Emancipated Women
Part 1
As an immediate application of the attempt to establish the principle of
intermediate sexual forms by means of a differential psychology, we must now
come to the question which it is the special object of this book to answer,
theoretically and practically, I mean the woman question; theoretically so far
as it is not a matter of ethnology and national economics, and practically in
so far as it is not merely a matter of law and domestic economy, that is to
say, of social science in the widest sense. The answer which this chapter is
about to give must not be considered as final or as exhaustive. It is rather a
necessary preliminary investigation, and does not go beyond deductions from
the principles that I have established. It will deal with the exploration of
individual cases and will not attempt to found on these any laws of general
significance. The practical indications that it will give are not moral maxims
that could or would guide the future; they are no more than technical rules
abstracted from past cases. The idea of male and female types will not be
discussed here; that is reserved for the second part of my book. This
preliminary investigation will deal with only those characterological
conclusions from the principle of sexually intermediate forms that are of
significance in the woman question.
The general direction of the investigation is easy to understand from what has
already been stated. A woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification
for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her. The idea of
emancipation, however, is many-sided, and its indefiniteness is increased by
its association with many practical customs which have nothing to do with the
theory of emancipation. By the term emancipation of a woman, I imply neither
her mastery at home nor her subjection of her husband. I have not in mind the
courage which enables her to go freely by night or by day unaccompanied in
public places, or the disregard of social rules which prohibit bachelor women
from receiving visits from men, or discussing or listening to discussions of
sexual matters. I exclude from my view the desire for economic independence,
the becoming fit for positions in technical schools, universities and
conservatories or teachers' institutes. And there may be many other similar
movements associated with the word emancipation which I do not intend to deal
with. Emancipation, as I mean to discuss it, is not the wish for an outward
equality with man, but what is of real importance in the woman question, the
deep-seated craving to acquire man's character, to attain his mental and moral
freedom, to reach his real interests and his creative power. I maintain that
the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for
emancipation in this sense. All those who are striving for this real
emancipation, all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental
ability, to the first glance of an expert reveal some of the anatomical
characters of the male, some external bodily resemblance to a man. Those
so-called "women" who have been held up to admiration in the past and present,
by the advocates of woman's rights, as examples of what women can do, have
almost invariably been what I have described as sexually intermediate forms. .
. .
I might refer many emancipated women at present well known to the public,
consideration of whom has provided me with much material for the support of my
proposition that the true female element, the abstract "woman," has nothing to
do with emancipation. There is some historical justification for the saying
"the longer the hair the smaller the brain," but the reservations made in
chap.ii. must be taken into account.
It is only the male element in emancipated women that craves for emancipation.
There is then, a stronger reason than has generally been supposed for the
familiar assumption of male pseudonyms by women writers. Their choice is a
mode of giving expression to the inherent maleness they feel; and this is
still more marked in the case of those who, like George Sand, have a
preference for male attire and masculine pursuits. The motive for choosing a
man's name springs from the feeling that it corresponds with their own
character much more than from any desire for increased notice from the public.
As a matter of fact, up to the present, partly owing to interest in the sex
question, women's writings have aroused more interest, ceteris paribus, than
those of men; and, owing to the issues involved, have always received a fuller
consideration and, if there were any justification, a greater meed of praise
than has been accorded to a man's work of equal merit. At the present time
especially many women have attained celebrity by work which, if it had been
produced by a man, would have passed almost unnoticed. Let us pause and
examine this more closely.
If we attempt to apply a standard taken from the names of men who are of
acknowledged value in philosophy, science, literature and art, to the long
list of women who have achieved some kind of fame, there will at once be a
miserable collapse. Judged in this way, it is difficult to grant any real
degree of merit to women like Angelica Kaufmann, or Madame Lebrun, Fernan
Caballero or Hroswitha von Gandersheim, Mary Somerville or George Egerton,
Elizabeth Barret Browning or Sophie Germain, Anna Maria Schurmann or Sybilla
Merian. I will not speak of names (such as that of Droste-Hulshoff) formerly
so over-rated in the annals of feminism, nor will I refer to the measure of
fame claimed for or by living women. It is enough to make the general
statement that there is not a single woman in the history of thought, not even
the most manlike, who can be truthfully compared with men of fifth or
sixth-rate genius, for instance with Ruckert as a poet, Van Dyck as a painter,
or Scheirmacher as a philosopher. If we eliminate hysterical visionaries
(Hysteria is the principal cause of much of the intellectual activity of many
of the women now mentioned. But the usual view, that these cases are
pathological, is too limited an interpretation, as I shall show in the second
part of this work), such as Sybils, the Priestesses of Delphi, Bourignon,
Kettenberg, Jeanna de la Mothe Guyon, Joanna Southcote, Beate Sturmin, St.
Teresa, there still remain cases like that of Marie Bashkirtseff. So far as I
can remember from her portrait, she at least seemed to be quite womanly in
face and figure, although her forehead was rather masculine. But to any one
who studies her pictures in the Salle des Etrangers in the Luxemburg Gallery
in Paris, and compares them with those of her adored master, Bastien Lepage,
it is plain that she simply had assimilated the style of the latter, as in
Goethe's "Elective Affinities" Ottilie acquired the handwriting of Eduard.
There remain the interesting and not infrequent cases where the talent of a
clever family seems to reach its maximum in a female member of the family. But
it is only talent that is transmitted in this way, not genius. Margarethe van
Eyck and Sabina von Steinbach form the best illustrations of the kind of
artists who, according to Ernst Guhl, an author with a great admiration for
women-workers, "have been undoubtedly influenced in their choice of an
artistic calling by their fathers, mothers, or brothers. In other words, they
found their incentive in their own families. There are two or three hundred
cases on record, and probably many hundreds more could be added without
exhausting the numbers of similar instances." In order to give due weight to
these statistics it may be mentioned that Guhl had just been speaking of
"roughly, a thousand names of women artists known to us."
This concludes my historical review of the emancipated women. It has justified
the assertion that real desire for emancipation and real fitness for it are
the outcome of a woman's maleness.
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