This insistent and deliberate stunting of woman’s intellectual growth is, as I have already stated, the best proof of her essentially servile position in the household; and that being the case, it is not to be wondered at that her code of honour and morals is essentially a servile code. That is to say, its origin and guiding motive is the well-being, moral and material, of some one else. Like her stupidity woman’s morality has been imposed on her, and to a great extent is not morality at all, in the proper sense of the word, but a code of manners formulated in the interests of her master.
I wish to make it clear that when I speak of morality in this connection I am not using the word in the narrow sense in which it is sometimes employed. By a standard of morality I mean a rule of life which we adopt as a guide to our conduct, and endeavour, more or less successfully, to apply to every action—to our dealings with others as well as to our dealings with our own hearts.
I cannot better explain what I mean by the essential servility of woman’s code of morals than by quoting Milton’s well-known line—
“He for God only; she for God in him.”
That one brief verse condenses into a nutshell the difference in the moral position of the two sexes—expresses boldly, simply, straightforwardly, the man’s belief that he had the right to divert and distort the moral impulse and growth in woman to serve his own convenience. No priesthood has ever made a claim more arrogant than this claim of man to stand between woman and her God, and divert the spiritual forces of her nature into the channel that served him best. The real superiority of man consists in this: that he is free to obey his conscience and to serve his God—if it be in him so to do. Woman is not. She can serve Him only at second hand—can obey His commands not directly but only by obeying the will of the man who stands between her and the Highest, and who has arrogated to himself not merely the material control of her person and her property, but the spiritual control of her conscience.
This is no fanciful piece of imagery. There are laws still in existence—laws of an earlier age—which prove how complete has been this moral control which we are only now shaking off, since they presume a man’s entire responsibility for the actions of his wife, be those actions good or ill. That a woman at her husband’s bidding should bend her conscience to his will as a reed bends; that, because he desired it of her, she should break and defy every commandment of God and man; this seemed to our forefathers a natural thing, and a course of action befitting her station and place in life. So far from blaming, they condoned it in her and have expressed that view of the matter in their law—sometimes with awkward and annoying results for a later generation. Woman, until she began to feel in herself the stirrings of independence—woman, when she was just the wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else, the domestic animal—seems to me to have been a creature whom you could not have described as being either moral or immoral. She was just unmoral. Whether she did good or evil was not, as far as her own individuality went, of very much account since the standard set up for her was not of her own setting up; it had been erected for the comfort and well-being of her master. Her virtues were second-hand virtues, instilled into her for the convenience of another; and she did what was right in his eyes, not in her own, after the manner of a child. Therefore she was neither moral nor immoral, but servile. The motive which guided and impelled her from childhood was a low one—the desire (disinterestedly or for her own advantage) of pleasing some one else. (To make others happy, as Mr. Burns expresses it.) The desire to please being the motive power of her existence, her code of honour and ethics was founded not on thought, conviction or even natural impulse, but on observation of the likes and dislikes of those she had to please. Hence its extraordinary and inconsistent character, its obvious artificiality and the manifest traces it bears of having been imposed upon her from without. For instance, no natural ethical code emanating from within could have summed up woman’s virtue in a virtue—physical purity. That confusion of one virtue with virtue in general was certainly of masculine origin arising from the masculine habit of thinking of woman only in connection with her relations to himself. To other aspects of her life and character man was indifferent—they hardly existed for him. And of masculine origin, too, was that extraordinary article of the code by which it was laid down that a woman’s “honour” was, to all intents and purposes, a matter of chance—a thing which she only possessed because no unkind fate had thrown her in the way of a man sufficiently brutal to deprive her of it by force. Her honour, in short, was not a moral but a physical quality.
One sees, of course, the advantage from the male point of view, of this peculiar provision of the code. In a world where the pickpocket class had the upper hand a somewhat similar regulation would, no doubt, be in force; and it would be enacted, by a custom stronger than law, that to have one’s pocket picked was in itself a disgrace which must on no account be cried aloud upon the housetops or communicated to the police. To reveal and publish the fact that your purse had been snatched from you by force would be to make yourself a mark of scorn and for hissing, to bring upon yourself an obloquy far greater than that accorded to the active partner in the transaction, whose doings would be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and the explanation that pickpockets are pickpockets, and will never be anything but what nature has made them; and, after all, you must have dangled the purse temptingly before his eyes. Under these circumstances, with the thief at liberty to ply his trade, the fact that you had money in your pocket would be, strictly speaking, an accident; and, to make the parallel complete, the lack of your money—the fact that it had been taken from you even against your will—would have to be accounted a black disgrace, leaving a lasting smear upon your whole life. That, it seems to me, is the exact position with regard to what is commonly termed a woman’s “honour.” I should prefer to put it that a woman has no honour; only an accident.
In such a world as I have described—a world run in the interest of the light-fingered class—the average and decent man would find it just as easy and just as difficult to take legal proceedings against the person who had violently deprived him of his purse as the average and decent woman would now find it were she to take legal proceedings against the man who had violently deprived her of her honour. Nominally, of course, justice would afford him a fair hearing and the process of law would be at his disposal; actually he would make himself a target for contempt and scorn, and the very men who tried his case, with every desire to be unbiassed, would be prejudiced against him because he had not hidden his disgrace in silence. In most cases the effect of such a public opinion would be to make him hold his tongue, and practically by his silence become an abettor and accomplice in the offence wrought upon himself and by which he himself had suffered. He might, if his mould were sensitive, choose the river rather than exposure—as women have done before now.
Honour, as I understand it, is not physical or accidental; is not even reputation, which is a species of reflection of honour in the minds of others; it is a state of mind resulting from a voluntary and conscious adherence to certain rules of life and conduct. As such it is entirely your own possession and a creation, a thing of which no one can rob you but yourself; it is at no man’s mercy but your own. It is because woman, as a rule, has not possessed the power of giving voluntary and conscious adherence to rules of life and conduct, because the rules of life and conduct which she follows have been framed in the interests of others and forced upon her in the interests of others—that she has been denied any other than a purely physical and accidental “honour.”
One’s mind goes back to two children in the school-room pondering seriously and in the light of their own unaided logic the puzzling story of Lucrece—much expurgated and newly acquired during the course of a Roman history lesson. The expurgated Roman history book had made it clear that she was a woman greatly to be admired; we sat with knitted brows and argued why. Something had been done to her—we were vague as to the nature of the something, but had gathered from the hurried manner of our instructress that here was a subject on which you must not ask for precise information. Our ignorance baffled and aggrieved us since fuller knowledge might have thrown light upon an otherwise incomprehensible case. Something had been done to her by a wicked man and against her will—so much we knew. She had tried all she could to prevent it, but he was the stronger—the expurgated Roman history had said, “By force.” Therefore, whatever had happened was not her fault. Yet the next morning she had sent posthaste for her husband and her father, told them all about it and stabbed herself to the heart before their eyes! Try as we would to sympathize with this paragon of Roman virtue, the action seemed inconsequent. It implied remorse where remorse was not only unnecessary but impossible. If she had stabbed Sextus Tarquinius, or if Sextus Tarquinius had stabbed himself in a fit of repentance for his own mysterious ill-doing.... But why needlessly distress your family by descending into an early grave because some one else had been mysteriously wicked while you yourself had done no harm at all? Our sense of logic and justice was shaken to its foundations. The verdict of admiration recorded in the history book stared us in the face, conflicting with our own conclusions; and it was our reverence for the written word alone that prevented the open and outspoken judgment, “She was silly.”
So two small persons, to whom sex was still a matter of garments, seriously troubled by their own inability to appreciate a virtue held up to them for reverence, with views as yet level and unwarped on the subject of justice, and still in complete ignorance of the “economic” law that the cost of sin, like the cost of taxation, is always shifted on to the shoulders of those least able to bear or to resent it.
The key to the curious and inferior position of woman with regard to breaches, voluntary or involuntary, of the moral law is to be found in this right of the strongest to avoid payment. It is a right that is recognized and openly acted upon in the world of business and of property, that has to be considered and taken into account by financiers and statesmen in the collection of revenue and the imposition of taxes. It is the general exercise of this right that makes the incidence of taxation a study for experts. Roughly its result is, the weakest pays. Tax the business man and he will set to work to send up prices, collecting his additional toll in farthings, pence and shillings from his customers, or to save it by cutting down the wages of his employees. Tax the landlord, and he sends up rents—perhaps in the slums. The stronger the position of the capitalist, the more easily does he avoid payment. If his position is so strong that he is an actual monopolist he can avoid it with complete ease, simply taking the amount required from the pockets of those who are unable to refuse his demands, handing it over to the powers that be and paying himself for his trouble in doing so.
The incidence of blame in offences against the code which regulates the sexual relations of men and women is governed by laws similar to those which govern the incidence of taxation. The stronger party to the offence, taking advantage of his strength, has refused to pay; has simply and squarely declined to take his share of the mutual punishment, and has shifted a double portion thereof on the shoulders of the weaker party. So far as I can see that is the real and only reason for the preferential treatment of man under the moral code—a preferential treatment insisted upon by Adam in the garden of Eden when he anxiously explained to the Deity that the woman was to blame, and insisted upon ever since by his descendants. Is it not Adam who sniggers over spicy stories at his club, retails them to the wife of his bosom and then gives vent to manly and generous indignation at the expense of the spinster who repeats them at third hand? while the extreme reluctance of a purely male electorate to raise what is termed the age of consent in girls is perhaps the most striking example of this tendency of the stronger to shift the responsibility of his misdeeds on to any shoulders but his own,—even on to the shoulders of a child.
Palpable and obvious hardship dealt out by men to women is usually defended, if not explained, by that more or less vague reference to natural law, which is again an attempt to shift responsibility; and I have heard the position of woman as scapegoat for the sins of the man justified by her greater importance to the race as the mother of the next generation. This position of trust and responsibility, it is urged, makes her fall more blameworthy in itself, since her offence is not only an offence against her own person. One would feel more inclined to give ear to this explanation if it could be proved that it was only in the case of actual infractions of the moral code that the male was in the habit of availing himself of his opportunities of shifting the blame that should be his on to the back of the weaker vessel. But it is not. Why, for instance, when a man who has been engaged to a woman changes his mind and throws her over against her will should the woman be regarded as to some extent humiliated and disgraced by the action of another person, an action over which she has had no control whatever, which has, in fact, been performed against her express desire? Yet in such circumstances the woman who has been left in the lurch is supposed to suffer, quite apart from the damage to her affection, a sort of moral damage and disgrace from the heartlessness or fickleness of another person—the man to whom she has been engaged; and this moral damage is, I believe, taken into account in actions for breach of promise of marriage (where there is no question of seduction). In these instances of fickleness on the side of the one party to the engagement, there is no suggestion of guilt or offence in the other party—the woman; yet the consequences of guilt and offence have been transferred to her shoulders, simply, it seems to me, because the guilty and offending party, being the stronger, declined to bear them himself. And woman’s code of honour and morals being essentially a servile code, designed for the benefit of those in authority over her, she accepts the position without protest and takes shame to herself for the fault of another person. The first provision of a wider code—a code drawn up by herself—must be that she will only accept responsibility for her own actions. Until she has taken her stand on that principle she cannot hope for a freedom that is real, even a material freedom. At present her position, in this respect, is analogous to that of the mediÆval whipping-boy or those slaves of antiquity who were liable to be put to death for the sins of their masters—a position entirely incompatible with the most elementary ideas of liberty and justice. The chaste and virtuous Lucrece whose untimely fate so distraught our youthful brains was not so much the victim of one man’s evil passions and wrong-doing as of her own servile code of morals; she was (if she ever existed) a slave of undoubted and heroic virtue—but certainly a slave and not a free woman, accountable for her own acts and her own acts alone.
As a matter of fact, if we come to look into them closely, we find that the virtues that have been enjoined upon woman for generations are practically all servile virtues—the virtues a man desires in and enjoins upon those whom he wishes to hold in subjection. Honour, in the proper sense of the word, truth-telling, independence of thought and action, self-reliance and courage are the qualities of a free people; and, because they are the qualities of a free people, they have not been required of her. Submission, suppleness, coaxing manners, a desire to please and ingratiate, tact and a capacity for hard work for which no definite return is to be expected are the qualities encouraged in a servile or subject race by those in authority over them; and it is precisely these qualities which have been required of woman. The ordinary male ideal of a mother is a servile ideal—a person who waits on others, gives way to others, drudges for others, and only lives for the convenience of others. The ordinary male ideal of a wife is a servile ideal—a person with less brains than himself, who is pleasant to look at, makes him comfortable at home and respects his authority. And it is the unfortunate fact that she is expected to live down to this ideal—and very often does—which accounts for that frequent phenomenon, the rapid mental deterioration of the woman who has fulfilled her destiny and attained to a completeness that is synonymous with stagnation.
It is obvious that marriage—the companionship of two reasonable human beings—ought not, under natural conditions, to have a stupefying effect upon one of the parties to the arrangement; and, as far as I can see, where the woman is recognized as a responsible human being with an individuality and interests of her own, and with a right to her own opinion, it does not have that effect. The professional woman—a class which I know fairly well—is not, as a rule, less interesting and individual after marriage than before it, simply because she does not usually marry the type of man who would expect her to swamp her own ideas and personality in his; and the working woman of another class, who, as the manager and financier of the household, is obliged to keep her wits sharp, is often an extremely interesting person with a shrewd and characteristic outlook on life. It is the woman of the “comfortable” class, with narrow duties and a few petty responsibilities, who now-a-days most readily conforms to the servile type of manners and morals set up for her admiration and imitation, sinks into a nonentity or a busybody, and does her best to gratify and justify her husband’s predilection for regarding her mental capacity with contempt.
