SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF THE MALADY IN WOMEN.

Women are particularly susceptible to the disease of Respectability. Our sisters esteem rank and birth; they bow down to all kinds of idols with a veneration seldom equalled in men. Form, ceremonies, modes of dress, points of etiquette, and social observances mean more to them than to us; and it is difficult to prove to them the hollowness and inutility of mere seems, because externals satisfy their sense of decorum and give them pleasure. The average bourgeois woman reads the court news and aristocratic tittle-tattle with avidity mingled with envy. Baubles, insignia, uniforms, and the pomps of officialdom attract and dazzle her, and she would rather know a stupid peer than a sage, unpretentious philosopher, man of science, or poet.

Notice the large proportion of women in the crowds that gather outside a West End mansion, or at the door of a church, on the occasions of a ball or a fashionable wedding. Many women will travel long distances, and endure severe fatigue and discomfort to gain a transitory glimpse at titled personages. Lacking the power of analysis, and being deficient in imagination, they admire the popular and ostentatious, and contemn the persons and the things of true worth. Besides this, women's sense of humour is less keen than that of men; they fail to see the droll side of customs and fetishes, and they get angry with those who jest and chuckle at grotesque ceremonies and functions. It matters not to the middle-class woman how good or wise a man or woman may be if they do not conform to preposterous codes and usages.

The romantic youth who imagines that most women are more sentimental and romantic than himself, discovers his error when he becomes a lover, and is received as a suitor in the family of his inamorata. He finds the Little Muddleton Road folk extremely practical and respectable. Materfamilias may possibly have been slightly tinged with romance and poetry in her teens; but at fifty she is a slave to Respectability, and she teaches her daughters, in season and out, that they must, before all else, be "Respectable members of society." Is it a matter for wonder? Naturally, the romantic youth puzzles over this shrewd, business-like phase of woman's character; but he forgets that "human beings, cramped under worse than South Sea Isle taboo," develop astuteness in order to survive. You cannot expect women who have been fenced around by Respectability and restricted to the back parlour and the kitchen, to be wild, free, natural creatures, and nymphs of the woodland. We ought not to have imprisoned them in this way at the beginning. By this time, alas! the majority of them appear to hug their fetters.

The black shadow of the plague of Respectability is over love and the relations of the sexes, and women suffer more than men from this terrible blight. Respectability isolates the sexes before marriage, and only allows them to discover each other's idiosyncracies, caprices, and foibles when they are inseparably united ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist, to hobble on through life, and pretend that they are enjoying the penance. I do not say that the shackles always gall. It is almost a sheer question of chance if they do not. For this fearful uncertainty Respectability is much to blame. Girls are immured and guarded, like vestal virgins of old; there is no wholesome widespread social commingling of the sexes. Boys are free; but what is their liberty worth to them, when girls are watched, chaperoned, and secluded at the very age when their society is most sought by the youth of the opposite sex? This nunnery system is practically restricted to the middle-class Respectables. What is its effect upon the morals and the weal of the order? Most disastrous. The young man, in a very large number of instances, gains his knowledge of womankind among the flashy, flighty, and even more undesirable specimens of the sex. He meets the Little Muddleton Road girls at parties occasionally, but if he walks home from chapel with one of them, Paterfamilias or Mamma intervenes, and cuts short the friendship, or they want to know the young fellow's "intentions" towards Ethel. His own parents tell him he is too youthful, or too poor, to think of wooing yet; and I have even known mothers who excluded all girls from the house for fear that their sons should fall in love prematurely.

Now, it is quite probable that the young man has no "intentions," beyond gaining a friend in one of the Little Muddleton Road girls. He may simply desire social intercourse with one of the feminine kind, out of obedience to an eternal and immutable law of attraction. But no, such intimacies, unless they are distinctly understood to be the prelude to marriage, are rarely permitted by the Respectables. "It is not proper for Ethel to be seen about with that young Simpkins. What will Mrs. Robinson think?" Therefore Ethel is interdicted from communication with the estimable Simpkins, and injured propriety is appeased and quieted.

I say without hesitation that such isolation is ruinous to the morals of the community. Finding how exceedingly difficult it is to associate with the daughters of the Respectables, young Simpkins finds companions among the female outcasts of society, women who besmirch his romance, and degrade his pure passion to the lowest animal lust. The world is full of love, could he but find it; but Respectability locks it up in fusty dens, and says: "You mustn't be a close friend of my daughter. That will never do! If you were engaged to her it would be a different matter; but you're not, and people would talk." So Simpkins goes away, and "picks up" very questionable girls in the street, and buys his first experience of "love." And the saddest thing is that he forms his opinion about women from these types, which is, of course, unwise, to say the least. But is he wholly to blame for this? No, he is one of the victims of Respectability, the grim tyrant who mars and blasts millions of human lives in England. At thirty-five Simpkins is a blasÉ, cynical young man-about-town, a sufferer, probably, from inordinate sexuality, with a profound contempt for all women, founded on his miserable experiences with female harpies and panders. "A fool and sinner," cries the moralist. Yes, but there are many like to him amongst us; and they were once decent, healthy, chivalrous young men.

And what of the isolated young girl? Her case seems to me even more sorrowful and piteous. Half of life is a sealed book to her. She has scarcely any ideas that are not delusions about love and the opposite sex, and the most important offices of her being. Her natural impulses have been suppressed, stunted, and perverted, and her physical health is probably feebler than that of the dissipated young man. She marries late, dazed with joy that her hour has come at last, and frequently awakes in the first year of marriage to the truth that she knew little about men in general, and not nearly enough about the man she has wedded; that she was wofully inexperienced and ignorant, and that Respectability condemns her to drain the bitter cup of disappointment to the dregs, to drain it with composure and a smiling face to the world. She was not allowed to mix freely with men. All her ideas of male human nature are derived from mawkish novels and story books, often written by women as ill-informed as herself. Many women have confessed to me that they did not understand men till they married one, and many men have said the same concerning women.

How, then, can we lessen the chances of drawing the wrong card in the great lottery of marriage? Certainly not by the sequestration of youths and maidens, for that is one of the chief causes of unsuccessful unions. Grundyism and Respectability must be set at defiance, and boys and girls in adolescence allowed to form companionships with each other. The artificial barriers between them must be broken down; the old stupid inhibitions rescinded, and a wholesome association not only permitted, but by every means encouraged. Education in life through the fellowship and the interchange of ideas between the sexes is one safeguard against wreckage in the perilous journey of matrimony.

Discoursing upon the "eternal feminine," Schopenhauer says: "Individual and partial exceptions do not alter the fact that women are, and will always remain, the most thorough and incurable Philistines.... Their domination and influence ruins modern society.... The essentially European lady is a being who ought to have no existence at all; there ought, on the other hand, to be housewives and girls who hope to become such, and who are, in consequence, brought up to domesticity by subordination. Just because there are ladies in Europe, women of a lower grade, who form, therefore, the great majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than they are in the East."

As to the charge of Philistinism, I am, unfortunately, compelled to agree with the pessimistic mysogynist. Women are the larger part of humanity in this country, and, that part being Philistine, it must exercise a bad influence upon society in the mass. I do not deny that the spirit of rebellion lurks in every woman's breast, but, for all that, women are not readily persuaded to rebel against absurd conventions. Their great desire is to be on the popular side, and in the ranks of the mightier force, because unpopular causes are generally accounted discreditable by the majority. Women, therefore, set a high value on Respectability, and they endure much suffering to maintain it. Yet here and there we find women as leaders and foremost fighters in assaults upon irrational institutions and customs, and they are often wise tacticians and valorous assailers. But such women are not of the Respectables; they are thinkers and reformers who have cast aside the cumbrous, tawdry trappings of that order, so that they may be of service to humanity. The Philistine woman cares little or nothing for social advance and the welfare of posterity, and in this respect she is always rather more apathetic or actively hostile to progress than the Philistine man. She feels that a woman has more to lose than a man by abandoning conventionalities and orthodox opinions. But this dread is somewhat ill-founded and exaggerated, because there are many unconventional men only too ready to warmly welcome the women who revolt, and not only to bid them cheer, but to pay them high homage for their bravery and independence. In the long run, a woman gains far more esteem and friendship in the army of the Unconventionalists than she wins from the host of the Respectables.

Timidity is one of the prime sources of the disease of Respectability in both sexes, and women are by nature more timid than men in the matter of revolt against ignorant Public Opinion. The result is that women are much less free than men in so-called free countries. "A man glories in being considered bold, but a woman shrinks from the charge of boldness, as degrading to her sex." [2] And here I shelter myself behind a doughty champion of women, because if I wrote the indictment which he has set down, my ethical-cum-philosophical Gamaliel, and possibly many of my women readers, would charge me with "cynicism" and "sex-bias." I quote again from Mr. Gibson, who, in this charge of the alleged untruthfulness of women, is almost as emphatic as Schopenhauer: "Owing to the subordinate position of women, they are less truthful than men. They work up to their ends without the exercise of force, and must therefore use guile. Men lie as readily as women when they think lies will serve their purpose, but, having more freedom, and being less afraid of conflict, they have less cause to lie. Women are taught to lie from their childhood, in order to hide their desires, their disappointments, and their sufferings. Women are driven in upon themselves, and in sheer self-defence lie as men are not called upon to lie." [3]

I know several charming women who lie most glibly and as to the manner born, without a tinge of shame; indeed, it is a difficult matter to make sure that you have "got them," so to speak, for their speech is so slippery, and they fib so artistically that no reliance can be placed upon their admissions of belief or disbelief in this or that. All that they say must be swallowed with a large grain of salt. But let me qualify this impugnment somewhat. I think we may fairly say that the tarradiddles of women are not generally of the more ignoble order of lies. They are mostly pretty little semi-transparent falsehoods which do not utterly deceive the hearer who has studied the psychology of women. It is Respectability that makes cowards and cozeners of men and women; and those who imagine that they have the most to lose by frankness will naturally practice the most deception. [4] The woman-thrall to convention is forced to use the weapons of falsehood and to don the armour of deceit. In corroboration of this assertion, I shall again quote the words of another writer, and a woman to boot. Miss Violet Hunt, a clever satiric novelist, thus describes the unhappy girl who has been inoculated with the virus of Respectability:—

"How one knows the kind of girl! One meets a specimen in almost every house-party. She is nicely dressed, but not quite so nicely as the other girls staying in the house. She has charming manners, but there is something of the offensive and defensive sharpness of the street Arab about her. She has had to take care of herself ever since she was grown up, and make her tongue do the work of chaperonage. If it rains, she is in mute agony, because she cannot afford to spoil her clothes. She takes Champagne regularly at dinner because she does not have it at home. She is at some pains to propitiate her hostess, because she intends to be asked again. She holds her tongue when grand functions are mentioned, because she was not there. In short, she is a kind of innocent whited sepulchre; a frail, jerry-built edifice, whose prestige may be destroyed at any moment by untoward revelations as to her social standing, whose whole endeavour is to give the impression that she lives in a mentionable part of London, and dresses on more than thirty pounds a year." [5]

This is a pitiless exposure of the shifts and subterfuges to which you must stoop in posing as a lady or gentleman, when you are only a person. What happiness, what profit, come out of such masquerading? It is better, a hundred times better, to save your soul alive, and preserve something of self-respect, as one of the unreceived and unrecognised Non-Respectables. You will find this enchanted garden of Philistia, fenced with high walls bristling with spikes, and set with warning boards, is a very shoddy Paradise when you are admitted to it on sufferance. It is the domain of the "bores and bored," the haunt of parasites and toadies, incessantly scheming and distrusting each other in a deadly dull atmosphere of uncongeniality.

My sister, you gain nothing by fostering this malady of Respectability, by vapouring and wasting your sweetness in the aridity of the Little Muddleton Road. So long as you slavishly conform to the barbaric customs and codes of that wretched clan, so long will you be abject and unhappy. Come out of the fetid air of the Charnel-house of Convention, rip off those corsets and cramping disguises, cast away your high-heeled boots, and stand erect and fearless among men and women who dare to live free uncontaminated lives, beyond the reek and blight of the infected purlieus.

[2] "The Emancipation of Women," by J. Gibson.