CHAPTER IX THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN SOCIETY

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“La sociÉtÉ crÉe la femme oÙ la nature a fait une femelle.” This reflection comes from that great novelist, but not too profound philosopher, Balzac. It is sufficiently general to start many trains of thought, though it is not in itself a peculiarly valuable addition to sociological ideas. Yet Balzac’s own train of thought when he wrote it is clear enough. He was lingering with admiration over the figure of Diane de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan, his incarnation of all the charm and the attraction of women. For him the opposition between the woman and the female was no idle one. In the latter he took no interest: she meant less to him than the hideous cowering creature with a baby at its breast which appeared behind that rutilant and terrifying primitive man on the cover of Mr Wells’ universal history, No. 2, means to us. But woman, as typified in Diane the supreme example, appeared to him as a work of art so amazingly perfected in every detail that one can almost describe him as kissing the tips of his fingers when he writes of her. He saw women as wonderful and beautiful refinements of raw nature, extraordinarily complicated, subtle beyond measure, no less alluring but more wily than the sirens, forming part of society, it is true, but in a remote way of their own, not as companions of the other half of humanity but as incalculable accidents of the simpler life of men. They were in his eyes divinities, witches or devils, but hardly ordinary human beings. Mrs Edith Wharton in her “French Ways and their Meaning” seems, in a less enthusiastic way, to adopt the same attitude towards French women. She boldly tells the American girl that she is but a child in the nursery compared with this daedal repository of feminine secrets, the French femme du monde. It is, in fact, the French point of view, which accounts for the power of women, or rather of the woman, in France and for the limitation of her activities to her own peculiar temples. She does not waste her virtues by wafting them at large over the dustier tracts of life, though it is possible that the jeunes filles en fleur, with their golf and tennis and boyish companionships, of whom M. Marcel Proust so engagingly writes, may come down from their pedestals more frequently than their mothers.

However this may be, Balzac’s train of thought does not apply to England. His reflection would not have occurred to an English novelist, or, if it had, it would have been thrown off easily as an obvious, not particularly pregnant, fact, without the wealth of suggestion in the antithesis of “female” and “woman” which is implied in Balzac’s sentence. The Englishman would be more apt to give the reflection another turn, to say: “Nature made woman and woman makes society,” leaving sharp the opposition between nature and society but blurring that between the natural and the social woman, with the idea that the two are too closely interwoven to be usefully disconnected. And that is the English point of view. Woman in England has never been a mystery, an intricate engine with simple aims and complicated methods, of a different order from man with his complex aims and simpler methods. The texture of English life is, and has always been, compounded of both as the warp and the woof—the more active man passing rapidly between the more stable feminine strands which keep his thread in place. Though this interconnection has become more obvious latterly with the complete disappearance of feudal and patriarchal traditions, earlier literature bears abundant witness to it. The Canterbury Tales are significant enough in this respect. In spite of occasional romanticism in the tales themselves, we have no hedged divinities in the band of pilgrims: the nun, the prioress and the wife of Bath all take their places naturally in the cavalcade, and the poet insists as little on the special claims of their femininity as he pays deference to their modesty. And where is the mystery in Viola, Sylvia, Beatrice or Rosalind? They are palpably of the same stuff as their lovers, and only distinguished by greater sanity from their fools. If there be any point in mystery, it is men, with weird compounds of good and evil in their souls, who were Shakespeare’s mysteries. But, so far as social relations are concerned in Shakespeare, as in England generally, men and women are part of the same homespun which covers all the issues of life in this country. I see no reason to doubt that it will continue to do so: even the apparently strong antagonisms of recent years, when loud exclamations were heard against a “man-made” world, made little difference to the even textile process of ordinary social life, and now, since the political enfranchisement of women, are but very feeble ghosts.

The truth is that in few societies have women always had greater rights than in English society. The English woman is neither, like the Frenchwoman, the flying buttress of one particular man, nor, like the German, his beast of burden, nor like the American, his imperious tyrant: she is, as I have already pointed out, his companion, and she is the ideal companion because she has so long been admitted to all the private rights of companionship. English society is held together by English women, for the men of England have a strange aloofness from one another and a want of curiosity about one another which is always an astonishment to women, who can make or break men’s friendships without an effort. English men cling to one another with such feeble tendrils that the faintest tug pulls them apart. Yet, if women sometimes almost involuntarily apply the tug, they are coagulators of men, linking knots of them together by tighter bonds of familiarity than they could have ever manufactured for themselves. They are able to perform this function because the two sexes do not live separate lives converging at a few fixed points, but common lives with a few divergences which are becoming more and more reduced. Wherever you look you see them coupled together, in tea shops and restaurants, in theatres and music-halls and cinemas, on the hunting field and in the butt; they shop together, they serve together, they go to church together. This state of affairs is not without its disadvantages: it encourages, for one thing, a lower standard of common thought than in France where the men keep more to themselves and more together, setting a higher level of intelligence to which women are expected to conform when the two sexes meet on common ground. But it is the characteristic note of English society, in which alone could women say without pose or presumption that “they like to have their men about.” Their men, mark you, not men in general, and in a very conscious possessive sense. There is an amusing passage in an early chapter of “Mount Music” by Miss Somerville and Martin Ross. Major Talbot-Lowry, a middle-aged country gentleman, has just left the room, singing. “In both his wife’s and his cousin’s faces was the same look that often comes into women’s faces when, unperceived, they regard the sovereign creature. Future generations may not know that look, but in the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of apprehension and of pity. Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so childlike.” The authors are perhaps right in saying that future generations will not know this look: the awe and the apprehension are giving way to more sympathetic emotions. But the look that remains will not be unlike the old look. It is a look of which English men are more conscious than women suppose: they catch it early on the more innocent faces of sisters and sisters’ friends. They know that women regard them with a blend of tolerance and admiration, as a kind of familiar institution to which they are bound by ties too intimate to be unravelled or analysed.

This intimate connection in the texture of society has an unmistakeable effect upon English men. It gives them, from early days, an inner refinement which, however rough and unpolished or cold and uncompromising their external appearance, is nearly always to be found behind it. Heavy-footed, wanting in delicacy and the finer shades as they may seem in comparison with men of some other nations, who pay more attention to finish and elegance of address, they are in many ways more truly civilised, with less of the wild man of the woods, the hunter, at the bottom of their natures. The manners of an English gentleman, which are manners of the heart, not of the dancing master or the enchanter, have, for their inward grace, no equal in the world. And the emotion which lies behind these manners is common to all English men, an emotion distilled of long and easy companionship with women, in which neither took more than was given in return, but the interchange of services and sympathies, not of mere compliments, naturally issued from mutual recognition of worth and mutual acknowledgement of dependence. For English women too this intimacy, which included a consciousness of the emotions it engendered in men, has had its peculiar grace. It has given them that frankness, that independence without bravado, that air of being equal to any situation, which are their remarkable qualities. At any age, even the most flighty, they fall too naturally into the performance of their stabilising function to waste more than a small and pardonable amount of energy upon private timidities and pursuits betraying a more primitive woman. They are in some sort aware of a national part to play which it would be indecent to abandon, either from passion or indifference. Hence they have a freer stride and a less self-conscious attitude than those women of other countries who are only credited with the graces and weaknesses of undiluted femininity.

But, if women stabilise, they also stratify. Men are more liquid entities, coalescing temporarily with other men at any level without difficulty and without feeling themselves engaged to remain at that or any other level longer than they please. But there is a viscosity about women—it is only another way of regarding their stabilising function—which forbids them to flow so freely and makes it harder for them to disengage themselves after any coalition with other entities of their own kind. So they arrange themselves inevitably in strata, the number of which in England is legion, which rise with an infinity of gradation from the labourer’s cottage to the royal palace. The process is almost too natural to be called snobbery, though its result often gives rise to that unpleasant quality, for the feminine element is buoyant and subject rather to the laws of expansion than those of gravity. Mrs John Lane’s Maria, good-natured but vulgarly pushing, will stick at nothing to penetrate the layers immediately above her: armed with determination, selfishness and ingratitude she marches brazenly to the attack, braving the snub to force the breach, feeling the wound but snatching the dart from it to add to the armoury which, from her ultimate vantage point, she will discharge upon her subsequent imitators. And a Maria will drag a man upwards with her, protesting but powerless, for men have not the force to abjure or to withstand such campaigns. Comic enough in fiction, it is nauseating in reality, especially as these pushing particles admit nothing but entirely laudable ambitions, whereas the scale in which they so furiously struggle to rise is not one of wit or merit, but one of trivialities, of pennies and titles, motor cars and meals.

But if the Marias show an uncanny quickness in judging the points of contact between the social layers, it is not the Marias who make the layers in the first place. These are the work of all women equally, as naturally made as birds’ nests, but for the protection of themselves rather than of their young. Two men may meet at the office or the club, day in day out, for years without in the least becoming involved in one another’s domestic circumstances or becoming aware of one another’s native layers. But it is impossible for women to meet casually for long without a degree of mutual implication which can never be undone. One visit by a woman to another woman’s home forms a link which the return of that visit closes irrevocably; it can thereafter neither be ignored nor broken without pain: whereas a man, especially a bachelor, may flit for ever like a butterfly, sipping in all freedom the honey where he finds it. At the bottom of this difference is the instinct of the home, which is so peculiarly strong in Englishwomen. A home must have stability and a definite position with regard to other homes, it cannot vaguely exist in an indeterminate social latitude and longitude. As map-readers would say, its coordinates must be settled and cannot be changed without an upheaval. Stability, moreover, is not the only quality of a home to women: they cherish its explanatory quality also. Away from their homes they feel vague and unattached, like travellers without passports, presenting rather a questionable appearance, dependent for recognition rather on the goodwill of others than on their own indubitable claims. In their homes they are solid and substantial, answering every question before it is asked, proof against all error, in a settled place and status with all circumstances and attachments stretching obviously away to the limits of vision. It is to the Englishwoman, far more than to the English man, that home is a castle.

The consequence is that Englishwomen, no less than women of other nations, are strongly individualistic, and stand like boulders in the stream of modern democracy which is running towards collectivism. It is impossible for the majority of women to sympathise with the collective ideal, since all their instincts run counter to it. In England, particularly, where for centuries the stratification of society has gone quietly on without catastrophic changes, it is hard to believe that, with political power now in their hands, women will easily permit a profound revolution in their modes of life. So long as wages and standards of life are in question, they may well vote with the most progressive, even the most aggressive, party: but the old social landmarks will not be entirely swept away unless the women, too, are swept off their feet by a wave of circumstance or emotion. It will be curious to see how the good Englishwoman modifies the course of history in the near future, as she is bound to do if she in a way succeeds in forcing a compromise between the oncoming of collectivist democracy and her own instinctive conservatism. So far as women are concerned, every layer of society is bound to offer resistance to eruption from below simply for its own safety. In this matter the stationmaster’s wife will not be behind the doctor’s or the works-foreman’s sister behind the vicar’s. If eruption comes at all, instead of the steady but almost imperceptible percolation which is the usual process of social change in this country, it can only come from the lowest layers whose Marias have nothing to lose and everything to gain by a more than usually abrupt effort to rise. If only wise statesmanship can discount the need for any abruptness, this eruption will never occur: the essential changes, in my belief, can be wrought without so ruinous a disturbance as to rend our English homespun into rags, or to snap the threads of that womanly warp which gives it its strength and durability.

The married women, at all events, will resist to the last: the weak threads in the womanly warp—and I mean weak in the sense of not withstanding disruptive influences—are the bachelor women. Nowadays it is foolish to talk of “old maids” and “coiffer Sainte CathÉrine,” or to use any other patronising phrase for unmarried women which implies that they have missed the only vocation of their sex. Already before the war this attitude was becoming passÉ in England, and the war has definitely bundled it into the lumber room. The enormous activity of women, young and old, during the war cannot subside leaving no effect at all, and one of its most permanent effects is that large numbers of women have learned to live as self-sufficing lives as men, working independently for an adequate return, dwelling in camps or colonies or bachelor companionships or even in solitude, and using their leisure as the spirit moved them. Young girls who ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving the home where they were doing nothing in particular, and older women who dabbled more or less aimlessly in existence because they could not catch a proper hold of it, both learned the happiness which comes from doing something in particular. They found in regular work an emancipation of which they had never dreamed: it solved their riddles and blew away their fantasies, besides removing them from those hundred and one insidious little distractions which waste more than half the time of unoccupied women. If this emancipation led to some follies, it led also to much wisdom. The value of regularity became patent to many for the first time: the settling effect of a definite aim for each day, the fact that, in the long run, work passes the time much more quickly than amusement, were revelations; and the realisation of holding a career, albeit a temporary one, in her own two hands gave to many a woman a new assurance and a new pride which were precious as jewels. Thereafter they could never regard with equanimity the possibility of a return to the older more dependent or less purposeful life. The cessation of wartime employment obscured their immediate prospect but did not cloud their new ideals, for they had learnt a new and healthy discontent. It was not that the other ideal of women, marriage and a home, lost its attraction—far from it: but, it had become clear that women need not wait, like wares in a market place, till the arrival of a purchaser, doing odd jobs and maintaining as long as possible the freshness of their looks. They had realised the real virtues of the bachelor state, which are not its opportunities for disorder, laxity and idleness, but, in youth, its freedom, its mobility and its sense of hammering out life with a will on the anvil of ambition, and, in maturer age, the full interests, the easy and untrammelled relations, the opportunities for many sided intercourse without responsibility and the power of unhampered concentration on a purpose which are its compensations for the inevitable loneliness.

In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity, instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about indefinitely in other people’s houses. Mothers and fathers it is true, will be left forlorn a little earlier, but they will have to put up with it, and it will teach them to preserve the charm of one another’s society with more care against the day when, after the crowded cares of parenthood have vanished, nothing else is left to them.

But, to return to my original point, will the bachelor woman be a stabiliser or will she be disruptive? She will have the feminine instinct for stability and definite surroundings: she will never become so fluid a being socially as a man. Nevertheless, for the time of her bachelorhood she will not so easily indulge those instincts and will be likely, in the first flush of freedom, to hold them of small importance. She is, moreover, apt in these days to be carried away by her head farther than her heart would naturally take her, and her head, like a newly hoisted sail, will belly in the wind of any ready theorist. Girls are poor critics of ideas, and are apt to grasp at them with a touch of flighty passion which is more dangerous than the intellectual trifling of young men, who can play with them as keenly yet as unemotionally as they play with tennis balls. The one foe always lying in wait for bachelor women is hysteria, which takes the form of flightiness in the young and of a sour wilfulness in the older who succumb to it. Disruptive tendencies in the state will always find fruitful ground among hysterical females, who will push a theory to unpractical limits, not out of honest conviction, but from pure passion. But the danger of any permanent damage, provided always that the nation as a whole maintains its sanity, from this source need not be too seriously considered. A career or a profession is in itself a stabilising influence, and, now that women in England have few specific grounds for discontents on the score of sex-inequalities, the sparks of hysteria can fly harmlessly upwards without being gathered into a blaze. However, we shall see. The good Englishwoman, married or single, is riding forward at a round pace into the future. She is not likely to lose her bearings, but we shall all suffer if she does. It rests with her teachers to endow her richly with the faculty of finding her way, even in the dark.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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