The Nature of Woman In preparation By the Same Author (Type Problems Series) Woman : Her life and development One volume The Sciences of Life In separate parts The Nature of Woman By J. Lionel Tayler, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. Member of the Royal Sanitary Institute London University Extension and Tutorial Lecturer on Biology and Sociology N EW YORK. P BUTTON & COMPANY 31 West Twenty-Third Street 93 T3 Preface T DO not expect for this little volume a large circulation, but I venture to hope that those who are interested in womanhood and manhood will find in its pages something that is worthy of consideration. I have written this book with the deepest and most sincere respect for womanly character and womanly individuality in my mind, and I have tried to write fairly and without the prejudice of the moment ; is it too much to ask of those who are my readers a like attitude of mind ? It has been my object to make a complex subject as simple as a complex subject can be made, because I hope that the book will be read by those unused to biological thought. It would have been easy to adduce many more facts than I have done in support of my views, but the book would then un- avoidably have become technical. I owe this apology to fellow biological students, and on another occa- sion hope to make good these defects. The author is, of course, writing in his private capacity, and claims no other authority than that which the facts of the subject appear to warrant. J. L. T. 257381 Contents CHAPTER PAGE Preface . . . . .5 I. The Woman's Movement . . p II. The Man's Movement . . 4 2 III. The Confusion of Thought of our Times . 47 IV. Our Great-grandparents' Days . . 62 V. Our Great-grandparents and Ourselves . 69 VI. The Evolution of Sex and its Significance . 87 VII. The Next Step : Economics and Biology . 115 VIII. The Home and Motherhood as Mental, not Material, Ideals . . . .124 IX. The Sphere of Woman . . .129 X. The Nature of Man and Woman . 138 Supplementary Chapter : Some Landmarks in the Subject, with the Substance of "Woman" by W. C. Roscoe, reprinted from "National Review" for October, 1858 146 References . . . . .180 Authors' Index . . . .185 Chronological Index . . .186 Subject Index . . . .186 7 The Nature of Woman Chapter I The Woman's Movement The Past ..." Woman is not undevelopt man." TENNYSON. I ask for nothing else than this that woman should recognise her own individuality, and that man should recognise it also in education, vocation, domestic life, and national representation. HPHE study of sex is primarily a human one, firstly because sex has in all forms of animal existence only a physical value, lacking both the individual and the social importance that it possesses in man ; secondly what is really a necessary bio- logical corollary to the first reason sex specialisa- tion and intensity have reached a higher stage in the human species than elsewhere. Woman's position can only be said to have been a matter for serious discussion in recent times, for although primitive man and woman had certain grievances that they each felt against the other, yet there can be little doubt that these were settled by individuals as individuals, and were not taken up by the one sex as a sex question and rejected by the 9 io The Nature of Woman other. In point of fact woman was physically in too undifferentiated a condition in early pre-civilised life, and she was mentally and physically so much more man-like that it is probable that the idea of mental differences of sex had hardly occurred to either the man or the woman at this time. Woman was regarded by man and regarded herself also as simply an inferior copy of himself. There is also ample evidence to prove that, although the virago such as Socrates' Xantippe has always, except possibly among the Spartans, excited derision and annoyance in the mind of man, there was not in the older civilisations any tendency for women of that time to assert themselves as women and as a distinctive sex state force. The feeling of injustice, of limitation felt so acutely by the modern woman manifested itself first in Renaissance times, and has grown and intensified slowly in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and then rapidly from the close of the eighteenth century to the present time. It is, therefore, pre-eminently a modern movement, and has excited greatest feeling only in the more progressive and more masculine countries of the modern civilised world. I do not wish my point to be misunderstood. No movement is, of course, ever really new. Many primitive races are not free from some discontent of women. The Amazon myth and certain Greek and Roman examples might be quoted, but these were not large lasting movements. There was, of course, also besides woman's political movement a well-known Renaissance of woman's influence, and this was perhaps most marked in the two feminine The Woman's Movement n countries, Italy and France. 1 But the active dis- content to which I allude appeared first in England, and spread from England to the United States and Germany ; and although it is true that other countries, such as Hungary and France, were also affected, yet it was only in Germany and Anglo- Saxon lands that definite movements were es- tablished which gave origin to definite schools of thought. For some reason the German Empire was and is hostile to woman's development, and the Anglo-Saxon countries favourable, and as both have misunderstood woman's requirements, it may be a matter of some interest to push the inquiry a little further. 2 The Anglo-Saxon Movement Mary Astell, at the close of the seventeenth century, published (in 1696) a small volume on woman's position, which is probably the first of its kind in any country or any language. It passed through several editions, so that it may fairly be said to have been read with an interest that proved 1 And from France in Auguste Comte there is to be found, perhaps, the only example of last century of a social student clearly trying to relate woman's biological capacity to her social functions. Whether he succeeded or not is not my point ; he at least saw the real scientific need. Motherhood, the Madonna ideal and chivalry, may be all more closely connected with true femininist growth of thought than is usually imagined, as Italy seems to suggest. 2 Finland might seem an exception, but I am not referring to legislation, but to sex feelings and the mental interest and thought aroused on the subject. Great national differences in sex status have always existed, Chaldea and Egypt, and Dorian, ./Eolian, and Ionian Greeks are also examples. 1 2 The Nature of Woman the subject was already exciting considerable at- tention. Richard Mulcaster, as early as I58I, 1 sup- ported a higher ideal of education for women, and he refers to public opinion as supporting him in this view. The question of sex emancipation must have been discussed in some slight degree, therefore, previous to his statement, but the movement, such as it was, came from the man's side, and there is no hint that woman felt in any conscious degree any bondage at the time he wrote on the subject. Mary Astell's work is, therefore, the first to point out clearly that women as women objected to the limitations imposed upon them. It is also to be noted that in her view woman was an inferior kind of man, having unlike sexual functions, and her work, which is quaintly written, pleads for higher education for women, on the ground of it making her more interesting to man quite as much as for her feminine functions and her own life. So that the first stage of the woman's movement began by a denial of woman's womanhood ; woman was from this early aspect simply a female man, and as such it was expedient, even with her own inferior powers, to educate her. After an attempt to prove that there is no difference of sex in the soul, she con- tinues (p. 12, 3rd edition) : " Neither can it be in the body (if I may credit the report of learned physicians), for there is no difference in the organi- sation of those parts which have any relation to or influence over the mind ; but the brain and all 1 It is curious that so long as man had a contempt for learning and left tf, as he did in the early mediaeval period, in woman's hands, she herself did not value it highly either. The Woman's Movement 13 other parts (which I am not anatomist enough to mention) are contrived as well for the plentiful conveyance of spirits which are held to be the immediate instruments of sensation, in women as in men." To a man this unconsciousness of the sexual differences of the mind on the part of a woman is remarkable. That a man of this period, who scarcely troubled himself about woman's real nature, should have passed them over is not sur- prising ; but that a woman, writing for the first time about a new subject, with her thoughts turned freshly in her own direction, should have passed over certain obvious differences, and assumed that the minds of men and women were alike, is indeed puzzling, and what is even more curious is that in some quarters the idea still persists. 1 This persistence is surely itself strong evidence of one unlikeness that more than one student of sexual psychology has pointed out, namely, woman's less intense analytic consciousness of her own person- ality. Possibly also of a reticence to lay bare what is there. The next defence of the woman's claim for wider opportunities took up a transitional attitude. It assumed that the minds of men and women were different, but considered that these differences were due to different habits of life and training, forgetful of the obvious fact that mental differences are 1 An American woman writer puts forward the claim of Mary Astell in words that might, indeed, have been those of the older authoress ; she writes : " There is no female brain. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver." (" Women and Economics." Oilman.) 14 The Nature of Woman marked in higher birds and mammals who are not differently trained nor differently environed in early life, forgetful, too, of the unquestionable influence that male and female reproductive glands exert on the individual as a whole. Emasculated animals develop feminine characteristics, the more marked the earlier the operation has been performed. Female birds whose plumage has been typical, when they cease to lay eggs at times acquire the plumage of a cock. Crowing hens that never lay, and women whose attributes change " at the change of life," and who may at this period acquire masculine characters, and even a thin beard, are well-known phenomena, with the mental characteristics that accompany them. Such are only a few common facts that have long been recognised, which prove, quite apart from other scientific evidence, that sex is of biological, of mental and bodily significance. Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill both assumed that woman's mind differed because woman had been prevented from using it ; and Helen Thompson, an American authoress, after establish- ing by experiment mental differences between men and women, follows in Mill's footsteps, and attempts to reason away her results. Woman is, of course, not a mere female man, but a woman possessed of womanliness ; and though there are manly women and womanly men, and men with female minds and women with male ones, yet womanliness is a broad characteristic of woman and manliness of man. The first stage of the woman's movement, based upon woman's likeness to man, was erroneous, and the second stage, that thought the unlikeness The Woman's Movement 15 existed but was acquired l and was unnatural proves also to be untrue. There is yet a third line of argument that Mary Wollstonecraft (" Rights of Woman," 1792) and Mill (" Subjection of Woman," 1869) attempted to justify, namely, that a woman had certain ethical rights in the state, and that these were not respected. This ethical issue became the one that dominated the whole of the Anglo-Saxon move- ment, permeated our education system when women were given larger opportunities, and has, in the opinion of many, led to some serious dangers in modern life. That the rights of woman might be equal in value to the rights of man and yet not be identical never occurred to English or American men and women. That it might be granted that women had been treated badly, be admitted that there was need of reform, and yet that people should disagree with the aim of the emancipationists to give the woman the same educational and occupational opportunities as the man, was a position that was summarily dis- missed. The whole question of woman's nature was disregarded. The spirit of the age was against woman's development, though it favoured in ex- treme quarters her emancipation, and it may be that woman has been sacrificed to an extent that after-ages are likely to regret. It was a misfortune that in England the two pioneers who were accepted by the nation were pre- cisely those who from experience knew little or 1 Acquired characteristics are not hereditary according to the best-informed modern biological authorities. 1 6 The Nature of Woman nothing of the higher aspects either of womanhood or of manhood, their knowledge being mainly con- fined to one sex. Mary Wollstonecraft had an unfortunate example of manhood in her father, and there was almost con- stant misery in the home of her early years. And Mill, by a curious and regrettable coincidence, was trained on an asexual system by his father, being almost exclusively deprived of womanly influences in his surroundings. The ignorance of man's higher nature that exists in the woman leader's writings, and the ignorance of woman's in the man's, is thus partially accounted for. But the people of England must themselves have acquiesced in this faulty position, otherwise other leaders would have been found. One such possible man l certainly existed. That the identical rights argument proved itself a fallacious one subsequent events have established. As no one in the movement tried to discover what woman's powers were, men soon took their own standard of comparison. If women were as fitted as men, why was it that in art, which she had had some practical knowledge of for centuries, no great woman artist had been produced ? Why was there not a woman Michael Angelo ? why not a woman Titian or a Raphael ? Raphael had painted motherhood even, yet no woman had equalled him. Music, too, had been her study, yet there had been no woman Mozart, no woman Beethoven. And 1 See "National Review," October, 1858, an article by W. C. Roscoe, afterwards published in volume form, 1860, after the writer's death in 1859 ; and the "Supplementary Chapter" of this book, The Woman's Movement 17 then it was remembered that there was a time when reading was more cultivated by women than men, when, in the early Middle Ages, men looked with contempt on the study of things mental, yet no recognised woman authoress of this time has been discovered. And up to the present time in dress, furnishing, cookery, and domestic life, inventions and designs have been mainly by men (as, for ex- ample, Chippendale and Sheraton in furniture, Worth in dress, Liebig in food preparations). So, as men still wished to deal justly by women, and women still expressed the desire to be freed from unjust restrictions that hampered them, a new kind of argument to meet this difficulty of woman's failure grew up. It began to be tacitly assumed that woman was inferior to man, and Huxley only voiced the ten- dency of the time he wrote in when he asserted that women and the lower races must both be emanci- pated, if not entirely for their own sakes, at least for those who held them enslaved. He asserted, and with truth, that emancipation benefited the emanci- pator more than the emancipated. And, as a result of this persistent effort, woman has attained some kind of emancipation. But the added freedom has not satisfied her. Why ? Is it not because it has not been founded on her natural capacity ? She has largely obtained economic independence, with the result that she has depreciated man's wage- earning value, and in many industries is displacing him entirely. 1 Where before the unmarried woman had diffi- 1 See Minority Report of Poor Law Commission, 1909, etc. 8 1 8 The Nature of Woman culty in obtaining employment, now the married man with wife and family has partly the difficulty that the single woman had to face. The lazy married man, too, has found out that it is useful for his wife to be able to work, and so he stops at home, or rather at the corner of the nearest public-house, and the wife, thus fettered, neglects her home, neglects her duties to her children, puts her babies out to be bottle-fed, and suffer illness and death while she often performs the man's work at a woman's current wage. A type of woman has meanwhile grown up almost without domestic education, who prefers public life to the home under any conditions. What prompted woman to feel dissatisfied was never discovered, and has not been discovered at the present time. What dissatisfied her in her in- dividual life, what dissatisfied her in her public life, remains unrecognised. She has been merely treated as a sexless being, as a man with female functions, or as an inferior human being having a subordinate social value, and precisely what the value was re- mained unknown. Why women were fairly satisfied with their lives till two hundred years ago ; why this dissatisfaction broke out only in the cultured parts of the world, and there only in the more cultured classes, has never been studied. Our movement, though a sincere and sympathetic one, and this is to its credit, supported by men as well as women, has miscarried, and woman's nature and the origin of her discontent remains now, as before, unknown. This is lamentable. The Woman's Movement 19 Germany The writers in Germany who have written on woman's nature have shown themselves to have knowledge and sympathy mainly for those elements which are merely common to all females, and are not characteristically woman's at all, and have asserted from this knowledge that woman is therefore man's inferior. 1 It would, of course, be as logical for woman to retort that taking a general estimate of the male elements in man, he could not compare with woman on her human side, and that the womanly promptings of her being were always lowered by his male assertiveness. One would have expected, had there not been such indisputable evidence to the contrary, that it would be un- necessary to point out that all investigations into the nature of woman must take note of woman's whole nature, and not inaccurately assume that, while man has a human individuality that is man's prerogative, woman has no individuality beyond that which she shares with all higher female life Yet this axiomatic assumption, which alone car make a study on this subject valuable, has been wholly disregarded. It is true that poets like Schiller have written sympathetically about woman, but these have not been students of her nature, nor have they been 1 The same view is taken on the scientific aspect of the subject. There are, however, many notable exceptions to this, Professor Max Miiller being one, but the general tendency is to this effect in literature and science. The German people as a whole adopt a saner and more wholesome view. 20 The Nature of Woman specially associated with the question of her de- velopment. Of the names that are so associated almost all are hostile, and to some degree unhealthy in their tone, and all profoundly selfish. I shall not, therefore, attempt to seriously criticise the German position, because it is self-condemned by its disregard of what is essentially womanly. It will only be necessary to point out the leading assumptions that have given the movement its characteristic tone. Schopenhauer's writings on woman and on love may be dismissed, because in reality he neither writes of woman nor of love, but only of one and that the lower aspect of woman's nature. He should dissatisfy men no less than women by his assump- tions, as, for instance, his contention that fidelity is impossible to man, which is in flagrant opposition to historic facts, which prove that the tendency of progressive civilised life is increasingly towards monogamy and mind comradeship in marriage, and that domestic ideals as shown in poetry and fiction favour more and more positively mutual sex purity of living ; l and his assertion that man's form is artistically superior to the woman's is contrary to all expert knowledge on the subject. A man so prejudiced in favour of man cannot be accepted seriously. Von Hartmann's comparison of the sexes is simply an endeavour to prove that chastity in the 1 Some evidence of relaxation has been recently manifested, but for reasons given by Spencer and Westermarck this is not likely to continue, as there would seem to be a permanent and increasing need for monogamy under advancing conditions of society. The Woman's Movement 21 man is unnecessary and unnatural, while it is an essential quality in woman. He asserts that " phy- siological shortcomings " are the basis of man's morality, assuming without one word of proof and without one single fact in support of his contention, that self-control in man is associated with weak sexual impulse. Marriage on this basis is solely on the man's side a matter of sensuality ; he states that " if man wanted nothing, then woman would have nothing valuable to give him, in which case the influence of the gentler sex over the male would diminish to vanishing point." He fails to realise that man would be gross indeed if daily contact with a womanly mind had no influence on his own. Recently a work on " Sex and Character " has been published, the work of a young man who wrote his book before reaching his twenty-first year, and who committed suicide before his twenty- fourth. It is ill-informed and unsupported by evidence, but it is shrewdly written. There is, however, little evidence of impartiality in his criticism of women ; and although he does not wholly lack intuitive insight, this, such as it is, is limited to one aspect of the female character, namely, the influence of brute strength on physical weakness and fragility. There is a similar disposition in German sex psychologists, which is, unfortunately, shared by some French and English scientists, to treat the psychology of sex from the physical point of view. So far has this unwholesome tendency gone that many writers for the general public have published 22 The Nature of Woman larger volumes " for its benefit " than is allotted to such matters in medical text-books for the medical man acting as trained adviser. This fact alone is sufficient condemnation of the movement. Exceptions I have tried to give a fair impression of the general trend of the movement in the two countries. I have shown that in England men were sympathetic but lacking in intuitive power, that they acted as if woman must dewomanise herself and become man- like in order to be free, and that woman felt this position to be a true one herself. This attempt, as was to be expected, inevitably failed. In Germany also the same lack of intuitive power is apparent, but the Germans were led to a belief that woman's womanly qualities were only feminine and could be studied as such. Of course, in both countries there were women and men who did not share these feelings ; women happily married, as men when vocationally well satisfied, seldom express their feelings. It was mainly those men and women who were dissatisfied with woman's position who asserted themselves. Nevertheless, there could be little doubt that a general dissatisfaction did exist, and that in England it was popular and supported by the general feeling, while in Germany it was disliked and overborne. Two writers, however, one an Englishman, the other a German woman, have taken this problem as it deserved to be taken, seriously and respectfully, The Woman's Movement 23 and have each given important contributions to the study. In the October number of the " National Review" for the year 1858, already referred to, appeared an unsigned article l on " Woman," which, though nominally a review of some works on the subject, is in reality an original essay, far the most original one I have ever had the pleasure of reading. In it every argument of real strength for and against the woman's movement, that has been used in the fifty odd years that followed its publi- cation, will be found summarised. That so able a statement excited so little comment is truly re- markable. The writer is free alike from the follies of German and English schools of thought. He starts from the only scientific position possible under the circum- stances, that woman has an individuality of her own, and that this needs interpreting before her nature can be understood. At a time when it was being asserted in England that woman's mind was not less original than man's, and a decade before Mill's " Subjection of Women " urged the same untenable belief, he emphasised the fact of man's clear and undisputed predominance in the following words : " Society ever since the world began has received its characteristic nature and dis- tinctive impress, not from the women, but from the men who helped to compose it." 2 This is shown by the predominance of the masculine and manly elements in all terms of thought and expression, 1 By W. C. Roscoe. 2 See note on next page. 24 The Nature of Woman " and the world's history confirms it, that the collective body of men are in their nature more strong, more vigorous, more comprehensive, more complete in themselves than women." He here carefully guards himself against exceptions by the use of the words " collective body " of men as com- pared with a like " collective body " of women. To the argument that women have not had fair oppor- tunities he replies by pointing out that had they had the mental ability they would have discovered them. He urges that woman's influence is now less than it was before the advent of " The Scientific Age," and states, as recent writers have since admitted, that this lessening influence has created " a sort of chasm between men and women." He connects woman's subordination with the growth of " material in- dustry," and he urges woman to base her just claims to a larger life not upon the false basis of a non-existent equality, but upon the " unexpugnable position of her real nature." Where writers, governed by a desire to assert the claim of man's superiority over woman, have charac- terised her intuitions as mere instincts, and placed her, as some German writers have done for this reason, with animals generally, he justly points out that these intuitions of women are due to greater delicacy of perceptive powers, and that woman's intellect is complementary to man's, offering sugges- tions to his, that in his brain become material for original thought. 1 These statements are not, however, quite the same, and while the first one is true, the second can only be accepted with important reservations. The Woman's Movement 25 He insists on the obvious but neglected fact, that is supported by our knowledge of the power of appetites in man, that woman is better in her nature but less noble in her power of self-control and in- dependent responsibility, and in a fine comparison of the two natures he states of woman that " her nature is higher than man's, but man is set above his nature." He points out that woman, by this fineness of her character and by her weaker will-power, is less fitted for the coarser struggles of life, and that there are special considerations in her case which do not apply to man. He pleads for a wider opportunity for mental culture, and asserts that the assumed objection to cultured women is unfounded. " Lieutenant Smith, skilled only in horses, does not like a young lady to mention Dante ; and Jones, who has contracted all he once knew into a familiarity with the prices of cotton, trembles to be asked what Kepler's laws are " ; but " it is an error to suppose that educated men prefer the society of uninformed women. Perhaps, indeed, there is no exercise so delightful, or so highly appreciated on either side, as the inter- change of ideas between the cultured minds of the different sexes." He denies the absurd assumption that to be womanly one must necessarily have a weak per- sonality, for " a manly woman is a very feeble man, a feeble man is a manly woman, and a strong woman is a strong woman, and not the less a true woman, and very different from what we call a strong- minded one." The following analysis of the cause of the friend- 26 The Nature of Woman ship of sex that develops into love is truly touched with the insight of genius. " There are two ways in which women and men approach and modify one another. The one is where they are drawn together by the affections, 1 where mutual sympathies, moral and intellectual, are aroused. . . . Yet, so far are they from being merged in one another by this union, that each sex acquires from it its most complete and characteristic development ; each gains from the other and strengthens what it has best of its own ; they ap- proach not by abnegations but by additions, each from the other of what is necessary to raise either man or woman to the fullness of the perfect creature." " The other mode of abroach is the reverse of this, where men brought up apart from women, and women deterred more or less from the society of men, 5 lose not only the benefit of what each can give the other, but something of the truest characteristics of their own sex, which are not developed in their fullness and beauty except when the affections and sympathies, aroused by free intercourse, have their full play. These men and women approach on a sort of neutral ground. Such women are more of men than the others ; but it is because they are less of women ; the two grow like one another by respective loss, not by respective gain"* Is society, he asks, prepared to sacrifice the former higher type for the latter lower ? 4 It is the position 1 Italics mine. 2 This is the elementary part of the real psychology of love and gives the one all-satisfying sanction to marriage which no other consideration can supply. 3 Italics mine. 4 The lower neutral type of woman has, as he asserts, largely dominated the woman's movement, but she did not create it. The Woman's Movement 27 of this lower neutral class that has attracted atten- tion. Is it not possible for both types to be pro- vided for, clearly, realising the claims of the higher ? This is the whole central position of the woman's movement, and no other writer, before or since, has troubled to realise what accurate answers to these questions would mean. Finally, to conclude my quotations with this warning, given before our factory legislation had acquired its strength, and which is still of tran- scendent social importance at the present time : Women tend, by the more easy disorganisation of their higher but more delicate minds, to acquire more readily than men the possible vices of occu- pational life. Business women, he says, are harder, have less feeling, are more unscrupulous ; fisher- women become worse than fishermen ; female lodging-house keepers are worse than male, and the fallen woman more irretrievably fallen. The broad truth of this fact is undoubted, and it is confirmed from all recent sources. The woman drunkard and morpho-maniac carry to greater excesses than the man of like habits does the craving that has mastered them. And he asks a question that few will be pre- pared to pass over lightly : " Is not the whole position of antagonistic relations and contests for advantage with the other sex the most perilous to delicacy and simple-mindedness into which a woman can enter?" And, as I have already pointed out, he connects the separation of the sexes, their lessened harmony with each other, with this spirit of antagonism that com- mercial competition arouses. No one will dispute the fact that the relations of 28 The Nature of Woman married life should be entirely amicable, that in proportion as a spirit of antagonism is aroused in the home there will be just this amount of failure, firstly as regards husband and wife, secondly as regards children, should they become parents. A woman who has once acquired an irritable, bicker- ing spirit, which she tends to acquire in the indus- trial struggle, is apt to carry it into the home, and just because she is by nature non-combative, so the alternatives in the struggle in which she is nearly always worsted are either this chronic irritability or a broken, wholly submissive spirit, instead of the natural, even disposition which is soothing and rest- ful to all that the healthy woman comes in contact with. In some instances the man's spirit is broken, not the wife's, and this is, of course, as regrettable as the wife's failure. It is at least worth considera- tion, therefore, this view that both directly and indirectly certain occupations are undesirable for women, and we may not feel disposed to disagree with the " National Review " writer when he asserts " that there are many phases of the life of industry totally unfitted for woman to enter on ; and that so far from its being to be desired that she should mingle in and understand by experience the diffi- culties with which many men have to contend, it is to be wished that her atmosphere should be as serene and her growth as unwarped as the conditions of humanity will allow." l In this connection it may be interesting to observe 1 Ruskin might, of course, be quoted for similar opinions, and although his teaching had many defects, there is certainly some truth in his view. The Woman's Movement 29 that fifty years later, after bitter experience, this is precisely the conclusion that saner men and women are coming to. Factory life under any circumstances debases woman generally, and there are many callings unsuitable for girls and young women because they unfit them in future years for the possibilities of married life. The employment of married women outside the home (to which there are, obviously, justifiable exceptions, which I cannot dwell upon in this book, owing to lack of space) is now generally condemned from the home point of view, for the comfort, order, and homeliness of life is difficult when the wife works ; from the child's standpoint, for the children are generally uncared for, 1 and from the woman's own outlook, for the treble labour of industrial, domestic, and childbirth duties wear her out, and exhaust her to an unrealised degree. The more masculine her type, the better she can thus sterilise herself, but the womanly woman who influences the man and humanises his ideals, who becomes a mother to her children, and is not simply a bearer of them, is spoilt, distorted, and ruined by the strain which modern life conditions often impose. 2 1 It is, of course, true that an idle, gossipy woman may, and often does, keep her home in a worst state than one engaged at a factory, who is not idle and cares for her home, but this seeming exception does not invalidate the rule. 2 I have myself in medical practice seen this disorganisation of a woman's individuality and strength repeatedly, and the state of unmarried girl clerks, as most medical men can testify to, is often pitiable in the extreme. The returns of Post Office clerks where men and women do in some instances almost identical work, and where women tend to be invalided many years earlier than the men, point to the same conclusion. And I am informed that in 30 The Nature of Woman " On the other hand," he continues, " we yet more strongly deprecate anything in the nature of a cloisteral seclusion or an enforced idleness." He believes practical life employment " in affairs of some kind or other to be essential to the healthy condition and just development of every individual, male or female," but woman must follow those occupations " which are most in consonance with her nature as it is, and not as it is presumed it may become." It is the study of what is consonant with the life of a true man and what with a true woman that will one day decide precisely what should be a man's field and what the woman's. It is not a matter for guess-work, nor for the industrial employer to discover after he has ruined thousands and thousands of lives, but for the scientist who shall take up such an investigation in a large-spirited and high-minded manner. To me, therefore, this essay, with its wide grasp of facts, its modern outlook, after half a century has passed away, is far more deserving of preservation than any other that I am acquainted with. Here was the one clear-sighted Englishman who saw the certain London banks where women have been employed the same early breakdown has been observed. If it is urged that the wages of the women are smaller than men's, which is, of course, true, I would suggest that three factors more than meet this contention : (i) Many women are partly supported by relatives ; (2) the woman clerk is generally unmarried ; (3) owing to the fact that a man is a bad manager of domestic matters and has to aim, if he be a normal man, for a wage that will support a wife and possible family besides himself, his own income even when unmarried is much less in excess of a woman's than at first sight appears. It seems, therefore, probable that monotonous employments are peculiarly hurtful to women. And this example is probably only one of many others not yet discovered. The Woman's Movement 31 dangers to which women would be exposed, who was fitted by nature and culture to lead the English movement, and to have left a world impression be- hind him, but who passed into oblivion because his work was drowned by the anti-social current that swept it by. About thirty years later a German woman com- menced writing a series of works on " Modern Women," "The Psychology of Woman," "We Women and our Authors," etc., which stand out in striking contrast to the general mass of inferior and unoriginal volumes on this subject that every year make their appearance. In her preface to " Modern Women " she states that " a woman who seeks freedom by means of the modern method of independence is generally one who desires to escape from a woman's sufferings. She is anxious to avoid subjection, also motherhood, and the dependence and impersonality of an ordi- nary woman's life, but in doing so she unconsciously deprives herself of her womanliness," and there comes a time in the lives of all such women when they find themselves " standing at the door of the heart's innermost sanctuary," and realise that they are excluded. She remarks that these women are generally individualistic, and yet are not able to stand alone. One may disagree, and I think justly, with her use of the word subjection, as if it were an unavoidable condition of womanhood ; one may hold different views from the authoress in her assumption that the modern woman really does desire to escape woman- hood, but there can be little doubt that there is a 32 The Nature of Woman desire in this newer type to shake herself free of man's influences, that she is not satisfied with the old conception of motherhood, that dependence on the man is in some way unsatisfactory to her feelings, and that home life, which is, of course, extremely personal, and not impersonal as stated, is also dis- tasteful to her. This writer's general outlook may be summarised, I hope not unfairly, as follows : Woman is a much less independent and self-reliant being than man, and cannot achieve her own fulfil- ment alone ; mentally and physically she requires his help to aid in her own development. " Woman, never, nowhere, and in nothing can make a starting- point," " all she does, performs, or suggests, repre- sents always but a deviation, a connection with, or continuation of something already produced, exist- ing, done." Mentally, even more than physically, she requires the stimulus of man, otherwise her life becomes vacant and wasted. "A woman has no destiny of her own ; she cannot have one, because she cannot exist alone. Neither can she become a destiny, except indirectly through the man. The more womanly she is, and the more richly endowed, all the more surely will her destiny be shaped by the man who takes her to be his wife. If, then, even in the case of the average woman, everything depends upon the man whom she marries, how much more true this must be in the case of the woman of genius, in whom not only her womanhood, but also her genius, needs calling to life by the embrace of a man. And if even the average woman cannot attain to the full consciousness of her womanhood without man, how much less can the woman of genius, in The Woman's Movement 33 whom sex is the actual root of her being and the source from whence she derives her talent and her ego. If her womanhood remains unawakened, then however promising the beginning may be, her life will be nothing more than a gradual decay, and the stronger her vitality the more terrible will the death struggle be." Dependence is natural to women, it is unnatural to men. " When man is no longer the supporter of woman, she becomes his oppressor," as the woman always acts as an industrial parasite. The under- selling of man by woman, the necessary result of " emancipation," brings with it, as men are less able to marry, the equally inevitable accompaniment, " prostitution." It is to be noted that it is of the modern womanly woman only, a^product of modern times, that she writes, and in support of her contention she analyses very strikingly the life habits of several repre- sentative women of this class. The woman of this type " knows nothing of her own powers until the man comes to reveal them." But these higher women, "unlike ordinary young girls, do not fall in love with mere outward qualities." " Physical maturity, which has hitherto been con- sidered sufficient, has placed the need for intellectual maturity in the shade. Surely women want to be grown up in mind and soul before entering life." As their life development, and this implies a mental rather than a physical ideal, depends upon the men they choose for husbands, and it is this mental har- mony felt between two individuals that attracts and is sought for, marriage for this reason becomes in- 34 The Nature of Woman creasingly difficult to them, for though on a physical basis many men would be pleasing to many women, on a mental it requires an acquiescence of two whole individualities in each other, and this is rare. Since the reward of success is so great, and the price of failure so terrible, and the result for women so far- reaching, the withering of mind and body that results is tragic. Finally, as this new life is, above all other things, womanly, so it is the manly, and, failing this, the male man that appeals to her. The big man and the little woman, the man of strength and courage, and the woman who feels the need and liking for pro- tection, are grouped together. This new type of woman, a woman in her whole nature, has given up the combative element, which has always charac- terised man, to man entirely. She is no scold, no virago, and she would appeal to the man through one element, love. Such is Laura Marholm's (now Laura Hansson's) interpretation of women. A com- parison of the essential positions of the two writers, a man who knew how to interpret a woman's nature and a woman not afraid to explain what in herself she felt to be truth, has not a little interest in show- ing how sincere workers on any problem tend to reach like results (see Appendix, p. 39). Writer " National Review " l Hansson l (i) Men as a body more (i) A woman has no destiny original, strong, vigorous, more apart from man. Woman never 1 There are many v faults in both these writers' outlooks ; neither adequately consider the position of the unmarried woman, and the values of the masculine type of woman and feminine type -of man receive no attention ; but this is a side criticism. The Woman's Movement 35 Writer " National Review " Hansson complete in themselves than women. (2) The manly man and the womanly woman are the essential factors in the situation. (3) The personal element is the big element in woman, the collective element in man. Wo- man's industrial life must be governed by her nature. (4) Woman's nature is higher than man's, but man is set above his nature.^ (5) Woman requires protec- tion for the finer elements of her nature. (6) (7) The woman's rights move- ment essentially due to neutral types of women unhappy in their development. (8) A chasm has arisen be- tween men and women. (9) (10) Woman's truest sphere is that which is aloof from the original by her own influence. Man is essential to make her realise herself. Man mentally and physically the creative organism, woman the bearing and developing. (2) Woman grows more con- scious of herself by her growing womanly individuality. (3) Women feel personally, and for this reason are unfitted for the roughness of life. Men feel collectively and are not thus injured. (4) Woman has a deep in- tuition to rise above > to escape from her ego. (5) Woman requires protec- tion for mind or soul, and body. (6) Nothing is more ten- acious than these small, slender, pliant women. (?) Rights of woman move- ment results from futile efforts at protection in the unfortunately married or in the unmarried. (8) Men and women have never been so widely separated from each other. (9) Man thinks coarsely about women and woman stupidly about men. 2 (10) Economic independence desired by woman is yet fatal to 1 Italics mine. This mental desire and realisation of the other's fullness by what is lacking and felt to be lacking in each, one element of love. 2 The German view referred to in my text. 36 The Nature of Woman Writer " National Review " Hansson her, and she is always a parasite on man in this unsupported relation. ( 1 1 ) Woman is anxious to avoid subjection, motherhood, and dependence, and her home dissatisfies her. But her woman- liness and happiness are bound up with these things. (12) Newer type of woman- hood wishes to be mentally mature as well as physically before marriage. harassing and exhausting strug- gles of daily bread earning. Woman does not elevate indus- trial life, but degrades it. (n) There is no bitterer satire passed, or graver injustice done to women, than by those of their own sex, who assume so passionately that everything that is masculine must be desir- able for women, and better than what they have of their own ; the claim should rather be the extension of the woman's field than the usurpation of man's. (12) The mental nature of the woman appeals strongly to the cultured man. (13) Woman's social value and social rights rest on her womanly nature solely. Neither of these studies are comprehensive enough, nor are they founded sufficiently securely upon scientific data to be of more than suggestive value to modern investigators, but they both help to give a fairly true picture of the subject, and in this make it more real and personal. Their agree- ments, as may be seen from the thirteen points taken from their works, is remarkable, with perhaps the exception of the fourth point, and where their views do not coincide they supplement. There can, I think, be no doubt that ultimately it is along the lines that are here laid down that future work will proceed. The Woman's Movement 37 It will be seen, I hope, from this analysis of the woman's emancipation that it has led inevitably to a consideration of man's. Woman's desire for emancipation was probably aroused by man's initiatory feeling that woman should have better educational opportunities ; this and an upgrowth of a new type of womanhood have led cultured men in England to like cultured women, while the un- cultured men and women have endeavoured to retard the development of woman's higher life. The question, therefore, is not exclusively a woman's question, but is really a sexual one. We have seen that woman is now desirous of becoming mentally mature before she undertakes the responsibilities of married life, and that she now is tending to apply a mental as well as a physical standard to man, and that her love is only given when her whole indi- viduality is satisfied. Is it possible that woman's dis- content is not so much dissatisfaction with her womanhood and its duties as with the prospect of defective self-realisation that is offered her ? Per- haps the assertion of men that women are neglecting their duties and shirking their burdens is only partially a just one. 1 Perhaps woman is rightly 1 Many years ago, as near as I can remember about fourteen, I heard a lecture by Dr. Henry Rayner on " Adolescence," in which he stated that the modern girl's development was retarded by her education, but he did not seem to consider that this retardation was harmful. I have since heard this view frequently expressed by men and women whose opportunities for observation have been large, and some of them seem to believe, and I personally share this belief, that the retardation is never completely made up in after- years. Should this be so, part of woman's dissatisfaction may be due to this unhealthy cause. 38 The Nature of Woman dissatisfied with her relation to the man and the child. Does she object to maternity ? Is her creative feeling of motherhood declining ? Of this, however, I am convinced, that the question of woman's distinctive individuality, men- tal and bodily alike being recognised, lies at the root of all fruitful investigation on the " woman's question " as regards her education, her social position and representation, and her own and man's relationship in the home. 1 In conclusion, I wish to make an appeal to women and men to take a broader and wiser view of this problem, and to feel earnestly enough about it to study what it really means. The majority of women are, and always will be, wives and mothers, and certain healthy individual and national needs of living are necessarily postulated by this fact. What are they ? All women have distinctive inherited qualities of mind and body which need healthy ex- pression, as well as other qualities common to both sexes. Do we appreciate what these distinctive womanly attributes are ? Nearly all thoughtful men and women are extremely dissatisfied with the dominance of the lower commercialism over higher mind ideals. But this is not a sex, but a human question. What is the cause of woman's discontent with modern womanly opportunities ? This is what we have to investigate, but which has never been in- vestigated. The desire on the part of some women for franchise changes, of others for increased occu- 1 There is apparently no work existent from this point of view in any country on any one or all of these four aspects. The Woman's Movement 39 pational facilities, of others for a wider domestic horizon, and yet others for the more or less com- plete abandonment of home life and the subordi- nation or even rejection of maternal claims : these desires are but superficial expressions of a deeper feeling ; and until we understand this governing feeling we cannot legislate without the gravest possibilities of disaster. When the young girl mind opens out into the womanly, why does a feeling of discontent with womanliness and its opportunities tend to arise ? Is this discontent biological or educational, healthy or unhealthy ? Until we can answer these preliminary inquiries the time will not have arrived for legislative action. Appendix Note It would be easy to demonstrate the general acceptance of most of these statements from competent novelists and others who have really described woman from the point of view of her womanly individuality ; two examples, however, must suffice. Olive Schreiner, 1 in the "Story of an African Farm," through the words of the chief character of the story a young woman with modern aspirations gives acceptance to almost all the points that these two writers emphasise. As Laura Hansson points out that " Woman has no destiny apart from man," so Olive Schreiner makes this girl, of exceptional mental calibre and will but who is also intensely womanly, express herself thus : " I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the world, till someone wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in self; till I have been delivered, I will deliver no one." Of woman's loneliness apart from man and of her need of pro- tection she insists constantly, and after showing the view of the vulgar cruder woman as a contrast to this higher type of woman- hood, she makes her thus express herself about the self-weariness 1 I am quite aware of her later writings, but these are probably less expressions of herself than her earlier and more autobiographical approach. 40 The Nature of Woman that Laura Hansson insists upon as being part of the lack of aim existing in womanhood. " I am so weary of myself. It is eating my soul to its core self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I can- not live ! Will nothing free me from myself I want to live ! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! . . . " and as an instance of the intensity of the modern womanly woman's love, " One day I shall love something utterly, and then I shall be better." Of the sex consciousness of the woman as woman and of her realisation of woman's individuality she says : " If women were the inhabitants of Jupiter, of whom you happened to hear something, you would pore over us and our condition night and day." And as a parallel to Laura Hansson's position that the newer type of womanhood wishes for a mental maturity as well as a physical before marrying, she makes this same girl say to a man who confesses to his physical love of her individuality : " You call into activity one part of my nature ; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch." I am tempted to allude to George Gissing in greater detail, but his wonderful intuitive realisation of the higher woman's nature would take me too far afield. " Thyrsa," a story that is really a modern love epic too beauti- ful to be analysed and dissected, is a wonderful study of a woman's life, of her passivity till love is born, of its intensity when it is born, and the incorporation of the woman's destiny in that of the man's that she is drawn to. That Gissing also, perhaps unconsciously, realised that the higher type of woman responds most perfectly to the gentleness that comes of true manly strength, and that a less perfect woman is fascinated by a strength that is tyrannously expressed, is also seen from such books as " The Nether World " and " The Emanci- pated," and is a fact of no little importance in this connection. " The Odd Women " is really a work that vividly portrays the conclusion that Laura Hansson in "Modern Women" insists upon, the sad fate of the refined unmarried wage-earning woman in modern times. And in George Meredith we have the same need of man's understanding and assisting women expressed in his closing words of Rhoda Fleming, " Help poor Girls." In fact, from these and other writers it would be possible, guided by modern science, to construct a true psychology of womanhood that would be capable of universal acceptance. The Woman's Movement 41 What is indeed one of the most remarkable facts of the woman's social movement is its general disregard of sex mentality. Fictional, poetic, and scientific literatures are full of references to mental differences of sex, and when a writer's thoughts are not biassed by the modern economic attitude the belief, resting as it does on various, everyday facts, that a woman's mind and a man's are unlike asserts itself naturally and inevitably. This is nowhere more noticeable than in works on religion. James Martineau, for instance, in his first volume of " Hours of Thought," has, in addition to many other allusions describing the feminine and the masculine attitudes of faith, a sermon (" Neither Man nor Woman in Christ Jesus") devoted almost entirely to this one point, and in agreement with Laura Hansson and the review writer already quoted, he gives intense passive susceptibility and repose as woman's chief characteristics. 1 And Francis William Newman, in his work. " The Soul," has many similar ideas. One is, in fact, embarrassed by the amount and agreement of opinion on this one point, which economic writers alone fail to realise, while even among them the better informed are at last awaking to the importance of the bio- logical point of view, bat at present it is still not understood that the differences of sex must ultimately be the basis upon which the structure of modern education and industry must rest. 1 Women hymn-writers confirm this. The American development of the Woman's Movement is treated in Chapter III. The single aspect of life and individual applications of this thought will be treated in another volume, and therefore hasty conclusions should not be drawn. Chapter II The Man's Movement FT is assumed, when we speak of a woman's movement as if it were a distinctive movement characteristic of the female sex, that woman is dis- contented, and that man is contented, and so obsessed are we all by ideas that, quite forgetful of the obvious discontent of man, and quite forgetful of the really happy relationships of the majority of men with the majority of women, we assume, what is not the fact, that there is a woman's move- ment based upon woman's unhappiness and man's happiness, and that somehow an adjustment of the rights and duties of the sexes is the real question at issue. Of course, this idea, as every man and woman of experience knows, is an utterly false one. A woman, on an average, lives longer than a man, partly, no doubt, because her life is a more moderate and balanced one than the man's ; but partly, also, because the strain of a man's work tells more heavily upon him than the woman's, including childbirth cares, tells upon her ; and as a fact, the larger proportion of mature men and women are married, and, in the main, happily married, and meet daily in friendly intercourse, and it is only the exceptional instances that are not. Further, 42 The Man's Movement 43 the striking fact of business relations, where men and women are employed together, and the women are as a class under-selling the men, is the amicable relationships which are preserved ; so far from there being sex antagonisms, the noticeable reality is this, that sex friendliness as a general rule overcomes the competitive unfriendliness that would have resulted had men underbid in the wage market their fellow- men. That employers, whether men or women, can and do induce women to take less than men is another aspect of the problem dependent probably upon woman's biological nature ; but the friendli- ness of the man employee with the woman employee is very remarkable, when it is borne in mind how all but universally the woman does take lower wages for similar work than the man. 1 The plain actuality, freed from misrepresentative propagandism, is that woman is discontented, and that her discontent is not primarily a sex discontent at all, and the discontent of the man is just as noticeable and very similar in many of its aspects to that of the woman. Official reports state that the worker is less satisfied with his work than formerly, that he throws down his tools at the first stroke of the hour when his em- ployment technically ceases. Is there a single nail to drive home to complete his labour, it must wait. A single button to be added to a garment, it must be completed next day. A single brick to give finish to the worker's day's labour, yet it must be left un- finished. There is, so it is said, no pride in the work for its own sake, as was formerly shown. As the 1 The cotton industry is, of course, an exception to this. 44 The Nature of Woman woman is accused of avoiding her home duties, of not feeding her child naturally, of taking it out late at night for her own pleasure, of buying tinned foods, and food badly cooked at some fish or sausage shop, for her husband's and children's meals, so the man is said to be passing away from his industrial ideals, and both are said to be less competent than formerly. And the employee, no doubt, has a case as strong against the employer as the employer against the employed ; but the fact to notice here is that the dissatisfaction is not a sex dissatisfaction, is not a woman's dissatisfaction or movement, or a man's, but exists in both sexes, and is, therefore, probably not due to a sex cause at all. Social reformers note this failure of the man, and treat of it despairingly. Carlyle thought we were ceasing to be men ; Morris that machinery is de- stroying the art of life, and that, because of this, work is ceasing to be a pleasure ; Ruskin that we are ceasing to feel the moral claims of our callings, yet none really analyse this feeling of discontent and trace it to its cause. Assumptions are made by many writers that will not bear serious examination. Is man more me- chanical and less of a man than formerly ? He is certainly less brutal and more humane. Even where it is claimed that work is becoming more mono- tonous, and this with some truth, yet the interest of the large factory life, associated with it, and the variety of amusements for leisure, and the shorter hours of labour, on the whole probably make for a brighter life than formerly, and one that is less The Man's Movement 45 rather than more uneventful. It is exceedingly doubtful if any material aspect of existence is worse now than formerly, for, on the whole, the material well-being of employer and employed has steadily improved, yet the discontent has increased. Like the woman's movement, the man's can be traced back to mediaeval times, to John Ball and similar types of men, who expressed dissatisfaction with the lot of the average man, and, like the modern woman's movement, it grew rapidly from the be- ginning of last century. It is, however, more general than the emancipation movement for women, in that it exists in all countries where thinking men and women are to be found : in Britain and the colonies, the United States, France, Germany, Russia. It is not physical discontent. The misery of the bodily wants of man has de- clined in all Anglo-Saxon and modern European countries, and in nearly every part of the more civilised portions of the world, yet this feeling has grown. It is not due to increase of machinery nor to the loss of the personal influence in life. For both mechanical and impersonal influences are greater in the town than the country, yet it is the country more than the town that breeds this feeling. It is not due to lack of educational opportunity. For the discontent exists most often in those classes of the nation, rich and poor alike, who have least desire for education, and lectures and good cheap literature are now in most modern countries within the reach of all. 46 The Nature of Woman The man's discontent and the woman's are both alike without a satisfactory explanation. Some cause, perhaps behind both and not a sexual one, must be sought for what is thus openly revealed. Chapter III The Confusion of Thought of our Times T WISH in this chapter, as I have to be unavoid- ably critical, to consider certain statements quite apart from the question of authorship ; but at the same time I shall try to use only those references that may be taken as being representative of wide- spread belief. I have, however, full authorities in my possession. The Woman of the Past as she is Stated to have been as Compared with the Woman of To-day I. "... Some of us, perhaps, can remember a time when girls in the schoolroom were brought up upon text-books, in question and answer, that had to be learned by rote, such as ' Magnall's Questions ' and ' Brewer's Guide to Science,' when Miss Corner's Histories were in fashion, when compound division was their extreme limit of arithmetic, and Euclid and algebra and Latin, and much more Greek, and even German, were not taught by governesses or included in school curricula. Both in limitation of range and want of thoroughness, the intellectual education of girls was sadly to seek." 47 48 The Nature of Woman This passage by a principal of an important ladies' college, though not intended to be disingenuous, could hardly be more so had it been a skilled, con- scious, deliberate attempt at misrepresentation. 1. School text-books, whether for girls or boys, at this period were very defective ; " Magnall's Ques- tions " were not worse than many text-books read by boys. 2. While it is pointed out that girls did not learn Euclid, algebra, Latin, Greek, and German, the domestic training which they received, and,/0r the time, a not-to-be-despised training in music and art, is omitted. Thus the inferiority of the woman's side seems self-evident, when, as a fact, it was rather a different system of education than an inferior one which was practised. Ruskin and many well-informed biologists are of opinion that in this respect the older thought was right for its time. II. " The Bad Old Days." " The women of our grandmother's days had few liberties and fewer rights. Their property and their persons belonged to their male relations, and they had little or no control over either. A father could dispose ot his children, even after his death, without the slightest regard to the wishes of the mother. A man might legally beat his wife, and many men did so. Wives were put up for auction, and sold to the highest bidder. There were instances, though happily they had become rare, of the employment by husbands of ducking-stools, gossip-bridles, public whipping-posts, and stocks. Of social life women had none. Their outgoings were restricted to visits Confusion of Thought of our Times 49 to church on holy days, and occasional rare journeys to market, wedding-feast, or death-bed. Such company as the master of the house permitted to cross its threshold was his company. It was the wife's duty to serve guests and then to depart ; they were but added burdens in her dreary, colourless life." This statement, made by one of the late leaders of the present suffrage movement, scarcely needs its fallacies pointed out. Had such a state of suppression ever existed as a world, fact, that fact alone would have proved the inferiority of woman, but the assertions are not accurate. We are told that women of our grandmothers' days, that is to say from 1825 to 1860, had no social life, were sold at auction, were frequently beaten, had no friends of their own, and there were in- stances of gossip-bridles and ducking-stools and public whipping-posts being used. Not one of these practices was prevalent or existed at all in our grandmothers' days. They belong to medixval times, when the treatment of men was even rougher than that of women. There was one sale of a wife, a semi-humorous sale, in quite the early part of last century, which caused an obsolete law to be repealed ; as there was an obsolete law of trial by combat for men which had to be repealed nearly the same^time. Woman's lack of property and of rights to her children, and other like defects, existed in our grand- mothers' days as laws, and at times were tyrannous laws, but as marriage settlements and other legal contrivances proved, these were frequently evaded. 50 The Nature of Woman A picture such as this can only be dismissed from serious controversy, yet there are nine similar para- graphs in the article, and many women's thoughts are fashioned on such material. Here is another extract : " Yet to-day, with liberty and training, women are proving their intellectual capacity ; and their physical development is a joy to the eye of the be- holder." This reference to improvement in woman's phy- sique is one that is frequently made without, so far as I am aware, one small shred of fact to support it. There are no large series of measurements of the bodies of men or women before 1880, no measure- ments of any kind comparing men and women to- gether, and no records of the relative health of men and women in occupational life. How such com- parisons as to the relative health of the woman of to-day as compared with the woman of the past have been framed, except from a few writers of fiction, it is hard to surmise. It would be easy to quote worse examples of in- competence, but I do not wish to make the picture too severe. Such obvious bias, and such a seemingly deliberate attempt to palpably libel the woman of the past, cannot be regarded as being due simply to ignorance of social history, though no doubt such is partly the case ; nor can it be thought of as a mere economic obsession, nor even as a means of crude propagandism, though something of each of these influences can be obviously traced. There is beyond this a conscious or unconscious animosity to the habits of the lives Confusion of Thought of our Times 51 of our grandparents, of which it is difficult to ex- plain the cause. At times, as one studies this aspect of the woman's movement, one is tempted to believe that a certain type of woman has been " educated " into a feeling of hostility to all things characteristic of woman, but no explanation is completely satis- fying to the mind. One fact is, however, certain, that the economic demands of last century centred round one need, that of cheap labour, and that a convenient philosophy of life arose, which disre- garded the real nature of womanhood and the healthy requisites of girl and boy life, and all the world over, no doubt unconsciously, encouraged all ideas that suppressed the demands of womanhood and parentage, and favoured an artificial and un- healthy life. No other view will explain the rapid spread of neo-Malthusian ideas, the rapid disorgan- isation of domestic ideals, and the rise of a type of woman and of man who favour factory employment outside the home for married women, artificial feeding of infants, creches, boarding-schools for quite young children, and who favour no legis- lative restrictions on the employment and for the protection of women and children. The Anti-Woman and Anti-Home Policy of some Women Writers The really serious extent to which this thought has become prevalent may be most easily seen if some attempt is made to co-ordinate into one whole the many various slipshod theories which have been formulated to attack the position that the womanly 52 The Nature of Woman mind and body are unlike the manly mind and body, and need, therefore, different but complementary forms of activity. The first and obvious difficulty that confronts even the superficial student is the ascendancy of man's influence in society ; the complete absence of first-rank genius, except in literature and acting, in women is so obvious, and has been so manifest for so many centuries, that some explanation, to hide the real facts, is required. Hence have grown up two curious ideas, both originating and flourishing mainly in the United States soil, but which have been transplanted to the more critical European climate : the one, the claim that woman at one time was the dominating influence in the world, and the other, which supports it, that early man had his industrial life organised by woman. These two ideas form the basis of a contention that beyond the patriarchal age was a matriarchal, and the argument one is invited to draw from this is that woman must recover the lost ground, and that the old matriarchy must be revived. But a few facts easily dispose of both theory and argument. The assumption of a very early feminine ascen- dancy has no comparative evidence to support it. If early man had been dominated by woman, one would have expected that other related animals, such as the higher apes, would show evidence of the same influence ; as a fact, however, over the whole mammalian and bird development of life, with two small exceptions in birds, the male is everywhere the stronger and the fighting creature, and the female the more passive ; and one has to turn either to the Confusion of Thought of our Times 53 spider or a parasitic worm, themselves exceptions, for support in the animal kingdom for this matri- archal idea. Truly a thin thread upon which to try to suspend such a heavy theory. In early man there is one support to this assumption of feminine ascendancy : in certain instances descent is traced through the female rather than the male line, but as maternity is an obvious fact, and paternity one that is much less certainly recognisable, it follows that maternal descent is much the more likely to be customary under early human life con- ditions. The status of woman varies extremely widely under all social conditions, and although it has some relation to the degree of civilisation a nation attains to, rising with national evolution, yet no certain conclusions can be drawn. The Egyptians treated women less freely but more kindly than the As- syrians, yet the Babylonians, of the same race as the Assyrians, gave to their women citizens great licence. Sparta, less civilised than Athens, was yet more free in its treatment of women, and it would have been difficult to conceive of an emancipation movement among the Spartan women, so great was their liberty as compared with the men, though both sexes were subordinated to the state. The position of Roman women is often quoted, but their greatest period of licence was during the decline, not during the rise, of Rome, and to-day the different position of women in Germany, England, and the United States cannot, upon any sane estimate, be regarded as measuring the standard of civilisation of these three countries. 54 The Nature of Woman Even among savages the treatment of women is extremely various, and affords no satisfactory basis for any sound theory of national culture. Finally, it is not true to assert that industrial life was organised by women under primitive social con- ditions, unless important qualifications are added, for early man had much to do with the pastoral side of life and cattle-rearing, and the specialisation was one of sex-capacity the man doing the fighting and hunting forms of labour and the woman the more peaceful. There is thus no satisfactory evidence for a matri- archy, as unquestionable authorities such as Wester- marck have pointed out, and if there were it would tell against the claims of womanhood, for in that case the status of the woman would have declined with advancing social evolution, instead of having, in some measure, advanced with it. The second practical difficulty that the de- womanising emancipationists had to face was the obvious fact that woman in her nature is different now when compared with the man, the civilised woman being more differentiated from the man than the barbaric. If, therefore, it has to be proved that there is no such thing " as a female mind," one must assert that either the woman of to-day is " over- sexed," whatever such an unscientific phrase can mean, and that the barbaric woman is the ideal woman, or that under civilised conditions a " neuter" sex is becoming manifested, a still wilder hypothesis, and that some women can discard their womanhood. The word " oversexed " has no scientific meaning of any kind behind it, it is one of those pleasing Confusion of Thought of our Times 55 words that seems to suggest something until it is examined, and then is found to be quite unreal and devoid of significance. The bodily cause of womanly and manly types depends primarily upon the activity of certain masculine and feminine glands, and if such an oversexed condition ever arose, it would be a state of actual disease that would need medical treatment. At present no such disease is known, and if it were it could have no direct relation to the woman's movement except in so far as something in our lives had affected woman hurtf ully. An over- sexed woman, being diseased, could not work until her health was restored, either industrially or in the home. The neuter sex idea is even cruder. It is an as- sumption that in man, a mammal, having a mammal's complicated organisation, obeying mammalian laws as to number of offspring born, a group of women and, presumably, men might arise in whom the call of parentage could be disregarded, and who could be compared to the neuter working bees. One has only to point out one fact to grasp the essential absurdity of this contention. The worker bee is recognisable as being different from the queen bee. Where are the men and women of the world whose bodily form as they walk up and down the streets permits us to assert that they belong to the undomesticated genus ? Yet upon these three fallacies of the matriarchate, the oversexed, and the neuter types of women, all three of which logically destroy each other, as well as being the merest grotesques of serious thought, much of the modern woman's movement is built up. From the oversexed idea we are told that woman 56 The Nature of Woman is too much in the home, and that expectant motherhood can disregard the fact of unborn life for six to seven months after its beginnings ; that the woman in the home is a worse, or, as some would put it, not a better, home-maker than the factory woman who neglects it, and that the state control and care of children is seriously to be discussed by the side of genuine, true, and worthy motherhood. That the very functional disabilities of woman that prepare for motherhood are expressions of disease, and that unmarried and married women must be free to work as they please under all conditions, and that divorce as family ties are slight should be easily granted. The neuter sex idea has as yet had little practical application, but it should form the basis of a logical thought about co-education, for if co-education means what its name implies, it assumes that the girl and boy are so alike in bodily and mental charac- teristics during pubescence and adolescence that they can receive a similar education. Even on the other ground of different kinds of education for boys and girls associated together in the same classroom, co-associational, not co-educational, we see a strange disregard for the consequences of scientific thought. For many advocates of the co- association of children, and the co-association of women and men in industrial and cultural life- pursuits, advocate disassociational practice in the home, the husband and wife leading a dual life, with easy divorce laws, so that permanent co- association of the married man and woman will be difficult. Confusion of Thought of our Times 57 The aim in all, whether consciously or uncon- sciously, is to dewomanise the woman and destroy her real inborn individuality of body and mind. The last of these unscientific assumptions is that of " economic independence." Sanely treated there is probably not a little truth in the idea ; a woman has a right whether married or single to the wages of her labour, and if some law could fix this right in statute form, so that a half of the husband's wages were regarded as legally belonging to the wife, I personally should have no objection to offer ; but to believe that either this or the franchise would make any serious difference to woman's domestic position is to openly disregard the teaching of fact and reality. There are four great groups of citizens in the nation : the unskilled labourer, the skilled artisan or mechanic, the trader or shopkeeper, and the pro- fessional worker. If economic independence of women really counted in married life, as the customs vary so widely in these four groups, some real differ- ences in the happiness of married women should be observable. What do we find ? The labourer is frequently out of work, and apart from his periods of enforced unemployment is im- provident, consequently, with one or two exceptions, the custom is for the wife to go out to work, and the better type of husband brings home his weekly wages to her when earning. The labourer's wife thus earns enough for her own keep and sometimes more, and has control of the larger part of her husband's earn- ings as well ; she is thus not only economically independent, but economically is the controlling 58 The Nature of Woman influence in married life. In other less favourable cases the husband earns little or nothing, and the wife is the sole bread-winner, and the husband is economically dependent on his wife. Any man or woman of real experience knows that the treatment of the wife will have practically nothing whatever to do with this economic relationship. Push the position one stage further. It is quite frequent that a mother or father or both are dependent on a daughter or a son. It will then almost entirely depend on the character of the parent and the child which of the following alternatives will be mani- fested : Either the unselfish child will be sacrificed to a selfish parent, and the whole of the weekly wages will be absorbed by the mother or father who exacts it ; Or the parent will be treated badly at home or sent to the workhouse or an equivalent accommodation outside of the home ; Or, as more commonly happens, the parent shares with the child, and there is mutual understanding. (In some cases the parent will prefer a little room or rooms of his or her own.) Among the labouring, mechanic, shopkeeping, and professional classes alike these alternatives dis- close no relation at all, as far as I can discover, to the economic position of the child, or, within limits, the parent. There are parents that exact from their children, and children from their parents, and this state of things exists in rich and poor and all classes alike. According to the economic independence theory Confusion of Thought of our Times 59 of woman, the labourer's wife should be the best treated in the nation, and it is needless to point out that this is not the fact ; and there ought to be some relation between the treatment of parent and child to each other, varying with the monetary depen- dence and independence of the one on the other. It is remarkable how seldom this is the case. It is almost more true to say, though this is not a general truth either, that dependence of one human being on another makes for kindliness of treatment. But, as if to demonstrate this point to the fullest degree, we see in the mechanic classes generally (there are some exceptions, as in the Lancashire cotton industry) the woman remaining exclusively at home, the husband bringing home his weekly wages to her, and the wife often giving him back for his pocket-money what she thinks the home can afford ; and there is no happier nor better class in the nation, nor happier man and woman than the mechanic and his wife. Finally, the larger shopkeeper and the pro- fessional man keep their earnings, make the wife a housekeeping allowance and a dress and personal allowance, and, as a whole, neither the shopkeeper's wife nor the professional man's is unhappy at the result. I do not deny that there may be something to be said for a wife's independent economic position, but a custom which is so various (and besides class, national differences could easily be shown) has quite obviously little or no relation to the happiness or the unhappiness of the majority of women. The status of woman in regard to the man clearly does not 60 The Nature of Woman depend upon economic financial conditions, but upon character reactions. There are tyrannous women and tyrannous men, and no law of any country can override Nature's law that in personal domestic re- lations of women with women, men with men, and women with men, it is character reactions, above everything else, that count. It is fortunate for human life that it is so, for the financial aspect has more than enough power as it is. Here, then, is a strange position, which, in con- cluding this present chapter, let me summarise. From about 1 830 to 1 850 a type of woman, probably a product of an increasingly dewomanised educational system and of an economic social atmosphere adverse to human needs, began to arise, who, with increasing vigour, unreason, and unreality has spoken increas- ingly contemptuously of the home and of the domestic woman of the past ; she has, with the help of men, formulated a number of crude and un- supported theories, such as the unhealthiness of the domestic, home and motherly type of woman ; the supremacy of woman in early barbaric life ; the oversexed condition of the woman of to-day, and, when it is convenient to urge the conflicting hypo- thesis to that of woman's supremacy in the past, to refer to the neuter sex at the present time ; when arguing about woman's work as compared with man's, claiming that a woman's work " is never done," and at other times that so much work has been taken out of the home that a woman ought to be able to seek employment outside it as well ; when asking for such a reform as the endowment of motherhood, claiming that no work is higher than Confusion of Thought of our Times 61 a mother's, and that, therefore, it ought to be well paid, invoking the fallacious assumption that the quality of the work is, or ever has been, in relation to money-payment, will yet in almost the same breath advocate the abandonment of motherhood and the home by maternity institutions, creches, infant schools, and boarding, co-educational sys- tems, and a system of marriage that would abolish the disgrace of divorce and lead inevitably, if the nation accepted it, to a lowered parental responsi- bility. For a natural, healthy-minded man or woman to hold such illogical views no explanation but that of a social obsession is possible, and it is discoverable in the economic demands of last century, which taught woman, and to some extent man, to believe that woman had no womanly individuality of mind, that mathematics, Latin, Greek, German, and logic were as much women's subjects as men's ; that any- one could make and keep a home and be a mother, and that a lady clerk's calling of copying out dic- tated letters was intellectual in comparison to this ; that a woman's gift of intuition was only instinct, and that a woman movement which was to emanci- pate her should in practice make her deny her bodily and mental personality. What have woman's and man's discontent to do with this attitude of mind ? Chapter IV Our Great-grandparents' Days T ET us try, avoiding all theories and discarding, except for illumination of information we are sure of from other sources, all writers of fiction, to reach something of the real life of the beginning of last century, the days of our great-grandparents, of Waterloo and Napoleon in the military world, and the beginnings of steam machinery in the in- dustrial. No railways exist, and the old coaching days are in full swing and life. Over England are spread a number of villages, a certain number of county, market towns and seaside towns the former with their days of fairs and buying and selling, the latter with local fishing industries, or, if large enough, with ports where fairly large sailing vessels go out to various parts of the world. How does life to-day compare with that of the past ? The artist, looking at the aesthetic side of the old-fashioned life, the thatched roofs and the lath and plaster walls of soft grey and stone colours, and little lattice windows of the cottages, and the unity of the village with its church, parsonage, little, quaint, prim, severe chapel of dissent, its smithy with its forge, the village shop, the little village 62 Our Great-grandparents' Days 63 green, and the picturesque inns, the squire's hall near by, and the farmsteads of the county farmers, sees children in imagination dancing at fairs and curtseying to their " betters," civil when asked a question, and the folk of the village all acquainted with each other, thinks of these days with a sigh of real sadness, and says, " Times have moved for the worse ; give me back those quiet, meditative, beautiful days." The social student, especially if he be medically trained, and particularly if his feeling for the beauti- ful is only slight and his knowledge of domestic habits of the people small, sees in the past the slow, unclean old days. Slow because of the absence of railways and motor-cars, and soon flying machines ; unclean and evil-smelling because of bad drainage and water supply, of village and farm pools that have the daily drainage of cooking and washing waters poured into them, of ditches that contain old pots and pans and household refuse, and harbour flies and disease, of clothes that are seldom changed, of narrow, airless courts and alleys in towns where, in extreme cases, hands can be shaken from upstairs windows, and of small windows that do not open, and of houses with a stuffy, stagnant smell, often smoky from wide chimneys, often damp from earth floors, and tumble-down, and he says, "Times have moved for the better ; I am thankful that I did not live then." The artist is right in externals. Life was beautiful because it could not be otherwise. No advertise- ments disfigured the landscape, because no ad- vertisements as trade was in small hands would 64 The Nature of Woman have paid. No corrugated iron, no jerry-building in rows of houses, because no rows of houses were necessary. But for all that life was coarser in those days than it is now ; there was no aesthetic sense of the beautiful then any more than in modern iso- lated country villages. Children were often in rags, mostly untidy, families frequently lived in one room, and shared their lodgings sometimes with other families, and with dogs, cats and other animals, as Irish peasantry still do. Hours of work were long and monotonous, relieved by gossip. The squire was a despotic, often irritable man ; the parson was patronising, and the children who curtseyed had another secret thought not so pleasing, known only to themselves and their kith and kin, but no doubt shrewdly suspected by the gentry. Women, as now, often neglected their children, and in both sexes there was both swearing and drinking, and heavy meals and animal life, as old books on diet and cooking prove. Brawls and fights, animal and human, public and domestic, were frequent. Manners were vulgar in the extreme, and open greed was often displayed. The artist might be pleased with this life of a village or a town strong smelling, often animal and brutal, but at times, when dancing and joy was the mood, sociable and picturesque, though rough with good- natured horseplay yet it is not true to say that in these things times have altered for the worse. But there is a sense in which the hygienic social student is wrong when he thinks times have altered for the better and is thankful he did not live in them. He is wrong in two ways : the absence of a life-purpose to-day as an ideal which the past had Our Great-grandparents' Days 65 as an ideal, though it seldom realised it, but was, nevertheless, steadied by it ; and the absence of personal associations which the past of our great- grandfathers firmly possessed. The village church and the village chapel were real centres of life, and they were small enough for everyone in them to be known. No great evolutional awakening had stirred the people, and the Bible was believed as The Book of God. We may think the old faiths crude, we may know that many did not follow any of them ; but before all alike was the fear of God as a background, a fear of God that in the religious came from the love and acknowledgment of His power, and in the irreligious a fear only of a possible punishment. There is no faith to-day that centres and holds the people and is adapted to its age as the early part of last century's was to its own period. This is, of course, common knowledge, but its social significance as a factor in a man's or woman's general satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life is constantly overlooked. In this sense our rudderless age, with its rudderless individual men and women who look upon marriage as a social, not a religious, ceremony, upon death with material eyes, upon birth as a curiosity of knowledge, not a wonder of existence, in this sense, though we cannot go back, we may well sigh for the light of the old times that gave a faith, however badly followed in practical life, to be looked up to as an ideal. Could you go back in reality and step across your great-grandfather's door, and see him and his wife and children living their every-day life what would probably strike you least would be the 66 The Nature of Woman picturesque side of existence ; the nearly complete absence of a real spirit of learning or desire for knowledge, except in a few homes ; the foul smells, the dirt, the untidiness ; all these would be subor- dinate and soon lost to your consciousness and something else would loom larger and larger in your mind the longer you stayed and yet kept the memory of our present age with you. Around you everywhere would be human associa- tions ; the husband would be at work either in or just outside his home, and running in sometimes for a chat with his wife. The house itself, out of which the children ran and round which they played, for very probably they would be left untaught, or be taught for an hour or two in a dame-school or by a governess or maiden aunt, according to social position, round this house would centre personal human life, rough, it is true, but living, constant, vital. The house where one parent was born in, and perhaps one of his parents also, an old clock, perchance a grandfather clock, perhaps more than one, real heirlooms, a family Bible on a table or a shelf, large, leather-bound, with the family record for genera- tions, old arm-chairs that ancestors had sat in, and as they were well upholstered, still shaped and im- pressed by their bodily presence ; tea-cosies that belonged to mothers now long dead, old family china, oak chests, tables, even clothes that someone in your family had worn, and jewellery ; and in the little garden trees and flowers that somebody once connected with you had planted, looked at, cared for, and admired. The parson or the minister, an old or a younger Our Great-grandparents' Days 67 man, would know the family actually from its youth up, or by report that would one day be actuality, and would be, if not a friend, an habitue. The family doctor would be the same, a real family doctor, foolish or wise as he had profited or not by experience. Even the schoolmaster, the shop- keeper, one's neighbours, friends or foes, would have this old familiar associational aspect. Art in the real sense of a conscious combination of har- monious colours and forms would hardly exist, but there was the mellowing of age, and everywhere conversation would have this strange personal associational note of human beings in contact with human beings, perhaps disputing or roughly quarrel- ling, perhaps in rough friendliness, but human, living, vital. And into this life comes the great hand of commerce and industry, and it takes away one thing only, human associations, and it gives in ex- change, through the compulsion of science and social effort, better housing and hygiene, higher wages, more and better and worse amusements, knowledge, and to those who love it the thought of progress ; but the home is broken up, men and women travel and often do not return ; the factory is formed and home industries disappear, and the woman is solitary in her house, her child at school, her husband " at the works," the family doctor has vanished, and a young practitioner or a dispensary or hospital taken his place. The church or the chapel is in a town, and is no longer small, but seats a thou- sand, whom the minister or the clergyman seldom visits, and then but for a few moments. Villages grow to towns, streets and lanes are altered, the 68 The Nature of Woman work of the past is swept away, temporary make- shifts take its place ; and while the materials of life ready for usage are bettered, the spirit of life, the human touch, the human record, the human memory is gone. Man stands in the midst of his progress dehumanised by the loss of his old associa- tions, and woman in her home dewomanised be- cause what gave her life its human association has fled. These are the essential differences between the past of our great-grandfathers and our lives to-day ; the life purpose of religion, the associations of our fellows are gone, and in their place material benefits that we know not how to use leave us men and women dissatisfied and discontented ; and from our economic ordering of life a new faith and a new means of forming human associations must be wrung by a religion and science of life that can shape our industry to higher ends. Chapter V Our Great-grandparents and Ourselves TN spite of public opinion to the contrary, com- parisons are not odious ; they are, on the con- trary, the very breath of science, if they are real, honest comparisons, made without animus or bias, and if well done are as illuminating as they are full of interest. And the great task before biologist and sociologist alike, and it will be a great task, long and arduous in its persistency, will be to teach human beings to see human applications that affect them- selves drawn by kindly hands, and learn to think over them, and not be annoyed at some home truths being told, and have the courage to feel that they are home truths, and learn the lessons that they bring. Some comparisons are obvious and certain, and admit of no doubt by reasonable minds; as, for example, that Germany has given birth to the supreme musicians, such as Bach and Beethoven, and that Italy is the only country that can compare with her in her musical record. Newton and Darwin are as certainly supreme in science, and Harvey and Roger Bacon, not to mention lesser lights, clearly prove that in the widest and grandest generalisations England, for some reason, is the foremost scientific 69 70 The Nature of Woman country. Qualifications have to be made in all such statements, otherwise they are unfair, because only half-truths. Perhaps one might assert, for instance as regards music, that Scotland had produced some of the most haunting national popular songs, and that Purcell in England deserved a place in musical history. One might have to add that, while for literary refinement the South of England was in advance of the North, that for music it would be scarcely fair to assert that England was wholly un- musical, in view of the exceptions in Wales and the North of England, and in certain districts of London. Nevertheless, it is a fact that Englishmen have to reckon with, that their taste is commonplace in music, and that they have produced but one great musician, and he not one of the most supreme musical minds. We can console ourselves with Shakespeare, with John Hampden, or Oliver Crom- well, according to taste, but the fact of our musical poverty remains a certain and unchallengeable fact that cannot in fairness be set aside. In science also our pre-eminence, like Germany's in music, needs qualifications. The German people are musical, and they produce great geniuses, but we as a people are not only unscientific, as compared with the Germans as a people, but we are not proud even of the scientists that belong to us. It is useless to be angry if a German should assert this truth as an offset against our position, for it is a simple fact. Again, France, England, and Italy might be com- pared for literary skill, and the heaviness of German sentences and a certain lack of inspiration would be as noticeable here as her skill in musical handling, Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 71 and the Germans would have to accept this as part of an honest study of their national life. On the other hand, in philosophy it no doubt would be possible to make out a very nearly balanced claim for France, Germany, and England, as compared with each other, and it might be quite legitimate for a citizen in either of these nations to think that his country, if so it seemed to him honestly, had the prior claim ; the two Bacons in England, Descartes in France, and Kant in Germany, are all so eminent that probably no final decision in terms of greatness could be made. Such comparisons are not odious, when honourably faced ; they strengthen and stimulate the mind and teach us to value our own and other countries more, the more frequently we consider and make them. It is so when honest comparisons are made be- tween different earlier generations and our own, between one class in a nation and another class, between man and woman ; and the reader had better close this book if he cannot go thus far with me, for I can have nothing further of interest to say to him. These comparisons must be made in the interests of science. The one criticism that may be justly raised is this : are these comparisons made in the sincere, kindly interest of truth or are they not ? If they are they must be accepted. The picture that I heavily outlined in the last chapter was too hard, too full of strong lights and shades to be really accurate, and yet I think it ex- pressed the essential truths. But there are very im- portant minor ones that I omitted. Writing quite broadly, it would, I think, be found that beyond the 72 The Nature of Woman charm of human associations, beyond the satisfying calm of a pervading religious faith, something which could be expressed by no other word than homeli- ness would be apparent as contrasted with ourselves to-day, and I fancy, though this I am less certain of, that the charm of sex, of manliness and of womanli- ness, would be far greater than is apparent at the present time, and in the better and less harsh homes the charm of childhood greater, perhaps, than at any other period in the world's history. Probably the women are more beautiful and more natural to-day and more learned, but I fancy that Taine and other students are right in thinking that the man was more manly in those times and the woman more womanly ; life, while it was at times rather insistent on mannerisms rather than manners, was none the less more spontaneous, fresher, more holding or possessing. General inequalities of character were certainly more marked, because life was less drilled, literally less schooled, except in the school of nature, less policed, as it were, up to and down to a certain standard, so that the heights and depths of character were greater. The levelling up and down has affected harmfully men more than women ; it has created a poor-fibred, ease-loving man, who might be wrongly spoken of as effeminate, wrongly because an effeminate man is not feminine, and more cor- rectly as emasculate, who takes few risks in life and favours safe positions, and at the commencement of his life, with the world before him and prospects open- ing out, will ask, if a mechanic, whether it is wise to marry on 2 or even .3 a week ; or if a professional Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 73 man, may even hesitate at a yearly income of ^500. I am not defending foolish daring ; but the type of man that a woman loves, and that makes a country great in the world's history, is that one who asks his wife to share his hardships with him, who softens them for her, but expects her to share, who is rightly confident in his strength, and who, taking up his own life purpose, shapes out a course for him- self and thus learns the worth of existence. I am not sure that this absence of manliness in our- selves has not done more to favour dissatisfaction and discontent in the woman's mind than can be easily estimated. Nothing so wearies a woman as tameness of life, and the man to-day who always acts, if a worker, through his union, if an author or publisher through his society or union, if a Member of Parliament through his party, is one that has been so drilled, so instructed as to have little feeling of self-responsibility, self-reliance, and originality ; and, like the pebbles on the sea-beach, has been so moulded by the tidal forces of his time as to be little more than an uninteresting unit one pebble among other pebbles, some large and some small, but all smooth and rounded repeating what others repeat, not thinking and acting for himself. Of course, our education and examination systems have done much to favour this kind of mind, and in the organisation of the masses of men and women, which was last century's work, this was to some extent temporarily unavoidable ; but for this century our task must be to bring back the individuality and strength of manhood into our citizens. But for the moment the man of to-day, while he is better in- 74 The Nature of Woman formed, more refined, more law-abiding, is also less an individual, less a responsible human being, and therefore is less interesting to his wife as a companion as well as to himself. The organisation of life during last century, by our education, our police, our trade unions, and unions of masters, by our system of limited liability in company formation, and in a hundred other ways, has not only been a necessary step in civilisation which has favoured a more obedient citizen, but for the moment massed action has been so compelling that manly individuality and strength have been almost killed. The woman of to-day has been influenced deleteri- ously in another direction. There are in the human mind a whole bundle of faculties not yet investi- gated or even faintly understood. We speak of them unscientifically as instincts, which they are not, for instincts are invariable, or almost invariable, in their activities ; we call them intuitions, conscience, and many other names. Yet no name is inclusive enough to include all these powers. Instincts need not trouble us here, for the most part they act in- voluntarily and unconsciously, and we may safely leave them to continue so to act. The same may be said of our bodily appetites ; satisfied within healthy bounds, and controlled by higher human impulses, they offer little difficulty to the will of the healthy individual. The real practical difficulty is in this we have rational powers, we have intuitions, we have feelings, and we have strange moral standards in our minds ; shall we live a reasonable, an intuitional, an emotional, or a morally guided life ? or, a larger question still, how shall we train our minds so that Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 75 each factor in our lives shall direct at the right moment and be subordinate at others ? It has been the misfortune of our past system of education that we have recognised in our schools, and, alas, even in our colleges, only one form of mental training, that connected with the art of learning, and to a less ex- tent with the method of reasoning about learning. Intuitions, mental feelings, moral inner standards, these have not simply been counted as nothing, but have been overlooked, and as one result there has grown up a belief that reason and knowledge are sole guides to life, and that our other powers of the mind not only have no place, but no existence. The older people, who had little education, exer- cised these other powers of their minds, and believed in them to an extent that to the modern mind not conversant with the literature and habits of the people of the past is difficult to imagine, but in this we have lost immeasurably. Two doctors see the same patient, sometimes nearly under the same conditions, and one in a momentary flash sees what the patient is suffering from. In his examination he puts on one side irrelevant details and symptoms, and makes an accurate diagnosis ; and the other fails, perhaps, after a painstaking examination. Two students examine one book, one seizes upon a few essential points and buys it to read, or rejects because it is not worth reading ; the other reads the work pains- takingly as a whole before he can form any judgment. Two artists stay at one country-side, and the one in a few days has discovered nearly all the " paintable " places ; the other attempts every view, and only 76 The Nature of Woman discovers some are unpaintable after he has tried to paint them. Two drivers reach a difficult spot in city traffic, the one sees how to manipulate his vehicle, the other follows slowly only as obvious openings arise. We say that the good man has the eye for his work and the inferior man has not, yet it is notorious that this absence of eye is just what many students lack, and it is the vital thing for success in life. The older people used to say that the capable man had nous^ the incapable only knowledge, and nous is something different as a faculty of the mind from the faculty of learning. The former can apply, the latter can absorb knowledge, and these powers of the mind are not the same. Every alert mind knows what is meant by " jump- ing to a conclusion " ; in the middle of a difficult problem a " sudden " " inspiration " comes ; how it is reached we do not know, but the real inspiration when it comes is nearly always the right one, and something in our minds tells us it is right ; it has been facetiously spoken of as an " intuiting " type of mind as compared with a reasoning, but there is not the least doubt that the power of intuiting is a real mind power, and that, unlike the reasoning power, the steps by which the conclusion is reached are hidden. Once more, there is something within all healthy minds that "knows its own goodness and badness," as it has been said. How it does so we do not know. Why it does so we cannot always say. Religious people call it conscience, but the fact that it exists for the majority of people is undoubted. Finally, our feelings confront us with other guides. The feeling, for instance, of privacy and Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 77 sanctity from the public eye of the bodily form, that no reason can justify ; that an artist of the nude is often genuinely angry with, and yet in his heart as genuinely respects, is in human evolution a high one, and therefore commands respect, develops late in civilisation, and takes rank over primitive feelings. 1 The feelings of sex and human sex love, and their expressions in words, thoughts, and actions of endearment, that are beyond reason yet none the less real and full of human value, and those that direct us towards truth, beauty, destiny, and at rare moments of our lives to a power beyond Nature, call it God or by some other name, these feelings touch the topmost heights of our character, and reason cannot and ought not to sway them ; yet it ought to be able to teach us the difference between true feelings, and sentiments and false. Reason and will lead to a governed character, intuition to a nimble one, conscience to a noble one, and mind feelings to a sensitive, fresh, intense character, full of subtlety and charm, nous to practical success in life. It has been nothing less than a misfortune to our age that reason and will and the acquisition of knowledge through reason have been almost alone valued, and that even thus the most important part of learning, the absorption of knowledge through meditation into the individual mind, so that it be- comes real wisdom and not a parrot learning, has scarcely been considered. The result, bad for men, has been far worse for women. The woman is a bad reasoner at best, but she is a 1 See note at end of chapter. 78 The Nature of Woman good intuitionist if her powers of mind are given free and healthful scope. This is shown in many ways : in the distaste the woman feels for philosophy, and her tendency to pedantry, if she takes this subject up, and in the fact that where women have excelled, it has been in fields where description and observation are required, as in literature or the stage, and not in constructive thought. Any student of woman's literature can easily convince himself of this truth. Elizabeth Hamilton, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Somerville, or modern writers in scientific fields, not working in co-operation with men, will be seen, if compared with women of their own period in literary fields, as, for example, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Bronte, or some of the modern novelists, to be practically always of inferior calibre, and the supreme efforts of genius demonstrate this beyond dispute. I shall return to this subject later, but it was an extreme misfortune for women, worse even than it was for men, that this rational side only has been so unaccountably accentuated in our schools and colleges. The result has been a distrust of woman and of woman's powers by woman herself, the setting up of an incomplete masculine ideal, and the denial in education and in industry of womanly individuality and life, under the cloak of that much- abused word emancipation. Woman's mind has suffered, and her health has suffered, as might easily have been predicted. First her mind has been taught to disbelieve in natural, healthy promptings, and consequently, although she has a natural feeling for refinement, yet she has tended to become careless in her choice Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 79 of expressions, to use slang freely, to play at smoking, which, she obviously has no real taste for, and to encourage man to think of her as a fellow-man, practical above all things. The old-fashioned mother at her worst was simply a bearer of children, but at her best she had the eye for motherhood, that intuitive understanding and sympathy which is far more essential than all the book-lore in the world, good and useful as this is ; but the new mother dis- trusts her intuitions and her feelings alike, and reads the latest work on child diseases, which she does not understand, and sees morbid ailments in nearly every action of her child, and yet, with all her care, takes it out on a cold winter's night three hours after its normal time for rest. The new woman thinks love is out of date, because she cannot understand love of course, nobody can talks of divorce and other kindred rational ideas, but is secretly pleased if a man she comes to care for sweeps these aside and treats her as a human, living, feeling woman after all ; but meanwhile something has gone out of her life, something that lifted a man up in his thought of her, her belief in love as an unselfish, lasting, lifelong ideal, and a trust in the man she loved, that aimed at, even though it often fell short of, being absolute. No man and no woman who faces this question honestly can deny that it is this unselfish conjugal love of the woman for her husband and of the mother for her child which takes a real, lasting hold on husband and child alike, and is the real elevating force of woman in the world, yet we are told that " any woman can make a home, any woman can love, any woman can be a mother " ; 8o The Nature of Woman and these assertions are only saved from being base falsehoods by this fact, that there is something of the home spirit, something of the womanly love spirit, something of the mother's feeling in all healthy women ; but the ordinary child who picks a flower and asks a question about its growth has some- thing of the biological spirit in its little mind, some- thing which gives it a distant kinship to a Darwin, and motherhood, wifehood, homehood (if I may use the word) at their ripest are as rare in their forms of genius almost as the genius of Darwin ; and mother-craft, house-craft, and home-craft are more essential to the world's progress and as noble studies, and this is said in no bitter sense, but as simple, obvious truth, than classic Greek and Latin studies, even if we add German to them. This, then, is one of the real evils of the modern life, as compared with the old : it has exalted one element of study, and one element only, to be the supreme thought, and by doing so it has incapacitated the woman to see and feel the greatness of her own being. She has become feebly rational, instead of alertly intuitive. She has ceased to trust her feelings, and has been in some measure degraded by it. The moral outlook is no longer trusted, and she is not really happy at the change. Beyond this the rational process has taught her to analyse herself very defectively, and she has produced books, and encouraged men to produce them, which in their unhealthiness of thought can have no real claim for their existence. 1 1 There can be no serious question about this unfortunate aspect of a certain type of woman's mind ; several of the better class of Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 81 And, lastly, her health has suffered. As I stated elsewhere, there are no statistics or observations existing which make an accurate estimate of the relative health of the women of this generation, as compared with earlier ones, except the quite un- papers, such as " The Times " and " The Westminster Gazette," have called attention to this fact in regard to certain women novelists and also writers on problems of womanhood, and in this respect Miss Godden and Mrs. Humphry Ward have done really good social service in recognising the danger and cautioning women about it from the woman's point of view, but there can be no doubt, either, that this unhealthy outlook is not confined to women writers, though, perhaps, its worst examples are. A few simple facts drawn from some advertisements that have reached me from various sources will demonstrate this point and place it beyond dispute. It is first necessary to observe that medical text-books on physiology, or on a branch of medicine where such matters have to be adequately discussed, seldom allot more than a chapter, and some- times a small chapter, to the whole field, and though some writers, perhaps, have given too little attention to questions that are of very great social importance, yet it is certain that thirty to forty pages is an outside limit for the needs of medical men, and less than half this for the non-medical mind, yet the following space has been given by various writers of books that claim to be written with a moral rather than an immoral intent : One of the least objectionable writers is responsible for four volumes, and two women for another four, on a subject that could have easily been compressed into a little pamphlet ; another devotes seven hundred pages to physiological details ; two more one thousand odd in length, and another almost as long, and all of these are written by English writers. An American work, circulated freely in England, devotes thirty odd chapters and four hundred odd pages to similar thoughts, and these are the best books of their class. An American publisher has recently placed upon the English-speaking market four German works, purporting to be scientific, each of them varying from nearly five hundred to over eight hundred pages, and we are told that one of these, that was advertised in the daily Press, has had a circulation of nearly forty thousand in Germany alone. 82 The Nature of Woman reliable statements which can be historically demon- strated to be false, save for a small percentage of the nation, as to women fainting in earlier times, as certain fiction writers have stated. The facts that are known are quite otherwise. The woman of the past was in the main admittedly a hard-working housewife, and not seldom a home- maker in the best and highest sense of the term. She was a mother often of a large family, and though sometimes she was a scold, she was not what is often spoken of as " nervy." The woman of to-day bears childbirth difficulties badly ; often her health is seriously affected after the birth of the first child, and the evenness of temper and good spirit still observable among the better-class poor woman have almost gone in some ranks of womanhood to-day. I do not wish to analyse too closely such causes, nor to press home facts which must be patent to every observing man and woman who has any sound historical knowledge. There has been a gain and loss in the growing freedom of women in the last century, and in the change in the life of men human associations have greatly lessened and life has become colder and less human, religious faith has been undermined, and the feeling of a purpose in life has, therefore, been undermined too. Life has been methodised, organised, until individuality and manly independence of character have been seriously weakened, and in education only the rational and accumulated knowledge aspects have been heeded, leaving other fields as large and as important quite untouched ; and womanly indi- Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 83 viduality has suffered severely as a result of this incomplete aim. There has been gain and loss, gain in the ordering of life, in its added material comforts, in its greater security, in its opening out to all of knowledge and all that knowledge means ; but life has been de- humanised, and to a large extent robbed of its man- hood, and dewomanised, and if real progress is to be made these ideals must be recovered. Economic needs are necessary, vital to social life, but what is healthy and human is even more vital. Life which has few human associations, which aims at supplying workers for machines, hands in factory activities, assistants behind shop counters, must be enriched and enlarged so as to include in its scope the laws of life and the needs of individual men and women. And woman's life will only be expanded, really emancipated, when she becomes conscious that she has a mental and a bodily individuality, and is content to work within it and through it to a self- realised life that has obeyed the healthy calls of her own being. Of course, in this account I have been speaking of general characteristics of the women of the times ; I know quite well, and appreciate, the many ex- ceptions who, in spite of the downward tendency of the age, have kept their freshness and vitality of out- look. Note Excessive Rationalism I am convinced that this rational but quite unscientific disregard for natural feelings is often fraught with grave danger and always with loss to the individual character. A few references to some 84 The Nature of Woman earlier statements of my own and of other people may make this clear. Dudley Kidd has shown, and other travellers have confirmed his statements, that the harm that can be done to native Kaffirs and other primitive peoples by trying to treat them without regard to native customs may be very great indeed, and much of this same rational spirit is responsible for the decay of more sensitive and higher feelings closely related to everyday morality in ourselves. In a discussion which I opened on the subject of " Medical Inspection of Children in Public Elementary Schools " in " The Westminster Gazette," l I pointed out the danger of sapping parental responsibility and the likelihood of a degradation of feeling if personal toilet and the privacy which it and other acts of life demand were treated in school life publicly. In the correspondence which followed, one article by a " Regis- tered Teacher " contains the following passage, and a much worse instance elsewhere has since been brought to my notice : " In the baths themselves the children (whether there be sufficient room otherwise or not) are placed two in a box. These boxes are open in front. Of the boys a number, varying according to school environment, wear some sort of swimming costume ; many, and in some cases most, are absolutely nude. They undress and reach this state of nudity in circumstances absolutely lacking privacy, but supplied with companions similarly situated ; and, after bathing, they dress again, somewhat more slowly, but otherwise in like fashion. If the children were all to select their companions the harm would be lessened, but not all boys are free from coarseness of thought and word, and the practice indicated must be, for a child naturally modest, one entailing some loss of feelings he would better retain. " The only theory that I have ever heard advanced in justifica- tion of the public exhibition of nudity is that of moral hardening that the habit of sight and of action decreases the vividity of impression. It does, but the question is whether it is desirable that the vividity and the unpleasant shock should be decreased." My own passage, which called forth this confirmation, was as follows : " Certain habits and hygienic needs of the body, by universal consent, it is admitted, should be carried out in absolute privacy. Almost all social workers have pointed out the lack of such seclusion in the lives of the poor and the need for reform in this respect. 1 September 5th, 1908. Our Great-grandparents & Ourselves 85 As the vulgarity which slum-life displays can, it is maintained, be in great part traced to this cause, to increase rather than diminish this tendency cannot fail to be highly detrimental to social life. The best effort in our hospitals and our infirmaries is directed towards the diminution of this evil, and it cannot make us, as a nation, more refined if we neglect fundamental refinements during the childhood period of our citizens." And I may add that I have come to feel that the final step in these matters, even as regards hospital patients, is for one case to be seen privately by not more than one doctor and two students as a rule, and this is especially true for women ; similar precautions ought to be taken for boys and girls. This sense of privacy is a late development of the race, but still thousands of years old, as the earlier parts of the Bible and other writings of primitive races clearly testify to, as well as the evolution of child nature itself, and it is a grave scientific error I would almost say a social error to treat such a feeling as if it were non-existent. A similar attitude of mind was raised in a controversy on co- education in the same paper. I urged that one of the biological difficulties against co-education was the obvious natural desire of girls and boys during pubescence, roughly from the years nine to fourteen or fifteen, to keep apart from each other in games and friendship, and I am met with the criticism, not disputing, be it noticed, my assertion of a fact, that we should " be on our guard against assuming that anything is a fundamental part of young human nature which may be only a by-product of the very system of segregation which we are now putting on the defence." Can anyone acquainted with school life in schools that are not co-educational, or where they are, assert that there is any ground to be on our guard in this matter ? The majority of schools for girls and boys do not err on the side of standing by any natural feelings, the fear much more is of their complete suppression. Probably every individual reader can remember the change in his or her own mind, which at about ten or eleven years made the other sex temporarily to some extent distasteful. As a fact, the same tendency towards one-sex friendship can be shown in the development of human races, the comradeship of men and women being scarcely established even in Greek times. It can be seen in narcotic drug deteriorations of character, as it is rare for a chum in drunkards to be of a different sex, and in many other studies of life. 86 The Nature of Woman Yet here are two feelings, both connected probably with the moral needs of life, which, because a rational explanation of their meaning cannot be given, are to be hardened out of existence. It is a dangerous, slippery path this that mankind is treading, for not one act or expression in the reality of human love can be justified by reason, and neither beauty, nor truth, nor monogamic love have ever found a satisfying philosophy on which to rely. Meantime plausible reasoning has made many things possible in married and unmarried life that would have been rejected a hundred years ago as unnatural, and it is notorious that there are certain large business firms that trade on this rational but unscientific, unhealthy, and un- religious side of life. At least we may be sure of this, that the reason is not the only quality, nor the only guiding quality, of the mind. Chapter VI The Evolution of Sex and its Significance word evolution has come to be used in several distinct ways, and therefore needs defining ; if by evolution is meant a growth out of an antecedent condition, the word change would do equally well ; but if evolution means, as it is usually taken to mean in the more popular use of the word, progressive change, then we should use this term more sparingly and scientifically than we do. From this outlook it is a misnomer to speak of the evolution of plants, because it cannot be said that any one type of plant is higher than another ; some are more complex and some more specialised, but no plant form can be said to be higher than any other, a moss than a tree or a flower, or vice versa. It is otherwise in the animal kingdom. Step by step as we rise from one order to later orders that follow it a real rise in type is discovered, single-celled are inferior to many-celled, and as we advance from sponge-like animals to worms, shell animals, insects, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, up to man, it is seen that the later developing classes of animals have an increasing share of mind, that there is an evolution of animal life from lower to higher types, and mind is the test of what is low and high. 87 88 The Nature of Woman Is there, then, an evolution o sex ? Has sex any relation to this development of the higher out of the lower ? Or are sex characteristics about the same in their significance at all stages of animal existence? Obviously there is no evolu- tion of sex in plants, though some plants carry both kinds of sex in one flower and others two kinds of flower on one plant, and others, again, two kinds of flowers on separate plants. There is simply more differentiation in one type of plant than in another ; and at first sight the same appears to be the fact in regard to animal life. Many male and female insects are widely different in appearance, some parasitic worms look almost as if they belonged to different species of life ; birds seem to be very sharply marked off, one sex from the other ; while even in one group, such as the lions, some are maned and others maneless. And man, as compared with other animals, is curiously free from these sharp contrasts, so that it appears as if sexual differences in animals depended upon no evolutional law, are simply marked in some forms of life and little marked in others. In plants where male flowers exist on one plant and female on another the leaves and shape of the whole plant are sometimes different ; but, taken as a whole, male and female plants differ less in their plant forms than male and female animals do in their animal forms. John Hunter, Thomas Lay- cock, and after them Charles Darwin, spoke of these bodily differences as secondary sex characters, and those immediately concerned with parentage as primary. In Darwin's work on sexual selection he Evolution of Sex and its Significance 89 has collected an immense quantity of these secondary differences of sex, and the variety is such that it seems as if no law could be deduced from man. If, however, all characteristics are excluded which are confined to one species or two species of related life, and only those bodily sex differences which per- vade the whole scale of animal life are for the moment considered, it will be found that there are some characters which are constant in being always pre- sent, and that these constant characters do undergo a very definite change, becoming increasingly marked as we pass from the lowest forms of life up to man. We have thus three groups of characters in relation to sex : primary, those essential to parentage ; secondary, those present in all sex states ; tertiary, those present in one or more related species, but not present elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Thus spurs are present in many male birds, horns in some cattle in both sexes, in only the male sex in others, and where they are only present in the male sex they are tertiary charac- ters. In like manner the male salmon has the lower jaw, in some varieties only during the breeding season, turned upward, and in the permanent varieties of this feature it is armed with teeth. This is not a characteristic of all fishes, but only of the salmon species, hence it is a tertiary feature, not a secondary one. The most constant secondary feature is the de- velopment of the hip region of the body in the female and the chest region in the male, and whether we turn to man or lower animals, this broad generali- sation holds true. 90 The Nature of Woman Sexual Evolution in the Race ist stage. The -fixation and, specialisation of sex tissue. The lowest form of animal multiplication is by division of a single-celled organism into two parts, and certain lower forms of many-celled or- ganisms can do the same, and, of course, this is quite a common form of multiplication in plants, runners, or elongated stems, developing roots where they touch the earth, and leaves and flowers where they are exposed to the air, and thus a new plant is pro- duced from a simple shoot. Animals early lose this power, and germinal tissue becomes specialised and localised at one spot, probably, quite early in animal evolution, as the formation of a new individual is a more complex problem than in plants. 2nd stage. The hermaphrodite condition. In several invertebrate organisms the two sexes are united in one body, just as in some plants, and it is not until this condition of sex life has become highly specialised that one of these sets of structures be- comes subordinate and the $rd stage, a unisexual one, is reached, and through- out the vertebrata, up to its highest mammalian order, the bodily forms of the two sexes, always retaining traces or rudiments of the complementary sex, are increasingly defined, and in man the greatest differ- ences of bodily form are to be found. In several im- portant features it can easily be demonstrated that the differences in man are greater than in any living creature. I . The contrast between shoulder and hip de- velopment is more than in any other animal. Evolution of Sex and its Significance 91 2. There is a marked difference in the blood of woman as compared with man, it containing one-ninth fewer red blood corpuscles, and therefore a proportionately smaller quantity of oxygen. This almost certainly means a less rapid tissue-exchange, which in adoles- cence in girls, and later in women, may be associated with a seriously impoverished con- dition of the blood, chlorosis or anaemia. This state is only very exceptionally known in men, and there is probably nowhere else such sharp contrast between males and females of the same species. 3. The woman is mentally much more " af- fectable " than the man, and in extreme cases hysteria or an exaggeration of this affecta- bility takes place. There is no recognised mental state corresponding to this in animals. 4. The change from immaturity to maturity runs a more widely contrasted course in boys and girls than in any other known forms of animal life. These four points are sufficient to prove that, in essential secondary bodily and mental character- istics, man is the most sexed of all creatures, and were it necessary to demonstrate the evolution, it could be shown that mammals are more so than birds, and birds than amphibia and reptiles, and these more than fishes ; but these points will be- come clearer and their meaning more certain when we consider the physiological significance of sexual evolution. It ought here to be pointed out that each of these four characteristics that separate man 92 The Nature of Woman from the animal group also separate civilised from savage man, and that, in face, form, and mind char- acteristics, barbaric women and men are more alike than members of either Eastern or Western civili- sations, though in this respect, as in some others, both the Eastern and the Hellenic Greek and ancient worlds are midway between barbaric tribes to-day and the Western life in which we live. Sexual Evolution in the Individual The three stages, of fixation of germ tissue, her- maphroditism, and unisexual development, are all passed through by the child before birth, and after birth childhood, pubescence, and adolescence mark three further stages of immaturity ; the asexual feelings and capacity of the child, the bodily and at last the mental consciousness of sex following in order. The history of the race and of the child alike point to the conclusion that mental and bodily sex indi- viduality is of progressive importance in human evo- lution, and therefore, after the childhood period is passed, biology cannot favour co-educational or co- occupational systems of social life. Physiological Significance of Sex To understand the physiological significance of sex one must see it clearly in two distinct and cor- relative lights : (a) one must see that sexual evolu- tion has developed in the animal kingdom, and that it must remain a great force in man ; (b) also Evolution of Sex and its Significance 93 that this accentuation of sex has made possible for us individual value in life, and in addition added to our individualities ranges of feeling and incentives to action that otherwise would have been absent from life. Why Sexual Evolution has Developed in the Animal Kingdom The significance of the various manifestations of sex in the plant world is a problem that awaits solution, but the main reasons for its development in animal life are known and easily comprehensible, be- cause there is a continuous thread which widens and thickens in importance as higher forms of animal life are reached, whereas among plants the changes are so indefinite at times, and so unexpectedly sudden and emphatic under other conditions, that one principle seems very difficult to establish. In the higher animals the development of the im- mature organism needs increasingly delicate and pro- tected nurture from exposed external surroundings, and it is probable, if one fully grasped the whole significance of the process, that one could predict with unerring certainty from the pre-natal demands of the organism, in its life before birth, its high or low stage in evolutional life that it was to rise to afterwards. The exact reason for the early specialisations of sex in two individuals is a little obscure. It has been assumed that in the interests of hereditary varia- bility two lines of heredity, male and female lines, will favour a wider range of adaptability than could 94 The Nature of Woman be obtained from an hermaphrodite condition. Whether this is so or not, it is more probable that the main cause was the strain exerted on any organism that carried forward two separate tissue specialisations of sex at the same or closely alter- nating periods of time. Whatever the reason, far back in the history of animal development, millions of years ago, the sexes for all higher forms of animal life became distinct, manifested in two separate organisms, and from that time the process has increased in its tendency towards more and more specialised masculine and feminine bodily forms. In all cold-blooded animals the egg-cell, which may be fertilised inside or outside of the feminine body, develops outside, and in a large number of instances the spawn is left to take care of itself, to grow and develop if conditions allow of it and it is not eaten by foes of the species, for its male and female bearers of its germ tissue leave it uncared for, to take its chances in existence. Many parent insects are dead before their progeny are hatched, and though there are the widest differences in the kind of provision made for larvae and other forms of early life, yet they have been too little studied for one to assert that the uncared-for cell that is to begin a new life is really to give rise to an animal form on a lower plane of mental capacity than one more cared for. Thus the spawn of a frog is deposited in an open ditch, exposed to changes of temperature, rain, and movement, and attacks of other life around it, the eggs of a bee are carefully housed and protected from the weather, and guarded from intrusion, but it cannot be asserted on present knowledge that a bee Evolution of Sex and its Significance 95 is higher in its organisation than the frog, though it can that the bee is one of the highest of the insects while the frog is one of the lowest of the vertebrates. In these lower forms, whether of insect or lower vertebrate life, the number of offspring possible is what primarily determines the persistence of the species ; as we ascend the scale, with many excep- tions it is true, fewer lives are created and more care is taken to preserve them, and the individual counts more and more in the survival of the type. Thus no bird, no mammal bears progeny in such prodigality as almost all life forms do beneath them. In birds and in egg-laying mammals, the latter nearly extinct, a rise has taken place from the cold-blooded to the warm-blooded type, and there can be little doubt that this rise of bodily temperature allows of more complex chemical changes going on in the body, makes possible a higher type of organism, but the egg now has to be more carefully provided for, it must have a larger supply of food for its incuba- tion, as it is longer or more rapid or both in its de- velopment ; the egg has to be protected by a hard shell, and the heat necessary for the development of warm-blooded life has to be supplied externally by the heat of the parent bird " sitting " upon the egg. When the young are hatched their immaturity is so great that the parent birds are needed to feed and care for them until they are mature or fledged. In the egg-laying mammal the female parent feeds the young after they are hatched from its own body by its milk, a carefully prepared food. In the pouch mammals the external incubation period is dispensed with, the young develop in the mother's 96 The Nature of Woman body, thus secure of an even temperature, of a com- pletely protected life, and of a food supply, in part at least, so perfectly ready for assimilation, that it has been completely digested and passed into the mother's blood to be transferred to the offspring. There has been a steady rise in the call and meaning of motherhood. In the full mammal all the early stages of development, up to the infant form of its type, take place before birth, the little life develop- ing in a soft muscular organ, filled with fluid in which it floats, so placed that no shock can easily reach it, so environed that one fixed temperature is secured, so nourished by an ?xchange of food supply from the mother organism that it takes up fully prepared food, gives off to its parent poisonous waste products, and develops its life free from the vicissitudes of external existence, in surroundings that are normally germ-free and free from disease. Nature takes every care to favour a quiescent growth of the complex new life, and it is evident that no other interpretation is broadly possible than that this provision is necessary, otherwise it would not have been provided, and the differentiation of sex have advanced to the degreewhich it has obtained in the mammalian type. It does not end when man is reached ; the barbaric type of woman takes her part, though this varies among different primitive peoples, in the life of the tribe until near the birth- time of the child, in some tribes almost up to the hour of birth, whereas the civilised woman would in the large majority of instances be quite unable to bear the exposure and roughness of life thus involved, and the act of childbirth is itself more painful for Evolution of Sex and its Significance 97 her, because the child that is born is larger-headed and being more frail needs greater after-care. We see, if we look at the history of our own European Continent, this increasing need for the care of woman reflected in her occupational life. Man under primitive conditions is concerned with fighting, hunting, fishing, a maker of war and chase implements, a builder of huts and a rearer of cattle. Woman fetches wood and water, prepares the food, dresses the skins, makes clothes, takes care of the children, cultivates the ground, and supplies the household with vegetable food, gathering roots, berries, acorns, where agriculture at its dawn has scarcely commenced. In mediaeval society agriculture had passed into man's hands except for the care of certain kitchen herbs, and the management of poultry where it existed, and the dairy in later times and spinning, weaving, knitting, embroidery, sewing, cooking, and gleaning and lighter work in the fields, the care of the children, and at first nursing, doctoring and midwifery, being woman's sphere. So day-work in the fields has almost gone, and is now universally regarded as unsuitable, even in those lighter field industries, such as strawberry and hop- picking, which, as a fact, draw women of the lowest class ; gleaning has almost gone, spinning and weav- ing have passed out of the home, and, varying in different districts, it is now true for Great Britain, and in various degrees in other countries, that seven-eighths of the whole employment of women is domestic, in which the rougher work of scrubbing, boot and window-cleaning is already passing to the 98 The Nature of Woman man. This, with the fact that the immature period of the child is slowly lengthening, demonstrate that the life of the female mammalian up to and including the latest period of the highest mammal man is tending towards a quieter, more protected life, in which rougher employments are taken over by the male, and the domestic field, viewed in its widest and most mental manner, becomes more and more the feminine possession. Why the Individual Value of Life has become possible through the Creation of Sex Types At first sight it seems as if woman in this is being sacrificed to the species, or rather, more accurately, that man and woman are being driven into lines of development that consider mainly the requirements of the species, and heed little those of the individual member. This was the mistaken assumption that so troubled Tennyson in his thought. Yet in no real sense is this true. It is broadly true that specialisa- tion of sex has led the way in the thought of peace as Darwin pointed out in his sexual selection, and as Drummond and Kropotkin have popularised in their thought. Males and females of the same species rarely fight, and though in some instances early man did treat woman roughly, it has always to be remembered that the times were rough, and acts seen with their eyes must have looked very different to ours. It is certain that without sex little of the gentler influences of life that have opened the way to civilisation could have originated, and the best and the greatest joys are unquestionably those that Evolution of Sex and its Significance 99 centre round the home, the place where the indi- vidual man or woman makes an individual atmo- sphere, becomes really an individual, and directs his life as an individual mind. The home originally would never have been conceived of but for the need of protecting the young. As a fact, the glory of motherhood on its mental side has never been stated, and though it brings its troubles and its difficulties, the opportunity and the desire that is opened out in the care of a child, the awakening influence on the woman's life, the understanding of mind or soul in another human being, could have been reached by no other conceivable means. The mistake is that it is so seldom even faintly realised. Imagine a woman trained to understand and, above all, feel the wonder of existence ; imagine the sudden increase of that wonder that should come to her when she is herself the bearer of a new life, when that new life that she has been expecting is at last born, when it grows in mind and body at her breast, when its little life looks into hers, and when, day by day, during the first years of toddling childhood, the mind unfolds to a mother's love, as a child mind opens to no other influence in the world. And though the father can only distantly share in this, as compared with the true mother, he brings from the world a fresh influence, and it is the reaction of two minds with one common aim, and yet approach- ing this aim from different points of view, that give charm and beauty to life which could not be ob- tained by two men or two women living under the same roof. This evolution testifies to when it super- sedes the love of man to man in Greek times by the ioo The Nature of Woman love of man and woman, which from Dante onwards has belonged to our own and has been the great ideal of life. The Application to Human Life To-day So far it has been pointed out that sex is among animals a real evolutional character, that differences between men and women will increase rather than decline with advancing civilisation, because this specialisation of sex is necessary, in order that a higher type of life can be originated, nurtured, undergo uninterrupted development, and be born into a world where, in its long immaturity, it can be cared for, and, lastly, that specialisation does not sacrifice the individual to the race. There is no mistaking the teaching of Nature and her demands. Woman stores, man spends. It is because woman stores that at nearly all periods of life her chances of living are greater than the man's, unless she takes up callings that draw upon her re- serve strength ; her digestive organs are relatively to her body weight as large, or larger, than the man's, her lungs are smaller, and her blood supply is prob- ably less, and certainly carries less oxygen ; she spends less than the man under healthy conditions of life, because oxygen is the great spending agency. If, however, she becomes dyspeptic, so that her food digests badly, she is opening the door to the time of ill-prepared motherhood, because, as her future child will draw its nourishment from her blood, its chances of well-nourished life are smaller ; as are her own if that unborn child draws from a faulty blood supply, in which half-digested products circulate to Evolution of Sex and its Significance her cells and to the child's. It must be obvious, too, that in the same way the child's natural food will suffer after it is born, when fed, as it is or should be, by its mother's milk, which would thus be formed from an impure blood. Yet no real substitute can be found for this which she can give, that is always blood temperature, that is clean and sweet and pure and free from germs of disease, that is adapted to the child's needs. The mother's life must be quiescent, free from worry, free from competitive struggles, free during the time of her motherhood from work that compels her to labour regardless of Nature's call for frequent rests. This is merely hygienic physiology. We have seen something of the lesson of the primary functions of motherhood. It is because the child is of so high an order that its demand on its mother and its mother's life is so insistent and life- long ; we have seen that the secondary characteristics of women and men reveal that in the human species sex is more insistent in its requirements, and has moulded our bodies to its needs. What lesson have tertiary sex characters to teach ? They teach that the male is the fighting, that is the active animal, over nearly the whole field of insects, nearly the whole fields of fishes and reptiles and birds, and over the whole range of mammalian life it is the male that fights, the male that strives, the female that is quiescent. What is it in man ? Man is, and always has been, the fighter, and except for the prob- ably mythical Amazons, no race has bred a permanent fighting female type. Even the Spartans never attained to this ; it was the men who fought. In i.02 The Nature of Woman man war has been slowly, and is being slowly, super- seded by industrial competition. What part has woman taken in these two processes ? The great struggle for victory in war and in industry turns mainly on invention and originality. The great warriors, from Hannibal to Napoleon, have been men ; the inventors of war weapons have been men ; the inventors of horse and steam ploughs and of agricultural implements were men, not women ; spinning and weaving were in the hands of women, but men, inventing spinning and weaving machines, took the spinning and weaving processes out of the home ; medicine was for some centuries in women's hands, but men invented surgical instruments, not women, even those instruments specially designed to help women in their childbirth cares, the new drugs that have been introduced have been by men, even chloroform and anaesthetics, that have so much softened woman's special difficulties, Simpson or American pioneers, it is still men. All the great engineers have been men, even the inventors of sewing machines. All important cooking appliances have been men's work : gas stoves, coal ranges, oil stoves and spirit. Pottery, architecture, hygiene, and sanitary science, men, not women. Furniture is mostly man's design, Chippendale, Sheraton, or some other. It is man always that has done the creative work. It will not do to argue that women have had no opportunities in cooking, in medicine, in household designing, in spinning and weaving, for their opportunity was originally greater than men's. It will not do for another reason, because Genius makes its own opportunity. There is a Evolution of Sex and its Significance 103 difference, a fundamental difference, of mind, and nothing else that can account for so invariable a law present in all ages and in all climes. In music we see the same truth, whether it is in the development of an instrument, a violin, a piano, a bugle, or a flute, or an organ, the inventors are men, not women. And in genius. In music there are no great women geniuses, though there have been women musicians. There have been no great women artists whose genius commands the world, though thousands of artists ; no great poets, ex- cept one woman, Sappho, and extremely little is known of her, but perhaps millions of women who have written, secretly or openly, verses and poeti- cal thoughts. In science the great names are again exclusively men, and in philosophy the same. Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart ; Phidias, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Turner, Watts ; Homer, Shake- speare, Goethe, Dante, Milton, Browning, Words- worth; Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Darwin, Hippocrates, Sydenham, and John Hunter ; Socrates and Plato, Francis Bacon and Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant ; Confucius, Buddha, Christ. How foolish to assert that of these names, from the East and the West of the world's life, in all lands and in all climes, under all conditions of civilisation, it is accident that they are men ; that, given opportunity for women, there might have been women too. Even in cookery we have a Count Rumford. Was there ever a time when women were suppressed to this extent ? Was there ever a time when genius was not ? If a woman could be a Cleopatra, dogmatic, tyrannical, might she not have been a feminine 104 The Nature of Woman Marcus Aurelius ? In actual historic fact there never has been a century where woman has not had much liberty, where the opportunity could easily have been made, had women had the capacity and the desire. Here is a comparison far more certain and unchallengeable than that Germany is musical or that England is scientific. All the great lines of creative and inventive thought within historic times have been made by men, not by women. But if a glance is given over these names two great exceptions to the word creative, as distinctive of them, may be rightly and wrongly made in Homer and Shakespeare. It is doubtful if Homer added one original, one creative thought to Greek life, Shakespeare certainly added nothing to English thought or English life. They were scenic geniuses, not creative, and from this point of view one ought to exclude them from our list, and yet one knows if one did so a gap would be felt at once. And the reason lies surely in this, that Homer made the Greek speech expressionable, Shakespeare did the same for English, and to a less extent Dante for Italian, Goethe for German. Dante also was creative on the thought of love, Goethe in a far lesser way in science, but one real grandeur of their names is that they gave flexible, free voice to a national tongue, a language that had been halting became free ; in this they were creative. In Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, a grandeur not less impressive is their scenic power ; they depict rather than originate. We see the Greek life glorified, it is true, made to move and act as in a stately pageantry, but still it is Greek life, and not Evolution of Sex and its Significance 105 Homer's ideal of it, that we see in Homer. Had Homer been asked, he might have agreed with Socrates and Euripides and other Greeks that his picture of the gods was ungodlike, but his answer would have been, " It is Greece, none the less." Had Shakespeare been asked whether Falstaff was a noble enough character, he would have said, " No, but he is English." Dante was national, but not in this sense, Goethe was national, but in a different, or one might have almost said a more indifferent, cold, contemplative way than either. Dante would have felt, " Italy must be this, I love her " ; Homer felt " Greece is, that is enough " ; and Shakespeare, like Homer, " It is my England." A woman who loves a man feels as Homer felt, as Shakespeare felt, not in their creative language side, which belongs to manhood and manliness, but in their scenic, contemplative side. Greece is, England is, my husband is, it is enough, I see, I know. The gods of Greece were the shadow of Greece, the Parthenon and its joy of life its glory ; Homer knew this, perhaps, better even than Socrates, and he saw that the glory and its shadow are one, Greece, as he knew her, and it sufficed. A real wife knows her husband as the husband does not even know himself, with his littlenesses, with his shadows, but also for there is this side in all men, if it can be reached its glory. The glory requires at times much seeing ; sometimes because it is great but hidden in the re- cesses of a silent mind ; sometimes because the glory is small and overlaid with fierce, rough, broken litter, jagged and dangerous, and to the outer world the one man is a dead mass, large but incomprehensible, io6 The Nature of Woman and the other a creature, scarce a man, to be avoided, to be shunned. Tell the real wife for a woman's genuine love goes down to the reality that is good and reaches it, much or little as it is there tell the real wife, as Socrates might have told Homer, that his gods, her husband's, were ungodlike, and she would not say " I know," but she would know. Tell her the like of her son, and she might be angry, because she would be less sure and because she takes her husband as he is, but she wishes for her son, as Dante of his country, " My son must be this, I love him." That is why a noble mother may err some- times, in spite of her great love and her insight, over her son ; but a noble wife almost never over her husband ; " My husband is, I see, I know him, rock and cranny, crack and crevice." A husband, even when he is f arseeing and true and loyal, never knows his wife in this perfect way ; and the wife, good woman as she may be, does not know herself. A woman's genius is scenic, therefore ; human charac- ter is seen by her as the higher artist sees a landscape, as he paints an old-world village, while its evil odours from an old pool near by come to him as he paints. The man wants the odours gone, and sometimes, in destroying the odour he sweeps away the beauty too. This is the same reason why a woman never really quite believes in perfection of character. She ad- mires gold, and can judge it when she sees it, but in a state of nature, here on this earth, she always expects to see it as rough ore, alloyed, not pure. She knows that the ore is richer in some natures than in others, but also that in none is it wholly pure ; if it counterfeits purity it is a sham. This is Evolution of Sex and its Significance 107 a wise axiom of a woman that she follows, and a man seldom does, when the woman's being is un- spoiled by a barren intellectual training that has taught her to distrust her powers. There are two fields, consequently, where women might have been expected to succeed, and where, as a fact, they have succeeded : in fiction, the scenic portrayal of life in words ; on the stage, the scenic portrayal of life in actions and spoken words ; and a Jane Austen or a Charlotte Bronte can compare with a Scott or a Dickens, an Ellen Terry with a Forbes Robertson. It may be asked how it is that man, a creative being, can have this scenic power too, that a Shakespeare or a Homer, men, can have that which belongs above all to women ; and the answer consists, I would suggest, in two considerations. One, the scenic power necessary for the drama is less than for life. An absolutely faithful drama is not possible, and if it were, it would be too harrowing to human feelings to witness it. This allows the lower scenic powers of man in this direction to find an outlet. Two, even scenic thought, to be presented to the world, needs some creative skill, the skill of selection and rejection, which, while it presents a picture to the world, makes it by this selection a little false in doing so. For both of these reasons a man has an opportunity in woman's fields, but it is only because the topmost power of womanhood is unrepresent- able to any but the woman herself. This is one reason, I am convinced, why the unspoiled woman by her mere presence makes her greatness felt, and why a test of that greatness in action is not demanded. It might have been thought that in the scenic io8 The Nature of Woman outlook the woman, taking this whole view of exist- ence, would have been fitted as no man could be to take the whole outlook which leads by an external confirmation or rejection of life to what is called a faith, and it is, of course, a noteworthy fact that to-day it is the women, rather than the men, who support the churches and the chapels, who form far more than half of the attendants at the services ; but in this, too, woman's influence is indirect, her mind is rapid, deep-seeing, and intuitional, not slow and reasoning process-forming as man's. She does not, therefore, construct a view of life, she simply sees the view, and she knows, though she frequently does not know why. In the past, as the friendships of Buddha, of Christ, of Socrates, show, though this is least true of Christ, men drew their inspiration from men ; to-day, while they look to other men for a critical acceptance or rejection of their teachings, they look to the woman for a belief in or a rejection of them and their views as men. And I am inclined to think that part of the lack of religious feeling in an age that is permeated by religious thought and question- ing is due to woman's dewomanising modern educa- tion, which teaches her to value mathematics and reason instead of literature and life. A woman knows her husband by feeling, sight, and insight, not by reason ; and that is also how she really knows the world ; and so long as she can see the sunlight, catch the scent of the morning air, and the beauty of flowers, and feel her life pulsate to the life around her, she knows that the alloy in life is but the incident and the true metal the reality, and she has faith. Rationalise her, and this faith is gone, and man's too, Evolution of Sex and its Significance 109 for the influence of the mother's mind, the wife's, the sister's, and women friends create an atmosphere of belief that is true and contagious, from which the man cannot, and as a fact does not wish to, escape. But the modern schoolgirl, with her standards of learning which she must pass, and which at best are superficial, and which she, like the schoolboy, almost completely forgets a few years later, though the pedagogic influence remains, tries to take in the universe as if it were a problem of geometry, despises home life, from which real inspiration would come, and as a lady clerk or an anaemic, tired shop assistant brings home to her family, and afterwards to her husband, a tired mind and a broken spirit, broken not in the higher religious sense of being humbled before the sublime, but because her natural powers have been ruined by a false scheme of life. Whether this is entirely so or not, I am convinced that a return to Nature's thought of woman in education is one aspect by which a revival of re- ligion quite consistent with scientific truth may be brought about. To return to our main thought : the evolution of animal life, and of man, and of individual man demonstrate the increasing importance of sex ; modern physiology demonstrates the paramount need for a quiet, restful, healthy life in the mother ; a restfulness and quiet and a health which is a life- time's culture, not to be acquired by a fortnight's quiet before the birth of a child. The facts of a study of sex demonstrate that the combative, active side is the male's throughout animal life, and of human life that the active fighting side and the no The Nature of Woman active creative and inventive, mental side are man's, not woman's. The Venus of Milo, the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, the Beatrice of Dante have not come down to us through the centuries for nothing. A Lucretia Borgia might have come down, not these. The great calm and repose of the Greek Venus, the great quiet and rest of the Madonna's face, the gentle presence of Beatrice are not accidental portrayals of the type of woman who is rather than does ; they are the ideals that mankind has treasured and still accepts. Dante, Raphael, and the Greeks saw nothing of the law of affectability, which proves that woman reacts and responds to her surroundings, while man tends to override them ; but they set up ideals in conformity with it. It is not an accident that all three aesthetic types agree in spirit, and that these agree with the teaching of science, woman a presence, man a force. Nature says, " Two types of body and mind I need," womanly and manly, a state of being for motherhood and for a measure of existence, a state of doing for achievement ; and for a moment our age says one, the woman's, is to be lost, but it is Nature that will prevail. Since animal life began its long upward evolution, since sex appeared, and it appeared very early on this earth, sex has slowly differ- entiated itself into two types, male and female, whose minds and bodies have grown more mascu- line and more feminine in this upward path. In the animal world the direction has been male- dominated until man, and man-directed ever since, in the beginning, and it will be so in the end. Man Evolution of Sex and its Significance 1 1 1 directed in his creative strength ; none the less, it is the woman who sees. And what I ask myself as this chapter closes, as I reiterate thoughts that I know are the reader's thoughts as well as mine, keeping before one the ideal of calm and rest for the woman and of energy for the man, ideals based on our natural desires, what I ask myself is, Have we as a people, having gone far astray from the natural healthy ideal of womanhood and manhood, have we the courage to return, on a higher plane, with wider knowledge, to the old thought, that is healthy and sane ? I cannot say, but I know that, whether we do or not, the world will. Rightly under- stood, the Bible saying stands ; " In the beginning . . . male and female created He them," in body, but not less in mind, in the beginning and in the end ; but will modern England have the courage to accept it ? I ask myself this question, but I cannot say. Note Statistics on the Home and on Infant Feeding An Englishman likes facts, and because he believes that statistics are facts, he is often prone to attach a quite exaggerated importance to them. When not prepared for the purposes of propaganda they may represent what are the investigator's own belief of what are the facts, but statistics always, even when scientifically prepared and this they very seldom are represent a formalised statement of something that cannot be scientifically formalised. When I was a medical student, I tried to acquaint myself fully with vaccination and anti-vaccination literature, and I have still on my shelves the books which testify to my endeavour to equip my- self honestly for advice on the subject. The study of some forty books, some of them filled with statistics from end to end, did not convince me either of the vaccination or the anti-vaccination case. 1 1 2 The Nature of Woman I had seen no case of smallpox myself, for there are so few to be seen, and I went into practice still in much doubt, until I worked in an outbreak myself and saw the disease and vaccinated some patients and studied others who had been vaccinated, when I saw with my own eyes five indisputable sets of data which drove me to five as indisputable conclusions, i. Vaccination, under modern conditions, is attended with very little risk indeed, and there is no known alternative of a pleasanter nature to offer. 2. Smallpox is a very serious disease in the un vaccinated now. 3. Some people, a very few, are practically immune by nature to smallpox, and for themselves need not be vaccinated if we could tell who they are, but because they take the disease so slightly and can pass it on to others in a more severe form, they require to be vaccinated for the protection of others as much as the susceptible. 4. Vaccination does protect. 5. Smallpox is an infectious disease like scarlet fever, not like typhoid, and therefore hygiene and isolation are insufficient to guard the community against the disease. And these are the five reasons which convince doctors of experience, knowledge, and judgment. The reader may or may not agree with the illustration ; what I merely want to point out is this : Statistics did not convince me, they were so plausibly expressed on both sides, that ivithout my own experience of the disease I could not have judged which was true, nor do I believe any statistician, un- armed with this experience, could have done so. Statistics on the home and on infant-feeding are like vaccination ; they are dangerous plausible presentations of fact always having some truth in them, if they are honestly compiled ; always, because they are formalised statements of fact and not descriptions of fact, much that is misleading and false. Statistics of the home prove nothing unless they are drawn up, not by somebody who makes a house-to-house visitation and spends half an hour or less in the front parlour kept only for visitors and Sundays, but by a man or woman who has visited frequently over many months the same home, and has called un- expectedly and been invited at different times into every room of the tenement or house occupied by the family. The only people who really know homes in this way are doctors, nurses, health visitors, clergymen, in special practices, perhaps, some solicitors, and some- times insurance visitors from large provident societies. See first whether a writer on the home is one of these ; if not, his data cannot be personally reliable, though he may have acquired second-hand Evolution of Sex and its Significance 1 13 knowledge of some importance, of which he will not be able to judge the value. There are some women whose feelings are against home life, who ought not to marry, who are cold in their natures to the thought of a child born to them, who think of marrying a man in as matter-of-fact a way as they would think of living with another woman, and there are men of a similar character. These ought not to marry, and will never make a home, though the rooms they live in may be habitable and neat. There are some women and some men who have such a low standard of life that dirt and dis- order and badly cooked and imperfect food do not trouble them. There are some women and some men who are of such a low mental stature that nothing would induce them to care for the artistic, the musical, the literary, the scientific, parental and hygienic possibilities of the home as an individual centre of life for them- selves and their children. The majority of men and women are not like this ; when they neglect the home it is from necessity, or more often because they do not know the possibilities of the home ; but the minority is a substantial one, and in certain classes of the nation, and even in one street as compared with another neighbouring street, may form the majority in that class or district, and statistics not compiled to show these different types of home inmate will be full of fallacies and errors. But the woman who knows what the home is worth, how to enlarge it and make it vital, and who is a mother in spirit as well as being a child-bearer in bodily actuality, will make of this home, and does make of it, a markedly different place. If she comes to it tired at the end of a day's outside labour, having let others do her work, making the outside work her life-vocation, her home must suffer. I am not denying that there is immense need for improvement in woman's home life, but I do ask the reader to beware of vague talk about the impracticability of the home, of the statement I repeat a false one that the wage-earning mother and wife has as good a home as the non-wage-earner. There are some women who keep the home spirit in spite of an outside occupation, there are others who have no home spirit though they are in the home, but that the home-loving woman can do better for herself, her husband, and her children by being out of it rather than in it is one of those foolish fallacies that nothing but statistics and their mad implications could ever have made us believe. The statistics on infant feeding are alike fallacious. Let me H4 The Nature of Woman merely point out two facts for the reader to remember. One, all scientific artificial foods are avowedly made and prepared as ap- proximations to human milk, and the nearer a food does so approach the human the better it is recognised to be ; there is no other medical test of the quality of an infant's artificial food but this one. Two, milk for human babies can only be prepared, when it is not the human mother's milk, by milk from other animal life ; it is troublesome to prepare, is contaminated in preparation, and costly. Is it a sane proceeding to substitute for the natural human mother's food for her child an imperfect substitute prepared from another and lower form of animal life, and fitted by Nature for that form ? It is necessary to point out these plain facts, because mathematicians, and sometimes statisticians of some note, have sometimes made the reality and the natural seem the unreal and incredible. Chapter VII The Next Step : Economics and Biology AST century was an economic century, and a preparatory biological one. Smith's " Wealth of Nations " had prepared the way for Ricardo and Mill ; and the first effect of Darwin's, Huxley's, and Spencer's work, but not its real final effect, being against religion, robbed religion of its strength to hold back the economic, rationalistic doctrines of supply and demand and a hard, rationalistic, un- scientific view of life. It ought to have been a very obvious truth, one would have thought, that the laws which regulate money, prices, markets, and exchange of goods must be different laws from those which regulate a healthy blood supply in a human body ; and that, whether one believes in an immortal soul and a destiny for individual man, or in a mind that disintegrates completely at bodily death, yet, while a human being lives, there are certain psycho- logical or mind laws, certain mind feelings (appetites and emotions), certain other powers even beyond these, that require a knowledge of life which the science of life, biology, including, as it does, body and mind studies, could have supplied ; and that, therefore, a completer view of society could have been obtained if biologists and economists had "5 n6 The Nature of Woman come together as social students to teach mankind its ideal of social life. Educational influences might in addition have been considered, as well as the geo- graphical potentiality of the soil. It might have been thought that these would have been common-sense practical conclusions, involving no great or technical knowledge, and that a man trained to logic as Mill was would have seen such a simple, obvious, common- sense and necessary scientific proposition. As a fact, neither he nor his contemporaries except Comte saw anything of the kind. They saw men and women who could be reasoned, ignorantly, about ; men and women, all alike, who in theory always obeyed rationalistic laws, who never suffered from disease, who never felt overstrain, who never felt a desire to do an act that could not be explained, justified, or blamed by the obvious reasons of a logician. Of course, Mill would have denied this attitude, had it been put to him. The fact remains, none the less, that there is not a single sentence, that I can remember, of applied biology, of the problems of human type and temperament of body and mind, of the problems of health and disease, in his work. He never saw practically the need to understand the biological sub-sciences, or even the practical eco- nomic study of prices of articles sold in the daily exchanges of life. He believed in a reasoned view of existence, quite apart from a study of it as a science, and hence his curious views about men and women and life generally. It was this unscientific, and in the larger sense illogical and unrational, atti- tude that justified Ruskin's strictures and Dickens's ridicule. Nevertheless, Mill is not to be too greatly Economics and Biology 117 blamed, for this blindness was largely an industrial attitude of the times, from which we ourselves have not even yet completely recovered ; but it is not necessary to plead to-day that there is a biological aspect of life. The Biological Demand What are the biological demands which the biologist wishes to make of the economist in regard to woman ? They can be probably already fore- shadowed by the reader. The physiological needs of motherhood demand non-employment after married life, some would assert for those married women only who have children. This restriction is, however, unsatisfac- tory, as it might tend to discourage one of the most important aims of marriage, parentage. The married woman with a husband living and capa- ble should not be a wage-earner for the following reasons : I. After the third month of expectant mother- hood, in some women earlier, slight and sometimes considerable interferences of health take place, and it is essential that for all women a composed, restful life, not idle, but with activities taken quietly, at the woman's own time and in the woman's own way, are essential for reasons discussed in the last chapter. The home is the only place where this is possible. It is no longer arguable scientifically that the natural food of the infant, for its first nine months of life after birth, is its mother's, and that no artificial food can equal this from any point of view. Thus n8 The Nature of Woman fifteen months' absence from factory or other occu- pational life outside the home is essential, not for the larger thought of motherhood only, but simply for the bearing and rearing of the child during this period. If we assume only three children to each family, this means on an average that in the first six years of married life the wife and mother would be pre- cluded from industrial or arduous professional em- ployment. But the matter does not end here, for those six years would be years in which a new attitude of mind would, or ought to have developed in the mother, and her fitness for her former work would for this reason have deteriorated. 2. For general reasons it is now granted that school is a mistake for children under five years of age, and there can be no serious question of the advantage of good home life, owing to less danger from infection ; of the smaller stimulus and strain to the child's brain in the home if it is not taken out late and improperly managed ; of the understanding and individual treatment that a mother can give her child, to say nothing of the feeling of love be- tween them, or of possible bad habits that may be taught by a careless nurse or learned from another child of greater precocity, that the mother is the proper, sole guardian for her child during this period, assisted, of course, by the father. But this granted four or five years on to the six years already conceded takes the wife for ten or eleven years away from industry. 3. The majority of homes are servantless, the majority of servants are unsuitable as nurses, so that Economics and Biology 119 if boarding-schools are not to be accepted as a universal school custom and national ones estab- lished (and financial and biological 1 reasons could both be given against them), the child must be at home for fifteen years of its life. This makes twenty years' absence from employment almost a certainty. 4. Assuming a woman marries at twenty-three to twenty-five, the twenty years thus take her to forty- three to forty-five ; would she be able to take up at this age her old pre-marital calling or a new one ? Obviously there is extremely little chance of this. A practical need at this moment creeps in which, though not of scientific insistence, is one that can hardly be avoided. Assuming that fifteen years of age is the time a boy or a girl can begin to learn something of occupational life, an age thought to be two years too early by many authorities, these children will not, as a fact, in the majority of reasons, leave home immediately ; in most instances they will remain until married, that is for another eight to ten years, and in the mere daily home needs of children and husband the wife will have her time fully occu- pied. By the time the children begin to leave home a wife married at the biological age of twenty-three to twenty-five would be fifty to fifty-five years before her home would be free from children and her life less occupied. This is also about the period of the change of life in women, and most mothers would, I think rightly, consider that their active life was done, and that some leisure was due to them, so that the post-maternal part of a woman's life is unlikely 1 The mother's and the home influence are probably most needed psychologically during pubescence and adolescence. 1 20 The Nature of Woman to see her leaving home to take up either her old occupation she had practised thirty to thirty-five years earlier or a new one. 5. There remains the pre-marital stage of life. What is the young, unmarried girl to do before marriage ? I may remark in passing that if marriage were possible to men at twenty-three to twenty-five years of age, it would be fairly certain that the be- trothal period would begin about eighteen months to three years earlier, so that for the majority of women the question would be what to occupy themselves with from the seventeenth to the twenty-third year. For those not marrying some other occupational solution different from the marriage one ought to be found. These questions come naturally into the subject matter of the next chapter but one. Thus on making two perfectly simple and scientific assump- tions, one, that for the majority of women marriage and parentage are the normal, healthy destinies (and no sane, competent authority could question this), two, that the home must persist for the needs of the child, we see what common sense suggests as well, that marriage is an occupation in itself, and there- fore excludes other occupations, and therefore for the married woman the wage-earning market must be closed. I shall, of course, be told that this will bring into still more striking prominence the endowment of motherhood, but there are powerful objections to any proposition made on such a basis, if the endow- ment is a real endowment equivalent in kind and value to what a man earns by his occupation. If it were general, given to every mother in proportion to the Economics and Biology 121 number of her children, it would favour early marriages, which, however, the law might forbid, and it would certainly tend to make the inefficient type of husband rely upon his wife for financial support, thus defeating the very object of the endowment. If the endowment was given on the basis of Sir Francis Galton's scheme, as a contribution propor- tional to the worth of any given family, then, quite apart from the practical scientific difficulty of tell- ing which are the worthy families, and the moral difficulty, scarcely less formidable, that the labelling of worth under these circumstances would foster a very dangerous priggish element in the nation, and at the same time by making worthiness a financial aim of the unworthy, defeat again its own object, quite apart from these difficulties, it would almost equally certainly take away from the worthy husband the incentive of labour. All such schemes would, more- over, brutalise woman by favouring, not incidentally but deliberately, the large family, and accentuating this aspect of marriage. We seem, therefore, driven back to the only possible way left to us, that of recognising the economic dependence of the married woman on her husband and of giving her full practical rights, even to the extent of shutting an idle husband up in a labour colony and obtaining work from him under compulsion for her support, and of discountenancing, though, of course, not forbidding, the continental system of the parental endowment of daughters, as this favours a money basis for marriage rather than a healthy love affinity and this is, after all, only a development of the English tradition. 122 The Nature of Woman It might be argued with much reason that the lazy wife's position ought to be legally punishable as well as the husband's, and it is, of course, needless to say that all celibate occupational positions should be gradually eliminated from social life. Shortly, then, what the biologist demands is this : the abolition of all forms of child labour except those legitimately connected with the teaching of trades and professions to youth ; the economic de- pendence of the married woman on the man and women should remember that this only means the domestic dependence of the man on the woman and the establishment of a man's mature marriageable living wage as the wage standard of the nation, the single woman and the single man being paid at the same hourly payment. It probably would be necessary to tax the single woman and man more heavily than the married man under these con- ditions, but as the single woman, better paid, ought not to work for such long hours (a great ad- vantage to her health), and the single man would be mostly making preparations for marriage, the tax should not, in justice, greatly exceed the married man's. This, then, is the biological demand, for a man's mature marriageable living family wage, varying, of course, for different occupations, as the standard payment for all in each respective employment, thus making juvenile labour impossible, and fixing all employment at the married man's standard. How this is to be done, whether by law or trade- union pressure, how expeditiously it can be achieved, these and other questions must be left to the Economics and Biology 123 economist, but of the biological necessity of this standard for healthy national and individual life liiere can be little doubt ; on this point biologists of the future will probably allow nothing in the nature of a compromise. Yet I do not desire the reader to think that I am wishful to establish binding laws to which no in- dividual exceptions are to be made. I repeat, I ask for nothing else than this that woman should re- cognise her own individuality and that man should recognise it also, in education, vocation, domestic life and national representation. Chapter VIII The Home and Motherhood as Mental, not Material, Ideals J HAVE said nothing so far about certain argu- ments that might be thought worthy of rather serious criticism. The fact, for instance, that in Lancashire, especially in many of the large towns, women have almost abandoned the home and work side by side with the men. Thus woman's economic independence may be said to be a fact accomplished, and that while this independence works badly in Dundee, it is fairly satisfactory in the cotton in- dustry. The answer is simple ; for the home not to be neglected some other woman than the mother has to keep it in order why not the mother ? and for expectant motherhood and for the child during infancy factory life is unphysiological. No one will seriously contend that the home under such con- ditions equals that of the better type of home- employed mother ; and if such a contention were made, it could easily be confuted, for it is not the fact. The argument then appears to be this : because the best type of factory or professionally employed mother can manage to so control unphysiological methods of life, and by payment of others to work for her can keep a house in order, provided her chil- 124 The Home and Motherhood 125 dren, who ought to be at home, are taken care of elsewhere, supposing this type of woman keeps up a condition of domestic life that, though defective, is yet better than the worst examples of home-em- ployed motherhood, that therefore all examples of home-employed motherhood shall be swept away and the employment of married women can go on moderately unsatisfactorily and extremely unsatis- factorily as before. It is an argument worthy of a logician's analysis for exposition to his students, of faulty reasoning, but it is not worth the scientist's attention. In all seriousness, what do such arguments amount to ? Nothing. Supposing it could be granted that an expectant mother can do the same kind and amount of work as the non-expectant or the single woman without injury to herself or child, which it cannot ; supposing it could be admitted that a modified cow's or so-called humanised milk could be prepared so as to suit the individual infant, and have the amount and quality changed with the infant's changing needs ; and supposing a feeding- bottle could be made which automatically heated the milk up to body temperature, and kept it at that temperature, and never lower or higher, and, without destroying the living food substances in the milk good and necessary for the baby, could at the same time be kept perfectly sterilised ; supposing this same feeding-bottle could be made so that the flow of milk could be properly regulated, and supposing you could guarantee that nurses who feed this little life shall not allow this very complex feeding-bottle to become dirty, as it easily might, and always obey i26 The Nature of Woman exactly the regulations which would have to be sent out with it to keep it in order ; supposing all this could be granted, would that justify an expectant mother living a factory life, or the nursing mother for her absence from her child ? Is there nothing in a mother thinking about the little life within her body and meditating upon it ? And what chance of medi- tation is there in the ordinary factory, or when the mother comes to her home tired (less her home, for it is managed by another woman), what chance is there for meditation there either ? A woman who would thus defend an industrial life after marriage is unworthy of marriage and of parentage. Is the book that has been tossed off carelessly, typed by one hand, indexed by another, refer- ences made by another, and corrections by yet another, worth the same in value as the one that is author -corrected, author -indexed, author-compiled ? No one in his senses would claim this. It would be pointed out that the care of the writer in his work would react on his mind, give him fresh ideas, enable him to link his chapters together and relate his thought, and make his book a whole. And the old-fashioned mother at her best, who felt the presence of her child, who made its garments with her own hands, giving the little finishes that as a mother pleased her, who prepared for its birth, who felt its little fingers at her breast after it was born, and looked down with posse^ion and protection on its little face, and cared for it her- self until it had made a place in her heart unshakable by time or difficulty, does not such a mother repre- sent the ideal of motherhood ? Is any sensible man The Home and Motherhood 127 or woman going to compare this woman, a mother, with that other woman who does none of these things, who simply bears the child grudgingly, and lets other hands minister to its wants and needs, when and wherever it is possible for them to do so ? That one who does, either has had no child or deserves none. Is it necessary to carry the argument further, to suggest that bricks and mortar and pictures and furniture and food and knives and forks and a bed to lie on do not make a home ? That what is meant by home is as real and as spiritual as what is meant by beauty or truth and as difficult to define ? The man or woman who has felt what the home means, is such a one going to be convinced by peti- tions or simple health arguments to abandon it for a life where meals are eaten at public places, where beds are hired and rooms purchased, when he or she has the chance of another mode of life, where the rule is affection, not finance, and privacy and indi- viduality, not publicity and nonentity? To have your own pictures on the wall, your own books on their shelves, your own furniture, your own friends, your own fireside, and to weigh against these pub- licity and finance as well tell an artist that photo- graphs are cheaper, or a scientist that truth is only veracity and not worthy of the trouble spent upon it. Home as a positive, mental reality, motherhood and wifehood as fatherhood and husbandhood, are things mental, spiritual, not material, as every one who has seen or had either knows, and to tell such a one that you could make a home by being absent from it and by doing little for it, and that it is not 128 The Nature of Woman to be weighed by the side of industrial life, would leave such a person unconvinced. The mere fact that such arguments are adduced demonstrates how far reason has usurped the place of feeling, and what an unworthy usurper it is ; how far low thoughts of trade have degraded life ; how far a man or woman with natural manly and womanly, fatherly and motherly, feelings can lose these and be obsessed by a worthless shadow that has not even the form of the reality it counterfeits. I am not blaming the woman who has uncon- sciously made mistakes, for the character of the times has dehumanised our lives and affected women even more than men. Chapter IX The Sphere of Woman little book draws in this and the next chapter to its close ; in this the practical side, in the next what one may say about the ideal. Our question is partly a more difficult one because our own follies have made it difficult. The excess of women results from one of these. Boy babies are born in greater numbers than girl babies, and were women better mothers and men better fathers, the boy baby, more delicate than the girl baby, would not die to the same extent, and the pro- portion of the sexes would be equalised at maturity. Still even then there would be single women and single men. From the beginning of this book I have insisted, and as a biologist I must insist, on the recognition of womanliness as a mental state as well as a bodily one, and have returned again and again to the thought that no system of education, of occupation, and of representation can afford to put this thought on one side. The problems of sex begin at the beginning of life in the strange fact just mentioned, that the boy baby is more frail, though why he is so we do not know. During childhood, that is for the first eight i 129 130 The Nature of Woman or nine years, there are few difficulties to face. The boy is a little rougher, needs, perhaps, just a shade more physical exercise, but with care boys and girls can play together, study together, in the home and the school, and are benefited by so doing. This is the relatively asexual period of life, and the kinder- garten system of education, with certain modifica- tions, may be accepted, the mother to teach for the first five years of life, and the lady school-teacher for the four that follow for both sexes. At pubescence, however, the fact of bodily change into womanhood begins to appear and develop rapidly in the girl, and commences slowly two years later in the boy. Some girls and boys are rapid developers, others are ordinary, others, again, are slow, but it is always true that of the boy and girl of the same type the girl is the first by about two years to begin this change, and it proceeds when begun at a more rapid rate, so that between eleven and fourteen years a girl may be actually taller, and is much more mature, than the boy. There is an undoubted natural tendency for the sexes to separate at this period, as anyone can verify for himself or herself. And the girl at this period equally certainly is less inclined for severe mental work, and from this time forward throughout her life tends to wish to take, unless encouraged to the contrary, less violent physical exercise. The boy also is less inclined for mental effort, but his interest in physical, bodily exercise becomes re- markably keen and intense. There is every reason to believe that these feelings The Sphere of Woman 131 express a natural need in the physical changes of the body. The girl's hips widen for later maturity, her limbs become rounded and more full of form, and her feet and hands do not grow in the same relation, so that they now begin to appear small. Were there no other facts than these, which are the contrary of the boys, with long limbs and often big hands and feet, they would be enough to demonstrate that muscular exercises of an extreme nature are unnatural. The chief mental fact of this period in girls is its in- stability, as frequent giggling proves, and of the boy a bodily idealism. There are no positive facts for or against, but it is probable rather than improbable that much physical, and perhaps mental, exercise at this period would retard womanly development, making it less perfect, drawing off to other quarters nourishment which is needed for womanly changes coming into the young girl's life. This much we do know, that probably at no other time in history has childbirth been so difficult, so unhealthily difficult, as now, and that this has manifested itself chiefly in the last fifty years, a period marked by increasing educational strain for girls and boys, by increased gymnastic and violent exercises, such as hockey, for girls, and by employment for young women outside of the home. It is probable that one or all of these changes are responsible for this childbirth difficulty, and for the nerviness in women. But, of course, on this subject we need painstaking research. During adolescence, the period up to about sixteen to eighteen in girls, and two years later in 132 The Nature of Woman boys, the mental side of sex begins to be manifested, and the danger to both sexes alike is a false senti- mentalism, which must, none the less, not make us blind to the fact that this period should be marked by a development of real sentiment, of genuine respect for women and men, of love of truth, beauty, and religion. If the minds of the boy and girl were the same, it might be conceivable that their education should be similar, but the girl is unquestionably more affectable than the boy, and ought to be so, is more intuitive, is less combative, and her mind is subtler, more suggestive, and the aesthetic element plays a larger part than in the boy's mind. The boy is more individual, more rational, more combative, and the ideal of truth and reality plays a larger part with the boy than aesthetic feelings. It is very difficult to see how these different qualities can each be strengthened so as to form natural sex characters except by distinctive, non- co-educational methods. Each should surely be taught something of the science of life ; but again I doubt if this knowledge could be taught wisely to both sexes at this age. If the education of either ends at this period there is no more to be said, but if both are to go to college there can be no question that their education should largely diverge, the domestic, aesthetic, and literary predominating in the woman's, and the public, civic, scientific, and technical sides be more, I do not say solely, emphasised in the man's. The case for co-education, I confess, seems to me The Sphere of Woman 133 quite unbiological, though I am ready to change this opinion if the evidence is forthcoming. It seems to depend for its influence on some rather dogmatic assertions of its value by co-educationists, which are not submitted to examination, and to the fact that it is cheap a bad argument ; and that classes are easier to manage which is, if possible, a worse. The easy way in almost all pursuits is easy by avoiding, not overcoming, difficulties. The mere facts that in America, even more than here in England, women are so often anxious to be like men, and so little desirous of disclosing the true glories of womanhood ; that the great colleges like Newnham and Girton in England have teachers and principals who take little pains with the woman's home and domestic points of view, are almost proof to the scientifically trained biologist that something is wrong, as structure and function should go to- gether ; a woman's body with womanliness and a man's with manliness. And as lecturer I know, what as biologist I look upon with great uneasiness, this fact, that there are extremely few women who glory in womanhood or even take a pride in such an ideal. There are, it is true, few men who have really high manly ideals, but the majority really wish to be manly, even the feminine type of man. It is not so with women, and it is a pity and an error for our nation and civilisation. Something such as the following is what is desirable biologically for healthy womanly and manly life : The kindergarten system. Mother-trained and home-influenced for first five to six years. For 134 The Nature of Woman boys and girls from about six to nine, under the guidance of women teachers. Girls' schools. Nine to seventeen. Under the control of women teachers specially trained to sympathise with and draw out in healthy directions womanly ideals, and themselves of some feminine charm and insight. College. Seventeen to twenty-two. Specialised studies, but domestic science taught to all. For the practical domestic teaching a woman lecturer, but for the theoretical a man. I am fairly convinced, just as women are adepts with children, and men in the early years of child life are very poor teachers, so for the final stages of teaching a man is a better and a more thorough guide than a woman. This later college work might be combined with some practical occupation at a post in which hours were light and work not heavy, and for those classes unable to afford full college work our national schools could be made use of. Examinations, except in the broadest spirit, I cannot myself accept for either sex, and while they seem unavoidable for men, but are none the less an evil, they could and ought to be dispensed with for women. All girls could go through this training with ad- vantage, and it would have this practical value, that no woman would be, as now almost all women are, unacquainted with all the many-sided demands and wonders of home life : child psychology ; human physiology ; dietetics and cooking ; hygiene and house-cleaning ; choosing a house ; the ordering of a home ; how a library may be acquired ; pictures The Sphere of Woman 135 and their value ; wall papers, furniture, windows, and how these can be hygienically and aesthetic- ally treated ; the stages of life ; nursing and the management of disease. Such a course, rightly developed, would open out to woman what the domestic side of life could be, and it would fit her for what the majority of women become, wives and mothers, and what the nation needs as its greatest womanly asset. And this same course would teach women to understand the truth that, rightly ap- preciated, there is almost too much in the home and its requisites, and not too little, and good mothers and good wives would be seen to be, as they are, the women who realise their lives most fully and com- pletely. This college period of seventeen to twenty-two is the period when the majority of women become be- trothed, and if a woman reaches twenty-two years without having met the man she is likely to care for as her future husband, it would be then quite time enough to open up the thought of the prospect of another kind of career. It is generally admitted in the practice of hospitals for nurses, and other similar institutions, that about twenty-three to twenty-five is a suitable vocational age for women ; and some spheres of life, such as music or art, which demand early training, might easily have been partially prepared for in the earlier stages. It is claimed that for no appropriate calling for women would this scheme of education be other than beneficial. One word more ought to be said for the unmarried woman. She is sometimes the unchosen of her type 136 The Nature of Woman and kind, and even as such may have a very useful and happy future ahead of her in literature, in music, or art, or in domestic pursuits, or in health visiting or similar occupations ; but, as often, she is one who for the sake of a high ideal chooses celibacy rather than degrade it. Such women are apt to look on their lives as partial failures. It is not so. These are the women who elevate their own sex, teach the grandeur of womanly individuality, and lead men as well as women to a higher appreciation of womanly life and powers. The teaching to-day that action is for woman as for man the ideal, is a cruel and false doctrine, false by the record of all history as well as of biological thought. A woman may attain to great- ness in literature or on the stage, the latter some- times at the cost of her character ; she may become a good musician or a good artist, a good nurse or a medical woman, but she is not primarily any one of these. A man's influence is small by the side of a womanly woman's, though his actions may be large, and it is the woman as she is that counts, not primarily what she does. But none the less I believe the day will come when by good motherhood the sexes will be equalised, or the excess even be on the man's side, and with a juster order of social life there will be few women who will not meet the men Nature has fitted them for. The call of sacrifice, however, may come to all, and perhaps in the final weighing up of things that man or woman, whether from the call of human love or for beauty or for truth, who holds up in his or her life the solitary ideal, may be the one who has really counted most in raising the standard of life. However this be, the teaching of biology, The Sphere of Woman 137 first and last, for woman and for man is to accept our natures, glory in them, and keep healthy what Nature has given us, making her vast possibilities real actualities by our lives. This can only be done for woman by being womanly, and for man by acting as becomes a man. s Chapter X The Nature of Man and Woman PHREE conclusions are very clearly present to the student of life confronted with the con- ditions of to-day, and studied in the light of modern knowledge. First, that it is no exaggeration but the simple truth to assert that human life is capable of wonderful possibilities ; it has its limita- tions, limitations which must be clearly realised before the possibilities can be in any large measure attained, but none the less the possibilities are there. Second, that in our treatment of a life occupation, in our marriages, and in our conduct after marriages ; in the thought about and in our realisation of parentage, as well as in our treatment of children afterwards in the home, at school, at college, for those able to carry the child to this period, we are at best very poor muddlers, throwing away generation by generation a patrimony from Nature worth far more than all the kings' ransoms in the world. Third, the fact noticed by Roscoe, Hansson, and others, and already commented upon in my first chapter, that men and women stand apart to-day, or, as Roscoe finely says, approach each other by negation rather than fulfilment ; that out of this negative spirit has grown a dangerous, ignorant, and 138 The Nature of Man and Woman 139 suicidal denial of sex, and with it, however incon- sistent this may seem, a still more dangerous ex- aggeration of the physical side of the relations of men and women, which has caused even genuine scientific writers, usually a balanced, healthy body of men, to write at quite unnecessary length, un- necessary even for scientific purposes, upon what our ancestors would have rightly called unhealthy and in the fact that certain practices are not normal, what they would have called unnatural subjects. Every man of experience knows that such sex failures exist, every medical man of experience knows broadly to what extent they exist, but to make public such unhealthiness, to encourage prurient thought on this depravity of human nature by publishing unpleasant details, is not good for the public mind, and I will go further and say that as it is a scientist's science to present all subjects im- personally and under general laws, these personal, domestic details of unhealthy minds that occupy volumes of some writers are only the crude, raw material out of which a scientific treatise might be written, but have no claims to be published as the treatise itself or published at all. One inevitable result of this modern treatment of the subject has been to take out the human from sex and to exalt the animal side and to vulgarise human love and human parentage so that commerce and the public Press can make traffic of what is by nature private and sacred. I know perfectly well that there were vulgar plays a hundred years ago, more openly vulgar than, perhaps, any to-day, but certainly far less suggestively so ; I know that through gossip, for the 140 The Nature of Woman Press had no existence then as a popular force, all sorts of unpleasant tales were disseminated ; but a hundred years ago there was a strong, refined body of men and women who opposed these tendencies, who rejected them, who in a real sense led the nation. There is no such body to-day. My life has been spent in science, and I believe in science because I know, however imperfectly, some- thing of what the search for truth and reality is capable of, but if I thought that the study of eugenics, of parental hygiene, of heredity were only tending to focus human minds on the morbid, un- healthy side of life, I would devote the rest of my life, such as it is, to discouraging these studies. Men and women must be taught to see that the lower side of sex is a relatively simple matter, and that its hygiene can be expressed in few words, but that what is wonderful, strange, and complex is woman- liness of the mind and manliness of the mind and the reactions that grow out of these in human marriage and parentage. That it is this higher appeal that justifies womanly and manly purity of life and monogamic love, of which the Western mind de- servedly may be proud, and which Dante idealised with his verse. When I think over these three points of view I find myself in this difficulty : If I assert, what is true, that the potentiality of life for man and woman is wonderful, did they but know it, and I try to appeal to real sentiment, and show its relationship to science, I may be honestly told by those whose knowledge has been, like Mill's, only a rationalistic knowledge, that I am sentimentalising, and that real sentiment does The Nature of Man and Woman 141 not exist. I may point to adolescence, and to the practical mind of Maudsley, the pioneer of adoles- cent teaching, who first recognised this truth, and suggest that this emotional enlargement of mind by sex is a reality, yet I may still leave such critics un- convinced. If I try to satisfy them I shall have to write a treatise, as I hope to do some day, but it will not have the object of this little book, which is to make the worker in non-scientific fields, the home- maker, feel that manhood and womanhood are noble realities. Yet this very man, and still more woman, that I am trying to reach may criticise me because I have set too high an ideal, which cannot be followed in life, and say I am a mere dreamer ; yet I know that some married women have been driven by circumstances into the labour market, and that some of these have done much to keep the home spirit, in spite of it. I know that some have married for financial reasons, and yet with a wise sense of duty have come to realise much happiness. I know that many have wrecked their lives, and I ought to have said a great deal for these, but had I done so it would not have been this book that I should have written, but another. To these people who are working through mistakes to a better realisation of life I would say, the mistake is made, and in spite of the natural but unscientific claim for divorce laws, it cannot and ought not to be capable of being remade. As a fact, no law can reshape these old errors and give us the opportunity of beginning life over again. We have not the secret of Faust ; and Goethe, no dreamer, did not hesitate to describe the nature of the source one would have to draw upon had we the 142 The Nature of Woman secret. No divorce laws can make blank our memories, none can make us cease to be parents with parents' responsibilities, if we have once become parents. There is only one way, the old-fashioned way, to meet these mistakes, to live them out, as was the religious, and is to-day the scientific, practice. To try to begin to live, in spite of the error, the blunder, as if no error or blunder had been made, and slowly, something, not the ideal it is true, but none the less approaching it, will be reached, and parents who have made this error can help their children not to repeat it in their lives. I want to say a final word, as far as this book is concerned, on the nature of man and the nature of woman, and I do not claim for this part of my book any scientific value whatever ; it is simply that I shall try and give two symbols of sex which in a fairly busy life have been of real help to me in understand- ing my fellows, men and women alike. I do not claim for it even originality, for it is possible that some writer that I read, perhaps, twenty years ago, when my own mind was opening, used these similes, and I have forgotten the author but remembered the illustration. I have, however, come to think of the mind of a boy or a man as one might think of a rope made up of many twisted strands, each strand a different and in the main an obvious colour. These strands can be plainly seen exactly as they twist and intertwine in the whole rope. One can see that some are thicker than others, some are more beautiful colours, some are stronger, it might conceivably be even necessary sometimes to untwist a part of the rope, dangerous The Nature of Man and Woman 143 as such a practice is, take out a bad portion and re- twist it again, so that only sound material remains. A masculine type of mind, and the more masculine he is the more clearly he sees it, sees his mind thus. He seems to stand apart, looking down upon his mental attitudes, desires, and feelings, appetites and emotions, examining them, testing them. He knows that some strands of his nature are lower than others, that some are stronger ; he knows that at times, if he has allowed his mind to be poisoned, there is nothing to save himself but the ex- tremely dangerous method of cutting a portion or the whole of one strand out of his being, but all the while he sees his nature in this form, directs it and controls it or, if he be weak, allows his nature to con- trol him, knowing all the time that he should himself rule, but knowing, of course, also that these strands of his being are all he has, and that he cannot acquire others, and must work with these alone. Man's nature is thus visible, as it were, to himself and to others who observe, and, as I have said, to his wife most of all, if she be his real wife. It is quite useless to try to disguise this, even if he desire. But within the limits of his powers he can, none the less, shape his life. To extend the simile to fit the needs, if each of these strands is capable of growth, man can be a gardener to them, checking some, stimulating others. He can make his life what he will within the limits of what is given him, and I think every strong man, even boy, knows this and realises it, especially if it is pressed home to him. But it is not so with a woman. An unspoiled woman does not reason about herself, for in that 144 The Nature of Woman direction lies morbidity and mind disease, as, of course, it may do in a man if it is carried too far. She accepts herself as a whole, a whole which she is conscious, none the less, is divided in its wholeness. There is an outer bloom, very frail, an inner, commonplace, supporting texture, and an inmost core, strong, tenacious, unconquerable. The bloom is so delicate that a finger-touch may spoil it ; the core is so strong that not even the strongest manly mind can break it, if the frail bloom be intact. But bloom and core go together, and leave, if they go, only the commonplace supporting texture and little else. The man may have five or fifty strands in his nature spoiled and yet something of beauty may remain, something of real manhood, but the woman, if the bloom really goes, has nothing. Teach a woman to respect this bloom, and she will live by the secret strength of this inner core in- vulnerable, unless man can be made blind so that he does not know or feel that the bloom exists. Teach him to know both the beauty and the frailty of the bloom and to respect it, and with even the roughest man woman need have no fear. There are women who have little of this bloom, who yet use this little to dominate the man by his respect for its frailty and its beauty. There are men who know that this bloom is frail, and who in their brutality brush it on one side and with it womanhood and, perhaps, manhood too. These are clumsy images, I know, but yet I hope that by them I have conveyed something of the truth, the woman's frailty, beauty, and yet deeper The Nature of Man and Woman 145 strength, which place her in these elements above man, her wholeness and her need to keep her whole- ness clean and unsullied, her fall almost irrecoverable when this bloom is gone. The bloom a mystery even to herself. The man rougher, stronger, much less supple, but capable of moulding his character to an extent that would be fatal to any real woman. When a man ceases to desire to shape himself he is done, a will-less wreck ; when a woman lets go this ideal of bloom, core and strength and tenacity go out from her even as the beauty, and what remains is the commonplace supporting texture, fouled and mired, of what once was a character. These similes are not good ones, I know, but there will be no real understanding of the woman's movement or the man's, nor of what causes dis- content in each, until these are understood, or if not understood, are bettered by at least an as well- intentioned and a more discerning application to life. In marriage, in public life, in representation, it is the mind of the woman and the man that counts for greatness ; and the nature of the woman's mind, its architecture, is fundamentally of a different order from the man's, and it is, partly at least, because the industrial movement of last century did not recognise this that the discontent of both men and women arose, and also out of the tendency in commercial development to take from human life its one need- ful thing, its humanity. Supplementary Chapter Some Landmarks in the Subject AFTER John Hunter, the surgeon, made his study (of whom, owing to the dishonesty of a friend entrusted after his death with his manu- scripts, it is not possible to say how much was worked out in these problems by him), no effective work was done until nearly the middle of last century, and the names that specially deserve at- tention are Thomas Laycock, W. C. Roscoe, Charles Darwin, and Laura Hansson ; in addition Auguste Comte's Chapter V of his Book VI, translated by Harriet Martineau, should be read, as, though it con- tains many ideas that we should now rightly reject, such as the assumption that woman is inferior, it was the first study to scientfically recognise that woman's position in society is, and must always be, different from the man's. Dr. Thomas Laycock published his work, " The Nervous Diseases of Women," in 1840. It is a work that, while highly suggestive and containing much evidence on the subject never before collected to- gether, is yet a little too speculative to rank as a supreme scientific achievement. He recognised, however, much that Charles Darwin established later, and he himself established certain truths : 146 Some Landmarks in the Subject 147 " The nervous system the seat of hysterical diseases." " Hysteria is peculiar to females " (Laycock means women). " Hysteria is related to woman's maternal func- tions." " Combativeness a male characteristic." He accepted the better informed thought of his time as to the relation of sex glands to sex person- ality, and he formulated, taking his term from Morelle, who preceded him, the celebrated law of affectability : " Without preface it may be stated that by universal consent the nervous system of the human female is allowed to be sooner affected by all stimuli, whether corporeal or mental, than that of the male " ( P . 7 6). This and his recognition of combativeness were the first detailed statements which recognised and proved that woman's mind was different from man's, and even female animals from male. W. C. Roscoe's article, published in October, 1858, the first real attempt to analyse the woman's mind and man's as woman's and man's (Schopenhauer's being only a vague study of bodily passion wrongly called love), is given almost in full in the text that follows. Charles Darwin, " The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," 1871, established the passivity of the female in animals and the combative- ness of the male as a mental and bodily feature : " The males are almost always the wooers ; and they alone are armed with special weapons for fight- 148 The Nature of Woman ing with their rivals. They are generally stronger and larger than the females, and are endowed with the requisite qualities of courage and pugnacity " (Chapter XXI, second revised and augmented edition). Laura Marholm, afterward Hansson, wrote from 1880 to the present time. A list of her works is given, with some other writers, in the fuller reference list. Her view is analysed and compared with Roscoe's in my first chapter. These are the really important writers in the understanding of woman's and man's life relation- ships ; other writers are subordinate to this central thought of mental differences in the minds of men and women as well as of physical differences in their bodies. Article " Woman" by W . C. Roscoe, 'published in "The National Review" for October, 1858, re- fublished a year later after his death. The sub- stance of this article here follows : " The influence of women on modern European society, Mr. Buckle tells us, has, on the whole, been extremely beneficial. We presume the influence of men has also, on the whole, been extremely bene- ficial. Yet it would seem odd to urge this. What is the origin of this curious habit, by which we so often speak and think of women as something outside of general humanity, or at least a lesser distinguishable part, whose relation to the whole may be made the subject of estimate ? Are they not in reality human society as much as men are ? If one looks at the subject with a fresh sudden glance, it seems as Some Landmarks in the Subject 149 strange to speak of women exercising a beneficial influence on society as of the branches and leaves exercising a beneficial influence on the tree. Yet a mode of speech so universal, and of antiquity so un- dated, must have some true basis. ' Man ' cannot mean both men and women for nothing ; and mean it in all times and all languages. Does this expression imply that the nature of the man comprehends, in- cludes within it, that of the woman ? Not this probably ; but it does imply that society ever since the world began has received its characteristic nature and distinctive impress, not from the women, but from the men who helped to compose it. It does imply, and the world's history confirms it, that the collective body of men are in their nature more strong, more vigorous, more comprehensive, more complete in themselves, than the collective body of women. It is of no use screaming about it ; the irre- fragable fact remains. It is idle to say it is all owing to the defective education you give us. Why not have secured a higher education ? It is no answer to cry, it all depends on your advantage in mere physical strength ; for to say so admits the fact, and gives an inadequate reason for it. Why tell us of Semiramis and Maria Theresa, of Vittoria Colonna and Mrs. Browning, of Mrs. Somerville and Miss Martineau, down to Brynhilda who tied up King Gunther and Captain Betsey who commands the Scotch brig Cleotus ? These great names, which shoot so high, serve but to measure the average growth. Against the great fact of subordination of place in the world's history, however, is to be placed another fact not less marked and important, that The Nature of Woman the upward progress of the race has always been accompanied by a commensurate increase in the in- fluence of women. The fact to which Mr. Buckle calls attention, that in the palmiest days of Athens the influence of women was at a minimum, is strictly in accordance with the purely intellectual, and there- fore narrow, though brilliant civilisation to which alone the Greek mind attained. It serves to show how large a part of intellectual cultivation may be independent of the woman, and how incomplete in such independence are its loftiest achievements. Mr. Buckle, with his narrow theory of civilisation, rests the matter too purely on considerations of intellec- tual conformation ; yet it can scarcely be denied that the influence of women is less at the present day than it was before the advent of what may be called the scientific age, that our material civilisation is the result of effort and mental activity of a more specially masculine kind. Both our forms of thought and our habits of industrial life have become too narrow and engrossing : and this defect may fairly be attributed (in some degree at least) to the fact that the quick advance and strong leaning in one direction of the men's minds has separated them by a sort of chasm from the women ; and depriving them of the softening and enlarging influence of the closer companionship of the latter, has left these too with inadequate resources for the full development of their faculties and natures. " The defects of our present social condition with respect to the education and position of women, are realjand important ; the suggestion of remedies most difficult. The question is so complex, casts its fine Some Landmarks in the Subject 151 and intertangled roots so deep into the groundwork of all our political, social, and domestic status ; the elements it deals with are so fundamental, and the region is one in which it is so impossible to prophesy the results or limit the consequences of the changes, that to approach it at all is disheartening to any mind capable of perceiving the mere outline of its bearings ; and thoroughly to investigate it would require a comprehensiveness of grasp, a delicacy, and a patience in the intellect attempting it, which is rarely granted to the children of men. The collision of many minds, and still more the experience wrung from many misdirected efforts, will doubtless eventually educe a more or less complete and success- ful solution of the problem. Meanwhile it is not surprising that most minds shrink from it ; and that men especially, not perceiving how deeply their own interests are engaged, and urged by no immediate practical stimulant, for the most part push the whole question impatiently aside, and, with a dim impression that their domestic comforts are en- dangered, hold by the old maxim, quieta non movere. " * For points obscure are of small use to learn, But common quiet is mankind's concern.' They tremble at the bare suggestion, that the delicacy, purity, and self-forgetfulness which shine about them, and restore and console them in their coarse and sharp conflicts with the world and cir- cumstance, are about to be lost to them. When they are told that women are like men, they know too surely that it is otherwise, and feel deeply that nothing more fatal could happen than that they should become so. The wiser women, too, see the 152 The Nature of Woman extent and difficulty of the subject, and prefer to occupy themselves with practical effort directed to the outlying portions of it which lie within their reach. Thus the matter, as is usual with a new and complex subject of reform, falls into the hands of the more shallow and doctrinaire minds of either sex ; wild projects and untenable theories are vented, and met on the other side by undiscriminating sarcasm and ridicule. " It seems strange at first sight that women them- selves, and their warmest advocates of modern days, should rather choose to urge the contest for ex- tended freedom and a larger scope in the manage- ment of the world's affairs from the basis of the false idea of woman's equality with and similarity to man, instead of the inexpugnable position of her real nature, and the claims which it gives her and the duties it demands from her. The reason, however, is pretty obvious. The advance from the latter position would be too slow : progress thence must be made not by the demand of assent to sweeping assertions and all-embracing principles, but step by step, as practical wants, proved advantages, and safe means prepare and open the way. It is far more tempting to be a brilliant intellectual pioneer, levelling the hills and making straight the ways, than one of those quiet engineers of the world's progress who make roads bit by bit, as the occasion for them arrives, and never care to lay them down until there is a certainty that they will be used, and .profitably used. The rights-of -woman question is in much the same position Ww that the rights-of- man question was in the days of Tom Paine. Some Landmarks in the Subject 153 Society reconstructed on the basis of the rights of woman as urged in their full extent, would be in a yet worse position than if we framed new schemes of government on the theory of the natural equality of men. " It is a pleasant exercise of the imagination to re- arrange the world on an hypothesis of what woman would be if her course of training and mode of life were entirely altered. The effect of this, some bold assertors maintain, would be so complete, that (except during her confinements) she would be in every respect identical with man. Others hold that she would be distinguished from him by retaining all her own superiority, while she absorbed all his special attributes. She would be more chaste, more refined, more virtuous, more religious ; not less bold, persevering, thoughtful, and comprehensive. These are engaging speculations, and we will not be rash enough to discuss what the future may have in store : "'Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescribed, their present state.' All we wish to call attention to is the fact that the main object for our attention is women as they are, not women as they are not. " That hitherto women have ever been different from men, has not been very seriously disputed ; and the vast number of instances in which their several characters approach, intermingle, and even interchange, has not been held either by profound thinkers or agricultural labourers to efface, or even to obscure, the permanent distinctions of sex : " ' If black and white blend, soften and unite A thousand ways, is there no black and white ? ' i54 The Nature of Woman Probably the agricultural labourer has the best of it in the clearness of his conviction as to the reality of the distinction : the thinker, in trying to eliminate what is common, and appreciate the exact nature of the differences, gets hopelessly bewildered among the grays, and loses all clear perception of the two original colours. Meanwhile the labourer knows from daily experience that he is not the same sort of creature as his wife. " Are the minds of women, however, different from those of men ? The indignation with which this is so often denied seems to indicate a deeply fixed im- pression that the male type of mind, or what passes for such, is the higher in order and the most to be desired. We are not quite sure that this is so ; and, on the other hand, we are pretty confident that there are real and deep-seated distinctions between the two classes of minds. Mr. Buckle says women have more deductive intellects than men. Whether they more often reason deductively than inductively depends a good deal on the vexed question whether it is by induction they get their general ideas. But few will be disposed to deny that they resort to general ideas more readily and generally than men do, and lean upon them with greater confidence. " The most obvious characteristics of the feminine intellect are delicacy of perceptive power and rapidity of movement. A woman sees a thousand things which escape a man. Physically even she is quicker sighted. A girl is a better bird-nest er than a^boy : a woman marks a thing/which passes over a man's eye too rapidly for him/to perceive it. Men- tally she takes in many more impressions in the same Some Landmarks in the Subject 155 time than a man does. A woman will have mastered the minutest details in another woman's dress, and noted all the evidences of character in her face, before a man who has been equally occupied in examining her knows the details of her features. And the ' fine and nimble minds,' as Mr. Buckle eloquently calls them, of the other sex, not only note rapidly, but with not less swiftness of movement they work out results. Mr. Buckle is no doubt right in the kind of influence he ascribes to the intellect of women, and has done them no more than justice in the wide scope he has given to its range, and the high place he has assigned to its importance. It may be questioned, however, whether he is very correct in saying that the value of the female intellect to the advancement of knowledge springs from its deduc- tive character. It is not as deductive reasoners that women have advanced the conquests of thought. They have never signalised themselves by a methodic and skilfully executed inroad on the surrounding realms of ignorance such as those of Newton or Liebig. Of the three constituent processes which Mr. Mill describes as making up the deductive method, it is in its contributions to the first (if that be a process) that the female mind is best calculated to be of service. It is valuable not so much in con- ducting deductive operations as in furnishing and suggesting the materials for deductive thought. It is an inexhaustible fountain of those general ideas (whether derived from induction or not) on which deductive reasoning is based ; but it rarely employs itself in an exhaustive inquiry as to the operation or consequences of that general idea. Its habit is to 156 The Nature of Woman use it for the elucidation of some particular simple case within it, and then to cast it aside. A woman's mind is probably not less occupied in induction than in deduction. It is constantly ascending with rapidity from few facts to a general idea, and coming down on a particular. A man's mind ascends slowly through many particulars ; but having gained the broader platform, he endeavours to master all that can be seen from it. The question of the extent of women's inductive exercise of mind depends upon the vexed question how far the ideas they strike out with so much fecundity are the result of unconscious induction or simple insight : but either they have a marvellous lightning-like faculty of induction, or a perhaps still more inexplicable one of direct mental insight. Whatever range, however, we may ascribe to this latter faculty, it still remains certain that women are incessant and rapid generalisers, and also often hasty and rash ones. The nature of their imagination tends in the same direction. It is not perhaps so comprehensive as that of man ; it has not the same power of at once presenting a subject vividly, and holding it steadily and continuously before the mind ; it is not perhaps so searching : but it is much quicker in its movements, and in much more constant operation ; it is far more of an every- day working faculty, and far more universally used by women than by men as a ministrant in the opera- tion of thought. Hitherto, however, the former have rarely, if ever, struck out by its aid any of those brilliant theories by which men of genius seize a truth yet hidden from and undreamt of by common minds, and cut with one fine bold stroke many a Some Landmarks in the Subject 157 Gordian knot of knowledge. They use it to inquire what they are to do to-day and to-morrow, to read the hearts and to calculate the actions of those around them. " If we were called upon to indicate the most marked and deep-seated distinction between the minds of men and women, we should say that the minds of men rested in generals and were stored with particulars, and that the minds of women rested in particulars and were prolific in general ideas. Men, it is said, are occupied with facts, and so they are ; but it is the characteristic of the highest and most typically masculine intellects always to be pressing through facts on to the principle which binds them together, and to base their lives and practice on the results thus attained. Women, it is said, are always rushing into general ideas ; so they are ; but it is as a way to particular facts, and they move from and are guided by the special relations thus educed. The women, we repeat, base themselves on the general ideas, but move from the deduced fact ; the men base them- selves on the facts, and move from the deduced principle. " And the mind of a woman is more fluid, as it were, than that of a man ; it moves more easily, and its operations have a less cohesive and permanent character. A woman thinks transiently, and in a hand-to-mouth sort of way. She makes a new observation and a new deduction for each case, and constantly also a new general idea. A man, less quick and less fertile, accumulates facts, collects them in classes, and combines them by principles ; 158 The Nature of Woman a woman's mind is a running stream, ever emptying itself and ever freshly supplied. She takes a bucket- ful when she wants it. A man's mind is a reservoir arranged to work a water-wheel. Women are scarcely less steady and persevering than men in the pursuit of practical ends : they are more full of re- sources and expedients ; they have a greater appre- ciation of, and a far greater power of wielding, small and indirect influences they have tact ; but they do not discuss practical matters efficiently when met together ; they become discursive, set larks and run hares ; each is occupied with her own idea, and several speak together. They do the work excellently : they do not shine in the committee- room. " Connected with these distinctions is the fact that the knowledge of women is for the most part direct, unreferred, and unclassified ; they differ from men in having far more varied, subtle, and numerous inlets to knowledge ; and they rely upon these, and do not care to remember and arrange previous ex- perience, as a man does. A lady will look a servant who comes to be hired in the face, and say he is not honest. She cannot tell you why she thinks so. She says she does not like his expression, she feels he is not honest, no consideration would induce her to take him into her service. He has the best of charac- ters, and you engage him : he robs you, you may be quite sure he will do that. Years after another man comes : the same lady looks him in the face, and says he too is not honest ; she says so again fresh from her mere insight, but you also say he is not honest. You say, I remember I had a servant with just the Some Landmarks in the Subject 159 same look about him three years ago, and he robbed me. This is one great distinction of the female in- tellect ; it walks directly and unconsciously, by more delicate insight and a more refined and more trusted intuition, to an end to which men's minds grope carefully and ploddingly along. Women have exercised a most beneficial influence in softening the hard and untruthful outline which knowledge is apt to assume in the hands of direct scientific observers and experimenters : they have prevented the casting aside of a mass of most valuable truth, which is too fine to be caught in the material sieve, and eludes the closest questioning of the microscope and the test- glass ; which is allied with our passions, our feelings, and especially holds the fine boundary-line where mind and matter, sense and spirit, wave their floating and indistinguishable boundaries, and exercise their complex action and reaction. Women, acting faith- fully on their intuitions in such things, and justified by the event, teach men also to rely upon them in their lives, to give them place in their philosophy ; and incalculably widening, ennobling, and refining is the influence they have thus had upon what the world calls its knowledge. But their influence, like their knowledge, has been direct, immediate, applied to particular cases ; and it has never, therefore, been very generally recognised, or moved in us the grati- tude that is due from us. " The characteristics of the moral and spiritual nature of women are closely allied with those of their intellect. Their superiority in all that depends on intuition ; their higher apprehension of and fuller life in personal relations, as distinguished both from i6o The Nature of Woman material things and abstract ideas ; their deeper power of influencing and greater dependence on individuals, as contrasted with a wider power exer- cised over numbers, are too obvious not to have been often made the subject of remark. "It is an idle question which is the higher in creation when each is in an equal degree supplemental to the other ; but if the point must be mooted, per- haps the following consideration may indicate the true solution : " If we glance through the various divisions of the animal kingdom, we shall find that the most perfect forms of each division are not those through which it passes into the class next above it. It is not the horse or the foxhound which treads on the heels of man, but the baboon ; it is not the rose or the oak which stands on the verge of vegetable and animal life, but the fern or the sea-weed. Something is lost of the typical completeness of each class as it approaches the verge of that above it. The same is true of man ; it is not necessarily the most healthy and highly developed specimen which is nearest a higher order of beings ; and in the distinction of sexes, if man be the more perfect creature, woman is nearer to the angels. Woman is higher than man in her nature ; she is less noble in the degree of self- control and independent responsibility imposed upon her. To man, with instincts less pure, in- tuition less deep, sensibilities less fine, and a heart less faithful and unselfish, has been given a weightier charge to be more entirely under his own control, to be more completely master of himself. Often has human existence been compared to the wide ocean, Some Landmarks in the Subject 161 over which each winged ship of individual life struggles forward through storm and sunshine. Man sets the sail and leans over the wheel, bends his eye on the compass and the chart, questions the heavens of his place, and considers with anxious revolving mind what port it were best to seek and what course to make ; asks even whether there be an ultimate haven and a pathway across the deep ; and, bent on knowing rather than trusting, questions the silent unresponsive stars, and casts his lead in the fathom- less ocean. But woman bears a loadstone in her breast, and, standing on the prow, gazes forward over the waves, and is drawn heavenward by some strong attraction. Devious gusts of passion blow her astray ; and losing once her track, sudden and utter shipwreck on sunken rocks or sand too often awaits her ; but originally she has but to be true to her highest intuitions, and needs not nor cares to distract her mind with questionings of the event. Her nature is higher than man's ; but man is set higher above his nature. To speak thus is of course to express, in unmodified language, the extreme ten- dencies of either sex. We do not mean that men have no intuitions, or women no consciences, only that each is stronger and fuller in one direction than the other. And the differences between male and female consciences illustrate the same thing. The sense of duty, the instinct of right, has in itself no discriminating power ; it simply asserts in its very action, whenever called into exercise, a higher claim to the obedience of the will than any other of our moving impulses. But it does not itself decide on a course of action, any more than hunger tells us what L 1 62 The Nature of Woman to eat. Conscience is the reason brought to bear on the sense of duty, rather say it is the verdict of the reason (using the word in its large sense) enforced by the sense of duty. In men destitute of judgment and force of character we sometimes see strange vagaries of the intuition of duty ; and in women, in whom the reason is less comprehensive and less distinctly supreme over the impulses, the conscience is not less binding, but it is certainly less consistent than in men. It yields to personal considerations, it falls under the sway of the affections. You may see one woman morbidly conscientious in the discharge of some remote duty ; and not only neglecting, as a man often does, others more near and more im- portant, but incapable of being convinced that they are duties. You may see another in her ordinary intercourse with those around her utterly disregard all the claims of sincerity ; yet there shall be some one whom she loves to whom she is as clear as day, and in intercourse with whom she would not only not conceal, but think it wicked to conceal or distort the least circumstance. Where women do feel a duty, however, they are generally more exact and scrupulous in the performance of it than men. Their sins are for the most part sins against higher impulses, the simple permission of a lower impulse to outweigh a higher one where the collision is so simple that the judgment has no place. A man feels more deeply a sin against his deliberate convictions ; he throws the sins of impulse aside more lightly, especially if the temptation has been strong and sudden ; but they weigh heavier on a woman, and they degrade her the more because her character Some Landmarks in the Subject 163 does depend more on the unbroken strength of her higher impulses. Again, compassion to the indi- vidual is the woman's virtue, justice to all the man's. But there is no need to point out the familiar operation of the more intuitive nature of woman finding its life among personal relations ; suffice it that out of these spring her gracious prerogative and happiest attribute the power to live in others, through the affections to enjoy self-sacrifice, and, high above these, the faculty through love to discern and rest upon a personal God. We do not say that the influence of women has kept personal religion alive in the world ; yet the truth lies not far from this ; and certainly there are thousands of men who owe it to her alone that they have ever soared above a cold and stoical conscientiousness. This is a higher office than preaching, or legislating, or ' in- culcating ideas,' or rivalling men in any of the more general but less profound influences they exercise over their fellows. " There is a vast deal which women have taught men, and men have then taught the world ; and which the men alone have had the credit for, be- cause the woman's share is untraceable. But, cry some of our modern ladies, this is exactly what we wish to avoid ; we can teach the world directly, and we insist on being allowed to do so. If our sphere has been hitherto more personal, it is because you have forced seclusion and restriction upon us. Educate us like yourselves, and we shall be compe- tent to fill the same place as you do, and discharge the same duties. With extreme deference, we do not think this is quite so ; we cannot believe, what is 1 64 The Nature of Woman nowadays so broadly asserted, that the difference between the male and female intellect is due en- tirely to difference of education and circumstance, and that women, placed under the same conditions as men, would become men except in the bare physical distinctions of sex. If the education and lives of women have been so utterly obliterative of such important qualities, it seems strange they should have retained what they have got. No influences have succeeded in making them stupid, in destroying the spring and vivacity of their minds, their readi- ness, their facility, their abundant resource. Yet their education has been little, if at all, directed to foster these qualities more than those of reflection and comprehensive thought. Reverse the question. Do not men in innumerable instances develop the characteristic masculine intellect in all its force, totally irrespective of any training whatever : and is it supposed that any care, however sedulous, would make the mass of men rivals of the mass of women in those qualities which we have indicated as specially belonging to the latter ? But it is fighting with shadows to combat such an assertion. The evidence of facts against it is scattered, minute, appealing in varied form to individual minds and experiences ; but it is overwhelming to all but the most prejudiced minds. On the other hand, none will deny that much is due to education ; nor can any limits be assigned a 'priori to the intellectual achievements of which a judicious training might make the female mind capable. We only say that men with equal advantages will go further in their own direction. The same pains bestowed on an Some Landmarks in the Subject 165 average boy and girl will not make the girl so patient and accurate an investigator as the boy ; but neither will it give the boy so quick and suggestive a mind as that of the girl. There can be no doubt, however, that our modern system of female educa- tion does great injustice and injury to the subjects of it ; part of education at least ought to be directed to preserving the balance of faculties. In saying this, we do not urge, as some have done, that its office is to create and maintain an equilibrium of powers, and that those which are naturally the most strong should be allowed to rest in the vain endeavour to place the weaker ones on a level with them ; that because a boy has a taste for languages you should confine him to mathematics, or because he is a soldier by nature try to make him a clergyman by profession : the true rule probably is, to give by education the strongest propulsion in the direction in which a man naturally leans, provided it be a desirable one, and at the same time sedulously to guard against absolute deficiency in any other direction ; to preserve an impetus, and to guard against an overbalance. We shall make nothing of attempting to make men of women ; but there re- mains much to be done in opposition to a system which hems them so closely within certain limits of range, and urges them so exclusively along the dis- tinctively feminine path. All honour to those who, without losing sight of insurmountable and in- effaceable distinctions, bend their practical efforts to giving a broader and completer character to the education of girls, and insist that they shall not be debarred from studies, and, above all, from modes of 1 66 The Nature of Woman study, which strengthen and invigorate the reflective powers. " Those modern Amazons who insist upon setting up their sex as a separate class of beings, naturally at enmity with man, and by him unjustly subjugated and ignorantly tyrannised over, are fond of speaking of us as if we either followed a Machiavellian policy in keeping our wives and daughters ignorant, or as if as a matter of taste we preferred to associate with ignorant females that we may rejoice in our superiority. This is a mistake. No doubt Lieu- tenant Smith, skilled only in horses, does dislike a young lady to mention Dante ; and Jones, who has contracted all he once knew into a familiarity with the prices and quality of cotton, trembles to be asked what Kepler's laws are ; but it is an error to suppose that educated men prefer the society of uninformed women. Perhaps, indeed, there is no intellectual exercise so delightful, or so highly ap- preciated on either side, as the interchange of ideas between cultivated minds of the different sexes. From a female mind on a level with his own a man gathers much more that is new and interesting to him than from conversation with a fellow-man ; he sees a new side of old ideas, and is presented with a thousand delicate suggestions beyond the reach of his own faculties ; nay, often when his mind is saturated with knowledge which yet forms a turbid incoherent mass, the touch of a woman's mind, some hint vague perhaps, but far-reaching will make it shoot into sudden crystalline harmony. It is idle to say that men, whenever they are worthy of it, do not appreciate this sort of intercourse, that they do not Some Landmarks in the Subject 167 consider it one of the highest pleasures of their lives. But they hate, and most justly hate, women who parade their knowledge and their cleverness for the gratification of their own vanity, who are so narrow- minded that they can talk nothing but information, and so indifferent to the sufferings of others as to obtrude it on them without regard to the occasion. Bores are selfish, callous, pachydermatous animals ; and these qualities are peculiarly disagreeable in women. This is a class all agree to avoid ; but that intellectual culture of the very highest order to which they can attain is not as good and as desirable for women as it is for men, none but those who are either narrow-minded, or themselves ignorant, will care to deny. Of course the pursuit of intellectual excellence must not in women interfere with higher and nearer duties ; but neither must it do so in men ; and the only real difference which exists is, that the natural pursuits of men make a severe training of the intellect and a complete stocking of the mind more universally and necessarily a duty with them than with women. Do any women complain of this ? Much more justly might men regret that the arrange- ments of society and the necessities of life leave them so much less opportunity than women for the culti- vation of the heart. The greatest deficiency in female education is, and ever has been, the absence of means for forming trained habits of thought ; and it is impossible to say how much of the rash and desultory reasoning of women, and their want of amenableness to logical proof, is the result of their defective education. An opinion of female tact, in- sight into character, and intuitions of management 1 68 The Nature of Woman formed in the harems o the East, would not differ widely from one formed in the drawing-rooms of London ; but the estimates of intellectual capacity made in the two places would vary as if made of two different kinds of creatures. " There is no bitterer satire passed, or graver in- justice done to women, than by those of their own sex who assume so passionately that everything that is masculine must be desirable for women, and better than what they have of their own ; and who quit the pleasant glories of their own seats, to sally out and snatch the most rugged and outlying bits of the territory of their neighbour man. Women must be true to their own high qualities and important duties, if they are to draw men up to themselves in those many points in which we are inferior to them ; and men must cease egotistically to assume that they hold an incontestably higher place, and learn that it will benefit themselves in many respects to become more of women, and that the more they approach women on the higher side of their characters, the less danger there will be of their becoming effeminate, i.e. approaching them in their weaknesses. ' Men,' says a Westminster reviewer, e cannot retain manli- ness unless women acquire it.' It is true, feeble women make feeble men, and vice versa ; but it is not true that the reverse of a feeble woman is a manly woman. A manly woman is a very feeble man, a feeble man is a manly woman. But a strong man is a strong man, and a strong woman is strange as it may sound to the reviewer a strong woman, and not the less a true woman, and very different from what we call a strong-minded one. Some Landmarks in the Subject 169 A great deal of the false extreme to which the claim for women of male functions is pushed arises from its having sprung from the real wants of a certain class, and having been argued too exclusively from the position and point of view of its members. It is the common, though unexpressed, assumption of this body of female-right vindicators, that unmarried women and unprotected females constitute the sex ; and that to meet their wants they have a right to demand that the arrangements of society shall be upset and remodelled. They have a right, and a very fair right, to demand that room shall be made for them in our social organisation, and may justly, to some extent, complain that, under our present arrangements, the avenues to occupation and the gaining of an independent livelihood are too much choked against them ; but they have no right what- ever to judge of the nature of all women, and the field of circumstance best adapted to them, accord- ing to the wants and ideas of this section of them. It should be remembered that of women these are the least truly women, and that it is most misleading to assume them as representatives of their sex. There are two ways in which women and men ap- proach and modify one another. The one is where they are drawn together by the affections, where mutual sympathies, moral and intellectual, are aroused : ' Les gouts se communiquent, les sentimens se repandent, les idees deviennent communes, les facultes intellectuelles se modelent mutuellement.' Yet so far are they from being merged in one an- other by this union, that each sex acquires from it its most complete and characteristic development ; 1 70 The Nature of Woman each gains from the other, and strengthens what it has best of its own ; they approach not by abnega- tions, but by additions, each from the other, of what is necessary to raise either man or woman to the full- ness of the perfect creature. The other mode of approach is the reverse of this, where men brought up apart from women, and women debarred more or less from the society of men, lose not only the benefit of what each can give the other, but some- thing of the truest characteristics of their own sex, which are not developed in their fullness and beauty except when the affections and sympathies, aroused by free intercourse, have their full play. These men and women approach on a sort of neutral ground. Such women are more of men than the others ; but it is because they are less of women : the two grow like one another by respective loss, not by respective gain. Many things which these more neutral women may dare and do without injury are not fitted for more real women. Many circumstances which will suit the one will not suit the other. If society can be arranged, and doubtless, as far as the defectiveness of human arrangements will allow, it both can and ought to be, so as to give free scope to both, this is what is most of all things to be desired ; but if the two come into competition, it is clear which ought to receive the advantage. Yet almost invariably it is the position of the neutral class which is specially had in view, and to whose supposed wants changes are to be adapted. We do not say this is exclusively so, but we do say that the great mass of thought and disputation on this subject is imbued with this idea, and that many arguments professing to be adapted Some Landmarks in the Subject 171 to the wants and position of all women are in reality only applicable to this portion of them ; and often it is plainly said, ' we do not care for wives and mothers they are well provided for, they have husbands and children ; ' but husbands and fathers take an interest in this class of women, and they will naturally con- tinue to look at the question almost too exclusively from this side. The real difficulty is, as to the in- fluence to be brought to bear upon young women whose destiny in life is as yet undecided, of whom none can tell whether they are to encounter those perils of matrimony over which decadescent virgins sigh so aifectingly, or are to enjoy what has been indulgently or ironically called the state of single blessedness. Are women to be brought up to be wives or unmarried independent women, or can an education be devised which will adapt them equally well to be either ? If there can, this is the thing to be aimed at ; but is this the thing which the more enlightened reprovers of what are pleasantly called female wrongs do aim at ? Doubtless the education of girls has hitherto fallen short of both these aims, and confined itself in great measure to teaching them, not things most advantageous to themselves either in the married or unmarried state, but things adapted to get them married. Still the whole mass of social opinion about women, the conventional influences which surround and mould them, are mainly adapted to their position as wives and mothers. We are by no means disposed to deny that both the direct training of girls and the environment of opinion in which they live, might advantageously be in some degree altered so as to leave them with 172 The Nature of Woman fuller resources to meet the demands and face the privations of unmarried life. But an excess in this direction is most of all things to be deprecated ; and there is undoubtedly a growing body of opinion which favours this excess. It is constantly asserted, or implied, that all women ought to be educated as if they were men and were going to live as men, nay, more, that the life of man is necessary to their com- plete education ; you must, it is said, shut no avenue of knowledge to women, and debar them from no occupation through any false fear of soiling their purity or hardening their nature. Now if the woman is to be educated to fight the battle of life in the same ranks and under the same discipline as the man, she must no doubt learn early to fit herself for the roughnesses of the campaign ; but if to the normal condition of a woman's life the freshest bloom of delicacy, the grace and depth of unvulgarised emotions, and a nature unhardened by the keen pursuit of selfish interests, are not only the highest crown, but the most necessary conditions of her highest function and influence, is it wise to endanger these at the outset ? Two replies are made. It is said, woman is an earthly creature ; and it is idle to strive after super-mundane purity. Most true, only let us have a quid pro quo. If women are to be ex- posed to a larger extent than hitherto to the ruder and coarser influences of life, let us take what care we can that they lose no more than is necessary, and nothing without an adequate countervailing benefit. Again it is said, if woman be that pure and lofty being you describe her and would fain have her re- main, raised by a holier and finer nature above the Some Landmarks in the Subject 173 man, she may be fearlessly exposed to the same in- fluences as he is, and will pass unsullied through them. But this is by no means so certain as it is assumed to be. Doubtless the innate delicacy and modesty of women is greater than that of men, from this axiom we all start ; but experience seems to prove that their finer bloom is more easily rubbed off. The stronger nature of man is better fitted for the ruder trials it has to undergo ; contamination neither stains it so deeply nor leaves so permanent a mark. He is, as we have said, less dependent in his nature than woman, and daily we see men retrieving themselves from impressions and habits which must permanently have degraded a woman. Of course the man suffers loss ; he can never be what he might have been had he been true to himself and placed under happier conditions ; but undoubtedly he has more power of casting his slough than the woman has ; and things which rub off his rough outside, sink into and decay the softer nature of a woman. " Let us not be misunderstood. We are not speaking of the contact of a higher nature with ex- traneous misery or debasement. It is of the evils of a competitive struggle we speak, with its temptations to selfishness, to dishonesty, to untruthf ulness, its not easy reconcilement with modesty and self-forgetful- ness ; it is of the dangers which must necessarily, and undoubtedly do, hang about many of the avenues of knowledge. Ought women rashly to expose them- selves to these ? And there is danger that they venture rashly ; extremes have a charm for them. There are signs enough of this in what advanced women write on education. They don't like the 174 The Nature of Woman commonplace difficulties of the beginning, the patient training of intellect, which is what they most want. They prefer something easy and outre. Miss Parkes does so. We have cited her before as the advocate of teaching all things ; we may cite her again to show that she really means to exclude all discrimination. She does, indeed, give Euclid a condescending, half-contemptuous nod of approba- tion in passing. It is not, however, mathematics that she urges as a discipline for the tender and dis- cursive intellect of young girls, nor the exact study of one of the completer languages, nor the methodic pursuit of some branch of natural science (indeed, these things do seem poor beside all knowledge) ; but she thinks that the subject of the relation of the sexes, which we are told includes in it ' the passional influences of women,' should certainly engage the attention of young women, and that it ought to be pursued with entire thoroughness ; that granting this, it is preposterous to debar girls from ' Chaucer and Dryden, Ben Jonson and Fielding,' and they must be well grounded in ' George Sand.' We can- not help saying this is not only nonsense, but non- sense of a very unpleasant sort. It is difficult to say why Dryden and Jonson are named, except from a sort of wanton love of pushing the theory beyond all the limits assigned by decency and common sense. There is nothing in either of these authors that bears on the relations of the sexes, except perhaps some of the most unmitigatedly indecent parts of their plays; and to read these parts for the sake of the knowledge to be derived from them, would be as if a well- dressed woman should insist on wading up a sewer to Some Landmarks in the Subject 175 secure a pin. Knowledge may be bought too dear, and we daily and most justly sacrifice the acquisition of it to higher considerations. Still it may be true that no research should be denied to a woman who is genuinely drawn towards it, self-responsible alone, and of mature mind. It may be true that the pure thirst for knowledge may carry her safe through even such a path ; but the idea of teaching young girls to study the sexual relations with these works for text- books is excusable only under the assumption that the lady is a theorist who has not realised the working of her vague ideas. Practically her recommendation is not a very dangerous one. Few people would send their daughters to attend the lectures of the Pro- fessor of the Passional Influences who proposes to read George Sand with his pupils ; intuition and ex- perience have alike made plain the ruinous effect, to boys and girls alike, of stimulating feelings through the imagination before they have met a legitimate natural development and practical object. " It is said that the habitual intervention of women in business would soften its asperities and raise its morality. We don't the least believe this. A -priori, we should say that the disposition of women to give too high a place to the personal interests with which matters are interwoven, and to attach an exaggerated importance to the aspects of things im- mediately before them, would make them less scru- pulous in pushing advantages, and less constantly open to the claims of justice and the interests of long-sighted prudence. And does not experience prove the same thing ? Do not business women as a rule exaggerate the defects of business men ? 176 The Nature of Woman Are not fishwomen worse than fishmen, female lodging-house keepers worse than male ones ? Widows are bad ; but if you would not be stripped alive, avoid a female orphan. Is not what is called a clever woman of business the most difficult and most disagreeable person to deal with in the whole world? Is not the whole position of antagonistic relations and contest for advantage with the other sex the most perilous to delicacy and simple-mindedness into which a woman can enter ? The scolding of the house is bad, but that of the market is worse ; the coquetry of the ball-room is more fashionable than desirable, but what shall we say of the coquetry of a bargain and sale ? Fanny using her fine eyes to sell sea-island cotton to advantage, or Georgy offering you a very white hand to seal terms which, but for the sake of pressing it, you would never dream of accepting ! A well-principled upholder of the rights of woman says of course, Fie ! such things are im- possible. We grieve to say they are not ; and what is proposed is not only that elderly creatures with peaked noses and coal-scuttle bonnets should join in the struggle, but that the world of industry should be equally open to, and frequented by, all women as it is by all men, with one single exception, made by the less thorough-going advocates of the change, the case of mothers with large families of small children and no nursemaids. " We are strongly of opinion, then, that there are many phases of the life of industry totally unfitted for women to enter on ; and that, so far from its being to be desired that she should mingle in and understand by experience the difficulties with Some Landmarks in the Subject 177 which many men have to contend, it is to be wished that her atmosphere should be as serene and her growth as unwarped as the conditions of humanity will allow. On the other hand, we yet more strongly deprecate anything in the nature of a cloisteral se- clusion or an enforced idleness. We believe practical life, employment in affairs of some kind or other, to be essential to the healthy condition and just de- velopment of every individual, male or female ; and we do believe that the number of unmarried women in modern society requires a wider field of industry than the middle classes at least have hitherto had opened to them. To discuss what this field is to be, would be a long and not very profitable task. It is a question which will decide itself. The advantages seem to point in the direction of some of the many branches of manufacturing occupation, especially those which can be carried on at home, and with the least exposure and publicity. For we do assert, and most strongly, that there is a multitude of avocations which, in the present condition of the world, are totally unfitted for woman ; and that it will require a nice discrimination and cautious judgment to select those in which she is most competent to succeed, and which are most in consonance with her nature as it is, not as it is presumed it may become, and with what, notwithstanding Amazonian sneers, we still with Mr. Tennyson believe to subsist, her ' distinctive womanhood.' ' They are happiest, and will ever remain so, who can find a place for their activity in administering, or helping to administer, a household ; and we do not hesitate to say, in spite of the most enlightened 178 The Nature of Woman remonstrance, not only that this occupation is more healthy and natural to a woman, but that it is in reality a broader field, calls forth more faculties, and exercises and disciplines them more perfectly, than ninety-nine out of a hundred of the industrial avocations out of doors. It is only in the higher branches of superintendence and conduct of business that anything like it can be obtained. Women are in a position to suffer much less than men by the ex- cessive division of labour and the narrowing influence it tends to exert. The greater part of them have a sphere in their own homes which calls for more varied faculties and higher powers than the unvaried task of the factory or the workshop. Every woman must govern more or less in her own house, or ought to do so ; and to govern is not an easy thing, nor are servants and children the easiest things to govern. But the nature of women specially adapts them to govern ; not, indeed, by a wise and far-sighted appli- cation of general ideas, but by choice of able ministers or immediate contact with the persons governed. Many women, even those whose minds are entirely uncultivated, show a power and a breadth of capacity in administering their house- holds, and controlling into harmony difficult tempers and unruly wills, which few men could rival. " Our observations have been directed not to any attempt to discuss the particular claims made for extension of the sphere of women's action ; but to draw attention to the false ideas on which such claims are based by what may be called the more neuter members of the sex and their adherents. Two of these ideas may be selected as most commonly put Some Landmarks in the Subject 179 forward, most evil in their results, and most in- trinsically untrue. These are, the idea that women are to be considered as forming a distinct class in society, which ought to possess a distinctive class action and a peculiar class position ; and the idea that if they are not men, it is only by some great injustice which demands instant remedy, and that the object of their highest ambition should be a successful rivalry in the masculine career." I have substituted intuition for instinct where it would have been so intended, otherwise this essay is Roscoe's untouched thought. I know of no earlier work that can seriously compare with this. Laura Hansson's was almost certainly developed independently thirty years later, and my own conclusions were reached by another path, that of science, and had already begun to appear in print before Roscoe's paper was placed in my hands, Mrs. Hansson'r work became known to me later still, let the reader remembes this when he compares our thoughts and notes their similarity. It is truth, not error, that leads different minds to so close and de- tailed a resemblance. I know that this book will pain many men and women friends of mine, friends whom I sincerely respect, and many more men and women whom I have never seen and may never know ; will these believe that I would have wished to do otherwise, and it is only my belief in truth that compels me to express my thought, because I know one certain reality : that truth pains to heal ? References These are extremely numerous and of very uneven quality ; a few of the more important are given below for the reader's further study of the subject should this be thought desirable. I. The Social Status and Characteristics of Woman in Social Life. (1) Professor E. Westermarck. " On the Position of Woman in Early Civilization/' Sociological Papers, 1904, Macmillan & Co., and all the writer's works on Marriage and kindred subjects. (2) Thomas Wright. "Domestic Manners and Sentiments." 1862. "Womankind in all Ages of Western Europe." 1869. No studies of an authoritative kind on woman from about 1800 onward of the " modern " woman exist ; but (3) Laura Hansson's " Modern Women " is much the best modern study. Note. The best type of woman, married or single, is for various reasons nearly always unrecorded ; if this be not borne in mind the above studies will be perhaps a little depressing. Dante and later poets and painters express a real truth in their poetical ideals of womanhood ; but it is an ideal to which only the few women, and for a corresponding manly ideal only the few men, attain ; it is the ideal none the less. II. Public Political Agitation. Earlier studies of Egyptian and Greek life should certainly be made, but Mary AstelPs works particularly : (i) "An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex " (1696) marks the breaking away from old traditional views about woman's life. 180 References 181 Note. Woman as a female counterpart of man, inferior to man because of her femininity. (2) Mary Wollstonecraft, "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." 1792. (3) John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women." 1869. (4) Thomas Huxley, " Emancipation Black and White. " " The Reader," May 2oth, 1865. Published afterwards in volume form, " Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews." 1891. (4) was published earlier than (3), but it is nevertheless a later thought ; no modern work has advanced beyond these four writers' positions, though much recent propagandist literature has been produced. It is difficult to do justice to this aspect of the question, as in this movement there are three elements of power, none wholly dominant, which aim respectively for licence rather than freedom ; for industrial and political opportunity on manly lines, in spite of disclaimers to the contrary ; for manly educational teaching ; and under this third heading the names of women such as Miss Beale, Miss Buss, Mrs. Fawcett, etc., and under the second head women such as Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Garrett Anderson ought to be mentioned. III. The Real Womaifs Movement. Representing a change in the use of two words female and woman. Burton (1793), Hannah More (i 799), and even Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth, use the word female because they seem to think that a woman is only a female man, and of course the word female was commonly used before this in this light. Very shortly after this date " woman " took the place of female, and the change was almost certainly due to a belief, in woman and in man, that a woman's mind needed the word woman to express it and separate it off from animal life. Femininism is a bad word express^ ing the same thought, but femininism should mean, as it does mean in medical science, what is common to all female life. The gradual growth of womanly aims as distinctive of woman and complementary to those of man has, as far as I am aware, received the attention of no competent writer. Johnson in his dictionary defines woman " as the female of the human race," and though modern dictionary authorities still follow him in this, the definition is no longer either scientifically or popularly sufficient. It is time that these subtler enlargements of woman's ideals were recognised and understood. 1 82 The Nature of Woman IV. Advances in Knowledge. (1) Schopenhauer wrote during the early part of last century many essays on woman, his point of view always being that of woman as the female, and therefore the inferior counterpart, of man. His writings are not healthy, are prejudiced, and express a low view of woman, but to the student his essays on " Woman " and "The Metaphysics of Love " should be read, because some partial truths are clearly stated. (2) Sex and Disease Susceptibility. Bodily differences have been studied by writers such as W. R. Williams and J. R. Andrew, and are useful as demonstrating the fact that women and men are different in their whole constitutions. Abnormalities of the mind and their manifestations are not healthy reading for the general public, and are best left to specialists, legal and biological. (3) References to Laycock, Darwin, Roscoe are given else- where. Geddes and Thomson's work on "The Evolution of Sex " supplements in many ways Laycock's and Darwin's work, but the emphasis is too much on bodily differences, the mental being insufficiently treated. V. Achievements of Woman. (1) Domestic. The influence of mother, wife and sister in the home. Of the mother in relation to hereditary and personal influence over sons and daughters as compared with the father ; of the wife's influence over the husband and vice versa, and of sisters' and brothers' mutual but distinctive effects upon each other's lives. Friendships within the home circle should not be omitted. From individual studies thus made the cumulative effect of such forces on the race can be investigated. No work of this nature exists. (2) The massed social influence of woman, in public and private life, as determining and guiding fashions, customs, etc., compared with the massed social influence of man, on society in its different stages of culture. No work of this nature known to me exists except Comte's study, which is quite inadequate, and a little essay of Buckle's, " The Influence of Woman." Mrs. Bosanquet and Mrs. Frederic Harrison have both published interesting works bearing indirectly on (i) and (2). (3) Genius and talent in woman and its cumulative effect on the race. References 183 1. "The Cyclopaedia of Female Biography." English edition. 1869. 2. " Women Poets," edited by Mrs. William Sharp. 3. Hansson. " Modern Women." 4. "Women Painters of the World," edited by W. Shaw Sparrow. There are many other writers, but these give a fair idea of this third division in the study of woman's achievement. (i) (2) (3) probable order of importance of woman's influence. VI. Maladjustments. Divorce and marriage difficulties have had almost endless books written about them, novelists claiming to write with a purpose, but omitting to state what their scientific or practical life experiences have been to justify them for the task, and often creating purely fictitious examples of misery not found in real life ; legal writers, often very able men, and others. These and other difficulties ought to wait for their solution until more careful studies of the minds of men and women have been made, and until we know what kind of school training, what kind of wage-earning life before marriage, and what kind of larger home life is most suitable to woman's needs. VII. Literary Portrayals of Womanhood. Probably the greatest of these, omitting Dante, Shakespeare, and some other classical references, are Jane Austen, for the detail aspect of a woman's nature. Charlotte Bronte, for the emotional outlook of a woman's life. And in spite of recent and to some extent just criticism Mrs. Gaskell and Louisa M. Alcott, for domestic life. I know of no modern books that can seriously compare with these writers in expressing woman's individuality as woman. As secondary to these one naturally thinks of George Meredith for very clever surface views of women almost of one type ; and of George Gissing's deeper, if less brilliant, and rather sad descriptions of many women very different and yet all of them womanly ; while for eccentric portraiture Charles Dickens is sometimes extraordinarily happy in his delineation. These references are only intended to guide the reader who wishes a larger study of the subject, and not, of course, as being representative of the whole inquiry. I have omitted any references 184 The Nature of Woman to an eighth division of the subject, the practical side of a woman's life, because the subject is so large that to do justice to it would fill many pages, merely with mentioning authorities. A good natural history book will illustrate the rise in the importance of the function of motherhood up to its supreme height in human life ; a very useful little work by Emilia V. Kaulhack de Voss on " The Preservation of Infant Life " may be mentioned. The whole fields of mother- craft, house-craft, or the old-fashioned word housekeeping, and home-craft need reconsideration from the modern point of view, but the one fault which must be avoided at all costs is that one which in its desire to run life into business channels tends, to its own loss, to shut out at last life itself. Had this been a larger volume, I should have referred to Aris- totle, Aristophanes and Plato ; to the inspirational influence of Joan of Arc, to an example such as Hypatia and other similar instances ; but Joan of Arc originated no new military idea nor Hypatia a new system of philosophy ; for this reason they do not affect the general thought of the volume and are more apparent than real exceptions to woman's life. Authors' Index Astell, Mary (1696), 11-13. First rationalistic woman writer on women. Comfe, Auguste (1830-42), n. Woman's social and domestic position, pioneer study. Dante (about 1300), 110, 140. Psychology of woman, pioneer poetic study. Darwin, Charles (1871), 147. The first scientific authority on sex characters. Gissingy George (1880-1906), 40-1. Hansson, Laura (about 1885). First woman psychologist of psychology of woman, 31-4, 34- 6 - 1 Hunter, John (born 1728, died 1793), H^- Secondary sex characters. Huxley, Thomas (1865), 17. Laycock, Thomas (1840), 146-7. Law of Affectability and stu- dent of sex characteristics. Mill, J. S. (1869), 14-16, 23, 115-18, 140. Political Eman- cipationist. Mulcaster, Richard (1581-2), 12. Early women's educationist. Roscoe,Vf. C. (1858), 1 6, 22- 31, 34-6, 148-79. Pioneer scientific study of psychology of woman. Rumford, Count [Thompson, B.] (second half of eighteenth cen- tury), 103 ; and Liebig (1840- 4), 17. Founders of modern cookery and beginnings of domestic science. Ruskin, John (1865, "Sesame and Lilies"), 28, 44. Schopenhauer^ 20. Pioneer human feminist psychologist of first half of last century. Schreiner, Olive, 39-40. Spencer, Herbert (second half of nineteenth century), 20. Bio- logical interpretation of love and sociological interpretation of marriage. Tennyson, Sir Alfred (1847). " The Princess," a poetic land- mark, quotation from p. 9 re- ferred to by W. C. Roscoe, l858,laterbyRomanes; see also Andrew Lang's " Tennyson." Westermarck (i894~date), 20, 54. Authority on marriage and on early status of woman. Wolhtonecraft, Mary (1792), 14- 16. First woman exponent of the ethical view of emancipa- tion of woman. 1 Hunter's reference above refers to birth and death dates, not to his works. I8 5 1 86 The Nature of Woman Chronological Index About 1300. Dante. 1581-2. Mulcaster. 1696. Astell. 1728-93. Hunter. About 1750. Rumford, Count. 1792. Wollstonecraft. 1830-42. Comte. Before 1850. Schopenhauer. 1840. Laycock. 1840-4. Liebig. 1847. Tennyson. Subject Index 1858. Roscoe. After 1860. Spencer. 1865. Huxley. 1865. Ruskin. 1869. Mill. 1871. Darwin. 1880-1906. Gissing. 1883. Schreiner. About 1885. Hansson. . Westermarck. Anti-woman and anti-home feelings, 50-1, 60-1. Artistic and hygienic views, 62-3. Co-education, 56, 85, 132. Comparisons, odious or not, 68- 70. Economic Independence, 57-60, 117-23. Education, 132-5. "Emancipationist" theories, 51- 61. Historical errors, 47-51. Historical facts, 97-8. Homeliness, 72, 118, 122-8. Human associations, 66-8. Hygiene of infancy, 113-14. Individuality, loss of, 72-4. Love, psychology of, 25-6, 169- 70. Man, ascendancy of, 100-4, 149. Man's Movements, 42-6. Matriarchy, 52-4. Motherhood, meaning of, 98- 103. National, British, 11-18. United States, chapter III. German, 19-22. " Neuter " states of sex, 54-5. " Oversexed" states of sex, 54-5. Rationalism, dominance of, 74- 80, 83-6. Religious life, 65, 72. Sex, animal and human values, 6-1 1. Public recognition of, 9-11. Sex status, 1 1. Sex question, 91 1-. Specialisation of, 9-11. Single woman, 41, 136. Woman's capacity, 16-17, 22-41, 100-4, I 3 I ~ 2 H9* Woman's dissatisfaction, 18, 38-9, 46, 61, 68. Woman s ideals, 10-17, 123, 136, 141-5. Women, types of, Amazonian, 10 ; asexual (neutral), 26, 113; feminine, 1 1 ; madonnas, 1 1 ; womanly, n, 26, 33-4, 168. THIS NIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY S BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW 3 1914 9181 T aw 1 1916 MAh 1 1916 KECD LD APR JUN17 4VW 4D, REC'D LD NOV 2 i REC'D LD JIM 25 f/ Jw-6, ? /. '<-> 257381 . / //(p.