largely
neglected all others. Otto Weininger, for instance,
the brilliant modern denouncer of woman, refers the
whole great difference between women and men to one
cause-the bondage of sexuality. Mrs.
Stetson, in Woman and Economics, finds a different
answer to the same question, and assumes that the
whole evil is of economic origin. Both explanations
are in part true, but neither is the truth.
To institute reform successfully needs
a wider spirit. We must face sex problems with
biological and historical knowledge. Before we
can understand women’s present position in society,
or even suggest a future, we must examine the place
she has filled in the civilisations of the past; we
must fix, too, the part the female half of life has
played in the evolution of the sexes. Yet an inquiry
into facts is only the first stage, and not the final.
When we can go on from these facts to their results,
and learn the reasons of what we have discovered,
we shall become to some extent, at least, prepared.
Then, and then only, can we venture to look forward
and intelligently suggest whither the present revolution
is leading us.
It is to reach this goal that this
book is written. It is an attempt to place the
woman question in a wider and more decisive light.
It is not an investigation of facts alone, but of
causes. The gospel it would preach is a gospel
of liberation. And that from which woman must
be freed is herself-the unsocial self that
has been created by a restricted environment.
We have seen that woman’s social inferiority
in the past has been to a great extent a legitimate
thing. To all appearances history would have
been impossible without it, just as it would have
been impossible without an epoch of slavery and war.
Physical strength has ruled in the past, and woman
was the weaker. The truth is that woman’s
time had not come, but now her unconscious evolution
must give place to a conscious development. Happiness
for women! That must imply wholly independent
activities, and complete freedom for the exercise
of her work of race production. Woman’s
duty to society is paramount, she is the guardian
of the Race-body and Race-soul. But woman must
be responsible to herself; no longer must she follow
men. The natural growth force needs to be liberated.
Woman must be freed as woman; she must die
to arise from death a full human being. There
is no other solution to the woman question, and there
can be no other.