Part 3
Woman thus sees humanity as a collection of individuals of whom no two are identical, growing separately like trees in a common direction, expressing in visible forms, each of which is significant, a common unseen life. If one may use a rough symbolism, women see humanity in vertical lines, while men see it in horizontal strata. The perfection of each individual is women’s business, and the combination of individuals into social systems is man’s business. These two aspects of life are necessarily continuous and inseparable: the difference between them here, as throughout, is one of emphasis. Women emphasise the wholeness of the individual in himself; men, the relation of the individual to his neighbours. It follows that women cannot disregard or eliminate anything which manifests itself in the life of the individual. Man resembles a tree only by analogy; he cannot be lopped of his branches; he can achieve strength and harmony only by carrying everything with him. Nothing is accidental or superfluous in his behaviour; virtues and vices are alike significant. From this point of view whatever prevents the harmony of the complete individual is bad; but it cannot be cut off, it must be fused into the whole, if possible. Woman therefore cannot shirk any issue or turn from the investigation of any human impulse, whatever its nature. She believes in the significance and continuity of all that life which passes into human consciousness, and to her goodness and badness are relative terms, depending on the nature of the immediate problem. Thus she cannot believe in original sin, although she recognises mistakes. Man, on the other hand, believes in the significance of his systems which cut across life horizontally, and he desires to fit the individual into his patterns. Whatever disrupts his patterns is bad and must be cut off. This condition naturally is uniform in its operation, and therefore badness is a constant quantity, something definite which can be written down in a code of prohibitions. Nonconformity with the law is original sin, and arouses his indignation. But as there are many systems, each system has its own code of offences and penalties, and each casts out its own offenders. The Church excommunicates them, the State imprisons them, Society boycotts them, professional bodies expel them; they are dishonoured and ignored, thrust out of the system whose stability they threaten. We penetrate to the very heart of the difference between men and women when we observe that the outcast, whose individuality is formally denied by his fellows, remains none the less an individual to the women who love him. Obviously a morality which satisfies the one point of view does not satisfy the other.
The morality honoured by men is thus a morality designed to preserve the systems which men create. Because it upholds the values of consciously organised life it distrusts the impulses of unconscious life, which it calls original sin, or personifies as a devil. Less civilised and more impulsive races are easily suspected of being direct agents of the devil, as are also the adherents of rival or opposing systems. Women, because they are natural supporters of spontaneous action, are particularly to be distrusted, and masculine morality, as we have seen, imposes a still more stringent code on women than on men. So it happened that Eve, a creative woman vindicating the importance of individual moral values and of an individual conscience that should make each man the equal of God, was necessarily abhorrent to an organised theology. So in the United States it happens that the earnest business man regards negroes and Socialists as public dangers; and in exactly the same way in Scotland the earnest Calvinist believes that Roman Catholics are damned. The follower of a systematic morality has always a black list. Each system produces its own code of offences for nonconformity, and its moral standards are therefore valid only for itself: they are not necessarily religious or universal.
In such a morality the individual is considered only as one who conforms or does not conform to the code required, never as an individual in himself. Further, because it distrusts the spontaneity of unconscious impulses, systematic morality believes that all individuals are bad in their hearts, that they are good only when they are afraid to be bad, and that penalties for badness must be sufficiently grievous to frighten them. Thus systematic morality depends upon fear of punishment. The kind of punishment imposed has only an arbitrary relation to the nature of the offence committed, and no relation at all to the psychological problems in which the offender is involved: it is designed merely to make him suffer, and, if he persists in offending, to remove him. The public school imposes its two hundred or its four hundred “lines” or so many strokes with the birch, or resorts to expulsion; the State fines varying sums, or imprisons for varying periods, or resorts to capital punishment; the business firm reprimands, or fines, or resorts to dismissal. In each case the system and the code which supports it are more important than the life of the individual. Morality of this kind, when it is perfectly developed, is quite impersonal; its abstract impersonality is revered by men as an ideal, which they call Justice.
This systematic morality with its impersonal judgments, its definite codes, its uniformly graded punishments, and its unquestioning repudiation of the offender is a logical pendant to the systems which men create. It is precisely what is usually called conventional morality, and it is essentially masculine in its attitude to the individual. Women, if they are to create free and harmonious individuals, cannot sacrifice an individual to a code; they cannot agree that goodness is only the fear of punishment; they cannot believe in the efficacy of external punishment, and they cannot permit the offender to be cut off. To the creative woman an offender is a question which she must try to answer. Her morality must be psychological rather than punitive, personal rather than impersonal, and fundamentally religious. It is clear that many actions which systematic morality considers bad must appear good to the creative woman, and inversely what she considers good must often be condemned by systematic morality.
Women must therefore create their own independent moral values. It may be objected that if each woman creates her own morality the result will be confusion. This objection, however, arises out of a misapprehension. It is not the business of women to condemn or to punish, or to exact conformity with any definite code of conduct: it is their business to understand the processes at work in the human soul and to help each individual to the fullest and most harmonious expression of his powers. There will always be enough men in the world to secure the existence of systematic morality; any confusion produced by the action of women will be only the rich confusion of life itself. Besides, creative love is not mere sympathy or even affection; if women cannot sacrifice an individual to a code they are equally unable to sacrifice their intuitions about the human race to an individual. Creative love demands a high discipline from those who would exercise it.
VII
The first condition that is required from women is that they shall know themselves. A woman who is ignorant of her own weaknesses cannot help others, for she is incapable of correcting distortions caused by her own fear or anger. The conventional woman hangs conventional ideas between herself and her own nature, thus negating her deepest instincts. She despises and represses part of her own humanity; consequently she has a repressive instead of a fostering effect on other people. Women must therefore be frankly sincere with themselves if they are to be creative, and must make allowances for their own faults in dealing with others. One can only mete out to others the measure one has already meted to oneself.
But though the instrument is imperfect the possibilities are great. The second condition for the exercise of creative love is a boundless faith in the capacity of the human soul for growth. This is where women cannot let the doctrine of original sin stand between them and the individuals with whom they have to deal. The gospel for women is contained in the words, “the kingdom of Heaven is within you,” qualified by the knowledge that Heaven is not a static condition of bliss but a vital harmony of body and spirit. Such a belief demands the fullest scientific knowledge of what promotes or hinders health of body and of mind; and it is the business of the creative woman to get all the information she can.
Religion and morality for women thus resolve themselves into a belief that human life is significant, serving a destiny greater than itself, and the interpretation of that belief into terms of conduct. Because each individual is a unique problem the details of this conduct can never be codified; therefore the morality of women is ultimately spontaneous and individual, depending for guidance upon their creative energies, expressed through love.
The whole world needs creative women, and seems to be unaware of its need. Women themselves do not know how necessary they are. The result is that many waste themselves in trying to be men, and many are content to justify their existence by simple drudgery. There still remain many who feel that a woman should be more to her husband than the keeper of his house, and some of these reserve themselves for men with obvious disabilities, because they think that the average man has no real need of them. But, although the desire is unformulated, nearly all women desire to have a creative influence on their husbands. If it were not so, the “best-sellers” which circulate among women would not resemble each other so strikingly in one respect: the hero is always at odds with the world and is rescued from a gloomy fate by the great love of the heroine. If he is a reputed villain so much the better; the field of action for the heroine is all the clearer. Only a courageous woman looking for really difficult work would marry an ordinary man instead of a villain with a heart of gold.
Women’s creative work is implicitly recognised in many beliefs and customs. The difference between the morality of men and women, for example, is finely illustrated among the Syrian Arabs, where a prisoner on his way to execution is absolved from his sentence if he can lay hold of a woman’s skirts. It is felt, though not understood, by those men of our own country who complain that women have no sense of justice. It is exploited by commercial firms who establish women welfare workers to humanise their business systems, within limits. And the tradition that woman’s place is the home is possibly not entirely determined by the subordinate position of women, but may arise from a sound intuition about the nature of women and their functions. The home is a strategic centre for the creation of human beings. Moreover, a home does not imply a husband: marriage is a desirable but not a necessary condition for women’s creative work. Nor is it bounded by the four walls of a house; whatever affects the people within the home is a woman’s proper business.
VIII
This raises the question of public life for women. There is certainly room for creative womanhood in the public life of the State. The modern State is a highly organised system of government resting upon other systems, such as those of finance, law, and industry; but these complicated organisations ramify downwards until they touch the lives of all the individuals who compose the nation. The point at which they do so is a fitting point for the public activities of women. Women have already begun to mediate between the system of law and the individuals upon whom punishment by imprisonment is imposed; they have called attention to the impossibility of reforming offenders in a prison which ignores individuality and the psychology of the individual. It is true that such mediation is at present usually subject to the veto of the controlling system, and is therefore limited; a disability which is likely to hamper women until the value of women’s work is recognised as equal to that of men. But the obscure dissatisfactions of our time, caused by the discrepancy between institutional and human values are, on the one hand, compelling women to penetrate into public life, and, on the other hand, threatening the stability of all institutions. If women are true to themselves their full co-operation with men is inevitable.
This means that women must carry their womanhood with them into all occupations, otherwise the advantage of their entry into public affairs will be entirely lost. Besides, a woman who tries to do a man’s work in a man’s way pays too high a price for the effort. A man can be formal and abstract without losing his human qualities or ceasing to be creative, since his energies are distributed in that way, but a woman cannot. She must expend more energy than he does to achieve the same formal outlook; she must abandon the creative love for the individual which is essential for womanhood; and, because she has killed herself spiritually, a formal woman is twice as formal as any man, and her work is necessarily barren. Most women are instinctively aware of this danger and protect themselves from the hardening of traditional routine by simple indifference to their work and an escape into marriage as soon as possible. But this is merely an evasion of the problem which women must solve in the next generation or two, the problem of leavening the organised systems of society with human values so that mechanical routine is reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile, women are obviously in their proper place in any occupation which deals directly with human beings.
IX
The differences that have been indicated between the sexes in this essay do not form a hard-and-fast dividing line. Men are not all intellect and consciousness, nor are women all intuition and unconsciousness. It would be juster to say that some men are more intellectual than any woman, and some women more intuitive than any man: but even this statement does not adequately cover the case. The different determination of energy which hinders women from supreme intellectual detachment, and men from supreme human understanding, is subtly operative between these two extremes throughout the intervening space where men and women have a common field of action. It should therefore be traceable in their respective contributions to art.
It is perhaps unwise though interesting to attempt the drawing of distinctions between men’s art and women’s: so much depends upon one’s idea of the nature of art. But it may be possible without becoming entangled in controversy to suggest tentatively some differences, and it seems worth while to see how far the argument will carry us.
From the point of view of this inquiry a work of art ranks as a supremely conscious creation. It has perfection of form and it is permanent: _ars longa, vita brevis_. But it is also directly and vitally connected with the forces of unconscious life; it depends upon, or rather it is characterised by an intensity of emotion which it transmits as if by magic to other people than its creator. Its form can be judged dispassionately, but not its content. It is detached from human life, and is at the same time a revelation of it in a way which is more immediate and more moving than a mere explanation. Thus, although it is as deliberate a product of conscious processes as a mathematical theory or a philosophical idea, or an economic system, it is more intimately linked to unconscious life than any of these; it is perhaps closer to unconscious life than any other kind of conscious creation. For this reason, because it belongs to both worlds, the esteem in which it is held varies according to the values of the people among whom it is practised. And in certain cases the place assigned to art seems to confirm the general theory of this essay, that women create unconscious more than conscious life, and that men associate the values of unconscious life with women. For in communities which are too rigidly organised, because entirely devoted to some system, and which therefore distrust the personal values of unconscious life, communities such as those of the business men here or in the United States, art is distrusted, the artist is considered to be effeminate, and the appreciation and culture of art are left half contemptuously, half respectfully to the women. On the other hand, in communities where the framework of conscious life has not hardened and unconscious values are not depreciated, the formal perfection of art arouses men’s admiration, and the artist is looked upon as the best type of manhood. The artist must thus possess both masculine and feminine qualities; that is to say, he has immediate access to the intuitions of unconscious life, as a woman has, and he creates conscious form, as a man does.
It has been already admitted that the difference between men and women is only a relative difference, that men have unconscious and women conscious powers; the fact that art belongs to both worlds therefore allows both men and women to be artists, while at the same time it makes more difficult than ever the attempt to draw a distinction between men’s art and women’s. There are, however, one or two possibilities which suggest themselves. In the first place, if the energy of women is more absorbed by unconscious life than that of men, it can play less freely in the world of conscious form and is therefore less able to achieve that perfect fusion of form and content on a grand scale which is supreme art. Certainly the greatest artists of historical times have been men, and there is no reason to think that the domination of men is even partly responsible for the lack of great women artists. But if women are handicapped in those arts, such as literature, painting, and the composition of music, where the finished product takes a permanent form detached from the human personality of the artist, they should have an advantage in arts like dancing, singing, and acting, where the actual personality is the medium of expression. And as a matter of fact in arts of this kind women have attained supreme rank. It seems permissible to say that the nearer they are to concrete human life, the more freely and naturally they can create.
Again, it may be suggested that the tendency to elaborate form at the expense of content is a danger to which men are more susceptible in art than women. Women’s greater vitality and comparative weakness in conscious life expose them rather to the opposite fault, a failure to achieve a strictness of form perfectly adequate to the intensity of the emotion expressed. This weakness would be more likely to occur in the rendering of a sustained than of a transient emotion or mood; consequently one would expect perfection of form from women artists in works of small compass and natural spontaneity, such as lyric poems, rather than in an epic or a long descriptive poem. The more elastic the form, the more shapeless it is, the more women are able to use it for sustained work. In literature, at least, this seems to be true. The loose bulk of the novel makes it attractive to women as a medium of expression; and any long works of the first rank written by women are to be found in this form.
Further, since it is women’s business to create individuals rather than systems of society, one would expect the art of women to be concerned largely with actual individual experience and concrete situations. In one sense, of course, all art must do this; but individual experience can be transmuted into symbols and so generalised, or projected into future worlds, and that is precisely what women are unlikely to do. No woman has ever written a great myth or a Utopia.
Finally, if women are essentially creators of human life, we may surmise that they are more interested in the relation of art to life than in art for art’s sake. But this supposition must be made with many qualifications. It is not suggested that in the act of creating or appreciating a work of art women pause to ask, “Of what use is this to life?” If the emotion that they experience is authentic and vivid they will accept its significance simply, as they accept the significance of any vivid experience. But it is suggested that if they reflect upon art at all, this is precisely the question, formulated or not, which will decide their attitude to it. In estimating a work of art women are more likely to be influenced by its content than by its form, and they are capable of drawing practical conclusions from it which would hardly occur to men.
Among the different kinds of art, those which express themselves in a medium closely related to the normal activities of daily life seem to be the most favourable for women. There are more great women artists in literature than in sculpture or painting, and more in these than in music. Literature is expressed through language, which is a medium in constant use between individuals; a paint brush in our civilisation is a less usual means of expression, and the making of music still less usual. One might also hazard a guess that in literature the vocabulary of women contains fewer unusual words than that of men. For the difference between spoken and written language is roughly analogous to the difference between women and men; a correspondence which may influence the style of women both as speakers and writers and their preferences as readers.
X
It may be affirmed, then, that women are more directly linked to concrete life than men, and that they naturally incline to utilitarian standards in judging the importance of things. Men create ideas, and women make use of them: women create human beings, and men make use of them: both men and women seize what they need for the service of their own purposes. Is this difference discernible in the intellectual work of educated women, in the subjects they deliberately choose for research, and in the contributions they make to knowledge? This question, and many others, remain to be answered; and, with them, the fundamental question whether the education of women, and especially their “higher education,” is planned to secure the development of an enlightened womanhood, as distinct from manhood. The present inquiry pretends to be nothing more than a stimulus to the further investigation of essential differences between men and women; but it is clear that if there is any truth in our conclusions, an honest re-statement of women’s aims is necessary. The conception of womanhood which has been adumbrated here, if it is accepted, demands so many adjustments in the attitude of women towards themselves, towards morality, religion, sex, and education that it is impossible within the limits of this essay to give even a hint of them.
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FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _The Dominant Sex_, by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. (Geo. Allen & Unwin.)]
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected.