42. The Transvaluation of Values
The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the
last century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly
delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the
oppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made
enormous progress--perhaps more than they made in the ten
thousand years preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which
has borne so harshly upon the race in general, has brought them
certain unmistakable benefits. Their economic dependence, though
still sufficient to make marriage highly attractive to them, is
nevertheless so far broken down that large classes of women are
now almost free agents, and quite independent of the favour of
men. Most of these women, responding to ideas that are still
powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by marriage, and prefer it to
the autonomy that is coming in,
but the fact remains that they
now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire necessity no
longer controls them. After all, they needn't
marry if they don't want to; it is possible to get their bread by their
own labour in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers
were in a far more difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only
suffered a cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of
actual starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the
economy of those times for the free woman. She either had to enter
a nunnery or accept a disdainful patronage that was as galling as
charity.
Nothing could be, plainer than the effect that the increasing
economic security of women is having upon their whole habit of life
and mind. The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly
diminishing birth rates how which way the wind is blowing. It is
common for male statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to
ascribe the fall in the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the
male side. This growing disinclination is actually on the female side.
Even though no considerable body of women has yet reached the
definite doctrine that marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must
be
plain that large numbers of them now approach the
business with far greater fastidiousness than their grandmothers or
even their mothers exhibited. They are harder to please, and hence
pleased less often. The woman of a century ago could imagine
nothing more favourable to her than marriage; even marriage with a
fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all. This notion is
gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion. Women in
general may still prefer marriage, to work, but there is an increasing
minority which begins to realize that work may offer the greater
contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount of
philandering.
There already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who,
while still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any
theory that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among
these women are a goodman somewhat vociferous propagandists,
almost male in their violent earnestness; they range from the man
eating suffragettes to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen
Key and such professional shockers of the bourgeoisie as the
American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret Sanger.
But
among them are many more who wake the world with no such noisy
eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas in a
quiet and respectable manner. The number of such women is much
larger than is generally imagined, and that number tends to increase
steadily. They are women who, with their economic independence
assured, either by inheritance or by their own efforts, chiefly in the
arts and professions, do exactly as they please, and make no pother
about it. Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the
common frenzy makes them extremely attractive to the better sort of
men, and so it is not uncommon for one of them to find herself
voluntarily sought in marriage, without any preliminary scheming by
herself--surely an experience that very few ordinary women ever
enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.
The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the
women's clubs and in the women's colleges, I have no doubt, there
is still much debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic
relations possible between the sexes? In other words, is friendship
possible without sex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses
the
problem with another question: Why without sex? With
the decay of the ancient concept of women as property there must
come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole sex question, and out
of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the mediaeval
penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The
notion that honour in women is exclusively a physical matter, that a
single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a
woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can
bring to marriage is virginity--this notion is so preposterous that no
intelligent person, male or female, actually cherishes it. It survives
as one of the hollow conventions of Christianity; nay, of the
levantine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As women throw
off the other conventions which now bind them they will throw off
this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded upon fastidiousness and
self-respect instead of upon mere fear and conformity, will become
afar more laudable thing than it ever can be under the present
system. And for its absence, if they see fit to dispose of it, they will
no more apologize. than a man apologizes today.