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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