THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM BY WILMA MEIKLE NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1917 GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSfDE PRESS LIMITED EDINBURGH PREFACE A BOOK on questions so much alive as those of feminism cannot be expected to fit every stage of their growth. Since the proofs of these essays were corrected the Prime Minister has recanted his former opinion of the suffragists' claims ; by the time the book leaves the printers', Parliament may either have en- franchised women or given a definite pledge of its intention of doing so when peace is declared. But as the writer has throughout treated the vote as one of the least important of feminists' demands and needs, the inclusion of women in the electoral register will hardly affect her arguments. WILMA MEIKLE. August 23, 1916. 2041926 CONTENTS PAGE jl. A CALL TO REPENTANCE . . 9 II. THE BUSS -BE ALE BLUNDER . . 21 III. GETTING EXPERIENCE . . .35 IV. THE REDISCOVERY OF THE WORKING MAN . . . . .45 V. THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY . . 59 VI. A BIRD IN THE HAND . . .70 VII. SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS . . 82 VIII. HOW TO BE MORAL THOUGH MARRIED . 98 IX. BETWEEN THE HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET . . . .111 X. THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST . 127 XI. THE FORTUNE OF WAR . . . 148 XII. A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS . .159 A CALL TO REPENTANCE IN primitive times women carried their husbands' burdens to leave men free to fight. To-day, after centuries of social development and years of advance towards feminine emancipation, women have returned to the old privilege of bearing men's burdens in warfare. But to-day the task is heavier. It demands more intelligence and longer hours and harder work, and in some cases greater personal danger. Yet it is a task that is eagerly shouldered. More than eighty per cent, of the total number of girls in Britain between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five are said to be now working for a living, and their number increases daily. Soon the labour market will be crowded out by women who had never supposed that it would be necessary for them to earn at all girls whose fathers have been killed in the war, widows with inadequate pensions, women of all ages with disabled relatives partially dependent upon them, girls who have been impelled to 9 10 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM work by patriotism and have acquired a taste for self-dependence. And from all our un- certainties about the social problems that will follow the war, which political party we shall uphold or whether political parties will be of any account at all, and what religion or philosophy we shall adopt or invent for our guidance, there stands out the conviction that whether they call themselves suffragists or feminists or guild socialists or by any other label, far greater numbers of women than before the war will be clamouring for privileges which have hitherto been with- held from them. The vote, to be sure, may have been granted long before the war is ended. It is even possible that women will be enfranchised principally because the war has created a scarcity of suitable parliamentary candidates and that the country will feel the need of women in Parliament before it is acutely conscious of the need of them as electors. But the vote, after all, is one of the least of the feminist needs, and it is for the removal of greater grievances than their political nullity that women will be agitating after the war. The feminist movement will be a much more formidable movement and a much more successful movement. Yet while A CALL TO REPENTANCE 11 the war has been rapidly revolutionising the position of women in industry the wanton misunderstanding of the truce declared by the suffragists in August 1914 has left women leaderless and their new needs inarticulate. The suffrage movement was very glad of a rest. But whatever the merits or demerits of that movement, the suffrage societies had gripped the imaginations of rebellious women and had accustomed them to look to those societies for direction. There was nothing in the suffrage truce to make such guidance impossible. The leading suffragists, how- ever, flung themselves into activities which, though undoubtedly valuable to the nation, had no very close connection with the needs of the new workers. They regarded it as a stupendous advance for women when new kinds of employment were opened to them, and did not pause to consider that the conditions of their employment might be definitely and dangerously retrogressive. Harems, after all, are usually well provisioned, and liberty makes a poor show against a background of starvation. It is more im- portant for the mass of women that munition workers and bus conductors should be well paid than that the higher grades of the Civil Service should be opened to a small number 12 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM of their sex or that a solitary Englishwoman should receive a diplomatic appointment at Christiania. The failure of the suffragists to champion insistently the needs of women workers at so critical a period cannot but weaken their influence after the war, and there is a fairly widespread feeling that, at a time when the enormously swollen numbers of women workers and their entrance into new kinds of employment makes a vigilant attention to the conditions of their work more than ever necessary, the attitude of the suffrage societies has from the very first in- clined to the admission that an insistence on health safeguards and good pay is inconsist- ent with patriotism. " I have told my wife," writes a working man who a few years ago drove his wife into a suffrage society almost at the point of the carving-knife, " I have told my wife that she had better keep her suffrage subscription and buy us more butter. A fat lot the suffragists are doing for working women now ! " Earlier in the war one heard of women ruptured through working at too heavy machines in munition factories, of girls docked of their pay because the factory lights were extinguished during a Zeppelin raid and the workers stood idle at their machines, of women working without proper sanitary A CALL TO REPENTANCE 13 accommodation at Woolwich, and suffering from sickness and skin disease through the nature of their work there. The suffrage societies have been too intent upon their new activities to attend to the grievances which were once their primary concern. There has been a stupid belief that the truce from political agitation completely shelved fem- inist problems. The chief suffrage societies have accordingly veiled their raison d'etre, and have turned to the work of supplying arsenals with women workers or equipping field hospitals or inciting the public against naturalised Germans. And while this im- mersion in war work is a tacit admission that the old feminism is ended, they have so far neglected to prepare for the new. The war has divided the feminist struggle into two periods a period of failure and humiliation which is behind us, and a period of unknown character which will begin with the peace treaty. And meanwhile it pro- vides from the clamour and deception of meetings and propaganda a truce which makes it possible to prepare for the new cam- paign. It has done other things for women. Those of us who have been knocked down and kicked in pre-war days by gentle English- men who objected to our speeches realise 14 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM with a chuckle that when peace comes women will be able to transform the most unruly audience into a crowd of seraphs by begging them not to behave like Huns. The whole task of feminists in this country will be made infinitely more agreeable by the new spirit of chivalry towards women which is quite foreign to us, and is being created by nothing on earth but our hatred of the Germans. But while a new courtesy will make a screwed courage and resolve no longer necessary in feminist propaganda work, it does not follow that it is the old gospel and the old policy that will win the social and economic liberty which is the real aim of feminists. At present it seems probable that an immense amount of time and money and energy will be wasted in the early years of peace in attempt- ing to exhume the old dead methods, if their death is not now decently and publicly acknowledged. Let us while there is still time for repentance humbly and with tears confess that all that was done and undone by pre-war feminists was nothing but a pro- digious crop of feminine wild oats. Let us admit that they were merely gaining the experience which is a popular euphemism for mistakes. Let us own that they were led astray by a mistaken policy and by incom- A CALL TO REPENTANCE 15 petent leaders. For in the earlier part of the Safe-Britain period, between 1815 and 1914, women were developing individual ambitions and were beginning to prove what women individually could accomplish. The desire to raise the status of a whole sex was a later growth, and when it came the women who first embraced the new gospel were too much occupied with their own work to preach it themselves. Even in the short period of abnormally rapid development in feminist thought between the South African and the present war the leaders were never quite worthy, intellectually, of a large number of the rank and file. The best feminine in- tellects having been caught up into profes- sions, the suffrage movement had to be led by those who were left over from more rigidly classified activities. And for the most part it had to be led by women communally supported that is, by women possessed of so-called independent incomes. Among men the minds best able to cope with modern affairs are usually found in those who have to earn a living. Their abilities secure in early manhood enough money to make a political career possible later. Walpoles and Newcastles and Pitts could deal with the upper-class politics of the eighteenth century, 16 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM but to-day a Rosebery fades away into nothingness, and the statesmen who win confidence have been shaped by economic struggle. It was the misfortune of the suffrage movement that for the most part its leaders were women whose minds had never been winnowed by personal experience of economic need. This is not true of the Pankhursts, and Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter will always be regarded by historians as the two great personalities of pre-war feminism. What- ever their faults, there was no one else who really mattered. Beside them there were in the suffrage world no individuals ; there were only societies. But Mrs Pankhurst was a woman of strong emotions rather than of strong intellect. Her feelings were a power ; her thoughts were a reflection. It was her emotion, very slightly fortified by the ability of her daughter, that created the militant movement. And her emotion was really directed by the judgment of the earliest pioneers. Militancy was a Pankhurst notion, but it would never have come into the Pank- hursts' heads if those heads had not been stuffed by the pioneers with the belief that political enfranchisement was the only way of raising women's economic and social A CALL TO REPENTANCE 17 status. As for Miss Christabel Pankhurst, she had the gift of speaking well when she looked plain, and looking charming when she spoke badly, so that her speeches were always admirable. But she had the mind of a cap- able, ambitious, well-informed lawyer whose judgments are uncultured by the compre- hension of weakness. In all her doctrines there was a hard logic which cut a sorry figure beside the illogical nature of humanity. By-and-by it became evident that her conclusions were habitually drawn from insufficient data, that there was in her a lack of sympathy which robbed her of experience and confidences. She was perfectly right when she decided that sex grievances were at the root of the feminist troubles. But there appeared to be nothing in her own nature, no imagination in her mind, to give her any clue to the real causes of those grievances. It would be hard to discover a more one-sided effusion than her celebrated pamphlet, The Great Scourge and How to End It. Not only does she glibly assume that because she herself is content with spinsterhood it follows that for all women a life of public activities without domestic happiness is satisfying; she totally ignores the fact that a large part of the existing 18 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM prostitution is due to the coldness and ugly materialism of married women on the one hand, and, on the other, to the refusal of modern women to marry struggling men and their expectation of being supported by their husbands. And it is possible from this book to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that all the most godly of our acquaintances, and especially all the directors of our youth, and all the most notoriously blameless of the con- spicuous men and women of our time, have some of the symptoms of the " scourge " in an acquired or hereditary form. Our gentle, maidenly, anaemic cousins, our pious spinster aunts suffering from angina pectoris and pleurisy, are immediately suspect, and we close the book with the conviction that the race cannot continue eugenically without the assistance of its author. This is no digression, for her pamphlet provides an unsurpassable example of Miss Pankhurst's limitations as a leader. The bitter injustice to men which characterised the daughter and the uncontrolled emotional- ism of the mother together hurled that branch of suffragism which the Pankhursts led into the quagmire of militancy. The courage, skill and endurance of hundreds of women during the political campaign have got to be A CALL TO REPENTANCE 19 considered quite apart from that campaign's wisdom. " A thing is not necessarily true," said Oscar Wilde, " because a man dies for it." Just as the memory of Edith Cavell's death will always be treasured by her country- men and held glorious to womanhood, in spite of the breach of professional etiquette involved in her heroism, so future ages will hold it a small thing that militancy was ridiculous and useless when militants them- selves were often so ennobling an example of feminine endurance and sacrifice. And the adventurous and persevering spirit of many of the constitutional suffragists will ultim- ately atone for the folly of the suffrage policy. For suffragists of every brand gave proof of the potential worth to society of many feminine qualities which had never before been allowed to reveal themselves. But though the historian takes long views and slurs over many mistakes which distance minimises, the politician cannot afford to neglect details. The politician of to-morrow will have to consider the policy of the feminists rather than their personal virtues. She will have to determine whether that policy was helping to gain their ends. And if a careful examination into the history of pre-war feminism convinces her that the suffrage 20 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM campaign was doing nothing to improve the position of women, and did not even appear likely to obtain the vote, she will naturally wish to inquire into the possibility of an alternative policy. II THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER WHEN that disorderly advance, " The Women's Movement," exhausted half its energy in attempting to force positions utterly irrelev- ant to the real objects of its campaign, it was misled by its leaders' ignorance of the country they were invading. They were women delicately unaware of the kitchen side of politics, genteelly unacquainted with the stupendous significance of commerce, women who had been bred in drawing-rooms where the ruling class posed as men whose power was based upon culture and oratory. Pacing the terrace of the House of Commons after a restrained consumption of parliamentary cakes and strawberries, discussing European crises and Westminster reputations in an expensive garden, releasing opinions on books and careers and the drama from the vigilant suavity of a political dinner-party, the ruling class appeared to its nieces and spinster cousins as a group of high-brows created by the universities. Life was bowdlerised for 21 22 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM their womenfolk into a Mary Ward novel. There was the background of a political Italy where British ministers and political writers rejuvenated political creeds, and an English foreground in which the parliamentary careers of men like William Ashe and the extremely superior husband of Marcella obliterated the mightier interests of the masses. It was a time when the Mayfair importance of Parlia- ment had produced the Victorian mother- hood which dreamed of a Westminster career for its sons as mediaeval mothers dreamed of a triple crown, and Scottish mothers in the seventies of an Edinburgh pulpit. St Stephen's was the popular spring-board for ambition. Manufacturers hated their manu- facturing and pined to write to their old neighbours on House of Commons notepaper. Prosperous shipbuilders counted their thou- sands as dross when compared with the social advantages of an unpaid Member of Parliament. Obscure men like Thomas Babington Macaulay and Benjamin Disraeli had been rushed into social eminence by their flowing rhetoric at Westminster. And jostling the country-house successes of politicians came the bishops and weighty writers who had sucked their wisdom from the universities. All the glittering array of THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 23 celebrity that dazzled restless women in the drawing-rooms of the great and loosed their envy seemed to base its achievements upon politics and learning. And the aftermath of the French Revolution was sweeping women out of their narrower interests into a swirling sea of desire. They wanted the women who had time to think about these things an absorbing occupation, they wanted to develop their minds, they wanted to think and to know, they wanted power, they wanted to be of conspicuous use, they wanted very emphatically to prove that the men who had, quite without reflection and as auto- matically as they walked and ate and slept, believed with the scornful conviction of a Jonathan Swift in the mental inferiority of women, were as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. And as the only views permitted to them of the men with whom they wanted to compete were the view politic and the view academic, it was naturally in the electorate and in the universities that women strove to prove their prowess. So, in that legendary Victorian age when the public life of England was commercial in action and romantic in spirit and Aristotelian in manner, the pioneers of feminism were tricked by appearances, and pursued those 24 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM two lean quarries, academic success and the vote. They built colleges for women, they founded public schools and high schools which caught up into the Buss-Beale educa- tional system the doomed daughters of the middle and lower-middle classes. Head down, those game old pioneers charged the professions. In time they made it possible for really capable women, expensively educated, to earn for thirty or even forty years an annual income of from one to two hundred pounds. It was a concession, that network of schools, to the needs not, certainly, of the masses but of those un- explored thousands of middleness from which the pioneers continually recruited their hench- men. The feminist leaders were probably aware that they themselves had learnt more from governesses and tutors and their own libraries and relatives than could possibly be taught in the unwieldy forms of the new schools. Universities were a different matter ; the laurels to be gained there were coveted by all. But the supreme aim of the pioneers was the political power which so notably distinguished the other sex as the subjector. Right up to August of the year 1914, that ghastly August of disruption and despair in innumerable leagues and unions, the suffrage THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 25 agitation was the central advance of femin- ism. From time to time there were flank movements. There was the sartorial crusade of mildly domestic women who found salva- tion in wearing " reformed " dress. There was the campaign of religious women who invented for private use new mysteries and worshipped a feminine Jehovah, or an incarnate male deity who exemplified for humanity the ideal married love by his marriage to an incarnate goddess. There were the women who proclaimed for the first time the right of wives to refuse maternity. There were those who preached the right of unmarried women to bear one child and were disconcerted when their daughters obeyed their precepts. There were the bolder spirits who wrote rather pedantic little notes petitioning leading statesmen and writers to join them in creating eugenic children. There were women who condemned marriage altogether as a degrading enslavement. And just before the war there was becoming con- spicuous a number of young women, most of them graduates, who boasted themselves the disciples of the hetairce of the Aspasian period. But these side issues, these disorganised attempts to shake the accepted opinion of the inevitable destiny of women, hardly affected 26 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the main action. The headier feminists might resort to theosophy or free love or vegetarian diet, but the established leaders were still concerned with the demand for the vote and the assault upon the male monopoly of the more profitable professions. Even when the solid and conventional braininess of the earlier pioneers was supplanted by the nimble brilliance of the Pankhursts, the plan of campaign was virtually unaltered. That raids and destruction by the voteless were preferred to voters' petitions was a small matter when their object remained a conquest which involved a bleeding waste of individual careers and at that stage of the feminist advance must itself prove valueless. For these pioneers, drilled by Mary Woll- stonecraft and John Stuart Mill and the Buss- Beale gang and the exponents of country- house culture, had not yet explored the England of their own day. In the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent or the Russia of Catherine II. the wisdom of the schools and political sharp practice might indeed have pillared the gate to feminine liberty. But in the nineteenth century power and the liberty which power gives had nothing to do with culture and very little to do with political THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 27 influence. They depended vulgarly, if your refinement demands the admission upon the possession of capital and commercial status. Men were slapped into Parliament by the hearty good will of manufacturers and merchants and tradesmen rich enough to control the electorate. Concessions were granted to working men, their economic con- ditions were bettered, the vote itself was yielded to them, because their commercial value was great enough to make their opposi- tion and rebellion a commercial disaster. It was precisely because the commercial value of women was low that it was possible for capitalists long after it had become worth while to make use of that low value in industry to continue to oppress them far more severely than men workers were oppressed and to continue to jeer at their impotent clamour for political power. Up and down the country went bands of heroic but very pitiful and rather ludicrous women preaching that they had a right to the vote, that the country would be better if they had it, and that it was horribly unjust to with- hold it from them. It was all dreadfully true, but the average male listened to them with a mild wonder and felt at the bottom of his inarticulate soul both the irrelevance of their 28 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM demand and the staggering impudence of it. For a sex utterly without commercial stand- ing was claiming an official share in the control of a nation which was governed by commercial values. If the feminist pioneers had used the wealth and ability which many of them possessed to embark upon industrial enterprises, if they had resolved to seize a place among those " captains of industry " who were already the heroes of journalists and politicians, if Mrs Fawcett and Mrs Pankhurst had devoted their organising powers to commerce and Miss Christabel Pankhurst had become a more brilliant Callisthenes to some greater firm than Selfridge, then the history of the suffrage agitation would make smoother and more progressive reading. It is inconceivable that a suffrage league as large as the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies or the Women's Social and Political Union could have demanded the vote in vain if its execu- tive committee had been composed of women colliery owners and soap makers and iron masters and cocoa manufacturers and women with a controlling interest in some great armament works or shipping firm. Be- cause the suffrage officials were intellectuals who carried no weight at all in the everyday THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 29 business of the nation, it was possible again and again to slight and ignore them. And if the bulk of the women behind them had been skilled mechanics or prosperous shopkeepers or highly salaried engineers and factory managers, their commercial importance would have been great enough to compel attention. But by far the greater number of the members of the suffrage societies were sweated school teachers and clerks and hospital nurses, struggling secretaries and journalists, underfed shop assistants, wives financially dependent upon their husbands. The working women whose numbers were held by some to make them worth all these adherents from the middle and lower-middle classes were usually too poor to join a suffrage society, and their lack of mechanical skill made them so entirely negligible in public affairs that the faint whisper of their needs hardly penetrated to Westminster. Instead of beginning the feminist campaign scientific- ally by giving to at least enough women to carry weight in the political world that busi- ness and industrial value which the country demanded of its voters, the leaders frittered the money and the strength and the abilities and the lives of their followers on a fruitless agitation and an out-of-date system of 30 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM education. In an age when socialism glaringly was not, they acted as though they lived in some Utopia which preferred wit and moral worth to the acquisitive faculty. The vision of socialism had dazzled their eyes till existing facts were a mist before them. It was true that in a socialist state education and a knowledge of the electorate might be the best preparation for enfranchisement and might themselves secure it. But the feminist leaders were living under capitalism, and they declared that the vote was needed by women now. There is bitterness in the memory of the long struggle for higher education, for ad- mission to the universities and the more envied professions, as the door to independ- ence. In those days every path was equally closed to women. The storming of the Stock Exchange, the entrance into business enter- prises, would surely have demanded no mightier effort than was thrown into the task selected. And not only was the new school education somewhat futile ; it happened that the pioneers plumped for higher education at a time when the value of a university training even for men was already declining. The fact that a man is a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge does not help him in commerce, THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 31 and though the more practical universities have their technical courses it remains doubtful whether from the business stand- point a university is to be regarded as other than a mediaeval survival or a fashionable finishing school. For the doctor, the lawyer, the clergyman, the scientist and the teacher graduation remains necessary ; from two of these professions women are still excluded. Even the politician in these days has little to gain from the university. The scholarly age when Pitt's budget figures were dipped in quotations from the classics has been succeeded by a more natural generation which feels that a Latin line on Mr Balfour's lips is in the worst possible taste in a House thronged by Labour members. To-day the politician's study of industrial and social con- ditions is merely unduly delayed by the study of Liter ce Humaniores. The social worker or local government official will find more in- struction in a few months lived in a Peabody building, or at work in a factory or work- shop, than he will obtain in three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge. The painter, the musician, the actor have little or nothing to learn from an academic training. The modern writer runs a dreadful risk as an undergraduate of having his style and his 32 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM taste ruined for ever by the weekly essay horror, and the isolation from normal human intercourse which is involved in college life often brands upon him that repelling self- consciousness which blunts his observation and drives from him those confidences which feed literature. Most of the more brilliant writers of our time, Mr Shaw, Mr Ford Madox Hueffer, Miss May Sinclair, Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr D. H. Lawrence, have never been to a university. The South Kensington training of Mr H. G. Wells could not dull the experience already gained in a more practical school. And the spectacle of the provocative ideas of an able mind like that of Mr G. D. H. Cole stiffly corseted into the inflexible form of a Balliol essay is an instance of the blighting effect upon letters of academic taste. No, the universities are no longer required to quicken the national life, and they no longer provide the best equipment for those who must work for a living. Just as Mr Winston Churchill turned with a British courage from the Admiralty to landscape painting, so women to-day must realise that they made a false start and must turn from the sweated professions for which gradua- tion fitted them to the wide and opulent THE BUSS-BEALE BLUNDER 33 possibilities of commerce. A degree provided them with an income averaging from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds per annum and side-tracked some of the best feminine brains into a grey and dismal existence of self-repression and overwork for salaries which hardly covered expenses. To study philosophy before one has experienced the need of a philosophy, to collect facts and write essays about the lives and policies of dead people before one under- stands anything about the lives and policies of living people, to study languages and sciences with a complete detachment from practical needs, is at best a rather dithering prelude to a lifetime of bread winning. It is shrilled into a mockery when its benefits are contrasted with the comfortable lives of many West End dressmakers and milliners, women designers and house decorators, who even now are often able to earn an income which not merely is a living but provides scope for the acquisition of knowledge and experience far wider than can possibly be obtained at a university. It is to be hoped that the present emergency which has slightly softened our snobbish- ness and immensely enhanced the value and dignity of manual labour will hurriedly 34 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM close the feminine sheep-walk to the uni- versities. If the majority of the women who in peace would have been sent to universities to gratify the thoughtless ambition of their relatives or to embellish the annual reports of their schools are given a marketable education and a reasonable start in business, there is sound reason to believe that the great Buss-Beale blunder will at last be retrieved and that the economic status of women will be raised within sight of political recognition. But the dreadful consequence of that blunder has been revealed by the complete powerless- ness of women since August 1914 to oppose the general tendency to double their work and halve their pay in the name of patriotism. Ill GETTING EXPERIENCE BEFORE the war there was among feminists a loyalty which forbade criticism. Just as to-day it is felt that criticism of the Govern- ment may help the enemy and discourage our allies, so yesterday it was believed that an honest inquiry into the merits of the suffrage policy would merely brighten the days of Mrs Humphry Ward and give anxious nights to Mr Philip Snowden. But after the war the Foreign Office and the War Office and the Admiralty and the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Munitions will all be shifting nervously from one foot to the other as they stand abashed before the fierce ingratitude of national criticism . And now that there is an interlude of peace in the feminist agitation, it becomes both permissible and necessary to criticise the policy of its pre-war leaders. And first we must altogether refuse to admit that feminism was advanced by mili- tancy. Militancy was a brand of suffragism specially prepared by a tremendous outlay of 35 36 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM money and prayer and inventive genius to tickle the jaded palate of Londoners. And it did tickle it. Mr Israel Zangwill, who is a Jew and therefore a typical Londoner, liked it so much that he could not for the life of him understand how the British public could be moved by anything else. But the fact is that Britain is a place quite a long way from London. The eyes of a horrified London charwoman nearly leapt from her face one day when I told her that I was going the next morning to Yorkshire. " Oh, miss ! " she exclaimed, " I do s ope you'll come to no 'arm in them parts ; my father once went out to Yorkshire as a missionary." She may have been confusing the most complaisantly self- respecting of all the English counties with some cannibal-cursed island in a southern sea, but in the main her knowledge was sound ; it really is a tremendous adventure and a for- midable plunge into the midst of an alien people when a Londoner leaves London and goes into any of the English counties. Frontiers are marked by diverging ideals at least as definitely as by different languages or hostile tariffs. And that London's ideals are not England's is made evident at once by the provincial's scorn and suspicion of the Londoner. A Lancashire man tries hard not GETTING EXPERIENCE 87 to grin when he hears the filtered southern accents ; he guffaws openly at the Londoner's conception of politics and commerce. A Yorkshire woman confesses with shame that her daughter deserved to be unhappy, for in spite of the warnings of her relatives she married a foreigner a Robinson of Camber- well. And the natives of most counties regard Londoners with a faint hostility crimsoned by contempt. When I was a child I thought Londoners the most ludicrous of beings not so much, I think, because they seemed quite hopelessly ignorant about crops and sheep and were afraid of slow-worms, as because I understood that their lungs were smoke-grimed and that my own were a gleaming white. It seemed such a dreadful thing that their lungs weren't decently clean that it followed quite naturally that their ways and opinions were entirely idiotic. I think at the bottom of the provincial distrust of London doctrines there lurks the belief that people who don't know how to disperse their own fogs cannot know much about politics. In any case, there can be little doubt that the provincial has to be de- bauched by election frenzy before he listens to a Londoner's opinions with any warmer feeling than one of intense self-restraint. 38 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM Londoners are foreigners, and Englishmen dislike foreigners. Even people born and bred in the provinces become irredeemably foreigners after they have lived for a few years in Kensington or Golder's Green. For an honest geography book would have to admit that London is located partly in a new Judaea and a good deal in France and to some extent in every other un-Anglican country in the world, but never for a moment in England. And it was just their failure to grasp this perfectly simple and obvious fact that made the Pankhursts imagine that the picture-chopping, Churchill-flogging, window- smashing exploits which gave a tremendous fillip to London conversations would be re- ceived in the provinces also with the welcome reserved for a new Charlie Chaplin film. The constitutional suffragists were never guilty of quite so gross an ignorance of geo- graphy as was revealed by the militants. They even showed an exaggerated regard for small villages in darkest Oxfordshire. They waded through mud and spoke for hours in the rain and nearly died of pneumonia in their passionate desire to convert sleepy squires who said that it was all nonsense, and choleric vicars who thought women were dis- gracing their sex, and highly skilled hedgers GETTING EXPERIENCE 39 who, at the end of a speech on woman's work in local government, inquired how their own position would be affected by this here Insurance Act. It was a work not strictly consistent with their own policy, which located England at Westminster, but it was an inconsistency overflowing with good omens. It showed that though the whole outlook of the militants seemed to be warped by bitterness and an astigmatic loyalty, the constitutional suffragists were still able to see that there was work to be done for woman outside the political struggle. It is true that when they talked of " educating the elector- ate " they meant chiefly that the opinions of men mattered to them at the moment con- siderably more than the opinions of women, and that they intended to devote themselves to the task of persuading voters that women ought to be enfranchised. But in practice they did clearly show that they were con- cerned with far broader matters. The leaders might fix their eyes on political issues, but the rank and file glanced hither and thither at a score of feminine needs that had no real connection with enfranchisement. A gener- ous feminism was continually breaking out through the tight bonds of their suffragism. They were continually discovering in spite 49 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM of themselves that women wanted infinitely more than the vote. And in the last years of the pre-war agitation there was discernible among younger women a growing doubt as to whether the vote gospel were not merely a drug that was swallowed to still the craving for something vitally needed. Now although the pessimist may sit down in a heap and protest that the whole suffrage campaign was dust and din and profited nothing, the progressive optimist will find in the broadening outlook of the constitutional suffragists not only encouragement for the future but also consolation for the past. For while the Pankhursts and their followers over-estimated the influence of London, and consequently hurled themselves and their union right outside the public life of the country, the constitutionalists did contrive, in spite of their mistaken belief in the political campaign, to keep to some extent in sympathy with national thought and to draw some sound conclusions from their knowledge of it. If we admit that the agitation for the vote was from the first an error, it does not follow that no wisdom has been gained from the folly of its experience. The worst sin is not sin but the failure to recover from it, to embody it in a career GETTING EXPERIENCE 41 making for usefulness. The truce from suffrage agitation provided by the war makes it possible for suffragists to digest their past errors and build the body of a decent femin- ism. And when we are tempted to sprinkle ashes on our heads and moan the suffrage years, it is more seemly to remember that without those years women would never have gained a mass of indispensable know- ledge now theirs of the lives and needs and desires of their sex as a whole. Women before the twentieth century were boxed into social classes and professions and oc- cupations. They were exceeding vulgar and genteel. The new fluidity of class, the new good breeding, which are really becoming fairly common among women, have resulted directly from the broader humanity, the wider comprehension of social needs, the deeper sympathy, evolved by the long cam- paign for enfranchisement. These were gains indispensable as a foundation for a reasonable feminism, and with them secured we cannot for a moment admit that the absurdity of the demand for the vote had no compensations. Without the nomadic life of the suffragists a mentally healthy womanhood could hardly have been evolved from the mentally anaemic " lady " of the last generation. 42 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM Through the sin of experience this stupend- ous advance has been made. Women have arrived at a halt where it is possible to take breath and prepare for a steeper climb. And a careful examination of the pre-war mistakes and the pre-war achievements naturally makes it easier to judge what should be the policy of feminists when peace once more switches upon them the limelight. Before the war it was noticeable that there was al- ready a rift between the work-dependent and the communally-supported suffragists. The former were beginning to understand that their deepest interests must in the long run clash with those of their leaders. The class war was eclipsing the sex war, and the rift between the classes can only be widened when the European War is ended and the number of women compelled to earn a living is very formidably increased. There is no reason why the class work-dependent and work-tied should not make use of the class communally-supported and leisured to win them liberty. But the existence of this hostility of interests in the ranks even of apparently united leagues and unions like those of the constitutional suffragists is merely a symptom of the existence among women of swelling needs and desires far GETTING EXPERIENCE 43 mightier than the demands of the political feminists were capable of expressing. The truth is that the suffragists were constantly unearthing needs which at first they had not even suspected. The advantages of the vote steadily paled beside the florid necessities which it was powerless to satisfy. And although the suffragists went on insisting that the remedy they offered for woman's grievances was far and away the best remedy on the market, the mass of women began to feel that if there were no better one there jolly well ought to be. One cannot say that enfranchisement would have no effect upon the economic position of women. One cannot say that it could not be used to better their legal position. But one can say with a strong conviction that since the position, legal, economic and domestic, of women is with such infinite complication the result of cen- turies of tradition and centuries of weakness, it appears in the highest degree unlikely that the vote would prove an adequate tool to raise that position. The talent and charm of Queen Tiy and the devotion of her husband could not raise her throne quite to the level of her lord's in the estimation of tradition- bound sculptors, and the political recognition of women in this country will help them no 44 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM more than Hercules would help the carter if they have not already by their own efforts outside political life broken down the popular opinion of the value of women's work and raised their position by other means. When they have compelled acknowledgment of their economic power, when women employers on the one hand and women's trade unions on the other have become politically formidable, then their entrance into political life will become inevitable. But even then the value of this political advance is likely to be swamped by a flood of social problems of far more moment to women. For year by year the rapidity with which modern civilisation is evolved makes the reformation of the domestic relations of women, of their relation to their husbands and their relation to their children and their work, more urgently neces- sary, and beside this problem the demand for enfranchisement appears curiously trivial. IV THE REDISCOVERY OF THE WORKING MAN EVERY political movement in Britain has rediscovered the working man. From the time of the Black Death his economic value has strained the understanding of statesmen and capitalists, and his enfranchisement, itself a tribute to his indispensable share in the production of wealth, brought the politicians clustering like flies about his more festering grievances. Inevitably he was dis- covered anew by the suffragists. And they discovered him in a new character. Other politicians had been fluttered by his wrongs and pestered by his wants ; the suffragists did not talk to him about his own troubles, but about his Olympian power of helping women. The traditional British workman was transformed into a Perseus, and though he was inclined to stipulate that his own wife and daughters and sisters and aunts and his incapable feminine cousins must on no account have votes, he decidedly rather liked being a hero to other women. And the suffragists 45 46 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM had such a way with them that there were times when he was almost persuaded that for their sakes he really would give up all the advantages which the Liberals were offering him. The militants soon lost interest in the working man. He was, after all, a man, and Miss Christabel Pankhurst therefore regarded him as a natural enemy and a very shady character. But the constitutional suffragists went on delighting in their discovery. They specialised in the conditions of working-class homes, in the food and the drainage and the rent and the state of the roof and the water supply, and prided themselves on their in- timate knowledge of the working-class point of view. They formed an alliance with the Labour Party and believed that their united forces would compel the Government to give the demands of the suffragists precedence to Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment and even to the European complications so elaborately concealed from the electorate. But the initiative of political reforms was no longer with the people. The days of the Reform Bill riots and Chartism had given place to the reign of the expert. To-day a new remedy for social grievances is elaborated by Mr and Mrs Webb and a committee is THE WORKING MAN 47 formed to boom it, and Sir Leo Chiozza Money writes a testimonial, and by-and-by Mr Lloyd George is pleased by the colour and the sparkle of it and goes to the electorate protesting that he is almost certain that it has practically no taste at all and no unpleasant after-effect. And the electorate swallows the medicine hopefully and calls in the other party if it regrets the dose too bitterly. The Labour Party was regarded as a quack by voters whose families had been accustomed to employ the same political doctor genera- tion after generation. A proposal for reform that did not come from the Government or from the Opposition Front Bench appeared to the majority of the electors decidedly frivolous. Quite often they were willing enough to give a theoretical assent to the suffragist dogmas. But it was one thing to sign a petition or join a suffrage society and quite another to vote against one's party. In those pre-war days every voter in the kingdom might have signed a petition for women's enfranchisement and it would still have been possible for Mr Asquith to lie low and say nothing without the smallest fear of weakening his position. The Labour Party, in fact, was of little practical use to the suffragists. It is true 48 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM that the alliance turned an election here and there, increased the expenses of the Liberal Party, and bothered the party agents. But every politician knew that the suffragists could be managed easily enough if only they were kept continually on the jump for benefits just a little above their reach. There was always some Bill to be introduced into Parliament into which a suffrage clause might be inserted, and there was also the hope that unflagging effort might build up a Labour Party strong enough to make the continued refusal of Parliament to enfranchise women impossible. In return for these encourage- ments the constitutional suffragists dedicated themselves to the service of the Labour Party, and that party very properly assumed that even the suffragists must, if they pursued their theories to a logical end, admit that it was more important at the moment to make working men powerful enough to help the suffragists than to make the suffragists powerful enough to turn and rend the working men. This would have been a good enough bargain for a shrewd suffrage leader if the Labour Party had had capable leaders who could secure popularity. But its curious organisation provided as its parliamentary candidates men who were not THE WORKING MAN 49 necessarily supported even by the men who nominated them in their unions, and those members of the party who were acknow- ledged to be the most able and even the most popular were almost consistently de- barred from leadership. This watered down enthusiasm for Labour candidates inside the party as well as outside it, and the dearth of experienced organisers and skilled canvassers often made the Labour Party's share in elections a sad fiasco. It was here that the alliance with the suffragists proved of enormous benefit to Labour. Women's reverence for detail and their diabolical skill in election tricks and evasions were just what were needed by a party as careless as it was unsophisticated, and of even greater value to a party peculiarly prone to wrangles and vituperation was the tolerably high standard of platform calm and public dignity introduced by the con- stitutional suffragists. And though the popular hatred of militancy sometimes brought into disrepute a party allied with suffragists, and much precious time had to be wasted at elections in explaining that the suffragists in question were law-abiding, I think that disadvantage was outweighed by the help given to Labour by feminine oratory. 50 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM It was not merely that a woman politician was still a slightly mysterious and even miraculous apparition and roused curiosity. There was among suffragists a very creditable level of speech-making, and, apart from some of those leaders who were Members of Parlia- ment, it was difficult for the Labour Party to put into the field at any election more than three or four speakers who could hold an audience against the counter-attraction of a threatening Ulsterman or a Nationalist with an incredible brogue. And in constituencies where the Labour Party were as unknown as the suffragists the tact, the wit, the personal charm and serenity of many of the latter often secured a welcome for their allies from audiences which would have been implacably hostile to a platform composed solely of Labour men. These were the main advantages of the alliance for the Labour Party. For its ad- vantages to the suffragists one must look behind appearances. It was unpopular with most of the rank and file. It was formed at a moment of despair. Nothing had come of the leaders' attempts to persuade the Con- servative and Liberal parties to adopt the suffrage cause. The Labour Party seemed to many the sole hope of continuance for the THE WORKING MAN 51 political campaign of the feminists ; in point of fact it was the only veil remaining for the inconvenient truth that that campaign had failed. But though the leaders went into the alliance eagerly and most hopefully, it was so distasteful to many of the anti- socialists in the ranks that in many districts the suffragist speakers and organisers who elsewhere created an appearance of loyalty to it hardly dared even to mention its exist- ence to their supporters. The leaders had rushed the constitutionalists into a position which might appear to be an electioneering gain but was certainly far in advance of the convictions of their followers. And for mere beginners in politics the Labour Party was an indiscreet Melbourne. Trade unionism was rightly its primary concern, and its know- ledge of industrial regulations was expert. But no better than an engineering expert can wield the tools of M. Rodin could its knowledge of industrial organisation guide its judgment when it considered the organisa- tion of colonies and dependencies, of foreign relations and the Imperial defences. War compels the admission that it would be a disaster if the control of South Africa were in the hands of the existing South African Labour Party, and when some of the more 52 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM able English Labour men, who have habitu- ally preached that our House of Lords con- sists principally of worthless parasites, seem nevertheless to think that clean streets and good housing must evolve from German workers a heavenly choir, less locally minded socialists reluctantly perceive that English Labour as a whole has not yet outgrown the political outlook of the town council. Closely associated with the Labour Party, many of the leading suffragists became tainted with the belief that peace can be maintained or created by the mere love of it. The approach of war found them scurrying like distracted ants whose ant-hill has been ruthlessly trampled. There is no reason to suppose that the bestowal of the vote upon yet larger numbers of peace-lovers would have been any guarantee of peace even supposing that the majority of women are less eager for war than men. A complete democracy would have been as helpless to prevent war as the existing andrarchy proved itself. But a pacif- ism of the heart rather than of the head had seized the emotions of many of the suffrage leaders and had weakened their influence. They had tried to squeeze feminism into the uniform of Labour opinions and the buttons were bursting. THE WORKING MAN 53 Yet, though the alliance with Labour did not help the suffragists as they had expected, and definitely injured them in ways of which they had not dreamt, its benefit to feminism will probably prove real and lasting. The rediscovery of the working man was for the constitutional suffragists a very genuine dis- covery, and their research would never have succeeded without the alliance with the Labour Party. They did not merely use their allies to further political aims ; they formed with them friendships which it is no exaggera- tion to describe as a national benefit. For in this country class prejudices have always been serious obstacles in the path of progress, and women more persistently than men have set them there. " Our women cling to social pride more closely than do men," warbled the incorrigibly metrical soul of good old Martin Tupper with that adhesion to platitude which is almost always convincing. But their social pride has been languishing for years. To-day it is amusing to hear of the English- woman who, having been rescued from a position of some danger during the Terror by Robespierre, ever afterwards spoke grate- fully of the creature as " a pleasant young man who knew his station." It must be rare in these days to find even women who are 54 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM more conscious of a great man's origin than of his greatness. Success in these days stirs the most worshipping depths of our snobbish- ness. It is for those who add to the passive sin of obscure origin the active crime of per- petual absence from Who's Who that the successful and the unsuccessful, the man born in the splendour of a soap king's palace and the humbly cradled daughter of a provincial retail grocer, alike reserve their patronage. Here and there one discovers fragments of the crumbled reverence for birth. A Scottish friend of mine who is a chauffeur confided to me recently that " he trusted he was nae snob, but he was fair ashamit to be seen wi' his employer's wife, for she wasna a lady." But in general the appearance of snub noses among royalties and the unsettled contro- versy between heredity and environment have destroyed the old belief in the magical influ- ence of quarterings, and the ideal of the Lady has been declining this long while. What feeds snobbishness now is the unacknow- ledged but quite prevalent notion that the stationary members of the " lower classes " are people not merely of straitened oppor- tunities but of despicable aspirations and an inhumanly dull outlook people whose un- developed intelligences are hardly potential THE WORKING MAN 55 minds at all, since ability like bad air always floats upwards. It is a notion that assumes that there is a working-class point of view of public affairs, that working men and working women can be neatly pigeon-holed as a dozen definite types, that the earnest politician and the ambitious curate and the benevolent lady sumptuously furred and hatted can learn by district visiting all that there is to be learned of the needs and desires of an inferior branch of humanity. If she were alive to-day, the snob who patronised Robespierre would be proud to meet Mr Lloyd George and Sir F. E. Smith, she would listen to Mr Thomas Hardy with awe and to Maxim Gorky with animation, and Mr Andrew Carnegie would seem to her one of the finest achievements of laissez-faire economy. But on a committee of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Associa- tion her ungovernable snobbishness would break out anew in her attitude to women and men hopelessly confined to the " lower orders." The quickest cure ever devised for this modern snobbishness was that taken by the constitutional suffragists when they allied themselves with the Labour Party. Many of those who disliked the alliance found them- selves gradually forced into an attitude of 56 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM comradeship towards working men. There was, for instance, a fastidious Anglo-Indian fresh from the university who nearly fainted with horror when she found that she was expected to sit on a Labour platform with a working man on each side of her. Yet within a year she was revelling in the alliance and was proud to be the guest of working-class families. And when the tenderly nurtured suffragist who had to share a bed with a hospitable miner's wife heard her hostess debating whether it was necessary to wash below the neck more than six times a year, she emerged from the shock with a fierce anger against that national careless- ness of health which makes shirked cleanliness inevitable in villages where all the water has to be fetched from a distant pump. The old notion of some inherent difference in nature between the classes, a notion carefully pre- served by the Victorian women, faded away before a growing intimacy, before the know- ledge that working men had much the same ambitions, the same discontents, the same desires, the same longing to see their wives made beautiful by leisure and the skill of the smart dressmaker, as the best of those known as their betters. Even such a trifle as the anxiety of a weaver to keep her shapely hands soft and white and her precaution of THE WORKING MAN 57 wearing gloves when she cleaned her loom struck at the heart of the old theory that those warped by toil should be humbly con- tent with the warping conditions of their labour. It was the workers' surging revolt against the denial of things that make existence life, their hunger for knowledge and their desire for leisure and their intention to have both, that gave the death-blow to the middle-class snobbishness of the suffragist. It is true that the Labour men of whom they saw most were no more typical of the working classes than are the Fabians of the middle classes. But if many of the Labour men were the cranks of their class, it was none the less true that by breaking away from the traditional acquiescence in suppression they had dragged into daylight some of the potentialities of their kind. And by making the suffragists realise these things they did more for them than their allies quite realised. Women's snobbish desire to cling to a more prosperous class, their snobbish fear of openly rebelling against it, has always been one of the causes of the low remuneration of their work. Many of them learnt from their Labour allies that there is only one class division that counts in modern life, and that that is one very little 58 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM affected by birth and education. It is the division between the income that depends upon an employer's caprice and the income that is dependent upon one's own enterprise and ability or the enterprise and ability of a husband or father or other male supporter. Before the war the large number of suffragists whose income belonged to the first category were steadily tending to make common cause with the more progressive members of the working class. And there can be little doubt that that tendency will be yet more notice- able after the war, when the number of middle- class women dependent upon employers will be increased beyond all expectation. The middle-class dislike of trade unionism will be crushed under the weight of personal necessity, and middle-class women will join with working-class women in making women's unions capable both of defence and ot aggression. THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY THOUGH from the very beginnings of civilisa- tion the lives of the mass of women have been moulded on the ideal of the Lady, there has never with the sole exception of Madame de Maintenon been any woman of dominat- ing personality who conformed to it. One cudgels history in vain for some hint of a second lady among the great women it records. Cleopatra drilled with the Roman legionaries, romped with Antony in disguise in the slums of her capital, beat the watch, drank as no lady should. Boadicea and Joan of Arc were soldiers whom no historian has accused of the conventionality insepar- able from the Lady's disciples, arid from Messalina and the Byzantine empresses to the Dowager Empress of China great empress consorts have been frankly adventuresses. Isabella of Castile, the Lord Kitchener of the fifteenth century, devoted herself to military organisation with a vigour and ability which our veneration for the late War Secretary 59 60 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM forbids us to describe as ladylike. St Teresa in a different sphere revealed rather similar qualities with a similar lack of gentility, and not one inch of our foul-mouthed Queen Elizabeth was a lady, though every inch was a queen. Christina of Sweden wore masculine dress and behaved like an Alsatian bully, and Catherine II. 's little habit of removing her enemies would surely have denied her the entree to the drawing-room of any lady that really was a lady. The name of Maria Teresa makes us pause for a moment, but Maria Teresa was a discreet chooser of tools and the mother of a remarkable son rather than herself a great personality, and no one since the publication of her letters has sus- pected Queen Victoria of ability. With these examples or warnings balefully lighting the pages of history, it is hardly surprising that in our own time some of the most carefully bred women have shouted down Cabinet ministers and scrimmaged with policemen at the gates of Buckingham Palace. We are forced to conclude that there is a natural hostility between mental ability and the ideal of the Lady, and that the recent renais- sance of feminine brains created an unkindly atmosphere for an ideal that is cretinous. Yet in her prime the Lady delicately THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY 61 sympathetic, alluringly reticent, consistently courteous and skilfully environed, lightly ac- complished in half-a-dozen of the pleasanter arts and conscientiously more beautiful than God had made her was an ideal altogether enchanting. But then so is the lovely Circassian, bred charmingly from her infancy to be the light of some good man's harem. And both are exceedingly expensive. The costliness of the Lady is one of the chief reasons why alert-witted people should re- joice that she is now breaking up. We may heartily recognise that she has been an economic benefit in the past, that her caprices were an incentive to industrial enterprise and a yet greater service to thought, that they brought the West into touch with the material and intellectual treasures of the East ; that in its search for spices and jewels and silks and cosmetics, commerce incidentally dis- covered raw materials of infinite value to industry and discovered also the Oriental sciences and philosophies which quickened the slow wits of the mead-swilling Europeans. We may acknowledge that society owes gratitude to the Lady for helping the trouba- dours to create in the midst of the crude- ness of Western mediaeval society a decent standard of manners, and for afterwards 62 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM maintaining it. We may admit that it owes her a yet greater debt for having provided a market for the wares of the artist. But in an age when good manners are fairly common in most classes and a love of beautiful things is found even in Bournemouth, when there is little of the world that is not explored, and the products of each country are known, and science and commerce and art are all inde- pendent of the Lady's greed, society is hardly bound to pension her for past services. Indeed, society is becoming dolefully aware that in these days the Lady is an anachron- ism ; worse, that her greed, undisciplined by declining years, is a serious menace. The Lancashire mill-girls who think that no woman can be a lady if she has a thread of white cotton sticking to her coat are essenti- ally right ; the Lady never worked for a living. The power to maintain her in luxuri- ous idleness has always marked a man's success in finance or commerce, and the immensity of her demand for luxuries has been the heart of innumerable industrial problems. Behind all the dust of the conflict between labour and capital looms the Gar- gantuan appetite of the Lady. " Gallantry," says Mr Edgar Saltus in his Love Throughout the Ages, " was the direct cause of the French THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY 68 Revolution. The people, bled to death to defray the amours of the great, sent in their bill." But the respectable matron is often no less exacting than the courtesan. Many a well-meaning employer must have been forced by the demands of a costly wife and costlier daughters to sweat his employees. Nor does the evil economic influence of the Lady end at that. In a life whose labours are the toils of social entertainment, she has had leisure to stimulate her own greed till she has enormously increased the cost of marriage. Women maintained by husbands and fathers have competed with each other in the adornment of themselves and their homes and the cost of their entertainments till they have made marriage a burden which a man hesitates to shoulder in early life ; and if there is indeed a formidable White Slave Traffic women should ask themselves whether they have not increased the demand for prostitutes by forcing men to remain bachelors who in a less extravagant society would have been eager to marry. And the most courtly old gallant would find it hard to deny that supported women have hobbled the activities of women work-dependent by raising the cost of their clothes, perpetually changing the fashions, and demanding a greater attention 64 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM to their wardrobes than is really consistent with good work. It is not merely because the price of food and clothes has for many years been rising, but far more because the Lady's caprices have continually increased the sartorial demands of various social occasions, that women's pay is becoming from year to year increasingly inadequate. These crimes and the employment of an indefensible quantity of labour in unpro- ductive industries are perhaps the sum of the economic evil that the Lady has wrought. But she has other sins upon her soul. The chief of them and it is the greater that includes a score of less is her subservience to authority. It is not at all astonishing that, although Miss Maude Royden and the Church Suffrage League rubbed the frigid minds of bishops into a faint glow of approval, feminism has been detested from its beginnings by all the slow-witted folk whose brains are frozen by an unreasoning veneration for Law-and-Order. For the Lady was so confirmed a worshipper of this deity that there was born of her a fiction that to fail to bow the knee before It was un- womanly as well as unladylike. Her power to enforce her conventions was always prodigious. The writer recalls how at the THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY 65 university, where it might have been sup- posed that the unshackling of women would have been a popular pastime, women students and women dons alike lived in perpetual fear of shocking a curious body of opinion vaguely known as " North Oxford." It was never discovered in the flesh, but it was understood to consist of the pussy element in dons' wives backed by the coerced support of their husbands. And although it would clearly have proved the salvation of " North Oxford," though a new liberality of thought might have spread from it to the Hebdomadal Council and in widening circles to British literature and politics, if women students had persistently shocked that opinion every day for a term, it is a dreadful fact that half the delightful and natural and wholesome things that every decently-minded woman student wanted to do were forbidden and prevented by nothing on earth but a cowardly fear of "North Oxford." In Oxford, to be sure, the Lady was incarnated in the exaggerated forms of mediaeval society. But her con- straining influence there is none the less characteristic of her pernicious and numbing effect upon the development of feminine thought. It is a just and mild observation that but for the idolatry of the Lady the 66 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM chief battles of feminism might have been won long ago. It was her snobbishness, her cringing admiration of masculine achieve- ments, her contempt for economic triumphs, that turned the feminist forces into the political quagmire. It was the desire to retain her favour that made thousands of " gentlewomen " content to drudge for mean pay instead of making common cause with women equally work-dependent who had the honesty to regard themselves as working women. It was the paralysing worship of gentility and Law-and-Order that made such " gentlewomen " refuse to have anything to do with trade unionism. And it is perfectly true that the break-up of the Lady is an essential prelude to the economic advance of women. There must be in them that robust- ness of mental fibre which the great women in history have proved incompatible with gentility before their opinions can acquire a driving force. But the Lady's subservience to authority has not merely prevented economic progress. It has prevented women from taking the part which society has a right to expect them to take in the world's mental activity. They have, for instance, contributed practically nothing to the world's moral thought. They THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY 67 have warbled in the manner of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox or moralised in the manner of Miss Ellen Key, but their efforts have really amounted to nothing but an echo or an analysis of the opinions of their favourite poets or priests or professors or politicians. When they refuse to worship spent traditions as the Lady commands them to worship they will transform into a progressive force the feminine opinion which is now a dead weight of conservatism. A lady without sub- servience, without a deep pool of stagnating prejudices, without a horror of natural im- pulses and a blood-thirsty, newspaper-evoked desire to tear the Kaiser limb from limb and a spontaneous conviction that in any strike the employees alone are to blame, is an unthinkable phenomenon. The Lady's pre- judices have always blocked the path of the reformer. Loathsomely she has kissed the feet of decaying religions and moralities and political dogmas, of putrescent faiths of every kind. She has not known, or has not cared, that honest, individual, continuous thought is the only real morality, that independent thought, independent religion or philosophy whatever you prefer to call the guiding rule of an individual's life is one of the most urgent needs of modern existence. Half the 68 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM emotions of youth and half its mental efforts are often wasted in a protracted attempt to fit into other people's dogmas because the idolatry of the Lady proclaims the propriety of doing so, and decent-minded young women frequently spend so large a period of their more intelligent years in discarding these painfully acquired philosophies that they have no time to invent or deduct a satis- factory religion of their own. It is only when the last remnants of their fervent devotion to authority are destroyed, and a fine disorder takes its place in their minds, that women will be capable of the creative anarchy which will evolve a sane rule for women. Until women as well as men are spurring unhobbled minds towards the wider knowledge and clearer perception which make for an intelligently ordered community, there can be no order but the order of restraint and hypocrisy. It would be a shame in the midst of a Nature notoriously thrifty to assert that the activities of the militant suffragists were entirely useless, and it is pleasant to be able to admit that their campaign undoubtedly helped to break up the Lady. By making the Cabinet and the magistrates and the law ridiculous, by treating bishops with marked disrespect and heartily defying public opinion, THE BREAK-UP OF THE LADY 69 they did nothing to advance woman's suffrage, but they forced thousands of women who had never considered such matters before to reflect whether the law were equitable, whether the Church were moral, and whether public opinion really mattered a twopenny damn. And since such reflection is a sword plunged into the Lady's heart, it is an indispensable prelude to a sane feminism. VI A BIRD IN THE HAND RECENTLY an ex-hunger-striker, smartly clad in the uniform of a woman constable, button- holed me on the stairs of my club and urged me to proceed at once to a meeting at which Miss Darner Dawson was to explain the work of the new policewomen. With precisely the same fanatical gleam in her eye with which formerly she implored people to come to hear Mrs Pankhurst, she assured me that if I would listen to her chief for only five minutes it would be infinitely worth while. This absorption of a militant suffragist in a comparatively narrow and unsensational work of civic usefulness seemed another proof of the opportunity provided by the war to make feminism more muscular. The war has headed the whole movement into byways which may yet prove a short cut to the vote. It has turned the mass of feminists into activities which, wisely used, may, through the increased responsibility which in war time is involved in women's work, be an 70 A BIRD IN THE HAND 71 invaluable preparation for enfranchisement. For some years before August 1914 many feminists had begun to realise that there was, after all, some truth in the anti- suffragist assertion that suffragists neglected the powers and opportunities they already possessed. The formation of the Women's Municipal Party was practically an admis- sion that the agitation for parliamentary enfranchisement had swamped the work of organising and educating women municipal voters. But it took a duchess to make the new league popular. One of the central causes of the long neglect of municipal politics was snobbishness. Educated women disliked mixing with the small tradesmen who in Britain form the majority of mayors, alder- men and councillors. And since feminism in its beginnings was the desire of a handful of ambitious, intellectual women for a status equal to that of the men of their own class, it was natural that these women should wish to meet educated men on their own ground imperial politics. Personal ambition and vanity and the pernicious influence of the Lady combined to prevent them from wield- ing one of the most handy tools at their dis- posal to gain the greater power they desired. It is under the sobering influence of the 72 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM war that Englishwomen of ability have be- come less ambitious, less snobbish, and more public-spirited. They have been content to renounce more sensational activities and de- vote themselves to humbler works which are building a far surer foundation for the future of feminism. The pre-war plea that women interested in local government found their efforts para- lysed by the lack of the parliamentary vote was specious but unsound. It was the suffrage movement that was crippled by the absence of any thorough organisation of the municipal vote. To organise it with com- pleteness would have been a tedious under- taking, and the organisers would not have been invested with any national celebrity. This is not an assertion that before the forma- tion of the Women's Municipal Party there were absolutely no attempts to rouse the women voters from their apathy. Miss Eleanor Rathbone, Miss Margaret Ashton, Mrs Stanbury, and many other well-known public- spirited women devoted much of their time and ability to the task of creating among women a deeper interest in local government. Individual women had long been actively interested. There were women guardians, women councillors, earnestly absorbed in A BIRD IN THE HAND 73 their public duties. But there was in Britain nothing that in the least resembled that patiently, minutely constructed network of clubs and associations which has made in America a science of women's local govern- ment activities and of the suffrage agitation a broadening success. It must be remembered that the powers conferred upon women by enfranchisement in many American states are little wider than those already theoretically possessed in this country by the woman municipal voter. But in some states the political power is great enough to enable them to introduce laws of a formidable and probably even dangerous character. They have been able, for instance, to pass a law forbidding the issue of marriage certificates in cases where either party to the marriage is unable to pro- duce a certificate of good health a law which bluntly ignores the medical uncer- tainty as to whether the heritage of some of the most shunned diseases may not even be a mental stimulus. And it is generally admitted to have been through feminine in- fluence that the law was passed which forbids a man to travel with a woman to whom he is not married. But however unbaked some of the feminist legislation of the States may be, 74 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM there can be no doubt that, with powers on the whole very little superior to those of Englishwomen, American women have effected far more important reforms. An admirable handbook recently published, Mrs Mary Ritter Beard's Woman's Work in Muni- cipalities, presents a wonderful record of the work of women in American cities. With in- finite attention to detail they have organised to provide the best conditions for infant wel- fare, to secure pure milk, pure food, pure water, clean streets, the abatement of smoke and noise, the sanitary removal and destruc- tion of garbage, the break-up of congested areas and the improvement of housing conditions. They have forced reluctant authorities to make artesian wells in dis- tricts almost destitute of a water supply. They have compelled the provision of public baths and public laundries. They have intro- duced state pensions for poor mothers. They have secured prison reforms of a revolution- ary character. They have had appointed in connection with the state schools visiting teachers to see that the intelligence of the pupils is not being handicapped by home conditions, and vocational guidance visitors to direct the child during his schooldays and after he goes to work. They have interested A BIRD IN THE HAND 75 the children in housing conditions and in the maintenance of clean streets, and have used boy scouts and ardent schoolgirls to watch for any infringement of the housing laws and to create even in the poorest districts a feeling that it is bad form to throw orange peel or waste paper on pavements or road- way. No detail connected with public wel- fare has been held unworthy of American women's housewifely attention. They have formed an "American Posture League" to demand the healthiest type of desks in schools and of seats in street cars, theatres, and other public places and so secure " the correct posture or carriage of the body as of funda- mental importance for health and efficiency," and by their " Press expose " of the common fly they left that dangerous insect without a leg to stand on. They have co-ordinated their social welfare activities by opening bureaux for the collection and analysis of information. And in Denver, two years ago, they were powerful enough to end a civil war between capital and labour by insisting upon federal intervention. Many of these activities are of a kind already undertaken by Englishwomen. But in Britain they are not undertaken with the same thoroughness, precisely because 76 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM enthusiasm for local government exists here only among small groups of women. Among us it has not been patiently fanned and fed till it has burst into a steady flame. To be sure, there are half-a-dozen reasons for our comparative indifference. American women have not been caught up as have most public- spirited Englishwomen into political parties, and they have therefore had more freedom to combine for local government purposes. And in Britain the disfranchisement of most married women debars from local politics a great army of capable women and weakens their enthusiasm for reforms. But the suffrage societies must nevertheless be blamed for having absorbed into a movement which accomplished little thousands of women who might, through local government, not only have secured important social reforms, but also have immensely strengthened feminism. The systematic education of women muni- cipal voters and their enrolment into clubs and associations strong through union would probably have secured the parlia- mentary vote long ago. Again and again in those wonderful times before the war one found that it was when suffragists revealed an intimate knowledge of housing abuses or the need of local government reforms to A BIRD IN THE HAND 77 secure infant welfare that working men were most easily persuaded to support the demand for women's suffrage. Nothing could be more convincing of women's fitness for parlia- mentary enfranchisement than a widespread technical knowledge among them of such questions as the management of municipal property, the principles of municipal taxa- tion, the provision of pure food and pure milk at reasonable prices, and the principles of town planning. There is a fluffiness about the public spirit of Englishwomen which seems to be quite absent from their American sisters. The American woman sets to work in the most practical way to realise her ideals . Mrs Beard tells us of one enthusiast who has made a practical study of municipal engin- eering, and of another who in her campaign for pure milk " made a close study of dealers, delivery, refrigeration, balanced rations for cows, care of cows, process of milking, soils in relation to cost of production, and many other phases of the problem. She did field work as well as laboratory work, and is justly entitled to the name of expert." And the American woman who wishes to secure the sanitary destruction of garbage is advised to choose a bright spring day and invite the " city fathers " to drive with her to the 78 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM outskirts of the town to look at the garbage heaps. But now that the suffrage agitation has been shelved by the war, Englishwomen have in their hands a profoundly important oppor- tunity of remedying their past omissions. Intelligent and public-spirited local govern- ment is steadily becoming more vital to national welfare. Under the narrowing in- fluence of war economy it is perhaps one of the few methods left to us of maintaining a decent standard of living. For though up to the present it may appear that that standard has not been perceptibly lowered, it is evident that, since any period of wide- spread distress caused by the war may very probably begin with the peace, it is likely enough that the renouncement of pre-war habits of comfort will become more and more necessary among all those classes which the war has not enriched. If the local authorities follow suit and in a short-sighted passion for retrenchment curtail their public benefits, the effects of this general economy upon the physical and mental welfare of the nation may be far from thrifty. It is to maintain thrifty methods of public economy that women municipal voters whose zeal has been educated are more than ever needed to-day. A BIRD IN THE HAND 79 No one, however, who has canvassed women municipal voters in English cities can fail to know that they are, on the whole, unpromising material. A very large pro- portion of them are widows bewildered by sudden accession to a vote in old age. They have not been accustomed to take an interest in municipal affairs, and they prefer to use their vote only at the bidding of some male relative. But this merely goes to show how widespread is the need of a systematic civic training. Not only the women who already have a vote but all who may some day be enfranchised should be urged to join non- party clubs and associations whose aim is social betterment. They should be advised to arrange courses of lectures on municipal economics. They should agitate for better housing conditions and the control of the suburbs in the interests of health and beauty. They should aim boldly at Utopian cities in which the streets will be as clean as a Dutch housewife's kitchen and where factories and warehouses and offices will all be banished to garden suburbs, so that in the clean and airy central districts people may live in inexpen- sive houses within easy reach of amusements and educational centres. They should enlist the enthusiasm of children, as American 80 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM women have done, in keeping the streets clean even under present conditions. All over London there are poor districts where the streets are strewn with paper and banana skins and orange skins and even with garb- age far more continuously than the authori- ties can sweep them, and in dry weather the wind whirls the dust and rubbish into every house. The women's local government as- sociations should endeavour to create in such districts a zeal for tidiness. They should agi- tate to prevent after the war the restoration of those electric sky signs which formerly made a nightmare of the leisure hours when cities should be most beautiful. They should clamour as persistently as before the war women clamoured for the vote for more and better endowed municipal polytechnics, for trade schools in all our great cities, for a vigilant care of the nation's children outside as well as inside the schools. They should interest themselves in the management of workhouses and county asylums and in- firmaries, in the profitable organisation of small holdings. It may be true that their public power for good will be vastly greater when they are enfranchised, but the feeble- ness of the bird in the hand has not been as yet completely demonstrated. A BIRD IN THE HAND 81 These, then, are some of the less sensa- tional activities which are open to the political abilities of women even in war time, and it may very possibly prove to be in war time that the value of those abilities is great- est. The men who formed the rank and file of the most progressive movements have been swept into the army. They have to rely upon women not to let those movements perish. They themselves may return with dead enthusiasms and maimed ideals. In civic life, as in the munitions factories, the diluting of labour by women is essential if national prosperity is to survive the war. To the men who come back with wounded spirits and scarred hopes women must point out the glory of the old visions, and if our soldiers return too weary for the old struggles women will have to fight for progress alone. But they must organise now to take their part in " the war of all the ages." They must make themselves politically formidable. And the basis of political power, even under the most centralised system of government, is always in the municipality. VII SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS THERE was a deep cleavage among suffragists between the old and the young. The old were women who had concealed their suffer- ings in youth and had nervously whispered their complaints in middle age, until at last they impetuously gave tongue. They were women who might be vulgar for a cause and in the exalted spirit of martyrdom (and quite frequently were), yet remained essentially ladies or " ladylike." Recently a young Turkish woman medical student declared that her modesty could never accustom itself to the necessity of going about London un- veiled. There was something of this purdah spirit lingering in the older suffragists. It was hardly possible for a younger and more natural generation to understand the tremend- ous courage that had been needed before their elders could publicly voice their grievances. A gulping defiance in many of their actions, a twittering eagerness to prove a neck-to- neck equality with men, demonstrated still 82 SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 83 the conscious fear of unseemliness in their new self-assertion, a dread that after all they might regret the old narrowness of their domestic seclusion, might find themselves too delicately fashioned for the jostling life of a wider experience. And the gentility of their minds shrank from much that for a later generation was part of the essential tissue of feminism. They stood for freedom, for an individual development strengthened by service, and the pioneers of their move- ment had declared that the path to that freedom and that development lay through higher education and political enfranchise- ment. So the older generation fixed their minds on the vote, basing their demand for it upon the intellectual ability of their sex to understand Acts of Parliament and our com- plicated system of local government. They ignored with a brazen decorum the more revolutionary claims that feminism involved. Yet across memories of suffragist meetings, suffragist deputations and lectures, street rows and mass demonstrations and the de- pression of house-to-house propaganda, float recollections of very frequent discussions with older suffragists of the more sordid problems of sex. There were women who pierced their veil of gentility with a disquiet- 84 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM ing hint, women who flung it aside to display a lamentable and astounding picture of their married life, women whose experiences re- vealed a tragic misunderstanding of those kindly-faced men who were their husbands. And a memory comes of a pallid invalid who raised her head from her pillow to whisper that her wedding night had been a dreadful revelation to her, and that she would never have married if she had known the true meaning of marriage. She had determined that her younger sister must be saved from a similar ignorance, and had made a long journey to tell her, on the eve of her marriage, " the essential facts." And her sister had passed a sleepless night and had had hysterics in church and had separated from her husband six months later. These were the women who crammed their shelves with pamphlets on venereal diseases, who suspected all their male acquaintances of harbouring a venereal taint, who hounded on the clergy to hold " purity " meetings in every big town, who collected stories of that White Slave Traffic whose truth is now buried fathoms deep beneath a surge of legends. These were the women who re- garded the majority of men as conscious and wilful oppressors, the women who smiled with SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 85 a tender gratitude upon the co-educated youths who confessed to them that " men were such beasts." They were the women who thought of love as a dangerous explosive and flirtation as a path by a precipice, the women for whom the beginning of war sug- gested principally the dreadful possibility of a rising birth-rate and who, with a vulgarity surpassing the unreflecting impertinence of Maurice d'Esparvieu's guardian angel in La Revoke des Anges, hurried into the shadowy haunts of modest lovers their accusing flashlights. And then there were the elderly and middle-aged spinsters, and those women who before the outbreak of war were classified by the youngest suffragists as " the suffragists in the thirties." Many of these were women oppressed by an indecent modesty. There was one typical, I think, of a large section of them who declared that she had never married because marriage had always seemed to her a little unmaidenly, and another in much the same spirit had virtuously avoided all possibility of a proposal of marriage by hastily leaving a room whenever she found herself alone in it with a man who was not a relative. Others were torn between a rever- ent belief in a haloed maternity and a sense 86 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM of some taint of indecency in parenthood, and some, still holding these dreadful opinions, were eventually tempted into marriage by social vanity or economic in- security. All of them both the wives with a grievance and the complaisant spinsters believed very sincerely that marriage must always be a sexual sacrifice for women, a union which gives happiness only through worldly comforts and motherhood. From all these women the younger suffra- gists were definitely separated by sharp differ- ences of outlook. They were less certain of the potency of the vote. They were inclined to value the suffrage agitation principally because it provided a platform for the ventila- tion of their own pet reforms. It advanced socialism or school clinics or schools for mothers or endowment of motherhood ; soon it would blast the barriers to a freedom that really mattered. They regarded enfranchise- ment as a mere prelude to the feminism which would secure for women an economic independence on which sexual independence would naturally base itself. They saw that sexual problems were the core of feminism. They had no desire to shirk their solution. They had no intention of hustling them out of sight behind the discussion of adult versus SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 87 householder's suffrage. Problems which for the veterans were the mere froth of the agitation seemed to many of the new recruits its chief concern. Their attack was especi- ally directed against those conventions which Mr Shaw and Mr Wells had seized by the scruff and shaken to the glory of woman- hood. Mr Shaw and Mr Wells remained, however involuntarily, the apostles of the new feminism. Young women at the uni- versities pored over their works and at last came out into the world earnestly convinced that there was something certainly wonderful and possibly glorious about this mystery called sex and that it was their business to discover it. Usually they had heard nothing about it at home or at school or at college. (Perhaps it is hardly understood how little the average school or university girl discusses such matters.) Some of them went to the British Museum with large notebooks like those they had been accustomed to take to university lectures, and soulfully took notes of books chosen quite without system on physiology and certain branches of medical science. Others who were occupied in social work learnt much from the sexual woes of the poor. And some who still cherished a university-bred enthusiasm for the suffrage 88 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM cause discovered that, whether they sold papers in the streets or canvassed house- holders or addressed meetings, they were certain to have stories of erotic troubles poured out to them by suffering women, and not seldom by men. Questions of sex were continually dashed against their conscious- ness ; it was impossible to escape them. It was clear that they were questions which leapt from the widespread urgency of a blurred happiness and an irritating dis- satisfaction rather than from any flayed misery. But just because happiness seemed so often to have been narrowly missed by a bumpkin stupidity, it appeared to these earnest young women their business to dis- cover how this stupidity could be enlightened. Yet there lingered even among the young- est suffragists some of the earlier prudery. Even among them there were some who saw in sex nothing but degradation for women, who thought love disgusting and the most thoroughly married motherhood a fall from virtue. Groping for knowledge, obtaining seasoned instruction only from women who were embittered or cranks, they arrived often at the conclusion that the honour of women could be maintained only by life-long celi- bacy and a stern rivalry of intellect with the SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 89 hostile sex. They tried to forget the scan- dalous fact that women sometimes bore children. Hotly opposed to these extremists of the right wing of the new feminists were the wild spirits of the extreme left. One met them in every suffragist league and union and society. In spite of the reticence which hid their opinions from the old, they created a vague uneasiness among the leaders. To the young they were more frank. They flaunted their insurgency. The first stages of ac- quaintance brought the most intimate con- fidences. There comes a memory of a fiery young woman who, after a week of indefinite and unrevealing acquaintance, gripped the writer's arm and murmured in the most thrilling tones of a rich contralto : " If I'm co-respondent in a divorce case next month, will you stand up for me ? " And she twisted a glorified wedding ring on her fourth finger and vowed that she was a wife in the sight of God. Yet it seemed that in the sight of God she had been married at least once previously. There had been tramps abroad in a heaven- observed union. She seemed to hold that only temporary and unlegalised unions were popular in heaven. She thundered her scorn of " the mere trade union of married women, 90 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the strongest and most anti-social trade union in the world." There was another young suffragist who had a habit of telegraphing to friends deeply involved in social or political engagements entreaties to go with her to a play and afterwards upbraiding them for having left her in the lurch of a sin-compelling boredom. And there was one very ardent and distinguished suffragist an older woman whose sympathies somehow placed her in the younger generation whose flat was a bureau of advice to lovers. There were conversa- tions there which were a brilliant review of the love affairs of the young women of her circle. Evenings with her suggested a Salvation Army meeting. In turn all who had been converted to " free love " testified, while the unconverted lighted another cigar- ette and greatly marvelled. It was a seance of confidences. There were few questions that were not permissible, few histories that roused disapproval. At intervals a new- comer would introduce a friend to the hostess with the mystic explanation, " She is one of us," or, " She wants to know about things." And in the firelight the ruggedly respectable face of the shrivelled little hostess glowed with the academic earnestness of her desire to instruct. One learnt there that though SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 91 the tragic end of Laura Grey might be un- usual, her career was typical of the lives of large numbers of young women of education and charm. But I think the greater number of the younger suffragists, the women whose atti- tude towards sex was creating a new feminism, avoided rather remarkably both these ex- tremes. They differed momentously from the older suffragists, inasmuch as while enormously interested in aspects of sex biological, social and pathological which had been hid from the sentimental Victorians, the adventurous young were neither greatly startled by those aspects nor greatly shocked. Nor did the new discoveries rouse any feeling of hostility towards men. They regarded men as fellow-discoverers, equally blunder- ing, equally uninstructed, equally suffering. Even venereal disease seemed to them piti- able. They saw in the exaggerated extent of modern prostitution the delirium of a system which enforced undesired chastity in passionate, respectably bred spinsters, and maintained in marriage women who by nature or bad instruction were tempera- mentally cold. The old theory of an Eve punished by God and an Adam abetted by the law found them incredulous. Their 92 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM observations convinced them that Nature had established an exquisite balance between the joys and sorrows and consolations of male and female. The inequality which existed was a derangement of the scales caused by economic conditions and the makeshift char- acter of the marriage laws. They believed that the suffrage movement, officered by university women, would win a political power which would secure, if not economic equality between the sexes, at least economic independence for women, and that this in- dependence would establish in law and in custom that sexual equality which Nature ordained. They realised that the existing system doomed an unprofitable number of women to celibacy or to an unsuitability for the best drawing-rooms. It was here that their sympathy with the younger prudes broke down. They saw naturally much more clearly than the prudes why the pro- ceedings of the Laura Grey party were im- moral. A deliberate life-long sterility, a half- abstracted promiscuity, seemed to the main body of these new feminists anti-social, not merely because of the refusal of motherhood, but far more because by exaggerating some of the body's needs these practices atrophied some of its finest mental functions. There SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 93 may be an element almost inhuman in the ungratified constancy of a Petrarch, but when his countrymen stopped a battle to let the immortal lover continue his journey un- disturbed by warfare they reverenced in him that passion for romance which is the fine flower of love and one of the most fruitful qualities of the intellect. A love in which there is no romance contributes nothing to the world's inspiration ; like pills for bilious- ness it serves merely the bodies of the patients who take it. For though it is true that bodily health is essential to mental activity, in bodily intimacy without mental sympathy there is always an ugliness which destroys the finest perceptions. And it was this blunting of the mind that the section of young suffragists which had best be called the Centre perceived in the modern hetairce. The latter were often perhaps almost in- variably women who at first had loved with all their faculties. But it was noticeable that the majority of them had been mated to men who entered these free unions in a Piccadilly spirit rather than in the Puritan spirit of protest which these emancipated women demanded. Probably the rigid chaperonage perpetrated by English girls' schools and colleges had maimed their judg- 94 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM ment ; the unchaperoned girls of the lower classes more often choose their mates wisely. Certainly the first lovers of these hetairce had often been men unworthy of their sincerity ; it seemed almost as though society had not yet evolved their mates, as though civilisa- tion had prematurely forced the development of a large class of bold-thinking women and lagged in the shaping of their complements. This misfit of love had not merely caused them a devastating suffering in the midst of what seemed to have been genuine love affairs ; it had left them with a sense of dis- satisfaction and almost of shame which gave them an exaggerated thirst for love. They sought a lover who would justify love to them. Soon their lives like their conversations were obsessed by passion. They became erotic. It is not good to think of love even of a love like Petrarch's continually. Love should be the secret and often forgotten mainspring of a useful career. It is only when it is out of order that it arrests activities. It was the collapse of their mainspring that sent the lives of these hetairce sprawling into futility. Generations of bromide writers have asserted that for women love is a necessity. But women far better than men can make shift with philosophy, and their need of it is SIMPLIFYJNG SEX PROBLEMS 95 greater. The tragedy of these promiscuous free lovers was that many of them had no philosophy. Christianity is a philosophy that has consoled many disappointed lovers, but for the majority of intellectuals it is discredited, and agnosticism is not a philosophy. To-day all moral codes stand naked before a ruthless criticism, and the young, bred to an acquiescence in creeds, are suddenly left without authority for guidance. Here and there appear sugges- tions of a new rule of life. The Research Magnificent, for instance, suggests as an ideal an intellectual aristocracy which even in the most torturing isolation must brace itself for service. It preaches the necessity of a religion individually created. The moral collapse, the promiscuous, loveless passions, the general messiness of the lives of many modern women, result from nothing on earth but the fact that they have shirked the demand of their souls for a strong philosophy hewed out by sweating thoughts to fit their own needs. When the war is over, and in an impover- ished England we are stretching out our hands for the crumbs of mental and material wealth that fall from the banquet of a world- financing America, it is possible that American 96 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM feminists will furnish us with some common- sense theories of sex. But, if peace had con- tinued, a sane morality would have had a better chance of a rapid creation at the hands of the conscientiously candid youth of the Centre. This section of the youngest suffra- gists saw, in the first place, the necessity of reducing the mass of conflicting sex problems to some degree of simplicity before any solution could be possible. They saw that discussions of the White Slave Traffic and venereal diseases obscured the main issue. They saw that the urban conditions of modern life gave sex a swollen importance which hampered the world's greater business. The real problem was how to make the sex instinct a source of strength instead of weakness. When the genius of a man like Mr D. H. Lawrence falls away into a feverish babbling about sexual organs, when service- ably witted women spend ten or twenty or thirty years of their lives in a restless pursuit of love instead of giving their powers to useful activities, the social danger of hyper- trophied passion shouts like a nightmare. And the battered marriages and the cowardly spinsterhood of the older suffragists and the soul-destroying promiscuity of the new hetairce and the literary failure of Mr SIMPLIFYING SEX PROBLEMS 97 Lawrence are all part of the widespread, stupendous tragedy of an imperfect under- standing of the obligations and the beauty of sex. The hetairce have done service by insisting on the need of sexual freedom for women and trampling on their elders' squalid belief in sexual sacrifice. But the young suffragists of the Centre were doing a greater benefit by attempting to balance the fiercest claims of the body with the mind's ultim- ately stronger hunger for romance, insisting at the same time that there is in civilised humanity a social conscience which refuses to love any excuse for existence unless it is the motive power of work. And this is the problem, the fundamental, ultimate problem of sex, which will face the world again, but with a far more pressing insistence, when peace lets loose anew the clamouring forces of feminism. VIII HOW TO BE MORAL THOUGH MARRIED SUFFRAGE propaganda was a slashing revenge for the early Christian calumnies upon women. It was man now who was held to be of the earth earthy, tempting to destruction a sex naturally pure and spiritual. It was man who appeared as a wily serpent, luring woman away from lofty thoughts and snar- ing her into carnal pleasures. Man was a white-slaver, a greedy, clutching, oppressive capitalist, a lover of bloodshed, a hater of progress, a creature brutish and ungodly, and from the hell of his tyrannies and sensu- alities the new woman was at last freeing herself to redeem the world. She was going to revolutionise society. Her confidence and her inspiration were so strong that her task would have seemed easy if only she could have rid the world of the duality of sex. She felt, with St Augustine, that even married love is a sin, and echoed his assumption that the relations between the sexes would have been " courteous and no more than 98 MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 99 courteous " if Eve had not happened to care for apples. Marriage, if not actually improper, hampered at least the complete development of the feminine mind. The new woman gravely debated whether evolution were not tending to eliminate men. She was succeeded by a yet newer type of womanhood, which regarded feminism chiefly as an attempt to equalise the position of the sexes to put them, so to speak, on a pleasanter footing. Man, the subjector, was regarded more amiably as man the bungler. That two heads are wiser than one was con- tinually put forward as a reason why women should be allowed and encouraged, even com- pelled, to help men to reform society. It was to make the world more comfortable for men as well as for women that the status of the latter was to be raised, that a larger life was positively to be forced upon them. But in spite of this difference in motive many of the newer feminists seemed to arrive at the same conclusion as the " new woman " that marriage was contrary to feminine in- terests, and was even intrinsically shocking. It was only when one inquired more closely into the grounds of this belief that one dis- covered that it had no real identity with the creed of the man-haters. It was backed by no 100 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM asceticism, by no hostility to men. The younger feminists were so far from thinking love sinful or unseemly or handicapping that they regarded people who had never known it with the puzzled pity extended to the half-witted. They held that such cold natures were incompletely human. What seemed to the new feminists shocking and immoral was the existing institution of marriage. One can imagine some neat episcopal leg tapping the floor irritably in dissent from such a statement, and the elder suffragists saying roundly : " Nonsense ! " But feminism came to the clergy a little flat and insipid through the filter of the Church League, and the last people to know the creeds of those younger suffragists who before the war were making the opinions of their own generation were naturally their elders. It is a fact that the immortal indecision of Panurge expressed no greater fear of a binding marriage than was felt by numbers of intelligent young women in the earlier years of this century. Their fear has been obscured to some extent by the recklessness caused by the war. But it does not follow that there has been any real weakening in the belief that marriage must remain certainly rash, and possibly immoral, MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 101 until the institution of marriage has been adjusted to fit modern conditions. There were two main objections among the younger suffragists to the traditional view of marriage. First, the general one that an affection is not kept hot by its own ardour, and that a man and woman may vow them- selves black in the face without thereby guaranteeing that the one personality will not outgrow the other within the next five years. Second, the definitely feminist objection that the financial dependence of a wife upon a husband is demoralising both to her and to society, and that the home and the family are not yet organised with a view to making her financial independence possible. This was naturally the objection that most troubled the minds of the younger suffragists. They felt that the economic position of women was degraded by the uncertain duration of their work-dependence, that their dignity in marriage was compromised by their kept condition, and that the obligation imposed upon men of wholly maintaining their wives definitely injured society by making early marriages impossible. The preceding essay shows, it is humbly hoped, that society cannot afford to disregard the criticism of the younger feminists. They 102 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM have shown themselves puritanical enough to translate their opinions into actions, and those actions have been largely anti-social. Courage and enterprise are qualities which every nation desires to have transmitted, and they were qualities which in these women were conspicuous. Their scorn of marriage was dangerous to society primarily because it usually involved either a refusal of mother- hood or an inability adequately to care for their children. And at a time when war conditions are bringing so many institutions and customs into the crucible, it is worth while to consider why the existing form of legal marriage is to so many women distaste- ful, and whether the causes can be removed. Legal marriage creates a sense of mutual obligation and security and social expecta- tion which a vast majority of men and women will probably always value. But it does not, of course, follow that the present form of legal marriage is the one which creates this sense in the most generally satisfactory manner. The consideration of the question at the present moment is important because the universal economic uncertainty makes it more than ever a hardship that a man should be normally expected to provide for his wife's MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 103 maintenance. To be sure, great numbers of married women who would formerly have been communally supported are now working outside the home. But is this a state of things likely to continue after the war ? Do most of these women expect to be supported with the return of peace ? And, if they do, will not the burden upon their husbands in any widespread economic stress be one that is almost intolerable ? In such circumstances the young men of the generation then adoles- cent will be tempted to postpone marriage even later than is at present customary a postponement which certainly will not make for morality. On the other hand, if it be- comes usual for married women to continue to work for a living, men may be able to marry at a far earlier age than was considered prudent in the old days of peace. The wife will be able to contribute to their common expenses at least enough to cover the cost of her own maintenance, and, while the happiness of individuals will be thus more easily secured, the community will be enriched (1) by the increase of workers, (2) by the disappearance of large numbers of the most prodigal patrons of unproductive labour. It is exceedingly wasteful to maintain in idleness especially when their circumstances are likely to make 104 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM them lavish consumers women capable of increasing the community's wealth, and the idle woman (i.e. the woman communally supported in such sufficiency that any occupa- tion in her home or outside it is merely caprice) usually provokes and indulges in an anti-social extravagance. If the war creates a general opinion that it is as despicable for an able-bodied, serviceably-witted woman to be wholly dependent upon a man's earnings as it is for an able-bodied man to be dependent on a woman's, the ugly mercenary element in sexual relationships will largely disappear. Women will no longer retreat into marriage to escape from hard work or economic in- security, for marriage will be a part of their private life which does not interrupt their share in industry. It is useless to pretend that a woman's domestic work is the service exchanged for her maintenance, for the less she does in the home the more highly she is paid for it. It is therefore perfectly true that the prosperous married woman at least can only be regarded as a married mistress unless she is self-supporting. Generations hence, in quite different social conditions, it may be possible to estimate justly the value of a woman's home-making labours, and it may then seem desirable to free her again MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 105 from outside work. But at present it seems unfair to deny a man the autocratic control of his household unless his wife is financially independent of his income. Evidently the work-dependence of a wife is impossible unless (a) she is able to earn enough to pay people to look after her house and children, or (b) her home is so small and herself so expert that she is able to look after it herself in her leisure hours, or (c) she has a very small family or no children at all. The cumbrous arrangement of most English homes seems planned to keep women occupied rather than to make them and their husbands comfortable. A complete reorganisation is necessary before the division of a woman's interests between her home and her outside occupation can work smoothly. And unless she and her husband are prepared to post- pone parenthood, or ar least to limit the size of their family in proportion to their income, clearly earlier marriage will be a disaster, and the work-dependence of the wife impossible. In England, however, as in most other civilised countries, intelligent people are now accustomed to regard the parents of a large family much as an earlier generation regarded spendthrifts addicted to gambling. Even among the least educated of manual workers 106 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the old child-like faith that a large family is the tyranny of God is decidedly weakening, and the professional classes admittedly in- crease their families only when fortune smiles on their finances. In The Times of April llth, 1916, a correspondent illustrates the inequity of the Budget by an account of his own circumstances, and remarks : " A private income of, roughly, three hundred pounds a year " (in addition to his salary of two hundred and fifty pounds) " caused in the days of peace a good many years ago marriage and three children." The next day another correspondent, also to illustrate Budget hard- ships, declares that in a certain area he alone of the many prosperous householders has a large family, and he accuses his neighbours of selfishness and a lack of patriotism. Bishops and elderly spinsters and the fathers of sixteen shake their heads all over the British Press. But our alliance with France forbids us to regard the regulation of the size of families as a crime, and the reckless waste of lives by the German General Staff suggests, when compared with the very different methods of the French Army, that that nation which cares more for quality than for quantity is likely to be the more humane. Experience teaches more and more clearly that the MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 107 parent of many is an indifferent parent to all, that small families are usually better equipped for life than large, and that the future of the child depends upon the in- dividual attention given to it in youth. There is no more devoted parent than the sow, but she frequently tramples to death one of a large litter. Large families may produce some valuable members, but there is usually more trampling than development, and a government is more likely to be paternal to a nation of small families than to a nation so over-populous that individual lives are of small account. Feminists, in short, should be prepared to face with courage and sanity one of the most difficult of all the problems that will follow the war. Any considerable rise in prices will be wholly incompatible with the maintenance of any decent standard of living if married people are persuaded to return to the old English habit of reckless parenthood, nor will it be possible for married women to be normally work-dependent. It is clearly a greater national service to bring up one child in circumstances that will provide for it the best possible physical and mental conditions than to bring up half-a-dozen children who are physically or mentally underfed. As a 108 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM nation we are overweighted by a slow-witted population whose numbers and muscles are of very little consequence in an age when shells matter more than courage, an under- standing of chemistry or economics more than distinction on the football field. The birth of a stupid child is no benefit to the country ; it is merely another clamorous stomach. English people need to realise as fully as our French allies have done that human beings have passed the stage when they could beget and bear children with the irresponsibility of unreasoning animals, and it is a realisation which must be shared with all classes. The immoral prattle of pleasure-loving bishops must be disregarded, and the high seriousness of parenthood openly preached. We must get rid of the old horror of Malthusianism ; we must denounce the spendthrift creation of families totally disproportionate to their parents' income. We must declare that it is as dishonest to beget such families as it is to take a house of which one cannot pay the rent. Ignorance about such matters is far more immoral and harmful than an open discussion. It is criminal to continue to shut our eyes to the fact that numbers of respectable married women of the working classes permanently injure their health by the MORAL THOUGH MARRIED 109 use of abortifaciants. Recently the writer came across the case of a woman who was dying as the result of her sixth miscarriage, deliberately caused by the use of some homely abortifaciant. She had previously borne five children, and said that as her husband earned only thirty shillings a week she could not possibly afford to bring up a larger family. She declared that large numbers of her neighbours and friends habitually used the same kind of abortifaciant, without, appar- ently, injuring their health. But there is reason to believe that the bodies of many working women are wrecked by such practices. Father Bernard Vaughan and other celibates who have shirked domestic responsibilities, and the Anglican clergy who have too reck- lessly assumed them, would do a greater service to morality by preaching the necessity of a decent restraint of philoprogenitive instincts than by railing at those who have had the piety to recognise that to breed children without the power to provide for them is a blasphemy of parenthood. If these official moralists refuse to exhort and en- lighten the classes most ignorant or careless of conjugal decency, the task falls to the sex which more notably suffers through their refusal. 110 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM These, then, were for the younger suffra- gists the two principal elements of matri- monial morality the recognition that women must continue to earn a living after marriage, and the acknowledgment that this necessity is, for our generation at least, so urgent that maternity must be subordinate to it. It is an admission which, after all, involves a pro- founder reverence for maternity, and a more genuine love of children, than have been generally felt by their foremothers. IX BETWEEN THE HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET IF domestic morality and feminine dignity make it essential for the married woman of to-morrow to be independent of her husband's income, and therefore normally dependent on some occupation outside the home, evidently the home must be reorganised. It must somehow be made possible for a woman to combine the care of her household with some paid profit-making employment. Probably this will be usually impracticable unless the domestic services of large areas are pooled and entrusted to a domestic-service agency. The agency would undertake to keep each house clean, and to provide luncheon and dinner, as the management does in many of the more expensive London flats, but the arrangement would be cheaper in the case of the agency, because its servants would neither wait at table (except for an extra fee) nor answer doors. There is no reason in the world except snobbishness and sloth in 112 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM why able-bodied people in every class, from crowned heads downwards, should not answer their own door-bell and prepare their own breakfast and tea (aided by Princess Mary or any other home-making daughter), if the local housewifery agents see that the house is swept and scrubbed and dusted and polished in the morning, and that luncheon and dinner are properly cooked. Or the work might be done more inexpensively in blocks of cheap flats, if the tenants fetched their own meals from a common kitchen or had them sent up in lifts. And unless people of ambition and intelligence but of limited income are to avoid parenthood altogether, to the great loss both of society and of lovers themselves, some arrangement must be made to free mothers who cannot afford to keep a nurse from the necessity of attending con- tinually to their children. There will have to be provided for all classes a large variety of creches, where small children will be looked after by skilled nurses during the working hours of their parents. There will be more beautiful and expensive creches for the more prosperous classes, but skilled nurses and the necessary appliances in all ; and this arrange- ment will make it possible for women to marry without sacrificing their ambitions or their HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 113 independence. It will make early marriage possible and natural. There may even come a time when the gardens of women's colleges, such as Girton and Newnham and Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall, will be beautiful with the toddling babies of the students in residence. There will certainly be no earthly reason why this should not happen ; why there should not be a university creche close at hand if the students desire it ; and why the distressingly stupid but extremely healthy young women who form so large a proportion of them should not justify their existence in the years when they are best fitted to do so by producing healthy babies, in addition to writing bromidic essays. And it is reason- ably to be supposed that in women's work as a whole a higher skill will be secured if the work is continued, with occasional lapses incidental to child-bearing, through- out married life. Indeed, the removal of the litter of super- fluous obligations which prejudice and obsolete economic and domestic conditions have strewn about maternity cannot fail to raise the standard of women's work. First, because the continued work-dependence of wives will substitute early marriages for the long period of restlessness which often has 114 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM disastrous effects upon the work, the physique, and the philosophy of numbers of young women who consciously or uncon- sciously want to be married. Second, be- cause an employment likely to be merely temporary cannot be undertaken in a very serious spirit, nor is the work usually very conscientiously performed. Women as a whole will be of more value to their em- ployers if new and untrained workers are not continually succeeding each other, and their remuneration will probably be higher. If the value of women's work as a whole remains disappointing, its inferiority is not primarily due to the fact that much of their work is rotten with the fear and diffidence which have oozed into feminine thought during cen- turies of suppression, and that they distrust their own abilities and shun originality. It is not even due principally to the weaker health which in some cases prevents them from working as continuously as men. (Their weaker health is, after all, largely the result of underpayment.) The central cause of the disappointing character of their achieve- ments seems to be that they normally work for a living only before marriage and in widowhood, that in spinsterhood most of them are restless with the expectation or HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 115 vague hope of marriage, and that in widow- hood they have lost most of any skill they had previously acquired in their trade or profession. But under present conditions it is im- possible to assert with any confidence that all, or even a majority, of married women should remain in the labour market. The literary woman, the painter, the actress, the musician, the charity or business organiser, the paid political agitator can often do so ; in some of these occupations the work is of a kind which makes it possible for a woman to continue working till within a few hours of the birth of her children ; in most of them she can frequently earn enough to pay a nurse and other servants to care for her family and her home. But the fortunate circumstances of the more talented and better educated women should not blind them to the very different circumstances of many business women and manual workers. It may even be feared that by doing too much themselves the former may increase the difficulties of the latter classes by showing their husbands and employers how light to other women is the burden of motherhood. It is clearly not desirable that pregnant women should stand all day behind the counter, or toil in the 116 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM moist, hot-house atmosphere of a cotton mill or the uproar of a shell factory, or be em- ployed as chain-makers or in potteries. But to say that women should not be employed during pregnancy does not involve the further admission that they should not be employed after marriage or until their children are in their teens. The helplessness of the preg- nant working-class woman can be protected by an adequate State endowment of mother- hood. And the imposition of taxation to provide such endowment might be used also to make the economic position of the sexes slightly less unequal. It is useless to pretend that the average woman is ever likely to earn as much as the average man. Since the war began I have again and again been told by feminists, gurgling with joy over the latest news of fresh industrial openings for women, that it is a secondary consideration that long hours and constant standing may prove dis- astrous to the feminine physique ; that the fact for us to grip is that the war has finally entrenched women in industry and commerce and that peace will be powerless to remove them ; that if they wish to receive the same pay as men they must be prepared to work as long and as hard. This, so far as it goes, is reasonable enough, but fortunately there HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 117 are now considerable numbers of feminists whose reasonableness goes further to the point of admitting that it is better to be healthy with a small income than an invalid with a large one ; and that, as in manual work at least women are not strong enough to work permanently as long or as hard as men, they must be content with a smaller income. Economically it is perfectly fair, if men and women are paid strictly according to the value of their work, that men should normally receive more than women, and a complete social justice would be attained if bachelors and childless married men were compelled to contribute a fixed percentage of their income to cover the State's share of the maintenance of the nation's children. This tax would provide endowment for pregnant women and nursing mothers, in addition to the present National Health In- surance maternity benefit ; and if a medical certificate of pregnancy enabled a manual worker to obtain State endowment from the earliest stages of that condition, there would be no hardship in a law forbidding her to work while receiving this support. These suggestions obviously assume that there is no natural necessity for any very close association between mother and child after 118 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the first few months of infancy. And, in- deed, it is not mere moonshine to ask whether maternity really continues after a child has left its mother's breast. At any rate, it is a passionate relationship only while the mother is bearing or suckling her infant. After that her feeling is one of friendship, if it does not degenerate into mere vanity or an exacting egotism. For clearly any devotion she may afterwards feel for her child apart from her personal pride in having produced it is a feeling frequently experienced by women for children not their own. There is, therefore, no physiological reason why the weaned child should be tended by its mother, and its health will usually have a better chance if it is handed over to the care of experts. Most women, like most men, are exceedingly fond of children, but the woman who really under- stands the care of them is no more normal than the man who can create jolly games for them. The women who have the natural gifts that make them good at tubbing babies and dressing them and understanding their dietary needs and their ailments and playing baby games with them and keeping them amused and happy are so rare that when they are found they ought instead of being selfishly reserved for one family to be put HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 119 in charge of a creche, with dozens of babies enjoying life round them. " Mother love " often stands principally for ignorance about diet and a nervous temper, and it is always an advantage to infancy when its lot is cast among experts. The advantage of being looked after in a creche would not deprive a child of intercourse with its mother, but it would present its mother to it in the pleasant guise of a playmate without nerves exposed by maternal cares. For mothers whose in- comes compel them to act as nurse to their children, the pleasure of motherhood is often swamped in the exhausting, irritating, per- petual vigilance which cuts them off from their earlier interests. The truth is that motherhood is one of the most casual of all relationships and one of the shortest lived. It is formed between an adult woman and an undeveloped creature of whose potentialities she knows absolutely nothing worse than nothing, perhaps, for she usually assumes the existence of qualities wildly improbable. She is almost certain to leave out of account the probability that it inherits a big slice of the personality of her husband's detested spinster aunt, and when it grows up a stranger to her she weeps and will not be comforted because it bears no 120 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM resemblance to some adored relative on her own side of the family. In fact, maternal affection as such is short, though parental responsibility is endless. It is evidently the lifelong duty of parents to make unlimited sacrifices to render tolerable to their children the world into which the latter have been brought by their parents' caprice. But there is a danger that many sacrifices make parents detestable to their children unless those sacrifices are very carefully concealed, and, after all, the average parents can really do very little to ensure their children's welfare. Much the wisest plan, for a mother at least, is to be as attractive as possible to her children, and, for the rest, to be content to provide for them conditions which are materi- ally and morally nourishing without strain- ing kinship more than that frail bond will stand. For in modern life the claims of kith are everywhere becoming far stronger than the claims of kin, and a mother's best chance of retaining the affections of her children is to present herself to them as much as possible as a nice old soul who is jolly to them and as little as possible as a relative with claims. The theory that a child should be grateful to its mother for bringing it into the world has never had much breath in it since it was so HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 121 thoroughly shaken by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and though the fiction was probably a useful one when children were necessarily and properly dependent upon the care of their parents, there will be less and less room for it in society as the importance of superseding parental by State control is more and more realised. The realisation that it is a national waste to leave it to parents to decide whether a talented child should go to a university, whether it should be an artist or a draper or a doctor or a hospital nurse or a scavenger, whether it should be made to cook and scour or be trained as a musician, is three-fourths of the way to the decision that for the common- weal parental control must be abolished. It does not follow from all this that in such a system there would be no place for a home. Presumably there is a home wherever two people love each other, and one must be a cynic indeed to think that without the fractiousness of parent-oppressed children and without a pervading sense of kinship stressed by reproaches such a place would be so pleasant that it would be merely a hotel. The essence of a home is not the continuous presence of children so penned into the mono- tony of each other's society that they are normally quarrelling. All that is beautiful 122 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM in the home would remain enhanced. And it is likely enough that an enlightened society will find it desirable and possible very greatly to shorten the hours of wage-earning labour for both women and men, so that parental friendship for children may become far more complete and more nearly bi-sexual than it is to-day. The middle classes especially need to realise that nothing is more destructive of the youthful soul than any kind of home influence, if that influence is continuous and therefore narrowing. Children should not live too much in their parents' presence, or they waste time by accepting their parents' opinions instead of critically listening to them. It should always be the aim of con- scientious parents to give their children a wider view of the world than they have them- selves been able to attain. Therefore it is a perfectly respectable opinion that it may be a greater spiritual advantage to be the child of a buffoon than the child of a saint or a scholar. For the scholar and the saint may dogmatise and even browbeat, but the buffoon will confess the insecurity of the creed he is proclaiming by a sly wink or a dig in the ribs. The whole course of the mental evolution of humanity cannot be repeated in every lifetime, and the child who is bred as a HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 123 little Glassite or Mormon frequently wastes later in sloughing its Glassiteism or its Mormonism years which should be profit- ably used for the development of its own individuality. The home may be safely regarded as a bracing retreat from the world only if the greater part of the family's time is spent in the world ; otherwise it is merely an atmosphere which generates cowardice, ignorance, and egotism. Children, therefore, would probably benefit very greatly by an arrangement which made them more independent of their mothers. And since the modern man evidently prefers the woman with outside interests to the woman immersed in housewifery, it is reason- able to suppose that the arrangement would be a benefit also to husbands. Naturally the existence of domestic agencies will involve the survival of large numbers of women devoted mainly to housework or the direction of house- holds. But such women will be specialists. There will surely come a thrifty age which will see that it is as wasteful to employ in household work women whose strongest talents are undomestic as it would be to use Mr Bernard Shaw as a chimney-sweep, or Mr Lloyd George as a scene-shifter, or Mrs Sydney Webb as a tea-shop waitress. The 124 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM majority of women will be quite unconcerned with household matters ; they will merely give their orders to the domestic agency in the morning and attend to their own livelihood. As for the argument that industrial efficiency demands the sacrifice of the cultivation of personal charm and domestic beauty, it is one which from time to time has wrung bitter warnings from anti-suffragists and silvery cadences of lamentation from sentimentalists like Mr G. K. Chesterton. But there is really very little body to it. Work-dependent women whose labour is of a wholesome character and who earn enough to keep them from disfiguring worry, to keep them well nourished, and to bring the purchase of becoming clothes within the scope of their purses, are as often attractive as the idle, communally supported woman. And the woman who lives only to cultivate beauty is a luxury which the modern overworked community really cannot afford. It must, of course, be admitted that when women are earning adequate incomes it will no longer be necessary or possible to maintain so rigid a marriage law. If the new condi- tions make early marriage possible, they will certainly make easy divorce a necessity, and if responsibility for children is vested in the HOME AND THE LABOUR MARKET 125 State there will be no occasion whatever for a mother to remain with the father of her children if she ceases to love him. (From which it by no means follows that in those circumstances it will be invariably desirable that she should leave him.) From the point of view of society it will not even greatly matter whether children are legitimate or illegitimate. It is of no consequence at all from a civic standpoint whether the child of a penniless tramp is born in or out of wedlock, for the sole importance of the difference to society is that the legitimate child is sup- posed to be honourably supported by its father. If all children are maintained by the State, this importance disappears. The lasting advantage of a legal marriage is for lovers, not for their children. The chief change in the marriage law likely to be created by the changed economic relation- ship is the institution of divorce facilities. Divorce will have to be granted on the de- mand of either party after a precautionary interval. To be sure, public opinion as a whole is still a long way from a belief in that necessity. But British morality is really very adaptable. That sinning hero, Lord Nelson, guarded by British lions and lifted high above London as the tutelary god of its 126 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM public life, testifies that a scared Britain, with the enemy at its gates, will pardon many sins in its public men, and women cannot urge the need of a relaxation of admittedly grievous bonds more effectively than with a menacing hint of economic power. THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST FOR Christians the war provides the dis- concerting lesson that the God of Battles is a lover of science. From the very begin- ning of the war He has been persistently on the side of mental exertion. Always He gives the victory to the brainiest general and the best public financier, to the most capable munitions organiser and the most brilliant inventor of airships. British mental slack- ness at the beginning of this as at the beginning of the South African war was punished by defeat, and it was by taking thought not by any increase in an already supreme courage that the Allies were at last able to turn back the German advance. This is a view perfectly compatible with an enlightened Christianity, for the most god- like part of humanity is naturally its brain. It is very curious that, although omniscience is one of the most conspicuous qualities of the Deity, it is a quality which the creature made in His image has never been encouraged 127 128 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM by his priests to imitate. To be sure, obedience to Biblical commands and ex- amples has always among all the sects been a little haphazard. For instance, though the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Deuter- onomy directs the Chosen People to eat pygarg, one rarely meets a Jew who knows what that beast is, nor can the average Jew define a glede, though it is forbidden meat to him and may, for all he knows, be frequently set before him under some fanciful name in his favourite restaurant. But the omni- science of Jehovah is insisted upon in the Old Testament far more emphatically and continuously than the necessity of ritual observance. And if it is admitted that divine precepts are revealed through history as clearly as through sacred writings, it must be admitted, too, that the present war of munitions discloses the divine contempt for an uninformed piety. Even Mr Lloyd George appreciates this sufficiently to ask for more shells without soliciting prayers. Unhappily, the outcry against " Kultur " has rather increased the British scorn of knowledge. But the fact that Germans have recently made an anti-social use of their brains does not affect the truth that the English neglect of the mind is impious a blasphemy of the SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 129 powers by which man most definitely asserts himself as the image of God. It is to be hoped that after the war the churches will preach that God is a god of brain power, and is to be worshipped with the sincerest flattery of imitation. British piety, in short, has been seriously compromised by its stupidity. Clergymen may regard the war as a scourge for whatever sins they happen to know most intimately, but its outstanding lesson is just precisely our lack of information, our lack of a sane education, our neglect of our brains. Our education has been dreadfully an academic and non-practical education, with disas- trous national results. For, while civilisa- tion is the gradual elimination of all sins but one, that one is unpardonable. It is the depravity of mental sloth, the swinish stupidity which will never be forgiven Vy that nobler part of humanity which is God, because it is the cause of all social evils, from wars to family quarrels, from prostitution to sweated labour, from a bloated passion for personal elegance to a social tolerance of company promoters, from matricide to malicious gossip. Let us have enough dignity to admit that Germans are right in asserting that dullness i 130 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM is the chief British weakness that one or two swallows like Darwin or Mr Charlie Chaplin do not make a summer, and that our national stupidity has more than once nearly lost us the war. But at a time when educa- tional expenses are being cut down, when mere boys are crowded into the army, and the best masculine brains have been removed from civil uses, there is little value in the admission unless the necessary work of educational reconstruction is to be under- taken by women. While the men of Europe are busy destroying brains, the women of Europe have to save the world's intellectual future, and it may at least be said of English women that they are, perhaps, better equipped for this task than the women of any other country. If they can accomplish it, if they can make use of the leisure which still be- longs to large numbers of women to prepare the way during war for the reforms which the jaded enthusiasm of the fighters might other- wise be tempted to postpone in peace, then they will be doing a work of more vital and lasting service to their country than even their patriotic share in the manufacture of munitions. But, alas ! if the average Englishman is slow-witted, his dullness is not a foil for the SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 131 brilliance of his squaw. It is, after all, only within the last century that independent thought has become respectable for a woman. In England, as elsewhere, women in the past have been busy deadening rather than stimu- lating the mind. Until feminism made the intelligent woman popular, receptivity was, if not the highest, at least the most desired mental quality in a woman, and a ready welcome for facts and a jerry-thought com- prehension of them were valued in her quite apart from the ability to combine them into ideas. Therefore we find the imitative virtues still the most conspicuous among women, and it is their follow-my-leader tendency, the shirked responsibility of indi- vidual research and judgment, which have made the feminist gospel a little tremulous and the feminist policy unconvinced, uncon- vincing, and neither democratic nor really formidable. Feminism has been lacking, not merely in good leadership, but also in that strong intelligence of the rank and file from which good leadership is always ultimately evolved. It is this lack of mental independ- ence which makes it questionable whether women are capable of organising a strong and sober and intelligent campaign to secure educational reforms. 132 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM It is easy to understand why women are still a little afraid of independence, why the presence of Mr Walter Maclaren and Mr Pet hick Lawrence on the Executive Com- mittees of the N.U.W.S.S. and the W.S.P.U. and the formation of the Men's League strengthened the faith of innumerable suffragists, while even the most gifted women often have more confidence in their opinions when they are backed by the approval of some commonplace male. Women as a whole have no very steady confidence as yet in the mental powers of their sex. And that lack of confidence is explained by the cir- cumstances of modern women's lives. The women who have the fullest opportunities to develop their brains are seldom the women of the greatest mental ability. From those centres of learning and discussion from which the leaders of women's movements might naturally be expected to come, there seldom come forth any but second-rate minds. In Britain, at least, the most gifted women do not go to a university. They develop too rapidly. They have the vivid charm which, in women no less than in men, usually goes with great ability. They have the full- blooded personality which makes a woman marry early, and if their mental powers are SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 133 used outside ordinary domestic and social life they are only indirectly influenced by academic traditions. By far the greater number of the most gifted modern women have never been to a university. But when this denial of the finest feminine brains to the women's colleges has been freely admitted there remains some degree of wonder that there should be so little distinction even of a second-rate character among those who are actually sent to them. Our colleges are filled with women most of whom have in- telligence, some of whom have talent, many of whom have considerable personal charm. But those of us who have been educated in one of these institutions often look back upon the years spent there with an eagerness quickly withered by a conscientious survey, and try in vain to remember any students who were possessed of mental powers which would have been conspicuous outside their college. In three years spent by the writer at some ancient university or other there seems to have been in her college but one student of real brilliance a girl of genuinely remarkable ability who died before the completion of her course. For the rest, there were students delightful enough to survive the detraction that their creeds merely reflected those of 134 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM Mr Shaw or the Cowley Fathers, and that their thoughts were a gaunt precis of their own bookshelves. There were also cranks who gave to the college life a flim-flam flicker of originality. The writer recalls a hungry poetess who paced the college garden in the small hours gnawing a hunch of bread, or was discovered sleeping on a tennis lawn in the moonlight with a loaf among her tresses. Or there comes the memory of an economist who found the possession of a horse a saving, because she could pawn it in times of stress to neighbouring farmers. There was "The Sporting Times," who collected university scandals and shared them with "ThePink 'Un" over a contraband case of Burgundy. There was also the anarchist whose spirit was will- ing but whose flesh was too weak to put bombs under the high table. There was the equality-at-any-price lady whose dress and room were conscientiously kept in horrible and unsavoury disorder because she in- tended to marry some day " a really grimy working man." There was the lisping, languishing enchantress who went elaborately garbed to Godstow or Cumnor or Iffley half- a-dozen times a term to refuse offers of marriage from King's Messengers or diplo- matists or to give the coup de grace to rising SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 135 Members of Parliament. And besides all these there were the group of ardent meta- physicians who gathered round the noxious cocoa brew to consider whether transcen- dental feeling ever illumined the heart of a costermonger, and the pride-of-body people who were photographed in bath towels with a background of madonna lilies. All these absurdities seemed amusing enough at the time and even, in such restricted circum- stances, a little daringly original. But be- side the hair-and-eye play and the diet and creeds of the supporters of The New Free- woman or the Cave of the Golden Calf, or even of the frequenters of the Occult Library, their eccentricities afterwards paled. It seems impossible to remember in them any signs of an ability that considerably mattered or in any degree redressed their pose. And it is surely fair to assert the probability that to the discussion of political and social questions neither the less individualistic students nor the deliberately eccentric ever contributed an original idea. Though both types were almost without exception suffragists, they had not so much pondered as accepted feminism. By a tremendous mental upheaval they had, most of them, rid themselves of their parents' themistes about God and women and the 136 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM home, and on leaving the university they settled down with some quiet little agnostic- ism, or some academic belief in the need of divorce facilities, or even with some cool little theory that some form of free love must sometimes in some circumstances be per- missible, and they devoted themselves to the world's hack work or to its prodigal frivolity. This is no attack upon the usefulness of the former occupation. It is an attack upon the merely temporary exercise of reason. For to an active mind agnosticism can be only a stage on the way to a creative philosophy, a belief in free love but a step towards the con- viction that humanity keeps its moral health only by the reasonable monogamy of com- patibilities. But most of these women ar- rived at agnosticism or at a thin shudder at the marriage law simply because the university traditions appeared to hold it un- cultured to leave such matters unconsidered. They had put aside out of their lives these three or four years for steady thought and for the formation of opinions. The effort was too unwonted, too alien from their earlier training, to be repeated. Most of them in- tended to keep their university opinions as sacred icons commanding their lifelong genu- flection. And since there was neither time SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 137 nor energy left over for honest reflection on feminism, it is not in the least astonishing that university women have merely followed the suffrage leaders with an indiscriminating loyalty. So that even with regard to those questions of the feminine status and the feminine sphere which might most reason- ably have been expected to rouse in them some independence of thought, there has been found in these women the old tendency to defer to an outside opinion too hastily accepted as expert. No doubt one cause of this obstinate habit of docility can be rooted out of the discipline common to almost all girls' schools, where girls are drilled into acquiescence long before they arrive at the universities. Able women generally admit that they were profoundly bored in their schooldays, and on less brilliant people the boredom often leaves its mark in a lasting apathy. Any originality there may be in the teachers is usually quickly trodden underfoot on the school curriculum, and the brighter gleams in their pupils flicker out in a murk of conventionality and extorted acquiescence. Worse still, across any minds whose individuality survives the system there sprawls almost inevitably an obscene and degrading vanity. But the discipline 138 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM in girls' schools is itself the result of the Great Domestic Cant of Good Wifehood and Good Motherhood. It is in order that she may some day be a "good wife" and a "good mother" that the schoolgirl is reproved when her con- duct is unworthy of a lady ; it is in deference to the Great Domestic Cant that she is for- bidden to be natural. And it is precisely this cant that sooner or later so frequently stifles the minds of those more able women who do not go to the universities. Even under the existing organisation of the family, there is no reason on earth why a woman of sound mind and sound constitution should not be able to combine some out-of-the-home career with marriage and motherhood and the orderly management of her household. Unless the size of her house or her family is extravagantly disproportionate to her in- come, the direction of her home ought to leave any woman who is not notably cretin- ous with ample time for the exercise and development of her wits. The housewife can usually arrange to have more leisure for such employment than the professional or business woman, and for the former it need not be the end-of-the-day leisure of a mind and body exhausted. But the Great Domestic Cant of Good Wifehood and Good Motherhood has SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 139 tied the average married woman into such a tangle of hypocrisies that she cannot unravel herself sufficiently to be a distinct personality. She cannot be herself a natural woman naturally loving her husband and enjoying an unaffected maternity. She has instead to be continually a Good Wife and a Good Mother. At the very beginning of her engagement her parents probably shadow her happiness by expressing a hope that she will be a Good Wife, that the man she is going to marry will be a good husband. When the honeymoon is over she hurriedly becomes a domestic martyr. Before long she is exhausted by hypocrisy. Her self-distrust lashes her to a duster, her determination to appear what she is not is a magnet that keeps her inextricably fastened to her servants or her cooking stove, her nursery or her dreary round of afternoon visits and uncongenial dinner-parties, her needle or her church. She fusses and fumes in her anxiety to be a little pocket saint to her husband and children. Her nerves are racked by the effort to live up to the Good Mother ideal. There is no fun left in her. She accepts motherhood in a spirit of immo- lation and sadly braces herself to meet its claims, instead of rejoicing in it with a godly simplicity and being a jolly comrade to her 140 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM children. A mother who amuses her children in their teens holds their allegiance for life. But a vast majority of children are im- measurably bored by their mothers because the latter are so wearisomely and consciously good. Because there is more cant about Good Motherhood than about Good Father- hood, children are usually more bored by their posturing mothers than by their male parents, who are frequently quite content to let their personality appear at home in un- dress uniform. The undesired and insuffer- ably conscious sacrifices which fatten the vanity of a great army of mothers are sel- dom a lasting benefit to their children, and are almost always an irritation. There are mothers who make a point, when they are ill, of performing easily dispensable tasks which do not really fall to their lot even when they are well, in order that their devotion to their children may be more effectively staged. Or they will perform genuine services with sighs and complaints which pervert them into an injury. Quite frequently it happens that all the beauty of motherhood lies draggled in the mud of renunciation. Be- cause Puritanism took a sensual pleasure hi sacrifice, a relationship which is naturally a very pleasant one has been starved and SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 141 disciplined till it is often little better than sacred. With our educational system subduing the intelligence of the less able women, and the Great Domestic Cant weighing down the powers of the more brilliant under an absurdly complicated organisation of the family, there remains no cause for wonder that in spite of higher education, in spite of feminism, original thought among women is almost non-existent. The rough-and-tumble of suffrage experience certainly did much to quicken the wits of the women who actually took part in it. It was forming in them the rudiments of an independent judgment. But even among suffragists and perhaps conspicuously among them a healthy scorn of second - hand opinions w r as lacking. Heaven forbid that any abuse should be hurled at the habit of cocking an eye in search of masculine approval. In a well- ordered world each sex will be yet more eager to secure the approval of the other than it is at present. But in a movement which ex- isted to emancipate women it was a great loss that even its leaders failed to break away from the masculine idea of the objects of emancipation and the methods by which emancipation should be secured. Here and 142 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM there the feminist cause was illumined by the sturdy independence of shrewd observers like Mrs Swanwick and Mrs Stanbury. Beneath the fanaticism of Miss Mary Gawthorpe and the Pankhursts there lay an originality which was criminally stifled by a too hurriedly adopted policy. And, in spite of her docile acceptance of the Buss-Beale theories, crises in the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies revealed in Mrs Fawcett a self- reliance which, though it sometimes sug- gested autocracy, gave ground for regret that she had not trusted her magnificent common- sense in the earlier stages of her political career. But by most of the suffrage speakers individual thought was so little cultivated that the difference between their speeches was one of manner rather than of matter. It was the rarest thing in the world to hear one of them produce a fresh idea. If she did, it immediately found its way into the reper- tory of a score of other orators. But for the incalculable influence of the human voice and personality, the speeches might easily have been reduced to the authorised version of a gramophone record. The grinding life of most of the speakers left, indeed, no time for study or reflection. They knew little of economics, of local government, of Imperial SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 143 legislation, except what they gained from their daily papers or from the speeches and conversation of more leisured suffragists. Many of them transformed themselves into glib and entertaining speakers by concocting a hotch-potch of the speeches of the more notable suffragists. One could analyse from their addresses, here a point made two years ago by Mrs Fawcett, there a joke of Mr Zang- will's, there an anecdote charmingly told by Dr Anna Shaw on her last visit to England, here an argument first put forward by Mr Pethick Lawrence, and there a score made by Mrs Swan wick. Although the suffrage ques- tion is one whose limits are very hard to de- fine, it was generally agreed that one spoke either on " the economic question," which usually resolved itself into a discussion of women's wages, or on " the political situa- tion," or on " the housing question," or on " the moral question " (that is, the White Slave Traffic and venereal diseases), or per- haps on the powers, limitations and achieve- ments of women in local government. Or perhaps one spoke on the policy of the differ- ent suffrage societies, or " replied to anti- suffrage arguments." Under each of these headings most suffrage speakers kept a fund of arguments and anecdotes. The chief 144 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM drawback was that it was usually a common fund. Thus it sometimes happened that there would be bitter ill feeling on a platform because the first speaker had touched each of these questions, used the best stories attached to each, and left nothing but vain repetition or inferior arguments to the speakers who followed. And once, at a great outdoor demonstration, at which the speakers passed from platform to platform without hearing each other's speeches, the audience at one platform heard three well-known speakers tell the same story in much the same manner to illustrate the same argument. Now, a lack of originality in suffragist speakers is very far from proving an inability to use a parliamentary vote. To be sure, it was excellent logic when an anti-suffrage woman speaker burst into tears and declared that she would not finish her speech if people were allowed to heckle her. She was there to demonstrate feminine weakness. Suffra- gist speakers, however, proved their mental fitness for the vote quite adequately by show- ing a power fully equal to that of the average male elector of understanding current political questions. Their mental docility is lamented here solely because one naturally looked to suffragists for the intellectual activity which SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 145 had not yet begun among the mass of women outside the suffrage movement. If it does not greatly matter whether this activity is roused in women before they are enfran- chised, it does not follow that it is other than indispensable for the larger aims of feminism. Moreover, it is evidently a national waste if potentially good brains, even of a second-rate character, are in large quantities kept unused for an indefinite or perpetual period " in domestic inertia. It is possible that a future generation may discover that women are fitted to use their minds finely rather than originally. Humanity always protects itself from the consequences of its own errors by a blessed inconsistency, and the experimental activities of the women of this generation in a variety of occupations will leave numbers untouched in an old-world domesticity. But it is very certain that the unrest among modern women has by no means been ended by the war. In 1914, indeed, it had probably barely begun. It was, after all, confined to a mere percentage. And, when the war is ended, much trouble and bitterness will be avoided if, instead of blaspheming against humanity by echoing the opinions of the Pankhursts or John Stuart Mill or St Paul or any other leader, the mass of women acquire 146 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the habit of investigating for themselves their own problems. Leaders are, at best, a frail support. The disciples of Sabbathi Zebi were self-reliant enough to preach their faith even after their supposed Messiah had become a Moslem, but if the pre-war feminists had been betrayed by their leaders probably most of them would have spurned their suffragism. The pre-war leaders echoed the opinions of women who had misjudged the needs of their time. Unless the same mis- take is to be repeated after the war the rank and file must judge for themselves what are the real needs of women. The vote is likely enough to be given them without further agitation. But the vote is one of the smallest needs of women driven out into a widening sphere of social evolution. One of their first necessities will be leisure to think and organise. And for married women, the women best fitted to be thinkers, that leisure can only be acquired by the reform of the home. They will have to refuse to take the serious view of wifehood and motherhood so comically held by their foremothers. They will have to realise that a woman can be a good comrade to her husband and children, and can really be very little more, and that this duty certainly need not, and SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 147 indeed cannot, occupy all her working hours. It is because the supreme piety of inde- pendent thought has been more neglected by women than by men that the former's most serious combination for reform effected little. It is because of that neglect that no very great confidence can yet be felt in any feminine war work for the reorganisation of education. Only when they themselves have been educated rather than moulded will women be able to take any prominent share in the task of levelling up the national intellect. The so-called higher education has either been seed wasted on stony ground or else has been unfitted to the feminine mind. In any case the great need of the nation to-day is not scholarship, but the scientific, practical training which will equip it for that more merciless commercial struggle which seems likely to follow the war. XI THE FORTUNE OF WAR IN the hey-day of dialectic which preceded the war anti-suffrage speakers loved above all their arguments the plea that women could not fight. It was an argument that gave great pleasure to the masculine part of an audience and taught the feminine part its place, and it was one that was never definitely put out of action by its opponents. It had not then been discovered that modern wars must increase the civic value of women and their claim to enfranchisement by making their labour essential to the production of munitions and the continuance of a nation's industries, and therefore suffragists were accustomed to make two foolish retorts. First they remarked that even in times of peace large numbers of women died in child- birth. And, secondly, they declared that the admission of women to the electorate would strengthen the hands of peace-lovers and make it more difficult for governments to declare war. 148 THE FORTUNE OF WAR 149 Now there is clearly no very close parallel between the child-bearing for which the feminine body is so planned that it is posi- tively unhealthy if it continues permanently without it, and the battlefield agonies which are so far from being natural to the masculine body that a man's power of enduring physical pain is almost always inferior to a woman's. And the suffragist theory that women are more peace-loving than men has been entirely destroyed by the present war. In August 1914 a handful of suffragists were inclined to protest against Britain's intervention in a Continental struggle. Later, a few English women of little influence went over to Holland to meet women equally uninfluential from various other countries to consider the possibility of agitating for peace. Also, some of those who were once well known as suffrage speakers are now enrolled in the Union of Democratic Control. But no one who remembers the pride with which in the early days of the war the reservists' wives said good-bye to their husbands, the en- thusiasm with which women cheered the troops, the resolution with which they urged their men-folks to enlist, the scorn heaped by them upon " slackers," or the frequent ex- pression of their bloodthirsty desire to " tear 150 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the Kaiser limb from limb," can suppose that they are naturally a pacifist sex. The truth is that since in neither sex is the judgment of public questions normally decided by sexual emotions, in both a very similar opinion tends to be deduced from similar data. A man in concluding that a war is inevitable is not as a rule turned from that conclusion by the consideration that he himself may eventually have to fight in it or that war is cruel and ruinous and uncivilising. Nor does any mental picture of the horror of war or the knowledge that it may rob her of her husband or lover or brother or son weaken a woman's first belief in its necessity. Her mind is simply a sexless and indistinguishable part of the public opinion which makes the war possible. And in acknowledging that there is always in the mass of men at least at the beginning of a war a definite pleasure, either in the prospect of taking part in it, or, more brutally, in the prospect of reading and hearing about it, it must be admitted that this pleasure has its counterpart in the natural brutality of women. No one who has spent even a short period in Germany on terms of intimacy with large numbers of German families can fail to be aware that the militant spirit there THE FORTUNE OF WAR 151 is fostered by women far more consistently than by male civilians. The average German woman worships the army, adores soldiers, sees more beauty in a husband's cheek scarred by an old duelling cut than in the handsomest features unmarred by barbarity. And if there was in Germany before the war a desire to fight England it was German women who more than the mass of German men desired to prove the omnipotence of their army and to test the strength of their fleet. Women, in fact, are no more civilised than their men- folk, and, on account of their subordinate part in industry and commerce, their war-like spirit has not been softened, as men's has sometimes been, by the frequent recollection of war's economic disadvantages. The peace-loving woman, compassionate alike to friend and foe, is a type evidently mythical. In principles and prejudices at least women advance side by side with men. More, it may even be asked with some reason whether women are not everywhere responsible for the amazing strength of that undercurrent of prejudice which floods at last into a national policy. A modern convention has supposed them more tender than men, just as in the eighteenth century it supposed them more timid, but both notions are confuted by 152 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM history. Deborah leading armies by the side of Barak, Jael stealing into a guest's tent to murder him treacherously, the Roman women delighting in gladiatorial fights and gloating over the sight of Christians torn by lions, the mediaeval women at the tournament and the modern Spanish woman at the bull-fight, the Turkish women sharpshooters of the present war and the women in the Serbian and Russian armies and the bold women snipers among the Sinn Fein rebels, do not suggest a sex naturally averse from bloodshed or lack- ing in courage. Moreover, the conscientious objectors against conscription have sought in vain for an effective feminine support. Indeed, the general feeling that women should not be enrolled in armies is not explained by their own distaste for war any more than by a normal physical incapacity. Most healthy young women at the beginning of this war longed to join the army, and the woman who is strong enough to work on the land or in a munitions factory is certainly strong enough to bear arms. Nor is there any sentimental objection to the enlistment of a robust young girl who is not a mother. But by general consent women are confined to civil employ- ments simply because, since the madness of bloodshedding notoriously weakens self- THE FORTUNE OF WAR 153 control, the protection of their honour could in no army be guaranteed. The suffragists' argument certainly bore a specious appearance of common-sense. It might perhaps be supposed by a shallow observer that a mother would suffer any indignity rather than send her son into danger. But history does not record a time when patriotism has not been a stronger feeling than maternity, when the average mother has not preferred for her son death rather than dishonour. Among savage tribes her pride in her son is fed by his fight- ing powers ; among civilised peoples she is justified only by war in her curious belief in male superiority. The modern mother is secretly aware that her son's ordinary em- ployment could be performed equally well by her daughter. But she prefers her son, not merely because the belief that a man has a better time than a woman, or the know- ledge that a mother is better loved by her sons than by her daughters made her want a son rather than a daughter long before he was born. Nor is her preference due to sexual attraction. The true explanation is that she has inherited from all the ages the belief, born of war, that a man is a stronger and a finer thing than a woman. This 154 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM theory droops in peace ; it only really blossoms in war. And therefore a war is necessary to restore to the disappointed mother her old belief in the superiority of her son. She cannot really protest against the horrors which hold for her this secret solace. The fact is that of all the follies of the pre- war suffragists the maddest was the persist- ent attempt to identify women as a whole with sectional causes. There was a flourish- ing hope that all women might in time be- come suffragists most of them, probably, after they were enfranchised. But there was no reasonable ground for the supposition that even the majority of Englishwomen could be converted to pacifism or total abstinence. Unfortunately, pacifism and temperance and Christianity and many other irrelevant causes were constantly preached from plat- forms ostensibly hired for purposes of suffrage propaganda. The suffragist support of total prohibition in many of the American states has seriously damaged transatlantic suffra- gist prospects, and if over here the pacifists had had their way and had succeeded in identifying the various suffrage societies with their own cause, the result would certainly have been the total and lasting collapse of the suffrage movement. THE FORTUNE OF WAR 155 Fortunately, that identification had never been effected. The faint voices of the pacifists had cried in a wilderness, and 1915 found thousands of women offering them- selves for war- work. By the end of the year the whole position of women had been trans- formed. In almost every country engaged in the war they had shown that in modern conditions the success of a war ultimately depends, not on the longest purse, but on the strength and discipline and enthusiasm of the women, whose labour alone can keep that purse filled ; on their thrift and self-sacrifice ; on their growing consciousness of an indi- vidual civic responsibility. It is a revelation which may possibly bring triumph to the suffragist cause without any renewal of the suffrage agitation. To women who have gloriously served their country it would certainly be an outrage to refuse enfranchise- ment. And, with enfranchisement gained, they will be free to go on towards the larger aims of feminism. The writer leaves altogether on one side the question whether after this war it will be possible to work for a general disarmament. This war was preceded by a more general love of peace than had been known since the eleventh-century Truce of God. There had 156 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM never been a more enthusiastic agitation for the settlement of international disputes by arbitration. In July 1889 the President of the International Arbitration and Peace Association wrote to Baroness von Suttner : "At no time, perhaps, in the history of the world has the cause of peace and good will been more hopeful. It seems that at last the long night of death and destruction will pass away ; and we who are on the mountain- top of humanity think that we see the first streaks of the dawn of the kingdom of heaven upon earth." But though that optimism was mocked by the numerous wars that followed, there had certainly spread in Britain between 1906 and 1914 a very general feeling that Europe at least was grow- ing so civilised that a war between any of the great Powers was unthinkable. If the principal women's organisations had been so misled by this feeling as to imagine that it was possible for them to remain hostile to a war, and refuse to take any share in it, the feminist cause would certainly have been wrecked. The mass of women would have disregarded their former spokeswomen and thrown themselves into war activities, but there would have been none with authority or desire to point the moral of their devotion. THE FORTUNE OF WAR 157 And for the women of to-morrow it is in the moral of this war work that the great value of the feminine share of the war con- sists. Women have demonstrated at last that there is practically no civic or industrial enterprise in which they are unfitted to take part. They have shown the folly of the old belief that they are of value only as wives and mothers and prostitutes and housewives. They have proved that it is as great a national waste to attempt to confine their energies to the sphere of love and housewifery as it would be to attempt to confine the mass of men to cattle-breeding or grouse- shooting or boxing. The fortune of war has suddenly plumped at women's feet a supreme oppor- tunity. It has given them a priceless ad- vantage. But it remains to be seen whether that advantage will be retained. It is in their power now to secure that better part in civic life and in industry which shall not be taken away from them. So far, however, they have done nothing to secure it. They have not formed strong trade unions for the new classes of women workers, nor have any very conspicuous efforts been made to enroll them in the unions already existing. There are no signs that any large numbers of women with capital are becoming employers, or that 158 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the existing system of feminine education is likely soon to be superseded by one adapted to modern needs. And it is, unhappily, only too likely that if they are putting their trust in anything so ephemeral as a public senti- ment they will again be fooled. At the moment the nation is deeply grateful to its women. But its gratitude will be of no value at all if they do not now consolidate the power they have so newly gained. XII A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS GRADUALLY it becomes possible to form some fairly definite idea as to what appears to be the sanest policy for feminists to adopt when the nations are at peace again. It is quite possible that there may be a general feeling that enfranchisement cannot be refused to the women who have kept the army armed and the nation prosperous. Or perhaps the dominant political party may think it a useful move in a period of some electoral uncertainty to support women's suffrage, and, since en- franchisement would be of secondary use to women, this would be a move undeniably helpful to feminist progress. Parliamentary representation under modern conditions is likely to be less advantageous to women workers than in the earliest years of the working-class vote it was to men's trade unions, for many of the biggest concessions have been already secured to trade unionism generally by the masculine vote, and can be claimed by women workers without the vote 159 160 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM when their own unions are popularised. But it Is easy to think of advantages which women will ultimately gain from political emancipa- tion even if their enfranchisement is slow to bear fruit. The writer's argument is merely that the suffrage agitation was before the war, and if revived in peace is likely to be again, so wasteful and disorganising, and on the whole unprofitable, that it will be far more advisable to turn the feminist forces into other channels. Admission to the franchise can, after all, be only the beginning of the feminist campaign. If women are industri- ally powerful, politicians may be trusted to sue their favour with the gift of the suffrage. Let the pother and vexation of deciding on what basis women should be enfranchised, and winning for their proposal the support of the present electors, be left to the parlia- mentary party that adopts the new policy. And meanwhile let women, putting no trust in politicians until performance confirms their promises, thriftily reserve and increase their resources by devoting themselves to the task of improving their economic position. There is no originality in this proposal. The late Mr Booker Washington, realising either that the vote was practically unattain- able by those economically negligible, or that A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS 161 for a subject race or class it could be only a blunted weapon until sharpened by economic power, urged that the American negroes should postpone their campaign for political emancipation until they were industrially emancipated. He was accused of playing into the hands of the whites because his system of industrial education made the negroes better employees, and because his attempts to make them thrifty and land- owning raised the price of land and provided good customers for white business men. " But no one who has studied the history of oppressed races," says a writer in The New Republic of 20th November 1915, " can question the correctness of Booker Washing- ton's tactics or the soundness of his phil- osophy. . . . For hundreds of years the op- pressed races of Europe have struggled to raise themselves through political agitation and social striving in vain. These are not solvents sufficiently powerful to relax the cohesion of the ruling caste. But where the Slovene or Ukrainian has succeeded in gain- ing economic power the weight of oppression begins to lift. If the goal of an oppressed race is political equality, economic progress is usually the only feasible road to its attain- ment. ... A ruling race will never relax its grip upon the political power in response to 162 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the moral and intellectual striving of a sub- ject race. But a ruling race will countenance attempts on the part of the oppressed to in- crease their economic efficiency, partly be- cause the members of the ruling race hope to profit thereby, and partly because a ruling race affects to despise the purely economic field and whatever goes on in it. The sub- ject race can elevate itself through industry and thrift without encountering any serious opposition. To develop these qualities by education, precept, organised propaganda, is the first duty of the leader of a race which finds itself in a condition of political subjection." Between the political and industrial position of American negroes and that of women there is an obvious parallel, and the reflection that follows experience urges that for women in- dustrial effort is as properly antecedent to enfranchisement as it is for the negroes. The industrial position of women in this country is admittedly inferior to their industrial ability, and the present time, when women of all classes are pouring into the labour market, is a time especially favourable for the im- provement of that position. Women who possess ability and capital should make every effort to obtain first business training and experience and ultimately partnership in firms which have lost partners through the A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS 163 war. Younger women who before the war would have struggled for academic honours should receive a sound commercial training and should be helped by their parents to enter a good business, just as on the Continent girls are helped into marriage by a dowry. Existing women's colleges should be trans- formed into commercial training centres of a superior type. The study in women's colleges of the classics, philosophy, English and foreign literature, philology, theology, geology, Egyptology, and other intellectual luxuries and the detailed study of history might be for a time at least altogether re- nounced and the study for commercial ends of mathematics, modern languages, chem- istry, engineering, economics, banking, archi- tecture, etc., substituted. The importance for girls of a technical course as an addition to the ordinary school training should be everywhere urged. Finally, the women who are already work-dependent, and those who later become so, women whose work is de- pendent upon the good will of an employer, should all be urged, and if possible compelled, to join trade unions. If it is argued that most work-dependent women take no interest in trade unionism, it must be remembered that women as a whole 164 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM took no interest in woman's suffrage, and that while it can be no more difficult to per- suade them to join a trade union than to per- suade them to join a suffrage society, the former is decidedly the more urgent effort. The truth is that the showier political agita- tion has kept out of the industrial agitation most of the leaders and most of the funds that ought to have been employed in strengthening the existing women's unions and creating new ones. Women's trade unionism has never had a reasonable chance. The low pay and consequent mental suppression of the existing members have made outside help to float the unions indispensable, and that help has been squandered on the suffrage move- ment. Women's trade unions have existed on so small a scale that an occasional strike has left very little impression on the public mind. What is wanted is the inclusion in the unions of those women who although work-dependent are nevertheless able to subscribe to the union funds more largely than the present members, and will also be able to contribute mental advantages to a fighting body. While the rise and increase of notable women employers (who will prob- ably be much more tyrannical than men em- ployers) will probably do far more at first A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS 165 than trade unionism will do to raise the industrial status of women, the economic future of women as a whole must largely depend upon their success in establishing in the teeth of the present spirit of sacrifice unions strong enough to demand satisfactory conditions of work, to secure adequate wages for qualified workers, and to see to it that there is no sudden fall in women's wages in any period of stagnation that may follow the war. The war has provided a supreme oppor- tunity for the consolidation of the advantages already gained by women and the attainment of others ; it will be a supreme treachery to humanity if that opportunity is not used. A great many paths to emancipation have already been attempted without much gain to the sex as a whole. Art has long provided a sphere in which there is sex equality, and the feminine right to sacrifice health to win academic scalps and afterwards to earn an income incapable of providing for old age is generously recognised. Since the days of Mrs Behn women writers have been able to earn a living by their pen, and no one in these days is in the least degree horrified when women travellers ride on motor bicycles from Cairo to Cape Town, or wander alone to paint pagodas and blossoming fruit trees in 166 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM the wildest parts of China. But higher educa- tion and adventure and the suffrage cam- paign have left the average woman in very much the same circumstances as at the begin- ning of the feminist agitation. A small body of adventurous women for a time turned the world upside down, but there remains the great mass of mentally flaccid women who would not to save their skins do any- thing so entirely contrary to social precedent. Yet at the present time it is precisely the mass of women who for the common weal must be prodded into activity. If feminine coquetry is embarrassing British commerce by swelling imports and bottling labour in unproductive industries, it is clear that an intelligent womanhood too usefully occupied to preserve the present hypertrophied appe- tite for ornament is a national necessity. And if during the war industry must rely more and more upon feminine labour, it is exceedingly desirable that the capricious element in that labour should be minimised. Feminine economic ambition is naturally blunted by the knowledge that while it is practically impossible for a woman to pro- vide for her old age by her own earnings, there is always rather more than a sporting chance that marriage will give her security. A STRAIGHT TIP FOR FEMINISTS 167 That is, a man's chances of earning security are normally far better than a woman's. Therefore until the present war it has always been sounder commercial wisdom for a woman to equip herself to secure a husband than to equip herself to get good work. And if she qualifies herself for good work, by that very effort she has often been likely to lose her chances of a husband. If, then, women by organisation and combination can secure higher earnings, they will be providing also a motive for a higher standard of work. Women in the mass will not be, as they have hitherto been, dependent on masculine sup- port for everything they desire in addi- tion to food and clothing, and they will be able to take a whole-hearted interest in their employment. And if the women's trade unions, becoming, as they ultimately must, politically as well as industrially powerful, use their political power to reform the marriage law, and institute endowment of motherhood and creches of different grades to leave mothers free to work, and to give the State the power to direct the lives of the children of all classes, then it will indeed be possible for women to live a full life, and the old rest- lessness which has almost universally lowered the value of their work will at last be stilled. 168 TOWARDS A SANE FEMINISM The organisation of women's home life to fit the demands of the labour market becomes more and more pressingly necessary. This does not mean that the labour market is more important than the home, but simply that economic independence is vitally necessary for women in order that the full beauty of home life may be secured. For the home is so delicate an organisation that its beauty fades wherever love is dependent upon a husband's financial contributions. One more question conspicuously arises : What, after all, is the feminism towards which women are advancing ? It is the dis- appearance of feminism, its ultimate absorp- tion in the common cause of humanity. Wherever a democratic spirit has begun to stir a nation women have first striven by the side of men to win masculine freedom. Later comes a time when masculine liberties are secured and the majority of men find very chivalrous reasons for not sharing them with women. It is then that feminism interferes to delay masculine progress till women are abreast with it. But when a further stage of civilisation gives women the same liberties as men, the sexes may reasonably be expected to work together in civic and industrial life without the interruption of sex bickerings. 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