Women As Citizens

( Originally Published 1919 )

THERE are philosophers who can no more endure women patiently than they can the toothache, but they lack the indulgence to see that what they detest in women is not so much the brand of femininity as the mark of slavery. The dishonesty, the rapacity, the untrustworthiness, the shallowness, the ferocious egoism of women are those of all slaves who have no outlet for their passions save through their vanity, which is thus made to do the work of the will. The slavery of women has deprived men of their free companionship, with the result that they have been driven to make the brain do the work of the mind. Between the male brain and female vanity it is small won-der that a sorry mess has been made of human affairs, which have only been saved from irretrievable disaster by the fact that humanity as a species knows its business fairly well.

If their society is to be restored to sanity, both men and women have to readjust their method of living and to discover a mea s by which, in public matters at least, they can understand each other, for while men thin only with their brains and women with their anity they must be hopelessly at cross purposes. (The men who, like women, think wit their vanity are "sports," who, though frequently very successful, are insignificant.) As for life under modern conditions vanity is a less adequate equipment than brain, it is women who are first in moving towards a change, an making the discovery that the will only responds to the call of the mind. In their slavery they had accepted that men had a monopoly of mind; but when under industrialism their slavery became desperate, because their work was taken out of their hands, they had for a gen ration or two the leisure to consider the situation the handiwork of man and to find o it that there was no mind in it whatever, and that such will as could be discerned was that of the species: no conscious will at all. The shock of it cracked the mirror of woman's vanity, and in her discontent she began to clamour for freedom, imagining that man was withholding it from her and not suspecting that she, by accepting slavery, was withholding it from man. Such has been the comedy of the sexes which the self-conscious generations have mistaken for a tragedy so profound that they have raised sex to the level of a taboo.

The development of self-consciousness into consciousness is the greatest effort of humanity for thousands of years, and it is perhaps from exhaustion after this effort that so many calamities are listlessly accepted as inevitable. The young equipped with a new consciousness do not know how to use it in a world still dominated by the old. They waste it in wild experiments and in intellectualising such experience as they can gather, though that is not much, as they are thwarted on every side by the remnants of self-consciousness, and their vision and sensations are so novel that they can find no guidance not even in the masterpieces of art of the ancient world. They find themselves more akin to the primitives and yet different from them. They have in living something of the joy of Heraclitus in philosophy, the exhilaration of being the first to do something. Their clucking is like that of the first hen to lay the first egg until they begin to wonder whether they are not after all the first egg. So absorbed have they beer with their novelty that they have passed through the horror of the war almost as a mater of course, and it has become a screen between them and the old world. They are not irritated or provoked by the old people; they simply do not understand them, nor do they want to, except that they realise that the self-consciousness of the old must always have been a barrier between themselves and their lives. If the old people want power and pomp and sovereignty let them have them. It is not only the intellectuals, the intelligentsia, who feel this, it is the young everywhere, intoxicated with their new consciousness and apt to despise intelligence, intellect, even imagination. Of course a great deal of their exhilaration is illusion, and they do not realise that a great deal of what they feel is the will of humanity asserting itself after ages of neglect, but they know that it is a force to which they can trust themselves absolutely, even through the direst misfortune. We are at the beginning of an age of faith, but it is different from its predecessors in that the faith will be conscious and critical, and fortified with knowledge and scientific methods of increasing and applying that knowledge. To the scientific study of the universe the young generation has gained the courage to add the scientific study of human nature. Without a conscious will the attempt would be in vain, but that has been gained, as will be acknowledged later, through the self-conscious sufferings of the preceding generations, but at present the gain seems like a miracle proceeding from some unimaginable source. It has as yet found no expression: it has been too intoxicating to leave room for more than living, but as it gathers soberness there is no doubt that it will be absorbed into an immense social effort. Seeking God through humanity it must first make humanity permeable, and destroy thé conditions which make for denseness and stolidity. Already the intellectuals have accepted that as their task, and they set about it with something of the enthusiasm of the Americans for commerce and with much the same machinery, advertisement and a card-index. They are content to let the Americans be the bagmen of the world. They want to be its inspiration and to have that inspiration creeping through every cranny of society. Like people enamoured at first sight they are in love with love, but they want to understand love and to be conscious through every phase of it. They accept the sway not of emotions but of a will, and to that th y devote their passions. Being conscious of the creative will in humanity they must, to pre-serve themselves, discover their own, and to that all their energies are attracted. Heroes and saints have lived, like that in the past, but with bitter agony and suffering. The danger for the young of this marvellous time, this ad-vent of an age of faith, is that they live so with such ease. They have no perplexity, hardly a shadow of doubt: there is so much that they can do without while the g owing will broods within them, and they ca smile happily at the desperate efforts of their elders to solve problems which do not need solution, because they will disappear when the w or-der begin to take shape and human beings become conscious in selection of what they want, instead of taking a hundred different things from life in case they should want one of them.

These young people are not possessive. They do not thrust upon each other what they have, but what they are. They turn to each other for confirmation of what they believe to be growing in themselves, and, finding t, they are reassured and smile happily and mysteriously. They exasperate their elders by leaving undone that which they ought to do, by doing in half an hour what has traditionally been done in a day, and by striking out in different directions every hour or so. They break every convention and many laws, but somehow they do not come to grief because they believe they are on the way to a world in which men and women will understand each other. They take understanding for granted, and even from the most unexpected and conventional persons it is forthcoming. Even the old are learning to appreciate the confidence with which the young face disaster, and to realise that it is a stronger power than calculation because it has no need to encroach on moral capital.

On the other hand, the confidence of the young is perhaps excessive. They have more to learn than they will admit, and they rely too much upon intellectual formulation. But whatever the tragedies their faults may bring about they will meet them face to face and not leave them to go dragging on through the generations. Their situation is such that they must do this, for they are charged with a direct responsibility to humanity: they h e no church, no nation, no group to which their loyalty can be diverted. The powers of work at their disposal have broken down frontiers and barriers.

As women have had less to unlearn than men they are the more ready to assume this new citizenship that has been created out of the world's agony. Their desire for it, already awake before the catastrophe, is no longer thwarted by the institutions and preju- ices of the old world, and they no longer need to waste energy in fighting as young men must against tradition, not to destroy it but to wring from it what is valid for the present and the future. Women, therefore, can bring into public affairs a freshness and eagerness of des re that have been far to seek, and they als bring into the open the secret knowledge of the ways of men which hitherto they have used to defend themselves. Men reveal themselves to, women as they never do to each other, and with women admitted to the councils of humanity the need for a great deal of bluff and blague disappears. To a smaller degree the same is true from the other side, and the many little conspiracies of women drop out from the machinery Uf social intercourse. A big step has been taken to-wards collective honesty, which, like everything else collective, depends upon the necessities of the individual, which have been relieved more by the evolutionary raising of the status of women than by any other factor in the great development now in progress. To this more than to anything else is due the release of consciousness which has made it possible for humanity to turn from the exploration of the earth to that of human experience.

At the same time it has to be remembered that times of spiritual release bring great illusions which always receive the warmest welcome in the most eager minds, and it is likely that much of what women gain in freedom will be lost in self-deception, and their contribution to society may for a long time be thwarted by themselves as they gradually transfer their power of passionate concentration from individual human beings to humanity, but they themselves will make that easier as they bring to light the discomforts and crushing deprivations from which they have long suffered in silence. Above all, they will bring into the scheme of politics a care for children which has for too long been absent. Without that care it has been impossible to find any true orientation for public affairs, and no religion —be-cause religions have kept women in subjection and used their power of devotion to create organisation has been strong enough to make the Holy Family a valid symbol of worship. Religion has taken from society its most fiery force, the reproductive instinct, and spent it upon thin air. For the lack of it me have been working unsupported in a kind of void and have depended too exclusively upon the creative powers of men of genius, always too far ahead of their contemporaries to be able directly to serve them; so that, in fact, two societies have been created, one in which artists, prophets and seers have dwelt in equality, and another which is a spurious imitation of it in which men of action imitate the greatness without having the force of these others, and set up tyranny in the place of authority. A tyranny, even with the support of the greatest number, has no authority, and it is the tragedy of the nineteenth century that it folio ' ed Napoleon instead of Goethe. The glory of a Napoleon fades, while that of a Goethe increases in perennial fecundity; but the slave mind in its stunted ignorance is always so dazzled by a successful tyranny that it cannot see the light of authority, and women hitherto have been slaves, the slaves of a system even when they have gained the freedom of love. They are skilled in self-martyrdom, apt in immolation, acknowledging loyalty to husbands, lovers, or children; but blind to any larger loyalty, often bringing ruin when they seem most noble, because their virtues are that of the sham society which has imposed itself on the true, largely through their docile acceptance of the theatricality with which men have deceived themselves and falsified their values. That sham society has been like a film overlaying life, but with the immense movement of the soul by which women have gained a new status, the film has been broken and the light of authority set up by generations of work can shine through to the humblest life. Once it becomes clear that work is the only available authority it is apparent that circulation of work is to society what the circulation of the blood is to the human body, and as work has extended in its effects from community to community everything that impedes its circulation has to give way. Accordingly a system which attempted to confine women to their natural functions could not but break under tat in-creasing pressure which demanded also he labour of women. It is the health-giving quality of work (as distinct from drudgery) that it makes the individual who does it insist that it shall be done upon honourable conditions, because a man or a woman can pocket his or her personal pride ; but pride of work cannot summarily dealt with, for, consciously consciously, it entails pride in humanity establishes, perhaps, even more clearly love, contact with the creative will. Th tact is more living in women than through their child-bearing instinct, an this is fortified with contact through pride work a formidable power is released. Already under the old system there were common instances of this in the successful mother who was also house-proud. When women ave in society the same pride that they have in the orderliness of the home, then they Will not waste so much time as they do now in trying to understand the jargon with which for ages men have vainly been attempting to ,understand each other. Political economy should then receive the necessary corrective from domestic experience, and we might even be on the road to the evolution of a sound finance which would put an end to the old trouble of money that there is always too much of it or too little.

It must be in the experience of every married woman to have seen her husband's swagger ooze away as the pressure of their difficult relationship forced him into surrender to the inexorable fact that his success as a human being depends upon his success as a husband and father. Something like that has happened between the sexes in these crucial years. Men have been forced to face the truth that they and their handiwork depend upon their relationship with women. If that is false, so will be their doing. The upshot of this discovery is the further revelation that humanity is deeper than sex.

Women, one suspects, have known that all the time, and have worked through sex, while men have always been inclined to run away from it. The pity of it has been that women have not wanted anything much. They have bowed too humbly to the natural law which limits their fecundity to the thirty years between fifteen and forty-five, and have over-looked the fact that, while their maturity be-gins soon after twenty, that of a man does not begin until he has passed thirty, so that in any generation responsibility first falls upon the women. To that may be due some of e jealousy between the sexes, but if resposibility begins with the women of a generation it ends with the men, and both need the support of the other.

Recognition of these facts, points, like that of other salient facts, to education as the solvent of the difficulty and as the road leading from a congested existence to a free life. The education of the last fifty years was necessitated by the recognition of the facts adduced by science working upon the pheno- mena of Nature. The facts revealed by the operation of science upon human nature necessitate a new phase of education, which mus take its character from the new needs of women as citizens and break away from the traditions that have grown out of the education of men rooted in religion, which, drawing its sustenance from the captivity of women, has no more to give to humanity. The price of material progress and physical adventure was the subjection of women. That price has been paid full, and the desire and the will of humanity is for spiritual adventure, and the price of that is the price of liberty eternal vigilance. That, in every generation, as we have seen, begins with the women and ends with the men, and both must be trained for it, and their training is the first charge upon the efforts of humanity.

It is true that defence comes before opulence, but the only defence of humanity is education, for without that one generation will always defend itself at the cost of the next in defiance of justice and to the lasting injury of liberty. To the present generation these truths have been brought home in bitter fashion, and the young women of today entering upon citizenship are vigilant in their guard of the freedom they have won, not only for themselves, but also for men who could never be free while their efforts were based upon the subjection of those who should be most deeply their companions. With the needs of women ennobled by freedom, those of men become subject to fundamental emendation: the need of wisdom is increased, that of physical wealth reduced, since a man must henceforth win by his character that respect which hitherto has been too easily given to his property. With women no longer property the value of property diminishes, the conceptions based on it lose their force, and socially influence becomes greater thing than power. No man with force or economic pressure at the back of his mind can utter the true word which again and again in history has shown itself mightier than force; and it is by the true word that henceforth humanity must be governed, because the violence of men reacts always to their own hurt. With women entering upon citizenship violence receives a check, and the untruth with which it is excused and maintained will be speedily reduced to absurdity by the art le . rued by women in their slavery of supporting male fictions even after the need for them has ceased, until, without a word, they are exposed. Life is a comedy, and it is tragic only in so far as men and women fail at crucial moments to summon up the vitality necessary to meet them. Then the conventions break, passions snap control, and the brutality of human nature for a time holds sway. On the whole women are better comedians than Men, more tenacious, tougher and more courageous; and even as slaves they have been marvellously acute in giving men what they want rather than what they think they want. These powers of theirs have hitherto been confined to the family, but the family has been absorbed into the industrialised community, which, for lack of making a proper use of women, has come to grief. The omission is being repaired. The advent of women as citizens releases men for further and higher adventures, which, properly directed, should make the world a place greater than was ever dreamed of by those who, as feudalism fell away into the past, strove to mark out for humanity the direction of its destiny.

The gentleness of women is largely a male fiction. They have a ferocity and a hardness which, turned in the right path, are the very qualities needed for breaking through the con-fused thoughts and emotions which are humanity's legacy from the misfortunes of the past. Their experience has made them realistic, perhaps a little cynical and suspicious of the too easy idealism in which men have been accustomed to take refuge. Above all, they know only too well that bills have to be paid, and that recklessness in public affairs reacts fatally upon the price of food. They know that before anything else is attempted, children must be fed and clothed. They are the last to emerge from feudalism, and they should bring into the new society something o the spirit that animated the old, something • f the pride that built in every community a ho se of God and made it nobler than any house built for man. It is for lack of this that communal buildings in the modern world are so ignoble. They are built only to serve the practical needs of men without reference to their service of a power greater than themselves, without which so nicely adjusted are the laws of humanity they cannot gain even their own advantage. Women serving the family ha e that ingrained in them, and, turned to the service of humanity, they will gain the support of humanity's creative will. Theirs is the power, theirs should be the desire, and with the rests the immediate responsibility for the fat of the next few generations. With them largely rests the task of rebuilding society fr from the bottom up, so that when the superstructure collapses, as it inevitably must, there shall re-main a finer edifice. While the new society is built we have to dwell in the ruins of the old. The important thing in society is not political institutions, but the lives of. the millions of workers which go on much the same whatever happens. It is out of them that the communal life grows, and it will be the first duty of women to see that the new communal life is not divorced from them as the old has been, and most probably the first field of their energies will be the schools which have to be re-claimed from the old communal life. That is the key to the reorganisation of social machinery. Reclaim the schools and the rest follows. Every village, every parish, should have a school in which it can take a pride as the institution through which the community acknowledges its responsibility for the children, who, after the first few years, need more than their parents can possibly give them. With the community accepting responsibility, the parents are then released to achieve a greater fulfilment of their lives than if they are crushed by the burdens imposed on them by the exercise of their natural functions. Again, it can-not be too often repeated that the purpose of society is to save men and women from being overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Society, indeed, has grown out of the pooling of responsibilities, and again it must be repeated that its sole sanction is work. The release of women has come about through their being deprived of the work imposed on them by the feudal family. They have claimed and won the right to contribute their work, over and above the bearing and care of children, to the indu trial community. With their victory ends the lose division of humanity into nations ; and humanity has entered upon a phase when it can n be acknowledged, practically as well as ideally, that the industrial community and it are one. Women then must either be citizens of the world or slaves; and if they meet the latter fate, with them the whole will dwindle away from its destiny and the races will have entered upon the process of disintegration.

Coming fresh to citizenship, it is likely that women may be able to supply that civic sense which is so painfully lacking in the organisations of Capital and Labour, both of whom naturally enough in a competitive state of society aim at getting as much as ever they can for their women and children to secure them against poverty. Remove poverty and you remove the necessity for organisation against it. Organisation can then be used for fruitful (purposes. Women who are used to being supported may remove from the male mind the objection to the idea of it. Every human being is, in fact, supported by humanity, but it has been the custom to ignore that fact. Admit it and there can come into social thought the simplification which scientific discoveries have brought about in philosophy. The refusal to admit it, the jealous preservation of sovereignty is the chief stumbling-block in the way of the unification of society. Women have a certain skill in painlessly picking obstinate ideas out of the funds of men, who often cling to them out of an unnecessary chivalry. Let it be so now and the world will be unmeasurably the gainer.

Above all, women are subject to psychic storms which clear the air, become fouled and poisonous wherever human beings are gathered together. The brooding thought of women breaks in them and fertilises the seeds of thought in men, bringing forth what else remained concealed, or covered up in unconsciousness.' Many a woman, even where she could not understand, has counted her life well lived because she was once the occasion of some germination in the soul of a man. It is among the profoundest needs of a woman and gives her her most subtle powers. Let them be used for the community, as they must when women begin to live socially, and a great source of power that is now almost entirely wasted can give its energy to the working of the whole.

It becomes clear, then, that men and women must more and more be allowed to govern themselves, to create and adapt the machinery they need for the satisfaction of their re. irements, and that social philosophy must a advance to this from the idea of getting out of men and women as much as possible for . little as possible. There is no reason why, in time, society should not be as supple and as varied as life itself, giving back an hundred-fold the work that is put into it.