Part 2

Creative power of any kind is, of course, the obverse of an equal power for destruction. No one can put an engine out of action so deftly as the man who designs engines. Woman’s power of fostering growth in human life implies, therefore, an equal power of hindering it. We must accept both sides of the hypothesis, and in doing so we find fresh proof that it is true. If the average man sees woman alternately as an angel and a devil, it is because she exercises both a creative and a destructive influence upon his inner life. He would neither fear nor reverence her so intensely if she were merely an inferior counterpart of himself. Nor would he lay upon her such peculiar disabilities. These disabilities are not only of the kind that would suffice to keep an inferior class in subjection. Inferior classes, whether actually enslaved or not, are kept in their place by being excluded from the sources of external power, such as the possession of wealth, the command of armies, the exercise of political rights. Certain moral and religious sanctions always rise to reinforce the law on these points, for the springs of human conduct lie in the unconscious, and morality and religion deal directly with the emotions of unconscious life. The ruling class seeks therefore to impose a morality consonant with its own interests, and fears a new religion more than a revolution. But it is always conscious of the expediency of the conventional morality it imposes on inferiors, and attaches no ultimate value to it. The model subordinate, obedient and loyal, is not reverenced or idealised: he is not regarded by his superiors as a type of perfect manhood, but only as a perfect subordinate. He may be a bad man provided that he is a good servant. The position of women in a men’s State does not correspond exactly to this. True, if we substitute the function of motherhood in its narrow interpretation for the function of servitude, the correspondence is exact up to a point. The wife and mother is excluded from independent access to the sources of external power: and she is expected to be obedient and loyal to her marriage contract. Moral and religious sanctions are called in to transform her marriage contract into a vow. The stock moral virtue required of her is chastity; she must have sexual relationships only within the pale of marriage. All women, because they are potential wives, must copy her virtues and avoid what is forbidden to her. So far this is only another aspect of the fact that men restrict the function of women to physical motherhood, and define their own responsibilities by the institution of marriage. Women are treated exactly as an inferior class with a definite function, that of child-bearing. But the correspondence stops here. The disabilities imposed upon women by conventional morality cut deeper still. The sexually good woman must be not only good but ignorant: whole tracts of human experience are withheld from her knowledge. Moreover, her chastity and her ignorance are translated by men themselves into an abstraction of artificial purity and reverenced as their ideal of womanhood. An ideal of womanhood cherished in men’s States, which has for its essential elements ignorance of life and a debased conception of sex, can be regarded with scepticism. It is noteworthy that intellectual ignorance does not have the same prestige, and therefore cannot be so important. Even an “educated” woman is conventionally more acceptable than a woman who is shocked at nothing. The conventionally pure good woman is shocked at a great many things: that is to say, she does not merely condemn certain phases of conduct, which would be at least a forthright attitude, she is uncomfortable and timid when they are brought to her notice. Now if man’s reverence for women is an acknowledgment of her vaguely realised power, at the same time in that very reverence, conventionalised into an ideal, he obviously safeguards himself against her power. Apparently, women can be kept in a subordinate position if ignorance of human conduct is imposed upon them as a necessary condition of social approval. It can be inferred that a fearless attitude towards human life is the first essential quality of a free woman, and that conventional morality is imposed with such emphasis upon women because the creation of moral values is their own peculiar vocation. Men are more concerned to prevent women from having untrammelled judgment and action in affairs of morality than from having access to the possession of wealth. In other words, women are hindered not only from external power, but from the inward power of creating independent moral and religious values. It is precisely this power which is exercised by creative women in their treatment of others, and the conventionalised ideal of the ignorant good woman is the deepest disability laid upon women in a men’s State. The conventionally good woman helps to perpetuate the formal traditions created by man, traditions which harden into empty shells unless they are continuously vitalised by the independent judgments of women. She accepts the masculine standpoint that human conduct is to be judged entirely by the values of consciously organised life, which are devised for the preservation of existing systems, and are not necessarily humane. She acquiesces in repression and punishment instead of seeking to understand and cherish. Men praise her for this subserviency and unconsciously despise her.

But in preventing her from aggression upon their forms and traditions men lose more than they gain. She is humbugged out of her womanhood, but she is still a woman, and does not cease to influence their inner life. The systems of society--such as marriage--are preserved, but the individual man suffers. He meets hardness where he looks for tolerance, and condemnation where he needs help. Worse still, for her conventionality is borrowed and therefore unintelligent, he finds himself imprisoned in traditions which he himself would destroy and create anew were it not for the timidity of the conventional women.

Thus in a typical men’s State where the creative work of women is ignored, where women are prevented by legal and economic barriers from access to external sources of power and hampered by conventional ignorance of life, they have an insidious influence which evades all the means by which men try to keep it in check. The fabric of the State, the organised systems, remain apparently intact, but the private life of men becomes sour and stale. The more men deny the rights of women in public, the more they are delivered over to the obscure dissatisfactions of their women in private. The conventional women whom men evoke for their own protection have in the end a more fatal, because a thwarted, influence on human life than the fearless women. Among the Hindus, for example, where the social systems of men have hardened into cast-iron (perhaps because the women have been prevented from free expression), the negative power of women is very great. Women are not merely inferior imitations of men: they create men or destroy them.

The question may be put, If the whole of human experience is the natural concern of women, and if women are indeed endowed with the capacity to understand and foster the growth of the human spirit, how is it possible for women to accept a narrow conventional morality? It is possible because unconscious life is remarkably suggestible, and in a society where womanly traditions are mainly negative the continuous pressure of conventional values is applied to girls almost from childhood. Only rare women with a genius for womanhood can resist the potency of such suggestions.

That it is a woman’s destiny to create human beings, whether she fulfils it or not, is amply confirmed by the natural bias of her interests. In spite of convention her interest in human beings is stronger and more spontaneous than her interest in anything else. Almost from the cradle a girl studies the people around her more attentively than a boy does, and is quicker in imitating their tricks of speech and behaviour. A little later she turns naturally to dolls, not because of an absurdly precocious maternal instinct, but because dolls are substitutes for human beings, and her creative fancy can play upon them without restriction. A doll is not necessarily a son or daughter: it is by turns a confidant, a scapegoat, and a talisman. Later still her interest in other people becomes practically a ruling passion: and since she is not merely a potential wife and mother but a potential woman, she is interested not only in possible sweethearts but in everybody. She is inquisitive about human relationships of every kind. She is indifferent to things which have no human interest: she values things for their associations, or the power they give her over other people. The intimacy between an adolescent girl and her bosom friend for the time being is based on a mutual interest in human nature and a common standard of critical values which they apply to each other as well as to the world. They analyse motives, provoke moods, love and hate with such intensity that emotional explosions are inevitable. Their interest is not that of mere spectators at the human comedy: they are ready to play important parts in it; and they test at every point their influence over others.

When fifteen-year-old girls write essays on “What I should like to be,” the aspirations disclosed are rarely intellectual or material. Nearly every girl wants to be popular, to be an influence for good, to establish a reputation for cheerfulness and kindness, in short, to be successful in handling human beings. When she leaves school the same bias continues. The average girl is more interested in the people around her than in her work, especially if her work has little direct human interest. If her daily work does not consist of personal relations to other people, her efficiency in it depends upon the approval of her employers rather than upon her pride in the work itself. She sees herself as the sunbeam in the office, or as the comforter of her employer’s broken life, or as a moral influence--in other words, where no human interest exists in her surroundings she takes pains to invent it. It is this entirely womanly impulse which generates most of the sentiment and scandal among women.

In married life women display the same passionate interest in other people, even though husbands and families absorb a certain amount of it. Neighbours, servants, and children are their dearest topics. No woman is bored when she is discussing other people; and this is true of both educated and uneducated women. The things which primarily concern women as women are human affairs and experiences, material which helps them more capably to scrutinise, to interpret, and to meddle with the people they meet. The result is that they often meddle tediously with other people’s lives. Like Hedda Gabler, they must have their fingers in somebody’s destiny, destructively if not creatively. Destruction of this kind instead of creation is tragic, but it arises at least from a pre-occupation with humanity, and so, unlike war, it is womanly.

Thus the current of women’s interests sets definitely towards actual human beings and concrete situations rather than abstract theories. There are other aspects of womanhood which confirm the hypothesis that women’s strength lies in unconscious rather than in conscious life, and which can be briefly enumerated.

The first of these is too obvious to require comment. By general consent of men, women are more irrational and impulsive than men are. Secondly, women have a strong, if inarticulate, affinity with what is called Nature; a fact which is symbolised by the personification of Nature as a woman. Nature in this sense is the sum of that growing life which has not reached the conscious level of humanity. To this growing life, vegetable or animal, women are never indifferent: their reactions to it are strongly emotional, whether sympathetic or antipathetic. When because of some timidity they cannot exercise their creative power on human beings, they readily foster plants or animals instead, and there are women who can do so with the sureness of intuitive knowledge. They are more obviously affected by natural phenomena than men; their sexual life, for example, is governed by the phases of the moon, and it is claimed that their fertility varies with the rainfall and the earth’s magnetic currents. Thirdly, they have an immediate sense of the significance of life: they have the same vivid interest in even trivial affairs that one finds in dreams. Women have none of the detachment which is equally prepared to prove that life is significant or that it is meaningless. They assume without proof that life, especially human life, is significant; they are so deeply immersed in life that it is not possible for them to question its value as men do. For this reason they are more tenacious of life than men. Fourthly, they come to maturity earlier than men do, although they live longer on the average. This does not mean that women remain in a state of arrested development as compared with men: the advent of puberty does not put a stop to mental and spiritual development. But it may be interpreted as a sign that the creative work of womanhood requires a less elaborate conscious equipment than that of men. The wisdom of conscious life is a structure slowly built by the individual, and needs a long apprenticeship; it is possible that the wisdom of unconscious life exists independently of the individual and waits only for admission. Incidentally, the fact that women have a reasonable expectation of living for twenty-five years after they have ceased to bear children is another proof--if proof be needed--that maternity is not merely a physical function: women go on living as long as their children need them. Lastly, although their creative work consists in the handling of individuals, and although they are finely aware of their own individual reactions, women rarely achieve a conscious individuality. They are so largely unconscious of themselves that they need emotional support for their personalities: it is their danger that they tend to live in a state of perpetual reference to other people; and when they express themselves as individuals, they do so spontaneously and not deliberately. Thus women as a body show a timidity which easily relapses into conservatism, and can only be overcome by urgent necessity. Conservatism becomes the spiritual death of women, as of men: but in women it springs from a timidity of intellect, from a weakness in conscious life; in men from a timidity of emotion, from a fear of the unconscious. This difference between men and women is illustrated in dress, for example. As the consciously organised life of men develops, their clothing expresses less of the emotion, the temperament, the spontaneity of unconscious life: it becomes a uniform, symbolic of their status as rational members of an organised society. They are sure of themselves and of their traditions, consequently fashion is a convention which sits as easily upon them as other conventions, and changes as slowly. It is a reasonable law, deliberately accepted for the sake of convenience and orderliness. Women, on the other hand, are not afraid of temperament and colour in dress; they express in their clothing the spontaneous, vivid, and irrational qualities of unconscious life. But because they are unsure of themselves as members of a public body, they need the assurance of “being in the fashion” to give them the necessary confidence for wearing even the most daring creations. Fashion among women is thus not a law accepted for convenience; it is a kind of emotional support, and it fluctuates as often and as widely as emotions.

V

In this weakness of women’s conscious life we have the key to men’s domination over them. It is the domination of the more articulate over the less articulate consciousness. Man is the intellectual organiser of life. He arranges life in patterns, or, as has been already suggested, translates it into conscious forms, and he is therefore more interested in the nature of his patterns than in the material out of which he composes them. He begins, where woman ends, with the individual human being and individual experiences; his aim is to lift these into a world of enduring and proved forms. The Platonic idea, for example, is a purely masculine conception. It is possible that man’s world of ultimate abstractions is another aspect of the world from which woman works towards the individual, and that his consciously constructed philosophy, if it were perfected, would coincide with the content of her intuitive wisdom. Thus a circle would be completed in which woman seeks to express the infinite in terms of the individual life, while man seeks to express the individual in terms of the infinite. The difference between them remains, however, not merely a difference in aim but a difference in equipment. Woman is the gateway through which the wisdom of the unconscious comes to be translated by man into conscious form. Her wisdom, derived from unfathomable sources, must be expended upon life incarnate and narrowed into the practical details of everyday circumstance. Her intelligence is fettered, as it were, to actual life, and is best stimulated by concrete situations. Man, on the other hand, moves away from human life: his intelligence ranges freely in a world of speculation and can create perfectly abstract universes of knowledge. His work consequently takes visible shape beneath his hand: it can be tested; it can be destroyed and shaped again; it can achieve completion. The work of woman has none of these attributes: she has no objective proof of success; in the last resort she must depend upon her subjective valuations. Thus the more organised and objective certainties of men impose themselves easily upon women. Men can prove their theories even when they are wrong; women cannot prove their intuitions even when they are right. In his world, that of organised form, man dominates woman naturally.

But woman should dominate man in her own field, the creation of free and harmonious individuals; for the potential progress of humanity may be determined by man, but its actual progress is determined by woman. In a society which recognises the domination of men and denies that of women, the creative work of both is hampered. The danger for men lies in that very quality of detachment which gives their work its value. Left to themselves they become more and more detached, substituting for the fluctuations of life a stable and systematic perfection of theory which is rigidly imposed upon individual members of society. Religion becomes a creed, morality a code of law, government a party machine: even art, which is of all their activities the most accessible to the vitality of unconscious life, is intellectualised and engenders theories of æsthetics instead of works of art. Human beings become mere pegs on which to hang the theories, economic units, and man, the heir of all the ages, is in danger of being crushed under the weight of his own machines. The financial machine in our own day is an excellent example of masculine activity pushed to extremes: it has been successfully detached from human values so that it exists for the production of money and not for the production of goods and services to humanity. The mere individual has ceased to be of any importance, and even the inventions or discoveries of his intelligence are valued only in terms of money. It is a curious paradox that men who, as individuals, are surer of themselves than women, and who command their conscious energies more freely, should inevitably create systems to which the individual is subordinated. A system of this kind is not necessarily an evil, but when it makes no allowance for women’s values, for their sense of the significance of human life and the individual human being, it moves to its extreme logical conclusion and becomes inhuman.

This over-emphasis of masculine activities was conceivably necessary at a point in history when civilisation was in its infancy and the need for organisation was greater than the need for individual freedom. Perhaps at such a point the domination of men over women began. But the discrepancy between human and institutional values is now so great that even men feel it acutely; it has disquieted women for some time and is forcing them into the open. It looks as if during the next few generations the really creative New Woman will emerge, for conventional morality is no longer so powerful among women, and they are gradually deserting the blind alleys into which they rushed in their first efforts at self-assertion.

It does not follow that women by themselves can save humanity. Men must face their own problems, and women are naturally ill-equipped to create new forms of society. But it is the business of women to create the creators of social forms, and they cannot escape a certain responsibility for the present tension in our organised life. Absolute domination by either sex is no longer necessary; the modern world needs the creative work of both. Woman by herself loses a sense of proportion, just as man by himself loses touch with reality. Man’s intellectual conclusions must be checked by woman’s intuitive knowledge of the human spirit, and woman’s spontaneous wisdom must be helped by man’s intellectual vision. Both are creative although they depend upon each other: there is no room on either side for false pride or humility.

VI

It is now advisable to consider attentively the statement that creative women need new and independent moral values since conventional morality expresses a man’s standpoint rather than a woman’s. If the latter part of this statement can be proved, that conventional morality is necessarily masculine, then the first part must inevitably be accepted.

It has already been postulated that women derive their greatest strength from unconscious life and are concerned with growth. Their energies and interests turn spontaneously towards the living human beings upon whom their influence is exerted. This influence, because it is largely unconscious, is not rational but emotional; when it is directed positively towards other people it is best described as love. Creative love is the fundamental attribute of womanhood, as perhaps creative thought is of manhood. Its aim is to foster harmony and strength in the individual.