Part 1

WOMEN: AN INQUIRY

THE HOGARTH ESSAYS

I. MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN. By VIRGINIA WOOLF. 2_s._ 6_d._

II. THE ARTIST AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS. By ROGER FRY. 2_s._ 6_d._

III. HENRY JAMES AT WORK. By THEODORA BOSANQUET. 2_s._ 6_d._

IV. HOMAGE TO JOHN DRYDEN. By T. S. ELIOT. 3_s._ 6_d._

V. HISTRIOPHONE. By BONAMY DOBRÉE. 3_s._ 6_d._

VI. IN RETREAT. By HERBERT READ. 3_s._ 6_d._

VII. FEAR AND POLITICS: A DEBATE AT THE ZOO. By LEONARD WOOLF. 2_s._ 6_d._

VIII. CONTEMPORARY TECHNIQUES OF POETRY. By ROBERT GRAVES. 3_s._ 6_d._

IX. THE CHARACTER OF JOHN DRYDEN. By ALAN LUBBOCK. 2_s._ 6_d._

X. WOMEN: An Inquiry. By WILLA MUIR. 2_s._ 6_d._

XI. POETRY AND CRITICISM. By EDITH SITWELL. 2_s._ 6_d._

WOMEN: AN INQUIRY

BY

WILLA MUIR

Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C. 1 1925

TO

VIOLET SCHIFF

Printed in Great Britain by NEILL & CO., LTD., EDINBURGH

“Methinks, brother,” replied my father, “you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong.”

_The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy._

WOMEN: AN INQUIRY

INTRODUCTORY

MEN and women are latecomers to this planet, but they have existed for a very long time, judged by human standards. One might reasonably expect the difference between them, if it is an essential difference, to be now capable of formulation. An essential difference would be a difference distinctively human, that is, spiritual as well as physical, and at the same time distinctively sexual.

External differences, such as the presence or absence of beards and other secondary sexual characteristics, do not satisfy the first part of this definition, and are to be disregarded. Many so-called differences in social behaviour are also not essential differences. A valuable book written by the Vaertings[1] has made this clear. In a State where men are dominant, as in most of our civilised States for the past two thousand years, certain attributes are considered to be characteristic of women which are equally characteristic of men in a State where women are dominant, as it is said they were for some time in ancient Egypt. The subordinate sex in each case is excluded from complete development, and is considered to be less intelligent, less courageous, and more domesticated than the dominant sex. In fact, men and women share jointly in what is called human nature, and are alike capable of courage, fear, cruelty, tenderness, intelligence, and stupidity. When exhilarated by power and responsibility they display the more dominating qualities, and in subordinate positions they manifest a “slave psychology.” Therefore men and women are not to be differentiated as brave or timid, intelligent or stupid, strong or weak, because a classification of this kind is too broadly human and not distinctively sexual.

It is not asserted that secondary physiological differences between the sexes or social differences in behaviour have no significance. Possibly sexual differentiation is so fundamental that it modifies the least reactions of men and women; but to begin an investigation of these would require exhaustive scientific information outside the scope of this essay, which is an attempt to discover if the division of the human race into men and women involves a division of spiritual as well as of sexual functions, so that the creative work of women is different in kind from the creative work of men. From this point of view the differences mentioned are significant as effects rather than causes, and a consideration of them must be dismissed as unfruitful. The aim of this essay, then, is to find a conception of womanhood as something essentially different from manhood. An essential difference would persist through all the variations of behaviour caused by the dominance of either sex: consequently the validity of this inquiry is not impaired by the restriction of its material to the activities of men and women in our present one-sided civilisation. The knowledge that it is one-sided, because men have for so long been dominant over women, is valuable in helping to distinguish what is essential from what is accidental. The subordination of women makes it difficult but not impossible to recognise the essential quality of womanhood. In a masculine civilisation the creative work of women may be belittled, misinterpreted, or denied: but if it is a reality, its existence will be proved at least by the emotional colour of the denial.

I

It is therefore legitimate to consider the composite picture of woman presented to us by the beliefs and opinions recorded by men. These opinions are curiously contradictory and at the same time generalised. In spite of the intense interest felt in individual women, generalisations about women are common, whereas generalisations about men are made warily, if at all. Men are fellow-creatures of many different kinds: conclusions are drawn about classes of men, such as kings, statesmen, or warriors, angry men, foolish men, or strangers; but nothing less than a universal attribute of humanity is attached to all men, such as that men are mortal, or subject to Fate, or inconstant. But it is seriously believed by Moslems that women have no souls. Thousands of Christians believe that women are not intelligent. Mystics believe that women are on a lower plane of spiritual development than men. Women have no sense of justice, no sense of honour: women cannot be trusted with political power: women are all the better for a good beating with a stick. These generalisations reflect man as the dominant sex, conscious of his superiority. But one comes at once upon contradictions. Every great man has been inspired by some woman. The hand that rocks the cradle indisputably rules the world. A woman was the first cause of original sin, but a woman was the Mother of God. What does this mean? Half of the picture is tinged with vague contempt, and the other half with vague reverence. Apparently the average man sees woman alternately as an inferior being and as an angel.

One must conclude that he is looking at her through a distorting medium. His conception of her as an inferior being is natural, in a man-made State, and were she really inferior it would stop there. His vague reverence for her remains to prevent this conclusion: it is certainly a compensation for something, a distorted recognition of some half-guessed-at power in women. It looks as if man knows that the inferiority of woman is a fiction, that his domination of her and his refusal to admit her to his own level are not justified. In the background there lurks a fear of reprisals. The distorting medium contains fear as one of its elements.

In men’s societies of a primitive or arrested type where the etiquette of conduct betrays its origin, one can see clearly man’s fear of woman. Woman possesses some mysterious power which must be averted by elaborate taboos. A woman can ruin a man’s chances of success in hunting or fishing by touching his gear. A woman’s shadow can blight a religious ceremony. Women are particularly to be feared when they are menstruating or in childbed. The most terrible ghost is that of a woman who dies in childbed. In more developed societies men burn old crones as witches in possession of the evil eye. And even to-day, especially in politics, men find it difficult to rid themselves of the uneasy suspicion that women are dangerous.

This fear proves the artificiality of man’s domination. One can be sceptical of any claim to superiority which throws such a shadow. Natural domination, that domination of skill and experience which is expected of a physician in a sick-room, or of a captain on his ship, establishes itself without arrogance and fear, and is exercised within its natural limits in particular directions. The physician does not interfere with navigation; the captain claims no divine right of authority over medical prescriptions. But the domination claimed by men over women has been a kind of magical quality, an absolute and divine right of authority, a mass domination, and, like all other mass dominations, rooted in fear.

But men’s fear of women proves only that women are not naturally inferior and subordinate. It does not prove that they are different from men. There remains the other side of the picture, however, with its sentimentalised ideal of women. A reverence for woman as a mother appears clearly: the mother is elevated to a place in heaven and worshipped as the Mother of God, or as the Mother of the Gods. Now motherhood is an undisputed function of women which they do not share with men. At the lowest estimate of their powers all women are potential mothers. Men are born of women, and of women only. It must be an important function, for men have tried to belittle it. The theology of the masculine world branded Eve as the first cause of evil, and explained the pains of child-birth as a just punishment from heaven. Still more significant, however, is the fact that Adam and Eve were created by a masculine God in a garden, and that the theologians could not leave them there. It was necessary to bring them from the plane of abstract art on to the plane of humanity. But only a woman can create human beings, and therefore it was the woman who had to bring them out of the mythical garden into reality--a confession of failure for the theologians, and they wreaked their revenge on Eve. Yet in spite of themselves they were driven to attribute to a woman the decisive action which transformed the figments of a male God into men and women.

But motherhood was smirched with original sin. Later on it was still further belittled. Women were regarded as mere receptacles, passive receptive bodies which created nothing. Men must have felt that motherhood was important, or they would not have tried to explain it away altogether. But the sentimental ideal of woman as the mother still persisted, especially among men, and could not be explained away: so, finally, motherhood was allowed by popular opinion to be a creative function, but of a purely physical nature, and it was further defined as the sole justifiable function of women. Mr. Rudyard Kipling expressed this very neatly when he said that blind Nature made man for several ends and woman for only one. In Oriental countries the still more logical conclusion is drawn that women justify their existence only by producing men-children. In a society committed to this point of view childless women are failures in life, and the unmarried woman is a ridiculous nuisance. If social remedies such as polygamy, suttee, infanticide, or euthanasia are not put into practice, the phrase “superfluous women” comes into existence, and the State is shaken by the problem of what to do with its superfluous women.

II

Yet if motherhood can be defined, rightly or wrongly, as the sole function of women, it must be a function which in some degree expresses the quality of womanhood as distinct from manhood. Even in this artificially narrowed field of activity one should be able to find some clue to the essential nature of women. It is therefore advisable first of all to compare motherhood and fatherhood.

Fatherhood seems the more casual relationship of the two. It cannot be proved with the same certainty as motherhood. In a masculine State, where the father is the only legal parent, the institution of marriage is necessary to prevent fathers from successfully disclaiming their children. Maternity is not so easily denied, and in a feminine State it could be proved without the aid of a marriage contract. Where the mother is the sole legal parent civil marriage is unnecessary. Hence, as the Vaertings point out, bastardy is unknown in a feminine State. A mother’s connection with her child is more obvious and immediate than a father’s. A man can be a parent without knowing it: a woman cannot.

Motherhood is also a greater tax on vital energy than fatherhood, even if we take motherhood merely as a physical function. The process of bearing a child culminates in a crisis which exhausts a woman’s energy: to such an extent, indeed, that women often die of it. Moreover, it is a process which, once initiated, is not under conscious control, so that the reserve of energy drawn upon is not deliberately assigned to this purpose by its owner. It is not at her free disposal to grant or to withhold; it cannot be exhausted by an act depending on conscious volition. The race in this respect is stronger than the individual.

It may be that here we are on the track of an essential difference between men and women in the distribution of energy. If fatherhood is a more casual relationship and uses up less time and energy than motherhood, it looks as if the specifically sexual life of men does not require such a jealously guarded reserve of energy as that of women. This would be true of all men and all women, for such a fundamental process as the propagation of the human race could not be left to a section of humanity. As far as the race is concerned, all women are potential mothers, and must have the necessary reserve of energy for this function whether they intend to become mothers or not. They cannot waste it even if they would. Thus men have more energy to waste on their own individual purposes than women: that is to say, men have more energy at their conscious disposal.

III

The implications of this hypothesis must be considered. It is attractive because it establishes an essential difference between men and women which makes them complementary to each other. There can be no question of absolute domination of one sex by the other when the strength of each lies in a different direction. If man’s energy is diverted more into conscious life, woman’s energy is diverted more into unconscious life, and one is not more important than the other. It is a relative, not an absolute difference; both men and women are human beings, and all that concerns human beings is their joint affair. But it means, as will be seen, a difference in the kind of creative work done by each: they will tackle the same things from a different point of view, and with different results. On this basis men and women would each have an equal right, the right of the creative spirit to do its work without let or hindrance.

Conscious life implies rational thinking. In thinking about things we arrange them in patterns, we give them form and system. But we do not give them content; conscious life modifies or seizes upon things which it does not originate. Growth is a process which is already well advanced before it enters consciousness at all. Our patterns of thought, therefore, can never be final: they must from time to time be broken and re-formed to admit new factors pushed into consciousness. But the existence of thought-patterns makes it easier to recognise the significance of new factors, since a thought, once formulated, can be passed on, and becomes a permanent heritage for the human race, part of the body of knowledge established by the processes of consciousness. These processes are continuously at work extending the body of knowledge, systematising thought, and endeavouring to systematise life. Consciousness is thus the shaper of form, which is one aspect of life, and its work tends to a permanence beyond the vicissitudes of living. But its vitality depends upon its communion with the unconscious.

Obviously, unconscious life cannot be clearly defined. We can only guess at its nature from the angle at which its processes enter consciousness, from its disruptive action upon our systems of thought, and from what we can remember of its manifestations in dreams. We know that our emotions rise from it like bubbles through water, that it determines our motives and our interests, and that it is not homogeneous by conscious standards. Its interferences with our conscious life are always spontaneous and strongly charged with feeling. We can infer from such interferences that it has purposes. From its manifestations in dreams and trance states we know that it has access to knowledge by other than conscious means. This kind of knowledge, when it makes its way into consciousness, we sometimes recognise by its emotional force and unexpectedness, and call it intuition. But for the most part we serve the purposes of our unconscious without knowing that we do so, and admit its wisdom only through the indirect channels of conscious rationalisation.

The processes of the unconscious can, however, be roughly described by contrast with the conscious life. The unconscious is concerned with growth rather than form; it is essentially emotional, spontaneous, and irrational. As far as we know, it is concrete in its thinking and not abstract; it creates living agents and not systems of thought. Thus, while conscious processes supply form and permanence in our world, unconscious processes supply growing vitality and change. The creations of unconscious life are wrought in mortal substances, those of conscious life in enduring patterns which are one step removed from life. Unconscious life creates, for example, human beings: conscious life creates, for example, philosophy. If men are stronger in conscious life, and women in unconscious life, their creative powers must express their strength. Men should excel in translating life into conscious forms, women in fostering the growth of life itself. Men will create systems of philosophy or government, while women are creating individual human beings.

IV

The facts of human life tend to confirm this theory. Starting again from the fundamental relationship of a mother to her child, we can see that owing to the peculiar position of the human race, the physical act of motherhood is only the merest beginning of motherhood as a function. Man, because he is destined for a more complex life than the other animals, is born more helpless than any of them, and takes a longer time to come to maturity. His conscious life constructs itself slowly out of the perceptions of every day, establishing at every point in its development a working relationship with his unconscious life, a relationship which is permanently biassed by the experiences of his first years. He is terribly at the mercy of his mother. She can ruin or strengthen that harmony between the conscious and the unconscious which is a necessary condition of full human development. In short, she must create not only a human body, but a human being, if she is to fulfil her function as a mother. But if it is her business to foster growth in her children, it must be equally her business to foster growth in all the people with whom she is intimate. If she is a specialist in the needs of the growing human spirit, her peculiar knowledge must be of service to men and women of all ages who are still capable of growth. And what is true in this respect of mothers must be true for all women: a special equipment for motherhood does not descend suddenly by the grace of Heaven upon the individual. All girls are potential mothers, and whatever gifts of intuition are necessary for the creative work of motherhood must be accessible to all women. If the full content of motherhood is thus recognised, it must inevitably be recognised as a special application of the creative power of women. Therefore the concept “superfluous women” can only arise in a society which denies the real functions of motherhood, and which consequently prevents women from free expression and ignores the creative power of womanhood.