“… And, if we think of it, what does civilisation itself rest upon—and what object has it, with its religions, arts, schools, etc., but rich, luxuriant, varied Personalism? To that all bends, and it is because toward such result Democracy alone, on anything like Nature’s scale, breaks up the limitless fallows of humankind, and plants the seed, and gives fair play, that its claims now precede the rest.”—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas.

In the last chapter mention was made of the tyranny of an ideal. Man thinks of the qualities he finds desirable in a woman and compounds an ideal woman out of these qualities, and then proceeds to call “unsexed” the real women of flesh and blood who do not conform or pretend to conform to this ideal. The older women have very naturally helped him to maintain these ideals; they were reared in them, and they have feared lest it might be difficult to find provision for their daughters, unless they kept the daughters strictly to the dedicated ways. They were wrong, as timid people nearly always are wrong. The free woman, with a character and a will of her own, is not only happier and more useful, but she is proving herself[139] far more attractive than the colourless submissive ideal.

We have been wearied out with talk of the ideal woman, and now there comes a change, but it is more apparent than real. We hear now a good deal about a person called by the name of Normal Woman. Men who have done good work in some particular corner of scientific research have been largely responsible for the respect with which this talk about Normal Woman has been received, but when you come to look at her, you will find that she is merely Ideal Woman dressed up in scientific terms, and that the author of her being is no other than the Old Adam. It often seems to me that the common people, with no notion of general principles or of scientific and philosophic methods, cannot wander so fantastically far from truth and justice and common humanity as your man of science, when his sex-vanity has been hurt or his prerogative of pure egoism has been disturbed. The denunciations of scientific men have, fortunately, been robbed of many of their terrors by the work of women in biology and medicine. It would be only human if scientific women showed traces of their sex in their work, just as men do, but that these are very slight is suggested by the complaint of Sir Almroth Wright, who declared, in his widely read letter to The Times (March 1912), that medical women violated the “modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up,” by putting above these their scientific “desire for[140] knowledge.” One has seldom read a more splendid tribute to the courage and candour of women,—a tribute all the more splendid because so entirely involuntary,—for women know how scientific men of the type of Sir Almroth Wright have made the path of scientific knowledge a very Calvary for modest women. It is nothing to men of this type that the modesties of our civilisation should in the past have led to our women being handled and examined in hospital by youths of the sort common among medical students; that the reticences of this same civilisation should have led to many men and nearly all women being ignorant of all that goes to the building of a healthy and moral nation. Sir Almroth declares that man “cannot and does not wish to work side by side with women.” Some men may not, but Sir Almroth is slandering his own sex when he makes the assertion for all mankind. The pioneer work of women of science was made possible by the existence of large numbers of scientific men willing to teach women. We may make a pretty shrewd guess at the reasons why some scientific men do not wish women to study science, for have not the medical and scientific women already, by their work, exploded many of the old fictions about women, and so put heart and hope into millions of women who felt their powers, but hardly dared believe in them, because of the dead weight of what they were told was science? They have now learned that all that is put forth by a scientific man is not science, and that when[141] sex comes into his calculations it is apt to be a very serious disturbance to clear thought. It seems to be a fact that men are as a rule far more conscious than women of the existence of sex in every relation of life, and if there be something in the speculations of biologists concerning the presence of male and female elements in the human female, there may be a very profound reason for this difference in outlook; but it seems like midsummer madness to say that the one of the two sexes who is most homogeneous in the elements of sex shall be the only one who shall have freedom to know and speculate and experiment, for it is clear that that one would be the one less likely to have sympathies wide enough to include both sexes.

What is the line the scientific reactionaries adopt? They abandon Ideal Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation, to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women; they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained. When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly the logical result of this tyranny of thought. It simplifies the side of life which has no obvious reference to themselves if they can make pigeon-holes all of one size[142] and shape, label them Normal Woman and stuff in all the women indiscriminately. But the cruelty and the waste is seen if we understand how the norm is arrived at. Procrustes’ bed was for normal persons. If you measured all the feet of humanity and then found the average and made one boot—the average boot—for men, women and children, they would all suffer, but the severest sufferings would be those of the men with the largest feet. So with the wretched insistence on making all life to fit the average woman. She doesn’t exist; she is a figment of men’s minds, and every single woman suffers in her degree from the tyranny of the average, but the woman who suffers most is the biggest woman. The world suffers too, from the stunting or warping or exasperation of its strongest and most original female minds. One has only to think of the agony of loneliness of a Charlotte Bront?, of the limiting of her opportunities for equal friendships, for which she had so rare a genius, of her starvation in experience and in knowledge, and of the cruel tyranny of hated, because uncongenial, toil. A normal woman loves children, it is said. Well, Charlotte Bront? did not love children; yet she was forced to teach them, and to wear out her heart over them, and she cannot even have done it at all well. The children would have been better taught by someone else. If Charlotte Bront? had been given the same scope to shape her life as Branwell had—merely because he was a man—her work might have gained by contact with wider life, and she herself might[143] have lived longer to give us more of it. The stubborn courage of this woman of genius during years of soul-imprisonment and starvation should surely help to break down these stupid and wasteful cruelties.

The enthusiasts for Normal Woman do not entirely deny that here and there an exceptional woman may suffer from the restrictions of a woman’s life, but they suggest that these sufferings are exaggerated, and affect only the exceptional women, and in any case only matter to the sufferer herself. It is wonderful with what complacency people can contemplate the sufferings of others; wonderful, too, the assumption that “exceptional” women are negligible, as if it were not, after all, only among the exceptional that we might hope to find genius. These people will tell you that women have never done anything which the world would have missed, except the one work of mothering the race. Therefore to this work they should be restricted. Women will never, so they say, be anything but third-rate in arts or sciences or crafts; they can be superlative mothers; let them concentrate on that. If they do not, it is darkly suggested that they will lose even the capacity for mothering, and then, where will they be? And, what is worse, where will men be?

Sometimes these views are advanced with all the thunders of an angry prophet; sometimes, more in sorrow than in anger, it is suggested that woman will sooner or later return to weep on the breast of man, and beg to be allowed, like Katharine, the[144] Shrew, to lay her hand beneath his foot. To do otherwise would argue in the fair sex (to use the denunciatory language of Sir James FitzJames Stephen) a “base, mutinous disposition,” which we sincerely hope she has not. In the words of Mr. Garvin (Pall Mall Gazette, 30th July 1913), “we can only hope that, whatever the woman of the future may prove to be, some of the womanliness which we knew when Victoria was Queen will remain in her, and that, when the first force of revolt is spent, she will once more realise the full glory of wifehood and motherhood. On that point we have no great fear, for, whatever her vagaries, woman will remain woman at heart.” I should like to rescue this exquisite piece of fatuity from oblivion, to make merry the hearts of future generations of men and women.

Now, as regards genius, we may know how much genius women have in some hundreds of years, when they have been free to develop according to their natures. The kind of emotional tyranny to which women have been subjected is the most crushing of all, and men have never had to undergo this particular sort of tyranny, so that it is not in the least true to say that if women had had any genius it would have overcome tyranny, as men’s genius has done. No man has ever known what it is to be born of the more sensitive, sympathetic, conscientious and affectionate sex, and to be reared in an atmosphere where insult and hate followed on any expression of genius, where cold discouragement was the best that a woman could[145] expect from her own people, and where the wooing from her own work has taken that most insidious of all forms for duty-loving woman—the claims of others to her care and service. Those who hold the theory of the norm would, however, exclaim “God forbid that women should become geniuses! We don’t like women geniuses, and, moreover, genius will interfere with motherhood.” If one of the necessities for genius is intense egotism (because no great work can be done without intense concentration, and this is impossible if the attention is perpetually switched off in order to do other people’s bidding), there is something to be said for the notion that genius will interfere with motherhood; that is to say, with the capacity or the desire of the genius to fulfil the ordinary functions of motherhood. It is a common assertion that a woman fulfils herself completely in motherhood, but this is manifestly not true of the woman who wants to think about the higher mathematics, or who has a genius for organising masses. This does not dismay me at all. Why, after all, should the genius be a mother? And if she be, could she not find motherly women to bring up the children? It is mere delusion to insist that in all cases, without exception, the mother is the best person to tend the babies, and no one even suggests that the mother should be the sole educator of children when they have passed babyhood. I am not apprehensive that the mass of women will ever become geniuses and so cease to provide the men[146] and women of the future. It seems clear to common sense that geniuses will be few, and that it is mere cant for men, who contemplate quite serenely the existence of several million spinsters in England, to cry out in dismay at the notion of a singular genius, here and there, as the mysterious forces of nature may provide. The existence of these millions of spinsters is an exceedingly serious matter, because many of them probably desire intensely to be mothers, and would be good ones; but it is only when the egoistic man fears that the unmated woman may be active and content, that his sensitive vanity is up in arms, and he is dismayed at the notion of a woman, of her free choice, forgoing man. He is content there should be millions of spinsters, if only they are unhappy.

Perhaps a eugenist will here intervene and say that we want the best women to be mothers, and therefore the potential genius should sacrifice her individual opportunity, in order to become the possible mother of male geniuses. But it will not be easy to persuade the woman of the future that sh............