Emancipated Women
part #2
The vast majority of women have never paid special attention to art or to
science, and regard such occupations merely as higher branches of manual
labour, or if they profess a certain devotion to such subjects, it is chiefly
as a mode of attracting a particular person or group of persons of the
opposite sex. Apart from these, a close investigation shows that women really
interested in intellectual matters are sexually intermediate forms.
If it be the case that the desire for freedom and equality with man occurs
only in masculine women, the inductive conclusion follows that the female
principle is not conscious of a necessity for emancipation; and the argument
becomes stronger if we remember that it is based on an examination of the
accounts of individual cases and not on psychical investigation of an
"abstract woman."
If we now look at the question of emancipation from the point of view of
hygiene (not morality) there is no doubt as to the harm in it. The
undesirability of emancipation lies in the excitement and agitation involved.
It induces women who have no real original capacity but undoubted imitative
powers to attempt to study or write, from various motives, such as vanity or
the desire to attract admirers. Whilst it cannot be denied that there are a
good many women with a real craving for emancipation and for higher education,
these set the fashion and are followed by a host of others who get up a
ridiculous agitation to convince themselves of the reality of their views. And
many otherwise estimable and worthy wives use the cry to assert themselves
against their husbands, whilst daughters take it as a method of rebelling
against maternal authority. The practical outcome of the whole matter would be
as follows; it being remembered that the issues are too mutable for the
establishment of uniform rules or laws. Let there be the freest scope given
to, and the fewest hindrances put in the way of all women with masculine
dispositions who feel a psychical necessity to devote themselves to masculine
occupations and are physically fit to undertake them. But the idea of making
an emancipation party, of aiming at a social revolution, must be abandoned.
Away with the whole "woman's movement," with its unnaturalness and
artificiality and its fundamental errors.
It is most important to have done with the senseless cry for "full equality,"
for even the malest woman is scarcely more than 50 per cent male, and it is
only to that male part of her that she owes her special capacity or whatever
importance she may eventually gain. It is absurd to make comparisons between
the few really intellectual women and one's average experience of men, and to
deduce, as has been done, even the superiority of the female sex. As Darwin
pointed out, the proper comparison is between the most highly developed
individuals of two stocks. "If two lists," Darwin wrote in the "Descent of
Man," "were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting,
sculpture, music - comprising composition and performance, history, science,
and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison." Moreover, if these lists were carefully examined
it would be seen that the women's list would prove the soundness of my theory
of the maleness of their genius, and the comparison would be still less
pleasing to the champions of woman's rights.
It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling in
favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an argument
overlooks the fact that "emancipation," the "woman question," "women's rights
movements," are no new things in history, but have always been with us,
although with varying prominence at different times in history. It also
largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the mental
development of women, especially at the present time. Furthermore it neglects
the fact that at the present time it is not the true woman who clamours for
emancipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who misconstrues her own
character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in
the name of woman.
As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it has been
with the contemporary woman's movement. Its originators were convinced that it
was being put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had never been
thought of before. They maintained that women had hitherto been held in
bondage and enveloped in darkness by man, and that it was high time for her to
assert herself and claim her natural rights.
But the prototype of this movement, as of other movements, occurred in the
earliest times. Ancient history and medieval times alike give us instances of
women who, in social relations and intellectual matters, fought for such
emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the female sex. It is
totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have had no opportunity for
the undisturbed development of their mental powers.
Jacob Burckhardt, speaking of the Renaissance, says: "The greatest possible
praise which could be given to the Italian women-celebrities of the time was
to say that they were like men in brains and disposition!" The virile deeds of
women recorded in the epics, especially those of Boiardo and Ariosto, show the
ideal of the time. To call a woman a "virago" nowadays would be a doubtful
compliment, but it originally meant an honour.
Women were first allowed on the stage in the sixteenth century, and actresses
date from that time. "At that period it was admitted that women were just as
capable as men of embodying the highest possible artistic ideals." It was the
period when panegyrics on the female sex were rife; Sir Thomas More claimed
for it full equality with the male sex, and Agrippa von Nettesheim goes so far
as to represent women as superior to men! And yet this was all lost for the
fair sex, and the whole question sank into the oblivion from which the
nineteenth century recalled it.
Is it not very remarkable that the agitation for the emancipation of women
seems to repeat itself at certain intervals in the world's history, and lasts
for a definite period?
It has been noticed that in the tenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and now again
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the agitation for the emancipation
of women has been more marked, and the woman's movement more vigorous than in
the intervening periods. It would be premature to found a hypothesis on the
data at our disposal, but the possibility of a vastly important periodicity
must be borne in mind, of regularly recurring periods in which it may be that
there is an excess of production of hermaphrodite and sexually intermediate
forms. Such a state of affairs is not unknown in the animal kingdom.
According to my interpretation, such a period would be one of minimum
"gonochorism," cleavage of the sexes; and it would be marked, on the one hand,
by an increased production of male women, and on the other, by a similar
increase in female men. There is strong evidence in favour of such a
periodicity; if it occurs it may be associated with the "secessionist taste,"
which idealised tall, lanky women with flat chests and narrow hips. The
enormous recent increase in a kind of dandified homosexuality may be due to
the increasing effeminacy of the age, and the peculiarities of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement may have a similar explanation.
The existence of such periods in organic life, comparable with stages in
individual life, but extending over several generations, would, if proved,
throw much light on many obscure points in human history, concerning which the
so-called "historical solutions," and especially the economic- materialistic
views now in vogue have proved so futile. The history of the world from the
biological standpoint has still to be written; it lies in the future. Here I
can do little more than indicate the direction which future work should take.
Were it proved that at certain periods fewer hermaphrodite beings were
produced, and at certain other periods more, it would appear that the rising
and falling, the periodic occurrence and disappearance of the woman movement
in an unfailing rhythm of ebb and flow, was one of the expressions of the
preponderance of masculine and feminine women with the concomitant greater or
lesser desire for emancipation.
Obviously I do not take into account in relation to the woman question the
large number of womanly women, the wives of the prolific artisan class whom
economic pressure forces to factory or field labour. The connection between
industrial progress and the woman question is much less close than is usually
realised, especially by the Social Democrat Group. The relation between the
mental energy required for intellectual and for industrial pursuits is even
less. France, for instance, although it can boast three of the most famous
women, has never had a successful woman's movement, and yet in no other
European country are there so many really businesslike, capable women. The
struggle for the material necessities of life has nothing to do with the
struggle for intellectual development, and a sharp distinction must be made
between the two.
The prospects of the movement for intellectual advance on the part of women
are not very promising; but still less promising is another view, sometimes
discussed in the same connection, the view that the human race is moving
towards a complete sexual differentiation, a definite sexual dimorphism.
The latter view seems to me fundamentally untenable, because in the higher
groups of the animal kingdom there is no evidence for the increase of sexual
dimorphism. Worms and rotifers, many birds and the mandrills amongst the apes,
have more advanced sexual dimorphism than man. On the view that such an
increased sexual dimorphism were to be expected, the necessity for
emancipation would gradually disappear as mankind became separated into the
completely male and the completely female. On the other hand, the view that
there will be periodical resurrections of the woman's movement would reduce
any such resurrection to ridiculous impotence, making it only an ephemeral
phase in the history of mankind.
A complete obliteration will be the fate of any emancipation movement which
attempts to place the whole sex in a new relation to society, and to see in
man its perpetual oppressor. A corps of Amazons might be formed, but as time
went on the material for the corps would cease to occur. The history of the
woman movement during the Renaissance and its complete disappearance contains
a lesson for the advocates of women's rights. Real intellectual freedom cannot
be attained by an agitated mass; it must be fought for by the individual. Who
is the enemy? What are the retarding influences?
The greatest, the one enemy of the emancipation of women is woman herself. It
is left to the second part of my work to prove this.
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