(2) Woman’s Part
“They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,—
They rightly do inherit Heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.”
William Shakespeare.

If men have made the mistake of attempting to repress women, we must admit that women have taken their share of the sex war in attempting to get the better of men. Men have insisted that women shall live by their sex alone, and women have used their sex in every conceivable way to accomplish their ends. Men have drawn ring-fences round women and then twitted them with their narrowness. Men have had to bow to the necessity of women bearing and rearing children, but whereas this is a work requiring the broadest culture and the widest sympathies, men have for[174] ages restricted women’s culture and cramped women’s sympathies. Full of vitality and personality, women have felt the heavy hand of brute force upon them, and like all live persons, they have either fretted and rebelled (which, when it is done by a woman, is called nagging), or they have circumvented the oppressor by wiles and lies. True, women have impotently raged against men, and, true, it is a pity. If you are weak and ignorant, your rage will, half the time, be not only impotent, but directed against the wrong things and the wrong persons. True, women have lied to men and cheated them, and some of these women have been the most successful in twisting men round their little fingers, while the incurably honest women have looked on in disgust and despair. But no one can say that women have abused men more than men have abused women—all literature and history proves the reverse. No one can say that women have lied to men more than men have lied to women; the deserted girl-mothers are the witnesses.

All these mistakes are due to selfishness, and this is a human, not a sex characteristic. It is always a difficult matter for each individual person to determine when self-expression and self-development merge into selfishness, and there is no short way and no simple rule by which it can be determined. One must allow that men have greater natural temptations to be selfish, owing to physical differences between them and women, and the[175] education of boys, instead of, as now, enhancing the force of these temptations, should be directed to counteracting them. The physical circumstances of motherhood, for instance, do not allow a woman to escape the consequences of the sexual act as a man can. It requires more imagination for a man to realise the cruelty of deserting a baby than it does for a woman to realise it. The baby reminds her. So we find that women less often desert their babies than men do. A healthy public opinion would stimulate the man’s imagination in this direction. Again, man’s greater physical strength makes it more easy for him to bully a woman than for her to bully him. When, by chance, a woman is physically stronger than a man, she does not always refrain from using her force unchivalrously. If it be true that a man has stronger appetites than a woman, this again increases his temptations; but one must, if one allows this circumstance, also allow that it may give the woman an advantage, and so tempt her to bully the man in her way, and there is no doubt some women yield to this temptation. I sometimes see, in the very cruelty of men to women, a hidden agony of fear lest, ultimately, women should need men less than men need women. If this be true on the purely animal plane, nothing could be further from the truth, if we take the whole human creature into account, and men who, by brutality (the result of fear and the cause of fear, too), kill the higher attractions of which they are capable,[176] are making a tremendous miscalculation; for they might attain by the one what they altogether miss by the other; and this is going in the future to be more so, not less. The women of the future will have men on terms, or go without, and the terms must be the only honourable terms, of love and liberty and mutual service. A man will find he has no need to preach wifely submission to the woman whose love he has won, and he will find that he does not want it either.

Alarmists declare that the women’s movement has caused sex-antagonism. The preceding chapter has, I think, disposed of such an absurd contention, and most thoughtful persons do not defend a statement so easily refuted by literature and history. Others, with more evidence, maintain that sex-antagonism was there, a kind of sleeping dog, which the women’s movement has now aroused to vicious attack. It is contended that the progressive women have stirred up normal women to rebellion, which they never would, of themselves, have contemplated; that the progressives are mischief-makers, who have put dangerous ideas into the heads of people quite unable to carry them out, and the only result will be unrest, disputes, discomfort for men, misery for women, and a final vindication of the supreme authority of man. The progressives will probably suffer severe castigation, but the normal women will be kissed and forgiven, for, after all, they are only women and not quite accountable for their[177] actions; and, besides, men are really rather fond of the silly things. This is the style of the commoner leader-writer in the anti-suffrage newspapers.

We may grant at once that the women’s movement would not be where it is but for its leaders. This is no less true of the women’s than of all other movements. A movement does not really get going until leaders have arisen from the ranks; the absurd mistake is to suppose that a movement can be kept going for any prolonged time by the leaders only, without support from the ranks. For many years, the women found it exceedingly difficult to raise up leaders from their own ranks, and a very considerable lead was, as a matter of fact, given by men. But until women had arisen who could carry on the leadership, progress was slow, partial and almost entirely academic. If John Stuart Mill’s searching analysis of women’s position had not made women think for themselves; if his disgust and shame had raised no answering disgust and shame in women, they would have proved themselves fit for the position they were in, and would never have begun to stir out of it. And about that time there were other men too, ready to help, William Lloyd Garrison and Walt Whitman and Mazzini and Stansfeld and Henry Sidgwick, and all the other people who did the pioneer work of helping the women to get education and training, and of opening up careers to them. Then, although the active reformers among[178] men have been comparatively recent, there have been great artists, from the earliest times, who have held the mirror up to man and shown him his deeds towards woman. No feminist tract can compare for propaganda purposes with The Trojan Women, or Medea. Tell a woman she has no concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times who have read its causes. If it were not so, we might despair of the true causes ever appearing to all.

If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of the war on the women’s side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature. It is a sorry picture that is presented to us, of the “womanly” woman cajoling and bamboozling a man into complaisance, and that state of things cannot[179] be described as peace, while the present state of friction is called war. There are elements of warfare in both, but the first was underhand and corrupting, while the foolish elements of the present condition are patent and, as I believe, temporary. I believe this because I feel pretty sure that there is enough fairness in the mass of men for them not permanently to resist what is just in the women’s claim, once the women make it plain; and secondly, because what has been foolish or wrong in the women’s movement is the result of the old folly and wrong which the movement as a whole is directed against: the folly of trying to make legislative action precede education, and the wrong of fighting evil with evil, the age-long error of retaliation.

One must grant that one hears a great deal more of sex-antagonism now than one did even ten years ago; certainly much more than one did a quarter of a century ago. But if anyone will take the trouble to compare the debates in the House of Commons twenty-five years ago with the debates now, and note the difference of tone when women are mentioned, he cannot avoid being struck by the fact that the thing is getting more talked about now, just because it is going. The old contempt for women has largely gone, and has been replaced by a most serious, if considerably bewildered effort to understand what the women would be at. It does not lie in the mouths of men who built or maintained in the House the monkey cage, which[180] goes by the euphemistic name of the Ladies’ Gallery, to assert that there was no antagonism; those men both feared and despised women. The cage will go when Englishmen realise (it takes them some time) how ridiculous they appear to all the world by exhibiting themselves as in terror of their own women.

In many other ways women feel the antagonism less, and one improvement of the utmost importance to them is the enormous increase in their liberty of going about without molestation from men. When I was a girl, it was considered rather a bold thing for a lady to walk unescorted within the precincts of the City of London, and there were very few restaurants where she would have been safe from rudeness. Consider who offered this rudeness: men. And why? because, though the woman was doing an absolutely harmless thing, she was singular, and it was assumed that she did it from an improper motive and was therefore fair game; or still more simply, because the cruel lust of tormenting a helpless creature was irresistible. What woman who has moved an inch out of shelter, but has encountered this?

Still, the antagonism is much less than it was. How is it that we hear more of it? The chief reason is a very simple one: women’s griefs have become reasoned and articulate. Whereas women were fighting man by wiles and arts, they are now appealing to his reason and finding words for their appeal, while a few, exasperated, are hitting out[181] rather wildly with man’s own weapons. In order to appeal to men’s reason, women have had to find words for their grievances and their differences, and to give words to a thing always makes it ten times as important as it was. The unreasonable man points to the inarticulate women and invites you to note how satisfied they are; he then points to the articulate ones and cries shame on them for fomenting sex-war. To the unreasonable man, it is impossible ever to demonstrate women’s grievances, for to do so is at once to be reproached with being “anti-man”; yet surely even he might admit that to err is human. If he had a little of the gift of humour, he might profitably consider the eighteenth-century treatment of women, and ask himself if it is really not rather funny that he should be so hurt when women at last find tongue to say what they think of the rare old sport of woman-baiting. When the admirable Sir Charles Grandison ejaculates, “Were it not, my dear ladies, for male protectors, to what insults, to what outrages, would not your sex be subject?” he was not overstating the case against the men of that day. It was not against the other forces of nature, against hunger or cold, or wild beasts that women most needed protection; it was against insult and outrage from man. Man was, by far, woman’s most formidable enemy and most terrible danger. Women are frequently invited to bewail the death of chivalry. What chivalry meant, in these days, was the protection by individual men of their own[182] women against the depredations of other men. If a woman had no “protector” of her own, or if he chanced to be a tyrant, she remained unprotected by the State. The growth of a healthier opinion among men has now greatly reduced the number of men who desire to “outrage and insult” women, and has greatly increased the State protection of women. There will perhaps always be some few men of primeval instincts, or what is worse, of primeval instincts corrupted by modernity; but it is for civilised men to reduce them as far as they can, to control those that cannot be civilised, and surely not to become their apologists.

The development in England that is known as militancy is, so far, peculiar to England, and is the result of the political situation and of the temperament and character of two women, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, acting upon it. The fiery and self-willed nature of Mrs. Pankhurst made her a person to whom half-measures and compromises have always been repugnant. Her deep and passionate sex-pride gave her an eloquence and an attractive force which drew thousands of women to her. She voiced in a language new to the timid and the ladylike, all the revolt that was gnawing at the hearts of women. To many women it must have seemed that their deepest unuttered thoughts and the unuttered thoughts of generations of women had found expression, and anyone who has had this experience, knows what intense devotion is[183] felt towards the person who has the courage and the genius to utter the words. If Mrs. Pankhurst alone had inspired............