^“AND what about woman’s relationship to the world?”

“There is no such thing as woman.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“There are only women. To talk of Woman as a being apart from man is absurd. When I used the word Man in talking of the universal mind, I included women. The word Man as used to represent men is a falsity in that it excludes women. The word Woman is absurd, however you take it.

“Men and women are cut out of the same piece of stuff—Human Nature. The woman is cut a bit smaller, and her outline is a bit different, that is all.

“Mentally it is just the same as physically. She is cut, as a rule, a bit smaller, and the outline of her mind is a bit different. But it is only a difference in size and outline. The stuff is the same. And the outline of the one is complementary to the outline of the other; where the woman’s outline sinks in the man’s sticks out, and vice versa. Mentally and physically it is the same; they are, in fact, the two parts of that great jig-saw puzzle, Humanity.

“The Male and Female are not a necessity of Life. They are only a necessity of higher vegetable and animal life. A large number of lower organisms propagate unsexually—the monera, the am[oe]bÆ, foraminifera, radiolara, etc. These increase either by splitting in two or putting out buds. The Male and Female are not, then, a radical necessity of life, but they are a radical necessity in development and in progress from a lower to a higher form of life. The Male and Female are not, as I will try to point out, of the essence of life, but of the essence of the forms of life.

“We must imagine that the first germ of life was sexless, a cellular structure that multiplied by splitting in two. We must imagine that because the rigid law of advance from the simple to the complex imposes on us the assumption that the first form of life must have been the simplest, and the simplest is the organism that develops by fission.

“There was a tremendous moment, then, when all earthly life lived and moved without sign of sex; cellular forms all alike, all developing alike, and by the same method.

“Had all these forms continued unchanged, the world would now be just as then. But a change came, due, we must suppose (from analogy), not to a change in the radical nature of these organisms, but to a change in the external conditions affecting some of them. The food environment, or the temperature environment, or the electrical environment surrounding some of these organisms, or some other unknown but always external influence, wrought a change in some of these lowly forms of life. The mother of Form—Differentiation—was the result.

“The organisms affected by Differentiation had to reproduce themselves by producing other organisms in a slightly different form, either lower than themselves, or on the same plane as themselves, or higher than themselves.

“Had they taken the first course, Differentiation would have meant destruction and death to all the organisms it touched. The second course was absolutely impossible. A simple organism cannot alter itself without ascending or descending; if it becomes the least degree more complex, it ascends; if it becomes the least degree less complex, it descends. It cannot alter its nature or its form in a horizontal direction. It is absolutely condemned to the vertical, and must go up or down.

“These basic simple organisms, then, that formed the foundation for all life, must have responded to their change in environment by ascending, that is, by becoming more complex. They must have done this, or else have descended to death. They were making for the great goal, Sex.

“How they reached that goal may be a story yet to be read by Science, but reach it they did on the day that two of these simple-minded organisms reproduced themselves, not by individual fission, but by mutual union.

“It was not a radical change in the life of the organisms; it was only a radical change in the method by which that life was reproduced.

“It was a change in business methods. It was co-operation, pure and simple, between two organisms in the production of other organisms. Before that day, the whole business had to be done by one individual; after that day it was done by partners, one called Male, the other Female.

“Now, what is the essence of partnership? Mutual assistance. In a labour partnership where the business is in the least complex, two men would be of very little assistance to each other who insisted always on doing the same job, or the same part of a job. There must always be a top sawyer and a bottom sawyer, a man who does what the other cannot do, or gives what the other has not got.

“It is exactly the same in the business of life-production, and the instant that Form could demonstrate them, the two partners appeared, and the instant that the new business of Life originated by this partnership became acute and competitive, the partners found themselves leagued together not only for the production of life, but for the defence of that life.

“But that carries us beyond my immediate point, which is that the terms Male and Female do not connote separate origins for the objects they apply to, nor essential differences between those objects. The two partners are essentially the same, only that one has got his hands horny from doing the rough jobs of the partnership and the other has kept her hands soft; one has developed mammary glands by doing her business in the partnership, the other has developed his biceps in doing his. One has developed certain attributes of mind in fighting the world, the other certain other attributes in keeping the home. One has developed certain organs for reproduction, the other—others.”

“Yet you deny the existence of Woman.”

“Absolutely. But I do not deny the existence of Sex, always holding that, though Sex is the most powerful factor in development, it has nothing to do with the essence of life. If it had, you would find men and women different from one another in essentials. They are not.

“As human beings they are exactly the same, only that you find some passions and attributes more developed in men, others more developed in women. But there is not a passion or attribute belonging to men that is not shared in by women, and vice versa.”

“But there is a vast difference between women and men.”

“Of course there is, but it is only a difference, not a division; moreover, it is only a surface difference, for the deeper you go into their natures, the less apparent is that difference. Use the touchstone of the profound emotions. Who has not seen a strong man weep like a woman, or a weak woman show the heroism of a man? Does sorrow affect men less than women? Does great joy affect women more than men?

“Is love a thing apart from man, and is it woman’s whole existence? It is not. That claptrap was born of Fancy, and the passion for saying a catchy thing. The love of men for women is just as powerful and as intimately connected with their existence as the love of women for men. Fidelity, the only true sign of real love, is exhibited by men in just the same proportion (allowing for the greater temptations of men) as it is by women.

“No; men and women are absolutely the same as human beings in all things essential, and the man who denies that is the man who sees the world with only one eye, and only uses the surface of his brain.

“Men and women are partners. Partners in a difficult business. They have been partners for millions of years, and the differences between them are caused by the exigencies of the partnership.

“Even in those surface mental differences that mark sex a man will often approximate to a woman in some particulars, and a woman to a man. These surface differences are not unalterable.

“Take the love of gossip. Listen to the talk of army men and navy men and club men.

“Take Vanity, and look at the nuts and the dudes and the macaronis.

“Take curiosity, and remember Coventry. Take love of dress—”

“And remember Mr. ——,” said she, laughing.

“Exactly. And let any one who would controvert me consider his friends and relations critically, and tell me, with his hand on his heart, are the males destitute of female attributes and the females of male?

“They are not. They are all human beings, and to class them philosophically under the two divisions, Woman and Man, is a profound error and a commonplace error.

“It has led men to look on women as mysterious beings with essential motive springs and essential mental clockwork quite different from that of men.

“It has led to frightful volumes of gas being generated in certain skulls, like the skull, for instance, of X——, and some of the leaders of the Feminist movement, and the escape of this gas is making an alarming noise.

“When Ellen Key, for instance, says that ‘Human souls can be divided into organic and inorganic,’ and that ‘Ibsen makes the masculine soul inorganic, definitive, finished, determined; the feminine soul, on the other hand, he more often makes organic, growing in evolution,’ what does she mean?

“All this loose talk about souls being organic and inorganic I would not exchange for one small concrete fact—such as that Mrs. Jones is a better man than her husband, or that John Smith ‘ought to have been born a girl,’ facts that help to prove that not only are men’s and women’s bodies and ‘souls’ made of the same stuff, but that the sex difference is so unfixed a quality that we find women who are to all intents and purposes men, and men women.

“I will be bold enough to lay down a law based on experience, History, and Common-sense.

“There is not a womanly attribute of either body or soul that has not been born of the stuff that men are made of, and there is not an attribute of women that has not been developed to its womanly pitch not by virtue of any mysterious energy rising from the source of ‘woman,’ but by purely external conditions. And the same with regard to men.

“There you have the old ‘conditions’ coming up again. Let us get at facts.

“The Æsthetic sense is pre-eminently womanly. You will say, at once, ‘This is not so. Women are rarely as good artists as men.’ I was not talking of art, but of the Æsthetic sense.

“Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the novelist that colours the work. Every man has the Æsthetic sense more or less developed, but women have it, as a mass, more developed than men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?

“I do not believe that the Æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. His power of craftsmanship, purely material and mechanical, and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them under which men have dwelt.

“Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the Æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular?

“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man.

“Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were, most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the Æsthetic basis of his artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother.

“And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father?

“If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and pictorial answer to that question.

“Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the Æsthetic sense. Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say.

“So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not because she is a woman, but because she is a human being, and the conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that development.

“Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy, and tenderness.

“It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or fighting the world in some other way.

“Go through the whole category of those attributes whose superior development makes woman the flower of the earth. You will find not one which has developed on its own account owing to some mysterious chemistry of being peculiar to Woman,—all have developed from the common soil of humanity, owing to the superior conditions for their development in women.

“And the chief of those conditions has been Protection. The old conditions come up again. The man when he was hunting and killing beasts for his wife and children, and fighting for their existence, never imagined that he was by his labours founding Art and Poetry. He was. He was giving their germs conditions to grow in. Love, tenderness, gentleness, affection, morality: all were there in the cave with the woman. She suckled them with her children; she trained them in their growth with kisses—and slaps. They were the man’s no less than the woman’s, common to both their natures, but he left them in the cave with her to take care of, while he went hunting.

“Conditions have made woman what she is: the best and most beautiful thing in the world. And now Feminists want to change those conditions, just as Socialists want to change the conditions affecting man.

“Both strike at the Home.”

^“‘WOMAN must have a freer life.’

“‘To evolve her genius, woman has but one need—Freedom.’

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“‘Woman must reorganize the mind and soul of humanity, for man has disintegrated it.’

“Those are some of the teachings of the Apostles of Feminism. I take them from the work of a clever American woman, and they are a fair statement of the case for Feminism.

“To the first I give an unqualified assent.

“Freedom, within limits, is the basic condition of growth.

“But what does the Feminist mean by Freedom?

“The third dictum answers that.

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“One would fancy from that that ‘woman’ was an animal capable of evolving ideas and a moral code different from man. Since woman is just the same human animal, we may put this aside, and ask again what the Feminist means.

“She asks, in fact, that women may be free to change their morals (we shall leave the talk about ideas aside for the present) in any way they please.

“Now, morals cannot be changed in a horizontal direction. It’s up, or down, or stationary. Any change in morals is for the better or for the worse.

“Does the Feminist ask for freedom to change her morals for the better? She has perfect freedom to do that; most men will applaud her, and most women, too.

“Does she ask for freedom to change her morals for the worse?

“If she is making that demand, let her frankly avow that what she wants is license, not freedom.

“There is a lot of difference between the two.

“I am not arguing to get the Feminist in a hole, but simply to clear the ground of brambles.

“She does want license, as a matter of fact; one would be blind who looked at her programme and did not see that.

“And the license she wants is not the license to steal, or lie, or murder, or commit arson. When she talks of forming her own morals, she has one morality entirely and solely in view—the morality that presides over Love; and when she asks for license, it is license in Love.

“Men have more license in this matter than women. That is undoubtedly so.

“Men, since the beginning of the world, have had more license than women; but that license is a relic of barbarism. It was useful once, but it is becoming less useful every day, and pari passu men are becoming more moral.”

“Useful once?”

“In this way. Men in the past were the fertilisers of the world. Who brought Roman blood to England, Norman blood, Norse blood? Men. Roman, Norman, and Norse women had nothing to do with the matter. Their duty was to stay at home and be moral. Armed and roaming men fertilised the world, just as bees fertilise a field of clover, crossed the races, and made the vitality of them.

“Roman, Norse, and Norman virtues that make England great were born of Roman, Norse, and Norman license. The same fact applies to all Europe. But the day of the free-lance in love is gone. He who was once a world-maker is now a world-curse. He is not now a world-maker, but a Home-wrecker and a woman-wrecker.

“Nations no longer require him for a fertiliser. Men no longer travel in masses, armed with spears; they go in railway carriages, accompanied by their families, and the world can get all the fertilisation it wants by immigration.

“License still lives among men, but it lives as a reptile; among men it is dying, yet Feminists, when they ask for license, would give this dying thing a new birth among women. They forget that what was once a bad necessity is now a hideous and dying superfluity.

^“I HAVE heard it stated by Feminists that motherhood is the right of every woman.

“So is fatherhood the right of every man, and on that plea a man might base a very wide scheme of immorality.

“As a matter of fact, there is something else: the right of the child.

“A woman has no right to motherhood unless she can provide a home for her child. A father has no right to fatherhood who cannot do likewise. And by a home I do not mean shelter and food; I mean everything sacred that lies in that word Home. Love, affection, self-restraint, mutual respect, and family respect.

“Of course, if the Feminist says, Destroy the home, one has nothing more to say. She is logical.

“But to say, I shall increase license among women without injuring or destroying the home, at once reduces her to a person who is not logical.

“As a matter of fact, the Feminist movement, as far as its moral side goes, is confined to a certain number of men who desire the extension of license; to a certain number of women who do likewise; and to a certain number of women who feel acutely that women are put upon by men in the matter of morals. That men have set up a rule of conduct for women which they don’t obey themselves.

“This is not so. The sternest moralists are women, and the morality of these moralists is not an abstract quality; it arises from a profound and intuitive motherhood instinct that tells them that license is death to the welfare of the child, whether it develops and is shown in the mother or the child.

“The child must restrain itself and not steal the jam; the woman must restrain herself and not let her honour be stolen.”

“And, you will say, the man must restrain himself and not steal her honour?”

“Certainly.

“And every man, who is a man and not a cur, obeys that law as far as in him lies.

“Man, you must remember, has a lot to fight against, and nothing so much as the old rules of license under which he has lived for ages.

“They used to be a royal robe; they are now a beggar’s tatters. He is ashamed to be seen in them nowadays; he only puts them on in private; yet they are always crying to him to put them on, just as filth is always crying to a dog, Roll in me.

“That is all I have to say about the moral side of the Feminist people. Their claim for equal freedom with man in other respects is far more pleasant to notice. And it comes to this:

“Since the mass of women is just the same as the mass of men, in the name of Humanity, why should not the woman mass have the same freedom in affairs as the man, politically and socially?

“Why should the women of the nation not be free to expand their mental and bodily energy in every social and political path in which the men expand it?

“Certainly they ought. But they can’t.

“They could, in a nation whose units were individuals; they can’t, in a nation whose units are homes.

“Every woman is a potential or actual queen-bee. Her duty is to found a hive, not to make honey. Like a man, she has only a limited quantity of energy.

“The little nation of the hive or home, which is, in very fact, the nation itself writ small, makes vast calls upon the man’s energy and the woman’s. Here alone is the national life as distinct from the national affairs.

“It is the germinal spot and centre of all national activity; it is the primary school of all morality; and it is the supreme province of the woman. Here she is a world Builder.

“This is her kingdom. Her duties here are not only family, but national. There are no humble duties in a home: they are all great and national duties, directly determining the advancement of the world. Like all great duties, they imply great outputs of energy, self-denial, and restraint, and it is impossible for her to use her energies effectively in two directions. She cannot be at the hub of the wheel and the tire both at the same time. In other words, she cannot be at home and in parliament or the law courts, or the council chambers of the nation, or the studios or dentists’ parlours at one and the same time.

“‘Woman must be free to create her own conduct and to seek her own experiences for self-development,’ runs another dictum of our Feminist sage.

“In the home she is only free to create her own conduct in a manner conducive to the well-being of the home. If she swerves from this law, she is a defaulter and an enemy to good. The same may be said of her freedom in self-development.

“Certainly she must be free to develop herself, and so must the man be free to develop himself.

“But the man who develops his muscles in golf at the expense of his business time and energy is a slacker and a defaulter and a home-injurer. And the woman who develops her political instincts or her mind power at the expense of her home time and energy is the same.”

^“IT seems to me,” said my audience, “that you look on women as though they were all married and with household duties to perform.”

“I look on women as though they were all married women, or women preparing to enter that state. No other women are of any account at all as world-builders.

“They may be delightful, charming, pleasant, true women in every way, but if they are not married they are not true women-factors in the progress of the world. Simply because they have no hand in the physical building of the future.

“The child is the future made visible and concrete. When you lay your finger on a child you are touching not flesh only, but future ages.

“The unmarried woman-genius may influence the art or the thought of her time; the labourer’s wife who produces a bouncing boy that lives has produced the future. More than that, she has sent forth her own attributes to dwell in the future. More than that, by her care and education of that child she is laying the foundation for vast world effects.

“That is the woman’s triumphant position in the scheme of things. She is a partner in world-building, and the duties lying on her share of the partnership are patent and obvious to the meanest intelligence.

“They are both moral and material, and they imply in their performance one supreme virtue: self-sacrifice. Not freedom to develop according to inclination; not freedom to alter her morals; not freedom to imitate the worst faults of men; but slavery in the interests of her children, her husband, and her home.

“And what happy people these slaves are! Just as happy as the men-slaves who, under the dominion of good conduct, love, and the hive instinct, often work themselves to death, like the bees, that others may live and prosper.

“But, as you say, all women cannot be mothers. Yet it is essential that the mothers of the nation should be protected at all costs from the disease which lurks under the specious word ‘Feminism.’”

^“THEY have come a long journey together, the Man and the Woman, and all through that long journey across the ages they have been leading the child by the hand.

“And if the wicked and blasphemous people who talk of sex-hate had but the scientific and poetic perception enabling them to see those three grand and mysterious figures as they are on the shores of Time, we would be spared, perhaps, from the poisonous blight of sexisms.”

^“YOU are so positive,” said she, “that I often haven’t dared to interrupt you, and you talk so quickly that all you have said, though I understood it at the time, is now a jumble in my mind.”

“I am positive, because there is no use at all in being negative. People who believe in what they say are usually positive—even though they may be wrong.

“If I have talked too quickly, I shall write out what I have said and send it to you; then you can pick it to pieces as much as you please.”

The End