The disadvantages of being a woman

(i) Unwise haste (ii) legislation for the élite, not for the masses, (iii) hostility to man, who should be the associate.

Resistless as the appointed tides, the Revolution of Woman has swept over us. Who can be held responsible? To criticise or to blame the women themselves would be as senseless as to attempt a judgment upon the shore washed by the sea. It had to be and it was. The end had come for Victorianism, with its soul-crushing hypocrisy. The new Force had to be set free.

Most unfortunately the advanced feminists who took charge of the movement had few of the god-given gifts of leadership. There is but a step from revolution, with its healthy exaggerations, to complete anarchy. They sowed the seeds, and only the Great War—with its issues of life and death—has saved them and us from a terrible harvest.

(i.) The leaders’ first tactical mistake, no doubt, was to set up a fighting corps before the average woman had learned how to march. To realise with what unstable rapidity they forged ahead, we have only to measure the distance between the women of this generation and of the last.

History has always recorded the perils and suffering of any period that follows a too rapid emancipation of slaves; and as all Suffrage Societies alluded to women as slaves, we may adopt the comparison without offence. Our speed in settling the women’s question was no less than a crime. Women ought to have served a period as novitiates before taking the full vows of freedom.

For our mothers the gates were locked. Their narrow horizon was bounded—on the one side by the needle and on the other by children. They had, in return, the safety and the protection of a home. For the women of this generation most doors have been flung wide. But with the full liberty to work, they have gained also full liberty to starve; and they are finding themselves too often forced down paths they have not the physical strength to tread. Rights demanded without tact, and the unconsidered outcry for absolute equality, have largely killed men’s protective instincts, and really amount to a “declaration of war between those who should be allies or partners in humankind.”

Only a few women can go far, or last long, without a home, a pension, or a private income, to fall back on. Our mothers were “looked after” as a matter of course. So many women to-day are forced to work for themselves, however unqualified they may be. They have been given the Parliamentary vote, before even learning their municipal responsibilities. They have entered upon business careers without training or capacity. At the moment, indeed, one feels as if both the professional and the business worlds were actually clogged up with untried women.

How different the whole situation might have been if the leaders had been content to move more slowly; feeling their way as they went along; organising, experimenting, and helping—teaching the meaning of responsibility, what it involves and how to use it?

Above all, they should never have lost touch with the anchor of the home, until they were well able to navigate their own course in the variable currents of the world outside and secure not only work for an income, but some security for the future.

Independence, so called, that does not include economic provision for bad times and old age, is not independence at all. What problem can be more terrible or more grave for the great army of superfluous women, than the absolute insecurity of their future?

(ii.) The feminist leaders also made a very serious mistake when they based their demands for all women upon the needs of a very exceptional minority. “Take care of the weak part of your army,” said Napoleon, “the strong can look after themselves.” But in this movement it was the reverse policy which the leaders preferred to adopt. If a few workers had proved that despite obstacles, difficulties, and sex-prejudice, they could yet take their place in open competition with men, these giant personalities were exceptions that proved the rule. Why legislate for exceptions?

It was maintained, from the first, that all professions should be open to all women; that the sexes should be at once placed upon absolute equality. “What one, the finest of women, can do, all should strive to do,” was the theory. And we had dangerous legislation, suddenly introduced, which was doomed in advance to disaster; carrying with it deceptions, disappointments, the unclassing and unsexing of women. For one woman who can succeed at the bar or in surgery there are hundreds who had far better be sighing for the cradle. They will never reach the bar, or prove fitted to wield the knife; and they will lose the cradle into the bargain.

All the ages have brought forth exceptional women. At the time when Mahomet raised his voice in the desert, and was leading his dusky-skinned converts out of semi-barbarianism into the light of civilisation, his own daughter, the Lady of Paradise, was speaking and lecturing in many lands, so that her fame spread over the whole of the East. Yet other women were not encouraged to follow her example; and few made the attempt before the arrival of Zeyneb, the famous professor of Damascus.

Yet in our own days, that woman might undertake man’s work, she was given the vote. It was held up, and fought for, as the key to unlock all professional doors—the instrument of the Millennium! It is true, of course, that the vote can, and perhaps will eventually be of great utility. But how can we judge? It is as yet scarcely out of its swaddling clothes; and, certainly for women, the promised Millennium is still far to seek.

(iii.) The final, and most disastrous mistake of the feminist leaders was their entire disregard of Nature herself. It is by this means that the whole movement has been developed on a false premiss; for any overdrafts on the bank of Nature must be repaid with crushing interest.

“Only the vote can right all wrongs,” said the leaders, “and as men used violence to obtain the vote, women must do the same. Men pillaged, burnt, destroyed; did evil that good might come. We must follow their example.” There is no real logic in such a claim. A woman simply cannot apply man’s weapons. Men who riot use fair violence against other men; whereas when women use violence against men, they gain an unfair advantage. When two men fight, it is the stronger who prevails; against women no man can strike the death-blow that is in his hands, lest he violate the most sacred laws of his manhood.

The only “force” a woman may fairly use against men is to know what she wants and sit tight until she obtains it. It is, we admit, a slow process, but it is sure and certain—in fact the only way.

What has woman, in fact, gained by violence? Since man considered she had not given him a square deal because he could not counter her violence by his own, he used the only weapon available—_complete indifference_. Instead of meeting man as an associate, woman became his enemy and his commercial competitor. As we shall later attempt to prove, woman is not so constituted, either physically or emotionally, that she can compete with men. Wherefore the loss is hers.

The attitude of distrust, or at least indifference, thus created in man necessarily reacts on him. It was responsibility towards his womenkind that gave him a regular outlet for his chivalry and the moral backbone he would otherwise have seldom maintained.

The lack of organisation in woman’s fight for independence has injured not only herself but man.