Part 1

HYPATIA

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_ By J. B. S. Haldane

_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_

_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_ By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams._

_NARCISSUS, or An Anatomy of Clothes_ By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_

_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_ By Dr. F. C. S. Schiller

_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_ By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.

_CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare_ By J. B. S. Haldane

_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_ By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.

_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_ By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.

_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_ By Dora Russell (Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)

_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_ By A. M. Ludovici

_WHAT I BELIEVE_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

_In Preparation_

_PERSEUS, of Dragons_ By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.

_THE FUTURE OF SEX_ By Rebecca West

_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_ By Alan Porter

_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.

_Other Volumes in Preparation_

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

HYPATIA OR WOMAN AND KNOWLEDGE

BY DORA RUSSELL (MRS. BERTRAND RUSSELL)

[Illustration]

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

Copyright 1925 By E. P. Dutton & Company

_All Rights Reserved_

First Printing July, 1925 Second Printing July, 1925 Third Printing February, 1926

_Printed in the United States of America_

To MY DAUGHTER KATE RUSSELL

PREFACE

Hypatia was a University lecturer denounced by Church dignitaries and torn to pieces by Christians. Such will probably be the fate of this book: therefore it bears her name. What I have written here I believe, and shall not retract or change for similar episcopal denunciations.

DORA RUSSELL.

_January, 1925._

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I JASON AND MEDEA _Is there a Sex War?_ 1

II ARTEMIS _The Early Struggles of Feminism_ 13

III ASPASIA _The Younger Feminists_ 26

IV HECUBA _Feminist Mothers_ 40

V JASON AND ADMETUS _Men_ 71

HYPATIA

I

JASON AND MEDEA _Is there a Sex War?_

A feature of modern life is that matrimonial quarrels, like modern war, are carried on on a large scale, involving not individuals, nor even small groups of individuals, but both sexes and whole classes of society. In the past, Jason and Medea, neither of them quite an exemplary character, measured their strength against one another as individuals; and, though each voiced the wrongs and the naked brutality of their sex, it did not occur to either to seek in politics or in social reform a solution or a compromise. Jason, indeed, as the reactionary face to face with a turbulent and insurgent female, called to his aid the powers of kingship and the State――to suppress and exile, but not to remedy. Medea, driven mad――like so many able and remarkable women――by the contempt and ingratitude of men as individuals or in the mass, and aware that the law was a mockery where she was concerned, expressed herself in savage protest after the manner of a militant suffragette. While I can open my newspaper to-day and read of mothers desperate with hunger, misery, or rage drowning themselves and their children, I cannot bring myself to look upon Medea as some elemental being from a dark and outrageous past. As for Jason, he never did appear to anybody as other than an ordinary male.

During the last twenty or twenty-five years, when women were struggling for their right as citizens to a vote and to a decent education, began what has been called the sex war. No woman would deny that we began it, in the sense that we were rebels against a system of masculine repression which had lasted almost unbroken since the beginning of history. In a similar sense, the proletarian to-day begins the class war. Those who remember the heroic battles of suffrage days know that the sequence of events was as follows: We made our just demands and were met with ridicule. We followed with abuse――all the pent-up anger, misery, and despair of centuries of thwarted instinct and intelligence. Man retaliated with rotten eggs. We replied with smashed windows; he with prison and torture. People forget so readily, that it is well to remember that this was in the immediate past; it is not a nightmare picture of one of those future sex wars with which our modern Jasons delight to terrify the timorous of both sexes.

Is there a sex war? There has been. It was a disgraceful exhibition, and would not have come to a truce so soon, but that it was eclipsed by the still more disgraceful exhibition of the European War. In 1918 they bestowed the vote, just as they dropped about a few Dames and M.B.E.’s, as a reward for our services in helping the destruction of our offspring. Had we done it after the fashion of Medea, the logical male would have been angry. They gave the vote to the older women, who were deemed less rebellious. Such is the discipline of patriotism and marriage, as it is understood by most women, that the mother will sacrifice her son with a more resigned devotion than the younger woman brings to the loss of her lover. There may be more in this than discipline. If honesty of thought, speech, and action were made possible for women, it might transpire that on the average a woman’s love for her mate is more compelling than love for her offspring. Maternal instinct――genuine, not simulated――is rarer, but, when found, more enduring.

There was a promise, as yet unredeemed by any political party――for the politician has yet to be found who will realize that the sex problem is as fundamental in politics as the class war, and more fundamental than foreign trade and imperial expansion――to extend this franchise on equal terms with men. “Good fellowship” between the sexes as between classes was the key-note of the war. It was held that women had proved their mettle and that mutual aid was to be the basis of all future activities, public and private. The sex question was deemed settled, and everyone was led to suppose that all inequalities would be gradually eliminated. On this partial victory and this promise feminists called a truce, and abandoned the tactics of militarism.

But you never know where you have Jason. He was a soldier, mark you, and a gentleman. Forbidden open warfare, he takes to sniping. He snipes the married women out of those posts for which they are peculiarly fitted――as teachers or maternity doctors――although it is against the law to bar women from any public activity on the ground of marriage. He cheats unemployed women out of their unemployment insurance more craftily and brutally than he cheats his fellow-men. Instead of realizing that the competition of women in industry and the professions is a competition of population pressure rather than of sex, he seeks by every means in his power to drive woman back to matrimonial dependence and an existence on less than half a miserably inadequate income; and then he mocks at her when she claims the right to stem the inevitable torrent of children whose advent will but aggravate man’s difficulties as well as her own. But worse than all the sniping is the smoke-screen of propaganda. While feminists have, in a large measure, stayed their hand, anybody who has anything abusive to say of women, whether ancient or modern, can command a vast public in the popular press and a ready agreement from the average publisher.

It is a very insidious propaganda. Thus the fashion-papers tell us that grandmamma’s ways are coming back into their own; elsewhere we are flattered for the frank honesty of the modern girl and then warned not to ask for equal pay or opportunity.[1] Again, we hear that woman, like the Labour Party when in office, has done nothing with the opportunities given her by the vote; or that the country rejected the women candidates wholesale. This, regardless of the fact that the steady increase of the Labour poll has been due in great part to the votes and more to the organization and propaganda of large numbers of intelligent working women who know not only what they want, but how to get it. They are backed now by many of the middle-class women who were young enough to be revolted by war politics in 1914, and are old enough to claim their citizenship in 1924. Hundreds of thousands of others, now between twenty and thirty, mothers, professional and working women, will make themselves heard before long. To them, the principle of feminine equality is as natural as drawing breath――they are neither oppressed by tradition nor worn by rebellion. I venture to think that, had the Labour Party machine been less dominated by the masculine perspective, to which the equal franchise bill was a matter of secondary importance, they would not have lost so heavily in the 1924 election. Votes for women at 21 would have greatly increased the poll of many Labour candidates. I have seen young mothers almost sobbing outside the polling-station on polling-day because they had no vote to cast for the future of themselves and their children. As for the defeat of women candidates, everybody, including the leader-writers who spread the adverse propaganda, knew perfectly well that the majority of them stood in constituencies where even a man of their party would not have had the ghost of a chance. Here again Jason at headquarters displayed his well-known chivalry.

[1] Lovat Fraser in a cunning article in _The Sunday Pictorial_, January 4, 1925.

It is no part of my thesis to maintain that women display their feminism in proportion as they vote for any particular political party――Labour, for example. But I do suggest that it is the progressive working woman rather than the woman of the middle class who will in the future make the most important contribution to the thought of feminism and to a solution of our practical difficulties. One of the most inveterate anti-feminists, the author of _Lysistrata_, as an avowed anti-democrat, has based his thesis and his strictures on observations that do not go beyond the bounds of upper- and middle-class people, barely even beyond the bounds of the night club or the suburban dance-hall. In his eyes we are to blame for everything. Our worst crime is to “blaspheme life and man”; our next, not to have prevented food being put into tins; our next, to have adhered faithfully to that ascetic view of life and sex so firmly instilled into us by medieval monks and bullying Puritan fathers and brothers. We are to blame for the industrial revolution in that we let weaving, spinning, milling, and baking go out of our hands. We are to blame for the iniquities of doctors in that we did not maintain our position as the dispensers of healing potions and simples. We are to blame in that we have not learned to bring forth our children without pain, those children whose brows bear the marks of obstetric instruments that were used to spare their mothers, and whose lips have not been laid to those inhuman mothers’ breasts. (There are no scars of war, O Jason!) Where is salvation for us, and how shall we rid us of the burden of our iniquity? We who have waxed so arrogant that we have even aspired to let science build our children outside their mothers’ bodies must humble ourselves once more and take upon us the whole duty of woman. We must use our votes to restore aristocracy[2] and take the food out of tins; spin and weave, no doubt, the while we nurse and bear our yearly child, delivering it over to infanticide when necessary, since birth-control is artificial and displeasing to the male. In our leisure moments――of which, doubtless, we shall find many under this humane _régime_――we are to discover by what means of diet, or exercise it may be, we can fulfil our maternal functions with pleasure instead of suffering.

[2] An ingenious method of accomplishing this suggests itself. Since women do not sit in the House of Lords, suppose that all Peers’ wives, following the example of the Duchess of Atholl, stand for Parliament where their husbands have estates. This would obviate the necessity, now felt by Conservatives, of restoring the veto of the House of Lords.

A joke, you say? No, no, my poor Medea, it is a man called Rousseau, risen from the dead. Not long ago he preached this sort of thing to women who pinched their waists and wore a dozen petticoats. They were not educated enough to follow Voltaire, so they listened to what Rousseau called the Voice of Nature. Soon thereafter, they found they were being abused for being less civilized, more ape-like than the male, irrational and unsuited to take a part in public life. So they tried again, poor things, and then there was an awful thing called the Industrial Revolution, and the food got into tins. They may be pardoned, as may all of us, if at this point they became a little bewildered. Some people blamed science, some civilization, some the meat-trusts and the millers, but the true culprit, as ever, was Woman. A thousand voices cried her down――she hadn’t enough children; she had too many; she was an ape; she was a dressed-up doll; she was a Puritan; she was an immoral minx; she was uneducated; they had taught her too much. Her pinched waist was formerly abused――now it was her slim and boyish body. Eminent surgeons[3] committed themselves to the view that the boyish figure with its pliable rubber bust-bodices and corselets would be the ruin of the race, that race which had been superbly undegenerate through four centuries of armour-plate corset and eighteen-inch waists, that race which, then or now, can hardly compete in toughness with the Chinese, among whom the boyish figure has been for centuries the ideal, and whose women cannot conceivably be accused of shirking any of the responsibilities of maternity. Others told us that the woman-doctor has no nerve to tend confinements, and conveniently forgot that, since the world began, and until quite modern times, it is women who have ministered to one another in that agony which now as in the past is the lot of every mother. Is there truth in the words of Jason? Is there truth or justice in the passion of Medea? Let us not ask the protagonists, but let us summon the inquiring intelligence of Hypatia to find us a way out of the intolerable tangle in which their quarrelling has landed us.

[3] Sir Arbuthnot Lane, for whom I have hitherto entertained an entirely unqualified admiration, in a recent article. _Vide The Weekly Dispatch_, December 28, 1924.

II

ARTEMIS _The Early Struggles of Feminism_

When the feminist struggle began during the last century, ignorance and beauty were the two qualities most admired in women. It is necessary to remind our masculine critics what was the soil from which the feminist movement sprang and what the current morality which influenced its direction. It was customary in those days to make fun of old or ugly women and to scorn those who showed any signs of intelligence. A man chose a young, beautiful, and blushing creature for his bride, and transformed her by one year of marriage and one childbirth into a gentle and submissive matron. Ugly or intelligent women, for the most part, paid a heavy price. Not only were they rejected in youth, and starved of all their natural joys, but as “old maids” they were the object of general scorn and derision. Small wonder that women adopted artificial aids to beauty and artificial hindrances to their native intelligence. Strongest of all the taboos laid by masculine custom and religion on feminine minds was that regarding sex-knowledge. Their purity was to be preserved only by ignorance, and even as matrons and mothers it was scarcely decent for them to refer to any of the physical changes of their bodies. It is impossible to over-estimate the strength of this tradition, or the harm which has been worked by it to the cause of women.

The feminists were, and are still, howled down by men on the pretence that they invented chastity and scorn of bodily values. History disproves such a ridiculous assertion. The early feminists were what history and tradition made them, and could not at the time of their rebellion have been otherwise. The origin of the stupid ideal of womanhood against which men as well as women to-day are still fighting was the asceticism of the Christian religion; and, unless St. Paul was a woman in disguise, I fail to see how woman is to be blamed for a conception of her place and duty from which she has suffered more than anybody else. Before the conversion of the West to Christianity, barbarian women of the North enjoyed a certain rough equality with their husbands. They stride through the sagas, these fierce women, brides of heroes, glad to reward the warrior with their favours, quick to avenge an insult or a wrong. They had no need to stoop to cajolery. Savage and untamed, they were the fit and equal mates of savage men.

Then came the monks, and the white wimples and courtly dresses and chivalry, chants and cathedrals, and meek and reverent casting up and casting down of eyes. The savage breast that had swelled and throbbed untrammelled in love or anger learnt to flutter and to sigh. Quenched were the fires of Brunhilde, her sunlit rock deserted. Agnes and Mary, tamed and pious, sat cooing in the shade. But for meekness and maternity, the early days of asceticism might have seen a crusade to destroy that temptress――woman. Barely allowed a soul, she slipped through a life of oblivion, praying that it might be a pretty crown with which Heaven would reward her patience and submission at the last. Then came the Puritans and denied her even that, substituting ugliness in this life as well as the negation of body, and a heaven of people in starched nightshirts, rendered oblivious to the horrid spectacle of their figures by the still more horrid chanting of their nasal psalms.

A breath of rationalism――brief, soon choked, a breath of “nature”――and so to crinolines, pantalettes, and a life still lived in terror of hell-fire, terror of parents, dread of husband, horror of the least breath of adverse public opinion. Anyone who reads the _Fairchild Family_ must marvel that from such nerve-destroying parental tyranny and the intolerable weight of prejudice and religious superstition the nineteenth-century woman ever found the courage to rebel.

Was it astonishing that the revolt had in it something frenzied and ascetic――that it seemed to express the anger of the spinster thwarted and despised in the current schemes of values? I do not think the pioneers were so much Puritan as votaries, hanging the tablet of each achievement in the temple of Athene or of Artemis, pressing on, breathless, swift of foot, sure of aim, in dread of the fate of Atalanta whom the Golden Apples lured to destruction and the marital embrace. “Chaste as the icicle, that hangs on Dian’s temple.” They had need to be, perhaps, who, in an atmosphere of swoons and ringlets, won for us schools and colleges, free limbs, health and the open air; unlocked for us the classics, science, medicine, the history of our world; drew us from our paltry, ladylike accomplishments; wrote upon our school-books: “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed,” and flung wide the gate into the world.

They, these pioneers, childless, unwed, created and bore thousands of women, made them anew, body and soul, for lives of mental and physical activity unknown in the past to any but the very exceptional few. Just like the new learning of the Renaissance to men’s minds in Europe was the opening of high school and university to the feminine mind of to-day. Thousands of women of the last generation and this, who would otherwise have passed their existence in genteel poverty and vacancy of mind, have found their happiness in teaching, in medicine, or in some other profession. Thousands of mothers have watched with delight the unfolding of their children’s minds, and enjoyed co-operating over “lessons” and arguing politics with the adolescent.

We, who in a sense are the children of the feminist pioneers, whose thoughts embrace the universe, whose lives are one long round of mental and physical delight, at times intense to ecstasy――we at least will pay our tribute to those who lit the sacred fires, before we take up pen and paper to criticize.

When one reads the lamentations of would-be intelligent men about the iniquities of modern young people, chiefly those of the female sex, one cannot but laugh at their method of approach. It would seem according to them that our modern women just happened like that: no one had a part in forming their bodies or in training their minds. In so far as these people consider education or early training at all, it is to blaspheme at the sex-hating feminists who have trained modern women to dispense with their birth-right――the love of man. How this squares with the wail of the Bishops against the sexual immorality of the younger generation we will leave Jason or the eloquent author of _Lysistrata_ to decide. Our business is not to condemn woman, past or present, but to chronicle faithfully the forces that have made her, and the aspirations which will mould her future. For she, and she alone, shall be the arbiter of her fate, and neither man nor creed stand between her and the realization of her ideals. Men have blasphemed woman and life too long, and it will not be until the issues are clearer, the battle more advanced, that the basis for co-operation between man and woman can be finally established. There is too much evidence at present that man, professing friendship and concern, is still ready to snatch from us what little we have won.

To those elderly gentlemen, then, who watch with horror the upper- and middle-class woman perpetrating similar follies to those of upper- and middle-class men, the first question we would put is: “What education did they give their daughters, and what was taught to their mothers before them? What were the current ideas about feminine destiny which encircled them in their impressionable years?” Many would answer, still far too many, that their daughters were given the education of a gentlewoman and fitted to become the wives of gentlemen. This we know of old. The lady eats, drinks, digests, wears clothes, tinkles the piano, dances, sings, handles a golf-club, submits to sex, bears a child without the smallest notion of anatomy, turns from the whole thing disgusted, and probably bears no more. Whose fault? Not hers. They do not teach mothercraft or physiology in finishing schools for gentlemen’s daughters, and it is no part of the duty of gentlemen’s wives to reproduce their kind. Perhaps there is comfort in that.

A great many parents, however, would tell us that they gave their daughters a good and liberal education in such schools as were available, good ordinary boarding- and day-schools which have sprung up during the last fifty years in response to the feminist propaganda. Then we have the working woman, who has shared with her brothers in what education is permitted to trickle through the elementary schools. It must not be forgotten that this ends at fourteen.