Part III Is There, If the Suffrage Is Barred, Any Palliative of Corrective for the Discontents of Woman?
I
PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE
DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN
What are the Suffragist’s Grievances?—Economic and
Physiological Difficulties of Woman—Intellectual
Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.
Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suf-
frage with its programme of feminism is
barred as leading to social disaster, any pallia-
tive or corrective that can be applied to the
present discontents of woman?
If such is to be found, it is to be found only
by placing clearly before us the suffragist’s
grievances.
These grievances are, first, the economic
difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her
living by work other than unskilled manual
labour; secondly, the difficult physiological
conditions in which woman is placed by the 155
excess of the female over the male population
and by her diminished chances of marriage 1;
and thirdly, the tedium which obsesses the life
of the woman who is not forced, and cannot
force herself, to work. On the top of these
grievances comes the fact that the suffragist
conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly
treated by man. This last is the fire which
sets a light to all the inflammable material.
It would be quite out of question to discuss
here the economic and physiological difficulties
of woman. Only this may be said: it is impos-
sible, in view of the procession of starved and
frustrated lives which is continuously filing
past, to close one’s eyes to the urgency of this
woman’s problem.
After all, the primary object of all civilisa-
tion is to provide for every member of the
community food and shelter and fulfilment of
natural cravings. And when, in what passes
as a civilised community, a whole class is called
upon to go without any one of these our hu-
1 Vide footnote, p. 138.
man requirements, it is little wonder that it
should break out.
But when a way of escape stands open revolt
is not morally justified.
Thus, for example, a man who is born into,
but cannot support himself in, a superior class
of society is not, as long as he can find a liveli-
hood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled
to revolt.
No more is the woman who is in economic or
physiological difficulties. For, if only she has
the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands
open to her.
She can emigrate; she can go out from the
social class in which she is not self-supporting
into a humbler social class in which she could
earn a living; and she can forsake conditions
in which she must remain a spinster for con-
ditions in which she may perhaps become a
mother. Only in this way can the problem of
finding work, and relief of tedium, for the
woman who now goes idle be resolved.
If women were to avail themselves of these 157
ways of escape out of unphysiological condi-
tions, the woman agitator would probably find
it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agita-
tion for woman suffrage as the Irish Nation-
alist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement
of the land question and the grant of old age
pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate
Parliament for Ireland.
For the happy wife and mother is never pas-
sionately concerned about the suffrage. It is
always the woman who is galled either by phy-
siological hardships, or by the fact that she has
not the same amount of money as man, or by
the fact that man does not desire her as a co-
partner in work, and withholds the homage
which she thinks he ought to pay to her intel-
lect.
For this class of grievances the present edu-
cation of woman is responsible. The girl who is
growing up to woman’s estate is never taught
where she stands relatively to man. She
is not taught anything about woman’s phys-
ical disabilities. She is not told—she is left 158
to discover it for herself when too late—that
child and husband are to woman physiological
requirements. She is not taught the defects
and limitations of the feminine mind. One
might almost think there were no such defects
and limitations; and that woman was not al-
ways overestimating her intellectual power.
And the ordinary girl is not made to realise
woman’s intrinsically inferior money-earning
capacity. She is not made to realise that the
woman who cannot work with her hands is
generally hard put to earn enough to keep her-
self alive in the incomplete condition of a
spinster.
As a result of such education, when, influ-
enced by the feminist movement, woman comes
to institute a comparison between herself and
man, she brings into that comparison all those
qualities in which she is substantially his equal,
and leaves out of account all those in which she
is his inferior.
The failure to recognise that man is the mas-
ter, and why he is the master, lies at the root 159
of the suffrage movement. By disregarding
man’s superior physical force, the power of
compulsion upon which all government is based
is disregarded. By leaving out of account
those powers of the mind in which man is the
superior, woman falls into the error of thinking
that she can really compete with him, and that
she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste.
Finally, by putting out of sight man’s superior
money-earning capacity, the power of the
purse is ignored.
Uninstructed woman commits also another
fundamental error in her comparison. Instead
of comparing together the average man and
the average woman, she sets herself to estab-
lish that there is no defect in woman which can-
not be discovered also in man; and that there
is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which
cannot be discovered also in woman. Which
having been established to her satisfaction, she
is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is
nothing whatever to choose between the sexes.
And from this there is only a step to the posi- 160
tion that human beings ought to be assigned,
without distinction of sex, to each and every
function which would come within the range
of their individual capacities, instead of being
assigned as they are at present: men to one
function, and women to another.
Here again women ought to have been safe-
guarded by education. She ought to have
been taught that even when an individual
woman comes up to the average of man this
does not abrogate the disqualification which
attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet—as
every one who recognises that we live in a
world which conducts itself by generalisations
will see—does it abrogate the disqualification
of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.
The present system of feminine education is
blameworthy not only in the respect that it
fails to draw attention to these disqualifications
and to teach woman where she stands; it is even
more blameworthy in that it fails to convey
to the girl who is growing up any conception
of that absolutely elementary form of morality 161
which consists in distinguishing meum and
tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours].
Instead of her educators encouraging every
girl to assert “rights” as against man, and put
forward claims, they ought to teach her with
respect to him those lessons of behaviour which
are driven home once for all into every boy at
a public school.
Just as there you learn that you may not
make unwarranted demands upon your fel-
low, and just as in the larger world every na-
tion has got to learn that it cannot with im-
punity lay claim to the possessions of its neigh-
bours, so woman will have to learn that when
things are not offered to her, and she has not
the power to take them by force, she has got
to make the best of things as they are.
One would wish for every girl who is grow-
ing up to womanhood that it might be brought
home to her by some refined and ethically-
minded member of her own sex how insuffer-
able a person woman becomes when, like a
spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of 162
man; when she proclaims that it is his duty
to serve her and to share with her his power
and possessions; when she makes an outcry
when he refuses to part with what is his own;
and when she insists upon thrusting her society
upon men everywhere.
And every girl ought to be warned that to
embark upon a policy of recrimination when
you do not get what you want, and to pro-
claim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you
are hit back, is the way to get yourself thor-
oughly disliked.
Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the
example of the militant suffragist, how revolt
and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess
oneself of what belongs to others, effects the
complete disorganisation of moral character.
No one would wish that in the education of
girls these quite unlovely things should be in-
sisted upon more than was absolutely neces-
sary. But one would wish that the educators
of the rising generation of women should, bas-
ing themselves upon these foundations, point 163
out to every girl how great is woman’s debt to
civilisation; in other words, how much is under
civilisation done for woman by man.
And one would wish that, in a world which is
rendered unwholesome by feminism, every
girl’s eyes were opened to comprehend the
great outstanding fact of the world: the fact
that, turn where you will, you find individ-
ual man showering upon individual woman—
one man in tribute to her enchantment, an-
other out of a sense of gratitude, and another
just because she is something that is his—every
good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she
never could have procured for herself. 164
APPENDIX
LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES
SIR,—For man the physiological psychology
of woman is full of difficulties.
He is not a little mystified when he encoun-
ters in her periodically recurring phases of
hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss
of the sense of proportion.
He is frankly perplexed when confronted
with a complete alteration of character in a
woman who is child-bearing.
When he is a witness of the “tendency of
woman to morally warp when nervously ill,”
and of the terrible physical havoc which the
pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is
appalled.
And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling
when he sees serious and long-continued men-
tal disorders developing in connexion with the 167
approaching extinction of a woman’s repro-
ductive faculty.
No man can close his eyes to these things;
but he does not feel at liberty to speak of
them.
For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away. [From “The Female of the Species” by Rudyard Kipling]
As for woman herself, she makes very light
of any of these mental upsettings.
She perhaps smiles a little at them.... 1
None the less, these upsettings of her men-
tal equilibrium are the things that a woman
has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever
lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman
is always threatened with danger from the
reverberations of her physiological emer-
gencies.
It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets
his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He
cannot shut them to the fact that there is
1 In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman’s flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause]. 168
mixed up with the woman’s movement much
mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from
himself the physiological emergencies which lie
behind.
The recruiting field for the militant suf-
fragists is the million of our excess female
population—that million which had better long
ago have gone out to mate with its comple-
ment of men beyond the sea.
Among them there are the following dif-
ferent types of women:—(a) First—let us
put them first—come a class of women who
hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that
they may, whenever it is to their advantage,
lawfully resort to physical violence.
The programme, as distinguished from the
methods, of these women is not very different
from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.
(b) There file past next a class of women
who have all their life-long been strangers to
joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed
have in the end broken into flame. These are
the sexually embittered women in whom every- 169
thing has turned into gall and bitterness of
heart, and hatred of men.
Their legislative programme is license for
themselves, or else restrictions for man.
(c) Next there file past the incomplete.
One side of their nature has undergone atro-
phy, with the result that they have lost touch
with their living fellow men and women.
Their programme is to convert the whole
world into an epicene institution—an epicene
institution in which man and woman shall
everywhere work side by side at the selfsame
tasks and for the selfsame pay.
These wishes can never by any possibility be
realised. Even in animals—I say even, be-
cause in these at least one of the sexes has
periods of complete quiscence—male and fe-
male cannot be safely worked side by side, ex-
cept when they are incomplete.
While in the human species safety can be
obtained, it can be obtained only at the price
of continual constraint. 170
And even then woman, though she protests
that she does not require it, and that she does
not receive it, practically always does receive
differential treatment at the hands of man.
It would be well, I often think, that every
woman should be clearly told—and the woman
of the world will immediately understand—
that when man sets his face against the pro-
posal to bring in an epicene world, he does so
because he can do his best work only in sur-
roundings where he is perfectly free from sug-
gestion and from restraint, and from the onus
which all differential treatment imposes.
And I may add in connexion with my own
profession that when a medical man asks that
he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical
woman he does so also because he would wish
to keep up as between men and women—even
when they are doctors—some of the modesties
and reticences upon which our civilisation has
been built up.
Now the medical woman is of course never 171
on the side of modesty,1 or in favour of any
reticences. Her desire for knowledge does
not allow of these.
(d) Inextricably mixed up with the types
which we have been discussing is the type of
woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams’s recent
letter brought so distinctly before our eyes—
the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced
self-esteem; and who flies out at every man
who does not pay homage to her intellect.
She is the woman who is affronted when a
man avers that for him the glory of woman lies
in her power of attraction, in her capacity for
motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to
the ethics which are special to her sex.
I have heard such an intellectually embit-
tered woman say, though she had been self-
denyingly taken to wife, that “never in the
whole course of her life had a man ever as much
as done her a kindness.”
1 To those who have out of inadvertence and as laymen and
women misunderstood, it may be explained that the issue here
discussed is the second in order of the three which are set out
on p. 139 (supra). 172
The programme of this type of woman is,
as a preliminary, to compel man to admit her
claim to be his intellectual equal; and, that
done, to compel him to divide up everything
with her to the last farthing, and so make her
also his financial equal.
And her journals exhibit to us the kind of
parliamentary representative she desiderates.
He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his orders
from a knot of washerwomen standing arms
a-kimbo.2
(e) Following in the wake of these em-
bittered human beings come troops of girls
just grown up.
All these will assure you, these young girls
—and what is seething in their minds is stir-
ring also in the minds in the girls in the col-
leges and schools which are staffed by un-
married suffragists—that woman has suffered
all manner of indignity and injustice at the
hands of man.
2 I give, in response to a request, the reference: Votes for
Women, March 18, 1910, p. 381. 173
And these young girls have been told about
the intellectual, and moral, and financial value
of woman—such tales as it never entered into
the heart of man to conceive.
The programme of these young women is to
be married upon their own terms. Man shall
—so runs their scheme—work for their sup-
port—to that end giving up his freedom, and
putting himself under orders, for many hours
of the day; but they themselves must not be
asked to give up any of their liberty to him,
or to subordinate themselves to his interests,
or to obey him in anything.
To obey a man would be to commit the
unpardonable sin.
It is not necessary, in connexion with a
movement which proceeds on the lines set out
above, any further to labour the point that
there is in it an element of mental disorder.
It is plain that it is there.
There is also a quite fatuous element in the
programmes of the militant suffragist. We
have this element, for instance, in the doctrine 174
that, notwithstanding the fact that the con-
ditions of the labour market deny it to her,
woman ought to receive the same wage as a
man for the same work.
This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves
out of sight that, even if woman succeeds in
doing the same work as man, he has behind him
a much larger reserve of physical strength.
As soon as a time of strain comes, areserve of
strength and freedom from periodic indisposi-
tion is worth paying extra for.
Fatuous also is the dogma that woman
ought to have the same pay for the same work
—fatuous because it leaves out of sight that
woman’s commercial value in many of the best
fields of work is subject to a very heavy dis-
count by reason of the fact that she cannot,
like a male employee, work cheek by jowl with
a male employer; nor work among men as a
man with his fellow employees.
So much for the woman suffragist’s protest
that she can conceive of no reason for a dif-
ferential rate of pay for man. 175
Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of
the militant suffragist. Every woman of the
world could tell her—whispering it into her
private ear—that if a sufficient number of men
should come to the conclusion that it was not
worth their while to marry except on the terms
of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman’s
demands would have to come down.
It is not at all certain that the institution of
matrimony—which, after all, is the great in-
strument in the levelling up of the financial
situation of woman—can endure apart from
some willing subordination on the part of the
wife.
It will have been observed that there is in
these programmes, in addition to the element
of mental disorder and to the element of the
fatuous, which have been animadverted upon,
also a very ugly element of dishonesty. In
reality the very kernel of the militant suffrage
movement is the element of immorality.
There is here not only immorality in the 176
ends which are in view, but also in the methods
adopted for the attainment of those ends.
We may restrict ourselves to indicating
wherein lies the immorality of the methods.
There is no one who does not discern that
woman in her relations to physical force stands
in quite a different position to man.
Out of that different relation there must of
necessity shape itself a special code of ethics
for woman. And to violate that code must be
for woman immorality.
So far as I have seen, no one in this con-
troversy has laid his finger upon the essential
point in the relations of woman to physical
violence.
It has been stated—and in the main quite
truly stated—that woman in the mass cannot,
like man, back up her vote by bringing physi-
cal force into play.
But the woman suffragist here counters by
insisting that she as an individual may have
more physical force than an individual man. 177
And it is quite certain—and it did not need
suffragist raids and window-breaking riots to
demonstrate it—that woman in the mass can
bring a certain amount of physical force to
bear.
The true inwardness of the relation in which
woman stands to physical force lies not in the
question of her having it at command, but in
the fact that she cannot put it forth without
placing herself within the jurisdiction of an
ethical law.
The law against which she offends when she
resorts to physical violence is not an ordinance
of man; it is not written in the statutes of any
State; it has not been enunciated by any hu-
man law-giver. It belongs to those unwritten,
and unassailable, and irreversible command-
ments of religion, [Greek 1 ],
which we suddenly and mysteriously become
aware of when we see them violated.
The law which the militant suffragist has
violated is among the ordinances of that code
which forbade us even to think of employing 178
[ 1 From Antigone by Sophocles; “the unwritten and unassailable statutes given to us by the gods. ” Sir Almroth had it in the original Greek with Greek fonts.]
our native Indian troops against the Boers;
which brands it as an ignominy when a man
leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his
own life; and which makes it an outrage for a
man to do violence to a woman.
To violate any ordinance of that code is
more dishonourable than to transgress every
statutory law.
We see acknowledgment of it in the fact
that even the uneducated man in the street
resents it as an outrage to civilisation when he
sees a man strike a blow at a woman.
But to the man who is committing the out-
rage it is a thing simply unaccountable that
any one should fly out at him.
In just such a case is the militant suffragist.
She cannot understand why any one should
think civilisation is outraged when she scuffles
in the street mud with a policeman.
If she asks for an explanation, it perhaps
behoves a man to supply it.
Up to the present in the whole civilised world
there has ruled a truce of God as between man 179
and woman. That truce is based upon the
solemn covenant that within the frontiers of
civilisation (outside them of course the rule
lapses) the weapon of physical force may not
be applied by man against woman; nor by
woman against man.
Under this covenant, the reign of force
which prevails in the world without comes to
an end when a man enters his household.
Under this covenant that half of the human
race which most needs protection is raised up
above the waves of violence.
Within the terms of this compact everything
that woman has received from man, and every-
thing man receives from woman, is given as a
free gift.
Again, under this covenant a full half of the
programme of Christianity has been realised;
and a foundation has been laid upon which it
may be possible to build higher; and perhaps
finally in the ideal future to achieve the aboli-
tion of physical violence and war.
And it is this solemn covenant, the covenant 180
so faithfully kept by man, which has been
violated by the militant suffragist in the in-
terest of her morbid, stupid, ugly, and dis-
honest programmes.
Is it wonder if men feel that they have had
enough of the militant suffragist, and that the
State would be well rid of her if she were
crushed under the soldiers’ shields like the
traitor woman at the Tarpeian rock [in ancient Rome where traitors were killed]?
We may turn now to that section of woman
suffragists—one is almost inclined to doubt
whether it any longer exists—which is opposed
to all violent measures, though it numbers in
its ranks women who are stung to the quick
by the thought that man, who will concede the
vote to the lowest and most degraded of his
own sex, withholds it from “even the noblest
woman in England.”
When that excited and somewhat pathetic
appeal is addressed to us, we have only to con-
sider what a vote really gives.
The parliamentary vote is an instrument—
and a quite astonishly disappointing instru- 181
ment it is—for obtaining legislation; that is,
for directing that the agents of the State shall
in certain defined circumstances bring into ap-
plication the weapon of physical compulsion.
Further, the vote is an instrument by which
we give to this or that group of statesmen an-
thority to supervise and keep in motion the
whole machinery of compulsion.
To take examples. A vote cast in favour
of a Bill for the prohibition of alcohol—if we
could find opportunity for giving a vote on
such a question—would be a formal expression
of our desire to apply, through the agency of
the paid servants of the State, that same physi-
cal compulsion which Mrs. Carrie Nation put
into application in her “bar-smashing” cru-
sades.
And a vote which puts a Government into
office in a country where murder is punishable
by death is a vote which, by agency of the
hangman, puts the noose round the neck of
every convicted murderer.
So that the difference between voting and 182
direct resort to force is simply the difference
between exerting physical violence in person,
and exerting it through the intermediary of
an agent of the State.
The thing, therefore, that is withheld from
“the noblest woman in England,” while it is
conceded to the man who is lacking in nobility
of character, is in the end only an instrument
by which she might bring into application
physical force.
When one realises that that same noblest
woman of England would shrink from any
personal exercise of violence, one would have
thought that it would have come home to her
that it is not precisely her job to commission
a man forcibly to shut up a public-house, or
to hang a murderer.
One cannot help asking oneself whether, if
she understood what a vote really means, the
noblest woman in England would still go on
complaining of the bitter insult which is done
to her in withholding the vote.
But the opportunist—the practical politi- 183
cian, as he calls himself—will perhaps here in-
tervene, holding some such language as this:
—“Granting all you say, granting, for the sake
of argument, that the principle of giving votes
to woman is unsound, and that evil must ulti-
mately come of it, how can you get over the
fact that no very conspicuous harm has re-
sulted from woman suffrage in the countries
which have adopted it? And can any firm
reasons be rendered for the belief that the giv-
ing of votes to women in England would be
any whit more harmful than in the Colo-
nies?”
A very few words will supply the answer.
The evils of woman suffrage lie, first, in the
fact that to give the vote to women is to give
it to voters who as a class are quite incom-
petent to adjudicate upon political issues;
secondly, in the fact that women are a class of
voters who cannot effectively back up their
votes by force; and, thirdly, in the fact that
it may seriously embroil man and woman.
The first two aspects of the question have 184
already in this controversy been adequately
dealt with. There remains the last issue.
From the point of view of this issue the con-
ditions which we have to deal with in this coun-
try are the absolute antithesis of those ruling
in any of the countries and States which have
adopted woman suffrage.
When woman suffrage was adopted in these
countries it was adopted in some for one
reason, in others for another. In some it was
adopted because it appealed to the doctrinaire [theoretical]
politician as the proper logical outcome of a
democratic and Socialistic policy. In others
it was adopted because opportunist politicians
saw in it an instrument by which they might
gain electioneering advantages. So much was
this the case that it sometimes happened that
the woman’s vote was sprung upon a com-
munity which was quite unprepared and in-
different to it.
The cause of woman suffrage was thus in
the countries of which we speak neither in its
inception nor in its realisation a question of 185
revolt of woman against the oppression of
man. It had, and has, no relation to the pro-
grammes of the militant suffragists as set out
at the outset of this letter.
By virtue of this, all the evils which spring
from the embroiling of man and woman have
in the countries in question been conspicuously
absent.
Instead of seeing himself confronted by a
section of embittered and hostile women voters
which might at any time outvote him and help
to turn an election, man there sees his women
folk voting practically everywhere in accord-
ance with his directions, and lending him a
hand to outvote his political opponent.
Whether or no such voting is for the good
of the common weal is beside our present ques-
tion. But it is clearly an arrangement which
leads to amity and peace between a man and
his womenkind, and through these to good-will
towards all women.
In England everything is different.
If woman suffrage comes in here, it will 186
have come as a surrender to a very violent
feminist agitation—an agitation which we have
traced back to our excess female population
and the associated abnormal physiological con-
ditions.
If ever Parliament concedes the vote to
woman in England, it will be accepted by the
militant suffragist, not as an eirenicon, but as a
victory which she will value only for the better
carrying on of her fight à outrance [to the bitter end] against the
oppression and injustice of man.
A conciliation with hysterical revolt is
neither an act of peace; nor will it bring
peace.
Nor would the conferring of the vote upon
women carry with it any advantages from the
point of view of finding a way out of the ma-
terial entanglements in which woman is en-
meshed, and thus ending the war between man
and woman.
One has only to ask oneself whether or not
it would help the legislator in remodelling the
divorce or the bastardy laws if he had con- 187
joined with him an unmarried militant suf-
fragist as assessor.
Peace will come again. It will come when
woman ceases to believe and to teach all man-
ner of evil of man despitefully. It will come
when she ceases to impute to him as a crime her
own natural disabilities, when she ceases to
resent the fact that man cannot and does not
wish to work side by side with her. And peace
will return when every woman for whom there
is no room in England seeks “rest” beyond the
sea, “each one in the house of her husband,” and
when the woman who remains in England
comes to recognise that she can, without sacri-
fice of dignity, give a willing subordination to
the husband or father, who, when all is said
and done, earns and lays up money for her.
A. E. WRIGHT.
March 27, 1912. 188
Prepared by Thomas Pollock aka Spartacus,
Editor of
Slight formatting changes were made to accommodate the new medium of the web, e.g., page numbers now appear on the margin of the last line of the page as opposed to underneath to avoid breaks in the text.