4. WOMAN SUFFRAGE
IV
31. The Crowning Victory
It is my sincere hope that nothing I have here exhibited will be
mistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No such
feeling, in truth, is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedrich
used to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd
which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the
minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess
of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished
by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me
that the average wine-bibber is a far better fellow than the, average
prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the
average poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave trader of my
acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In the
same way I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her
deficiencies, is greatly superior to the average man. The very ease
with which she defies and swindles him in several capital
situations of life is the clearest of proofs of her general superiority.
She did not obtain her present high immunities as a gift from the
gods, but only after a long and often bitter fight, and in that fight
she exhibited forensic and tactical talents of a truly admirable order.
There was no weakness of man that she did not penetrate and take
advantage of. There was no trick that she did not put to effective
use. There was no device so bold and inordinate that it daunted her.
The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the
extension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries,
and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit
was garnered, not by an, attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I
believe that the majority of women, for reasons that I shall presently
expose, were not eager for the extension, and regard it as of small
value today. They know that they can get what they want without
going to the actual polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy
with most of the brummagem reforms advocated by the professional
suffragists, male and female. The mere
statement of the
current suffragist platform, with its long list of quack sure-cures for
all the sorrows of the world, is enough to make them smile sadly. In
particular, they are sceptical of all reforms that depend upon the
mass action of immense numbers of voters, large sections of whom
are wholly devoid of sense. A normal woman, indeed, no more
believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy
at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a class to order
and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she,
susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole
democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in
them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late
Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignominious
defeat--The first general election in which all American women
could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of
Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised
women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for
deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept
effort to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will
remember his
bathos about breaking the heart of the world.
Well, very few women believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not
far to seek: practically every woman above the, age of twenty-five
has a broken heart. That is to say, she has been vastly disappointed,
either by failing to nab some pretty fellow that her heart was set on,
or, worse, by actually nabbing him, and then discovering him to be a
bounder or an imbecile, or both. Thus walking the world with
broken hearts, women know that the injury is not serious. When he
pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began sobbing and snuffling
and blowing his nose tragically, the learned doctor simply drove all
the women voters into the arms of the Hon. Warren Gamaliel
Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at all, but simply
took negative advantage of the distrust aroused by his opponent.
Once the women of Christendom become at ease in the use of the
ballot, and get rid of the preposterous harridans who got it for them
and who now seek to tell them what to do with it, they will proceed
to a scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently
corrupt politics.
For one thing, I believe that they will initiate
measures against democracy--the worst evil of the present-day
world. When they come to the matter, they will certainly not ordain
the extension of the suffrage to children, criminals and the insane in
brief, to those ever more inflammable and knavish than the male
hinds who have enjoyed it for so long; they will try to bring about its
restriction, bit by bit, to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic
and self-possessed--say six women to one man. Thus, out of their
greater instinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a
democracy.
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his
stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever
embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all hat have
gone before. But where is the delusion that women cherish--I mean
habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of
propositions, held and maintained by them in sober earnest, that are
obviously not true? (I allude here, of course, to genuine women, not
to suffragettes and other such pseudo-males). As for me, I should
not like to undertake such a list.
I know of nothing, in fact,
that properly belongs to it. Women, as a class, believe in none of
the ludicrous rights, duties and pious obligations that men are
forever gabbling about. Their superior intelligence is in no way
more eloquently demonstrated than by their ironical view of all such
phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude toward men is one of aloof
disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men believe in, and
get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially the same, It
takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new fallacy
as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt,
hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado
had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibition
sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt it; their own
majority voice was against it to the end. During the interval the men
voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking
to the mourners' bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the
women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition
was adopted during the war without their votes--they did not get the
franchise throughout the country until it was in
the
Constitution--and it is without their support today. The American
man, despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much
afraid of the police, and in all the regions where prohibition is now
actually enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance
of it by arguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he
ought to sacrifice his private desires to the common weal. But it is
almost impossible to find an American woman of any culture who is
in favour of it. One and all, they are opposed to the turmoil and
corruption that it involves, and resentful'of the invasion of liberty
underlying it. Being realists, they have no belief in any program
which proposes to cure the natural swinishness of men by
legislation. Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that
the average man is very much like her husband, John, and she
knows very well that John is a weak, silly and knavish fellow, and
that any effort to convert him into an archangel overnight is bound
to come to grief. As for her view of the average creature of her
own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so
destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond
endurance.
32. The Woman Voter
Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women
of Protestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot,
will give, any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead
and instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these
suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They
are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to
advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly
preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh
at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of
the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great
political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply
becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter
she is nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking
machine, the sole intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a
horde of scoundrels in public office. Her vote is instantly set off by
the vote of some sister who joins the other camorra.
Parenthetically, I may add that all of the ladies to take to this
political
immolation seem to me to be frightfully plain. I
know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia only by their
portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the United States I
have studied at close range at various large political gatherings,
including the two national conventions first following the extension
of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow--in fact, I prefer a
certain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon
brilliance of youth--but I give you my word that there were not five
women at either national convention who could have embraced me
in camera without first giving me chloral. Some of the chief
stateswomen on show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt
faint every time I had to look at them.
The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the
more caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but
they certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know
how to dress their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms
aimed at the alleged lubricity of the male-the single standard,
medical certificates for bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The
motive here, I believe, is mere rage and jealousy. The woman
who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive
to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive
woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration,
however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of
herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough
to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her
extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed,
beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I
know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her
right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
whenever they bear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet
more, the normal woman of lively charms, roving about among
men, always tries to draw the admiration of those who have
previously admired elsewhere; she prefers the professional to the
amateur, and estimates her skill by the attractiveness of the
huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The iron-faced suffragist
propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get one wholly without
sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude manoeuvres make
him laugh and he is repelled
by her lack of pulchritude and
amiability. All such suffragists(save a few miraculous beauties)
marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up
with the sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with
lady physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant
viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women
until hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the
latter enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love
would play out, for not many men take any notice of women
spontaneously. Nine men out of ten would be quite happy, I
believe, if there were no women in the world, once they had grown
accustomed to the quiet. Practically all men are their happiest when
they are engaged upon activities--for example, drinking, gambling,
hunting, business, adventure--to which women are not ordinarily
admitted. It is women who seduce them from such celibate doings.
The hare postures and gyrates in front of the hound. The way to
put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmists talk
about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in the world,
and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put
them in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to
wear scents, or to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as
usual, mistakes the fish for the fly.
33. A Glance Into the Future
The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due to
the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very
stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women,
and so show them politeness. But soon or late--and probably
disconcertingly soon--the great mass of sensible and agnostic
women will turn upon them and depose them, and thereafter the
woman vote will be no longer at the disposal of bogus Great
Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes continue to fill the
newspapers with nonsense, once that change has been effected, it
will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, like the
Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and
other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension
of the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before
the national enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated
in the nation at large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent.
Women are not taken in by quackery as readily as men are; the
hardness of their shell of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their
emotions. For one woman who testifies publicly that she has been
cured of cancer by some swindling patent medicine, there are at
least twenty masculine witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite
American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are
ostensibly remedies for specifically feminine ills, anatomically
impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent
druggist tells me, by men.
My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is
that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none
the less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the
end, in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an
intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the
commonwealth is almost impossible. A politician normally prospers
under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and
his honour incorruptible, but in proportion
as he excels in the
manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary
perils and imaginary defences against them. Our politics thus
degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins; the male voter, a
coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at a new one and
electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years past the
people of the United States, the most terrible existing democratic
state, have scarcely had apolitical campaign that was not based upon
some preposterous fear--first of slavery and then of the manumitted
slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of the old and
then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they are not
easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such
facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling
and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause
a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy
and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this
sniffing. What we need--and in the end it must come--is a sniff so
powerful that it will call a halt upon the, navigation of the ship from
the forecastle, and put a competent staff on the
bridge, and lay
a course that is describable in intelligible terms.
The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern
democracies before the extension of the suffrage were, usually
chosen, not for their competence but for their mere talent for idiocy;
they reflected accurately thymol weakness for whatever is rhetorical
and sentimental and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what
happened in a salient case. Every four years the male voters of the
United States chose from among themselves one who was put
forward as the man most fit, of all resident men, to be the first
citizen of the commonwealth. He was chosen after interminable
discussion; his qualifications were thoroughly canvassed; very large
powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we
commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found, not
a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of
notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that
they must needs disgust a sentient suckling--in brief, a spouting
geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported
assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and
platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were
flattered when they were called comprehensible--specifically, a
Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.
This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of
comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a
woman of like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh
them, for sense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure
relations, for intellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas of the
average midwife.
34. The Suffragette
I have spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the
matter with her, fundamentally, is simple: she is a woman who has
stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of
men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession,
and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary
character. In particular, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one
definite privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in
amour, the modern droit du seigneur.
Read the books of the
chief lady Savonarolas, and you will find running through them an
hysterical denunciation of what is called the double standard of
morality; there is, indeed, a whole literature devoted exclusively to
it. The existence of this double standard seems to drive the poor
girls half frantic. They bellow raucously for its abrogation, and
demand that the frivolous male be visited with even more idiotic
penalties than those which now visit the aberrant female; some even
advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery, that he may be forced
into rectitude by a physical disability for sin.
All this, of course, is hocus-pocus, and the judicious are not
deceived by it for an instant. What these virtuous bel dames actually
desire in their hearts is not that the male be reduced to chemical
purity, but that the franchise of dalliance be extended to themselves.
The most elementary acquaintance with Freudian psychology
exposes their secret animus. Unable to ensnare males under the
present system, or at all events, unable to ensnare males sufficiently
appetizing to arouse the envy of other women, they leap to the
theory that it would be easier
if the rules were less exacting.
This theory exposes their deficiency in the chief character of their
sex: accurate observation. The fact is that, even if they possessed
the freedom that men are supposed to possess, they would still find
it difficult to achieve their ambition, for the average man, whatever
his stupidity, is at least keen enough in judgment to prefer a single
wink from a genuinely attractive woman to the last delirious favours
of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory of the whoopers and
snorters of the cause, in its esoteric as well as in its public aspect, is
unsound. They are simply women who, in their tastes and
processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explains their
failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolatory
betrayal, quite as effectively as it explains the ready credence they
give to political an philosophical absurdities.
35. A Mythical Dare-Devil
The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women
conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already
observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt
Gamble, a paralogist on a somewhat higher plane. As they
depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave
trading and
ophthalmia neonatorum, the average male adult of the
Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy lubricity,
rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and with an almost
endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen,
parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and
despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is
the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous,
multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable
debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously unfaithful to his
wife, and even to his friends' wives; fathomlessly libidinous and
superbly happy.
Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military "expert" promoted
from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak
without any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough
to men to get near enough to enough men to know enough about
them for their purpose they would
paralyze the Dorcas societies
with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average
man of our time and race is quite incapable of all these incandescent
and intriguing divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they
make him out, far less schooled in sin far less enterprising and
ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is pure in heart, for the
chances are that he isn't; what I do say is that, in the overwhelming
majority of cases, he is pure in act, even in the face of temptation.
And why? For several main reasons, not to go into minor ones.
One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the
money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and has a
conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to
plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid; it takes more
ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it off; it takes
more money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it.
A man may force his actual wife to share the direst poverty, but
even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands to be
courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand manner,
and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save
a small
minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife
knows her husband's in come accurately, she has a sure means of
holding him to his oaths.
Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the
other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his
easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd
behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of
initiating an extra-legal affair--at all events, above the mawkish
harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is
of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing
it, just as he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or
climbing the Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to
imagine the thing done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he
is a bad one. But at the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is
usually nothing more material than an oafish smirk at some
disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins under the table. Let any
woman who is disquieted by reports of her husband's derelictions
figure to herself how long
it would have taken him to propose
to her if left to his own enterprise, and then let her ask herself if so
pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.
Finally, there is his conscience--the accumulated sediment of
ancestral faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague
religious fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a
conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may
be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It may be
indistinguishable, at times, from the mere fear that someone may be
looking. It may be shot through with hypocrisy, stupidity,
play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go in Christendom, it
is genuinely entitled to the name--and it is always in action. A man,
remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit and slave of the
environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the House of
Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons without
becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard
without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern
university without carrying away scars. And by the same token one
cannot live and have one's being in a modern
democratic state,
year in and year out, without falling, to some extent at least, under
that moral obsession which is the hall-mark of the mob-man set
free. A citizen of such astate, his nose buried in Nietzsche, "Man
and Superman," and other such advanced literature, may caress
himself with the notion that he is an immoralist, that his soul is full
of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loose from the revelation of
God. But all the while there is a part of him that remains a sound
Christian, a moralist, a right thinking and forward-looking man.
And that part, in times of stress, asserts itself. It may not worry him
on ordinary occasions. It may not stop him when he swears, or
takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring on
Sunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a leg-show. But
the moment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her noses
now-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping provokingly--the
moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack of ready
funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault and
wobble him--at that precise moment his conscience flares into
function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then
he
sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he
slinks off in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey.
It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the
Protestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You
will a travel a long way before you find a married man who will
admit that he is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one
to flout them.
36. The Origin of a Delusion
The origin of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II or
Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig,
is not far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse
briefly:
- 1.The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, either
by open lying or sinister hints.
- 2.The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M.C. A.
secretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they
would do themselves if they bad the courage.
- 3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto.
Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less
critical sort of women
a great deal of needless uneasiness and
vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old
fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice
society, puts in an evening ploughing through such books as "The
Memoirs of Fanny Hill," Casanova's Confessions, the Cena
Trimalchionis of Gaius Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal
he arises with the conviction that life amid the red lights must be one
stupendous whirl of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or
Piccadilly at night are out for revels that would have caused protests
in Sodom and Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell
leads an existence comparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the
world outside the Bible class is packed like a sardine-can with
betrayed salesgirls, that every man who doesn't believe that Jonah
swallowed the whale spends his whole leisure leaping through the
seventh hoop of the Decalogue. "If I were not saved and anointed
of God," whispers the vice director into his own ear, "that is what I,
the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King
David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King
Edward VII was not
beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his
name has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route. . . .
Ergo, Up, guards, and at'em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants!
Order out the seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four
hundred more policemen! Let us chase these hell-hounds out of
Christendom, and make the world safe for monogamy, poor
working girls, and infant damnation!"
Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret
aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the
unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are
free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of
resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The
vast majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are
there, not to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble
agreeably upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish
experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair,
and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the
sort of books that our vice crusading friend reads. They like to
conjure up the charms of carnality, and to help out their
somewhat sluggish imaginations by actual peeps at it, but when
it comes to taking a forthright header into the sulphur they usually
fail to muster up the courage. For one clerk who succumbs to the
houris of the pave, there are five hundred who succumb to lack of
means, the warnings of the sex hygienists, and their own depressing
consciences. For one"clubman"--i.e., bagman or suburban
vestryman--who invades the women's shops, engages the affection
of some innocent miss, lures her into infamy and then sells her to
the Italians, there are one thousand who never get any further than
asking the price of cologne water and discharging a few furtive
winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race who maintains a
blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury around the comer, there are ten
thousand who are as true to their wives, year in and year out, as so
many convicts in the death-house, and would be no more capable of
any such loathsome malpractice, even in the face of free
opportunity, than they would be of cutting off the ears of their
young.
I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry
for the suffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when
they
get into pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom,
they will discover to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a
chimera--that there is really no such animal as the male anarchist
they have been denouncing and envying--that the wholesale
fornication of man, at least under Christian democracy, has little
more actual existence than honest advertising or sound cooking.
They have followed the porno maniacs in embracing a piece of
buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it will turn to
ashes in their arms.
Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and
enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a
quality in which the average man is far exceeded by the average
jackal or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man,
of the slightest descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and
barbarous as the consequences to a young girl in like case, it would
take a division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that
lex talionis in the whole western world. As things stand today, even
with the odds so greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and
is thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice
crusaders if
you doubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female recruits
upon the wharves of sin are always more than the demand; that
more young women enter upon the vermilion career than can make
respectable livings at it; that the pressure of the temptation they hold
out is the chief factor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was
the first act of the American Army when it began summoning its
young clerks and college boys and plough hands to conscription
camps? Its first act was to mark off a so-called moral zone around
each camp, and to secure it with trenches and machine guns, and to
put a lot of volunteer termagants to patrolling it, that the assembled
jeunesse might be protected in their rectitude from the immoral
advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor working girls.
37. Women as Martyrs
I have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that man
is a natural polygamist, bent eternally upon fresh dives into Lake of
Brimstone No. 7. To these another should be added: the thirst for
martyrdom which shows
itself in so many women, particularly
under the higher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite, in
fact, may be described as one of civilization's diseases; it is almost
unheard of in more primitive societies. The savage woman,
unprotected by her rude culture and forced to heavy and incessant
labour, has retained her physical strength and with it her honesty
and self-respect. The civilized woman, gradually degenerated by a
greater ease, and helped down that hill by the pretensions of
civilized man, has turned her infirmity into a virtue, and so affects a
feebleness that is actually far beyond the reality. It is by this route
that she can most effectively disarm masculine distrust, and get what
she wants. Man is flattered by any acknowledgment, however
insincere, of his superior strength and capacity. He likes to be
leaned upon, appealed to, followed docilely. And this tribute to his
might caresses him on the psychic plane as well as on the plane of
the obviously physical. He not only enjoys helping a woman over a
gutter; he also enjoys helping her dry her tears. The result is the
vast pretence that characterizes the relations of the sexes under
civilization--the double pretence of
man's cunning and
autonomy and of woman's dependence and deference. Man is
always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking
for a shoulder to put her head on.
This feminine affectation, of course, has gradually taken on the
force of a fixed habit, and so it has got a certain support, by a
familiar process of self-delusion, in reality. The civilized woman
inherits that habit as she inherits her cunning. She is born half
convinced that she is really as weak and helpless as she later
pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore offers her endless
corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the delight in
martyrdom that one so often finds in women, and particularly in the
least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy
pleasure in suffering; it subtly pleases them to be bard put upon;
they like to picture themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they
always find something to complain of; the very conditions of
domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical material. And
if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, they are uneasy
and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is not
reasonably open to question, and
she will invent mythical
offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will
be plunged into the utmost misery and humiliation. This fact
probably explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not
too bad, but too good. For public opinion among women,
remember, does not favour the woman who is full of a placid
contentment and has no masculine torts to report; if she says that
her husband is wholly satisfactory she is looked upon as a numskull
even more dense that he is himself. A man, speaking of his wife to
other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her
soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. But
when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that
they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the one with the
longest and most various repertoire of complaints.
This yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly noted
characters of women: their eager flair for bearing physical pain. As
we have seen, they have actually a good deal less endurance than
men; massive injuries shock them more severely and kill them more
quickly. But when acute algesia is unaccompanied by
any
profounder phenomena they are undoubtedly able to bear it with a
far greater show of resignation. The reason is not far to seek. In
pain a man sees only an invasion of his liberty, strength and
self-esteem. It floors him, masters him, and makes him ridiculous.
But a woman, more subtle and devious in her processes of mind,
senses the dramatic effect that the spectacle of her suffering makes
upon the spectators, already filled with compassion for her
feebleness. She would thus much rather be praised for facing pain
with a martyr's fortitude than for devising some means of getting rid
of it the first thought of a man. No woman could have invented
chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both drugs offer an
escape from situations and experiences that, even in aggravated
forms, women relish. The woman who drinks as men drink--that is,
to raise her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of
living--nearly always shows a deficiency in feminine characters and
an undue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably
you will find her vain and boastful, and full of other marks of that
bombastic exhibitionism which is so sterlingly male.
38. Pathological Effects
This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a
downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.
Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman
under our Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is
heavy with repression and dissimulation, and this repression and
dissimulation, in the long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are
indistinguishable from disease. You will find some of them
described at length in any handbook on psychoanalysis. The
Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul Bjerre, argue, indeed, that
womanliness itself, as it is encountered under Christianity, is a
disease. All women suffer from a suppressed revolt against the
inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial culture, and this
suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means, produces a
complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At one
end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque
adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her
hysterical
demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not
put to use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling
and neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant
pruderies and her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long
ago, this is a man's world. Women have broken many of their old
chains, but they are still enmeshed in a formidable network of
man-made taboos and sentimentalities, and it will take them another
generation, at least, to get genuine freedom. That this is true is
shown by the deep unrest that yet marks the sex, despite its recent
progress toward social, political and economic equality. It is almost
impossible to find a man who honestly wishes that he were a
woman, but almost every woman, at some time or other in her life,
is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man.
Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the
stupid masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority,
or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human
equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine
doctrine that they constitute a special and ineffable species
of
vertebrate, without the natural instincts and appetites of the
order--to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental
and almost gaseous mammals, and marked by a complete lack of
certain salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has
already concerned us at length. One finds traces of it even in works
professedly devoted to disposing of it. In one such book, for
example, I come upon this: "What all the skill and constructive
capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish
Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and
nobility of soul." In other words, by her possession of some
recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the
ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and
preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not
by magic, but by hard common sense. The problem before her was
simply one of organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of
them had failed stupendously. What she did was to bring her
feminine sharpness of wit, her feminine clear-thinking, to bear upon
it. Thus attacked, it yielded quickly, and once it had been brought
to order it was easy for other
persons to carry on what she had
begun. But the opinion of a man's world still prefers to credit her
success to some mysterious angelical quality, unstatable in lucid
terms and having no more reality than the divine inspiration of an
archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and accurate intelligence is
thus conveniently put upon the table, and the amour propre of man
is kept inviolate. To confess frankly that she had more sense than
any male Englishman of her generation would be to utter a truth too
harsh to be bearable.
The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already
discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct--that they
submit to the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a
powerful effort of the will, and with the sole object of discharging
their duty to posterity. It would be impossible to go into this
delusion with proper candour and at due length in a work designed
for reading aloud in the domestic circle; all I can do is to refer the
student to the books of any competent authority on the psychology
of sex, say Ellis, or to the confidences (if they are obtainable) of any
complaisant bachelor of his acquaintance.
39. Women as Christians
The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly
favourable to women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord
when their very possession of souls was still doubted by the majority
of rival theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set
value upon their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their
sex, a lady formerly in public life, was among His regular advisers.
Mariolatry is thus by no means the invention of the mediaeval
popes, as Protestant theologians would have us believe. On the
contrary, it is plainly discernible in the Four Gospels. What the
mediaeval popes actually invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for
they simply borrowed the elements of it from St. Paul) was the
doctrine of women's inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing
credited to them. Committed, for sound reasons of discipline, to the
celibacy of the clergy, they had to support it by depicting all traffic
with women in the light of a hazardous and ignominious business.
The result was the deliberate organization and development of the
theory of female triviality, lack of
responsibility and general
looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of devil, but without the
admired intelligence of the regular demons. The appearance of
women saints, however, offered a constant and embarrassing
criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to sit
upon the right hand of God--and they were often proving it, and
forcing the church to acknowledge it--then surely all women could
not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the
concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full
length in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the
end was a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and
secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has
merged, as we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern
times. By that dogma it is held, on the one hand, that women are
unintelligent and immoral, and on the other hand, that they are free
from all those weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish men. This,
roughly speaking, is the notion of the average male numskull today.
Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but
with the weight always on the
side of the libel. It is therefore
at bottom, their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct,
was their friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that
have bound them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the
fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are
growing less and less religious as year chases year. Their ordinary
devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice,
force on them by the masculine notion that an appearance of
holiness is proper to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that
church-going somehow keeps them in order, and out of doings that
would be less reassuring. When they exhibit any genuine religious
fervour, its sexual character is usually so obvious that even the
majority of men are cognizant of it. Women never go flocking
ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in the pulpit is an
elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds them driven
to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows
of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up to
grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement
before the heavenly throne,
it is quite safe to assume, even
without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the
miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more
aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in
modern times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and
the great majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and
down, have been taken, soon or late, in transactions far more
suitable to the boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their
famous killings have always been made among the silliest sort of
women--the sort, in brief, who fall so short of the normal acumen of
their sex that they are bemused by mere beauty in men.
Such women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal
fewer religious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and
belief. Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the
Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was
constantly struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen
devoted to the saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers
came swarming to the altar, loudly bawling for help against their
sins, but the women were anything
but numerous, and the few
who appeared were chiefly either chlorotic adolescents or pathetic
old
Saufschwestern. For six nights running I sat directly beneath the
gifted exhorter without seeing a single female convert of what
statisticians call the child-bearing age--that is, the age of maximum
intelligence and charm. Among the male simpletons bagged by his
yells during this time were the president of a railroad, half a dozen
rich bankers and merchants, and the former governor of an
American state. But not a woman of comparable position or
dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care
to chuck under the chin.
This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole
stock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least in
part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal
career. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the
pulpit--usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not
equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect--one
never hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite
content to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better
fitted for
it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque
sects, chiefly American, which admit them they show no eagerness
to put on the stole and chasuble. When the first clergywoman
appeared in the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that men
would be driven out of the pulpit by the new competition. Nothing
of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect. The whole corps of
female divines in the country might be herded into one small room.
Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective
ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endless opposition to
the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands
against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory.
Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost
invariably moved by some motive distinct from mere pious
inflammation. It is a commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic
countries, girls are driven into convents by economic considerations
or by disasters of amour far oftener than they are drawn there by the
hope of heaven. Read the lives of the female saints, and you will
see how many of them tried marriage and failed at it before ever
they
turned to religion. In Protestant lands very few women
adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few a secular impulse
is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly overcome by a
desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is nearly invariably
found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a theory that it would
be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In point of fact, she
duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it impossible to
get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China, Senegal and
Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is equally
impossible to fail.
40. Piety as a Social Habit
What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a
social habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other
and more inviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the
women of Spain and Italy at their devotions you need not be told
how much the worship of God may be a mere excuse for relaxation
and gossip. These women, in their daily lives, are surrounded by a
formidable
network of mediaeval taboos; their normal human
desire for ease and freedom in intercourse is opposed by masculine
distrust and superstition; they meet no strangers; they see and hear
nothing new. In the house of the Most High they escape from that
vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders with a crowd.
Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and stretch
their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some sort of
contact with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming
than their husbands and fathers--to wit, with the rev. clergy.
Elsewhere in Christendom, though women are not quite so
relentlessly watched and penned up, they feel much the same need
of variety and excitement, and both are likewise on tap in the
temples of the Lord. No one, I am sure, need be told that the
average missionary society or church sewing circle is not primarily a
religious organization. Its actual purpose is precisely that of the
absurd clubs and secret orders to which the lower and least
resourceful classes of men belong: it offers a means of refreshment,
of self-expression, of personal display, of political manipulation and
boasting, and, if the pastor
happens to be interesting, of
discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course of a life largely
devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have never met a
single woman who cared an authentic damn for the actual heathen.
The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely social.
Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts
go to church.
Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of
Christendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants
are ever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively
ambitious architecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the
caressing meaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are
far more responsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily
quite as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The
attitude of the typical man toward beauty in its various forms is, in
fact, an attitude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a
work of art as merely inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some
indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a
professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him
in his
household than he would trust a coloured clergyman in
his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such
sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards,
Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to
beautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent
for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of
idiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all,
moves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical
obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time
holding her. She can no more be an actual Methodist than a
gentleman can be a Methodist.
This inclination toward beauty, of course, is dismissed by the
average male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality.
The truth is that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not
sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony
of the mass, or even, say, by those timid imitations of it which one
observes in certain Protestant churches. Such proceedings,
whatever their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are at
all events vastly more beautiful than any of the private
acts of
the folk who take part in them. They lift themselves above the
barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and no less above the maudlin
sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in. They offer a means of
escape, convenient and inviting, from that sordid routine of thought
and occupation which women revolt against so pertinaciously.
41. The Ethics of Women
I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct
in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying,
of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it.
They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as
they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and
particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the
renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in
an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance.
No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with
a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she
genuinely desires
in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom.
No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can
prevail. No woman is honestly meek.
In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the
precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into
proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is
visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment
a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely
dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those
under her protection--say a child or a husband--she displays a
bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the
courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is
against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since
the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women
invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who
has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the
obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused.
Women litigants almost
always win their cases, not, as is
commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but
simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,
implacable and without qualms.
What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more
obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a
serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of
finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a
sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome
experience. Women not only bite in the clinches; they bite even in
open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing
length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it,
once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it
stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I
served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court,
and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called
wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost invariably
pleaded justification, and some of them
told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,
that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes
and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses.
Many more men than women go insane, and many more married
men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the
same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on, year in and
year out, behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman,
if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so
sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems
sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps
Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary
man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The
hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of
a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and
summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in
amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.
To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even
when they are
honest and profound, cannot be expected to
give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His
performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed,
unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women
survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for
play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they
deceive even themselves; the average woman's contentment, indeed,
is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be
innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders
that so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their
husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it
out; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among
wives. More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an
acquaintance who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in
the eyes of the inconsolable widow.
Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serious
transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;
the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence
to senility. When they
step outside their habitual circle they
show the same alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A
man who has dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and
even when he is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their
sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into
trade she quickly gets a reputation as a sharp trader. Every little
town in America has its Hetty Green, each sweating blood from
turnips, each the terror of all the male usurers of the
neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazon of barter
takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more chance of success
against the feminine technique in business than he has against the
feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the advantage of
women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In business they
address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give no thought
whatever to the hopes, aspirations and
amour propre of their
antagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points,
but to disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off
a woman who has attempted to marry him, always carries away a
maudlin sympathy for her in her defeat and dismay.
But no one
ever heard of a woman who pitied the poor fellow whose honest
passion she had found it expedient to spurn. On the contrary,
women take delight in such clownish agonies, and exhibit them
proudly, and boast about them to other women.