“Decay,” said Seithenyn, “is one thing, and danger is another. Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it keeps out the water from the land and it lets in the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cup-bearer, fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we were to be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it.”
“The stonework,” said Teithrin, “is sapped and mined: the piles are rotten, broken and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky.”
“That is the beauty of it,” said Seithenyn. “Some parts of it are rotten, and some parts of it are sound.”
“It is well,” said Elphin, “that some parts are sound: it were better that all were so.”
“So I have heard some people say before,” said Seithenyn; “perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable sort of people who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation.”—Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin.
The women’s movement is a great movement of adaptation. It is not directed against the community, nor against any section of the community.[194] It is not anti-man: no movement for the liberation of woman can do man anything but good; for modern men to try to keep women in the old ways, while they go ahead, is a ridiculous attempt to produce an anachronism which is foredoomed. It is not anti-social: when people bring this accusation against it, they generally mean that it is anti-maternal; but the progressive women desire that motherhood should be as free and beneficent and instructed as human effort can make it, and they desire, too, that it shall be possible for far more women to have the opportunity of motherhood. It is not anti-democratic; for the extension of liberty and representation to the masses of women will diminish the privileges of the few. It is the anti-suffragists who are anti-democratic. They tell us that the opposition of women to their own enfranchisement is unprecedented and proves that there must be some great harm in liberty, which women feel, while men have never resisted their own enfranchisement. This is not true. Slaves, even male slaves, have been known to object to manumission. But, as a matter of fact, if you will inquire, you will find that nearly all the opposition of women is directed against the enfranchisement of other women, not themselves. Most anti-suffragists will agree that some women are fit for the vote. Scarcely any woman thinks that she herself is unfit; it is the other women who are unfit. When Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks of the incurable political ignorance[195] of women, she does not mean that she is ignorant. It is the other women who are ignorant. Men have been every bit as strongly convinced that other men should not have the vote. It is undemocratic, it is arrogant, it is profoundly selfish, but it is human, not feminine, to endeavour to maintain privilege.
We are in for very big changes—social, economic and political. No one can doubt it. In what spirit are we going to make those changes? They are long overdue, and the amount of needless suffering caused by our slowness in adaptation is appalling. Dead creeds cumber the ground in all directions, and men make no serious effort either to resuscitate or decently to bury them. We say one thing and we do the other, and we merit the certificate given to us by international acclamation, of being the most canting nation on earth. Some of us do not like change. When did older people ever like change? Change implies thinking, and if there is one thing the majority of people hate more than another it is thinking. There is always in most of us a pathetic hope that some day we shall come to a state where the machinery of life will go of itself and we shall be safe and free from the necessity—so exhausting—of eternal vigilance. Free also from the terrible necessity of judging for ourselves and from the difficult task of loving our neighbour as ourselves. But those who hate change—the catlike people with whom I have every sympathy—should ask themselves, “Am I going to stop just here? And, if so, why?[196] Is this really the warmest, prettiest spot, and is there room for the others here?” Most people who know even a corner of life, as it is for the less fortunate, would admit that the present does not offer the most perfect conditions imaginable for all. “But it might be worse, and so we will not move, for fear of worse befalling. All the efforts of our forefathers, all their mistakes and sacrifices and heroisms we will accept, but this generation will not add one brave deed to the record of time.” If this opinion were universal, this generation would be dead, and rotting fast.
A certain type of man is never tired of boasting that this is a “man’s world” and that men have made it. They certainly have made many things, some good and some bad. But whatever they have made of the world, this type of man expects woman to be an impossible She,—impossible in the world he has chosen to make around her. This kind of man professes to admire beauty, peace, the amenities of life, and these are to be given him, if you please, by woman. He does not see that man has himself largely destroyed the beauty, peace and amenity of life. He has created the modern industrial system; he has taken women’s work out of the home; he has filled the air with smoke and clangour; he has polluted the rivers; he has based the growth of millions of pounds upon the destruction of millions of human bodies; he has driven the humane spirit out of his activities, and then he has called upon woman to maintain[197] it alone. She cannot do it alone. It is not reasonable to expect women to be capable of what Whitman finely calls “sane, athletic motherhood,” in the midst of the noise and cruelty and dirt and meanness in which the daughters of the poor are reared, or of the futility and silliness to which so many of the daughters of the rich are heirs.
Women may not have produced great works of art, but they are artists in life. They are often said to be nearer nature than men. Certainly they seem to have a keener sense of reality and of essentials. They can be the greatest inspiration, when they are intellectually alive, when they have joy and freedom. In families where the women’s movement has opened the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women: jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship of sexes, classes and ages.
It is this genius for living that must be altogether liberated, and with it we shall see an immense liberation of the organising and governing power of women. The union of practicality and ideality, of which I have already spoken, must be used to its utmost. Women are less pompous and less wasteful than men. They “cut the cackle” and get to business sooner; I cannot conceive of a[198] body of women tolerating the sort of thing that goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their concern.
The growth of humaner notions is both the fruit and the promise of comradeship; it is seen in the change of ideas about education and about crime and will appear in the ideas about war. People are realising that many vices are the result of the absence of healthy pleasures. We shall not need to punish so much for cruelty, drink, and sexual offences, when we have given people other things to think about and live for; nor for idleness and theft, when we have made employment safe. The reforms of the future are going to be constructive, not punitive, and in all these women’s gifts will be priceless.
Men who wish to keep women in subjection justify themselves by two claims: (1) Those of men, their needs and appetites; (2) those of children. With regard to the needs of men, it is certainly essential that women should understand them, else they will be as stupid about men as men have been about women, and few conditions are so fertile in suffering as stupidity. The men, therefore, who, like Sir Almroth Wright, declare that men will not tolerate epicene institutions, are hopelessly[199] wrong, for if there are to be two worlds, the man’s and the woman’s, and if all their work and their thinking are to be done apart, and if men are all the same to go on arranging the lives of women, with whom they have no relations but physical relations of sex, there will be less and less of that understanding, without which there can never be peace. Men who say greedily, “This world is ours, and we will give you just so much of it as we please, and it is for you to be thankful,” are blaspheming. The world is not theirs to give, and although woman cannot fight man with physical force, let man not think that to give woman her liberty is to confer a favour upon her. It is only to do his duty, as a man is bound to do.
The men who are afraid women will not see eye to eye with them on the matter of men’s temptations, use a double-edged argument, when they declare that there must be a double standard of sexual morality. It is sometimes based upon the physiological fact that a man can “have” a hundred children in the time that it takes a woman to “have” one. But this is to misuse words. A man does not have a child, nor does a woman: a man and woman together have a child. And, if we even conceded that promiscuity in a man would not be wrong, provided he could be promiscuous by himself, how can anyone defend promiscuity in a man, if it infallibly involves the corruption of women? Those who wish to defend promiscuity must find a better weapon than the double standard;[200] for if promiscuity is bad in a woman, it must be bad that a man should corrupt a woman, and there is the added stain on this particular badness that it is mean and cowardly as well, for when he has corrupted her in this way, he not only deserts her, but he hales her before his tribunals and punishes her.
When men advocate the subjection of women for the sake of the child, it is difficult to speak with patience of the monumental conceit and arrogance of the notion. Women do not sentimentalise so much about children, because they are a part of women’s work, and you do not sentimentalise about your work. I have said (Chapter XIII.) that girls ought not to be expressly trained to be mothers, and to prevent misunderstanding, it may be well to touch upon positive education.
Nothing in all the circumstances of a girl’s upbringing ought to be allowed to injure her health, and, in consequence, her phys............