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MODERN WOMAN

HER INTENTIONS

BY

FLORENCE FARR

[Illustration: Logo]

LONDON FRANK PALMER 12-14 RED LION COURT


     _Another fire has come into the harp,_
     _Fire from beyond the world, and wakens it:_
     _It has begun to cry out to the eagles!_
                         W. B. YEATS,
               _Second version of “Shadowy Waters.”_


_First published 1910. All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


PREFACE

 Mr. Galsworthy’s toy dog--Jewish religion--Embryology  _page_ 7


I

THE VOTE

 Latent period before explosion--Refusal of the vote
 has given impetus to revolutionary enthusiasm--Thin
 end of the wedge--Ingenuity of women--A
 working woman and the hospital official’s
 chivalry--Thirty-two million workers, half-million
 independent means, two million of idle spinsters
 in England and Wales--Our wants                              15


II

WOMEN’S INCOMES

 Lucrative professions for women--Opera singing--Theatrical,
 Literature, Medical, Expert, and
 average incomes--Other work--Independent incomes--Marriage
 for money--Courtesans, prostitutes,
 and riff-raff--Economic independence is a
 way of ennobling sex relations--Marriage often
 settles down into business partnership--The working
 man’s wife--Eugenic advantages of economic
 independence--Racial and social ideals are opposed
 to each other at present                                     25


III

THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE

 The difficulty of a lasting attachment--Enthusiasm
 of youth--English girls apt to mistake interest for
 love--The virtuous wife--The flow and ebb of the
 tide of love--Permanent relations often founded
 on mutual contempt--Jealousy of relations--Mr.
 Harold Gorst’s _Philosophy of Love_--The marriage
 tie must persist because it suits one half of the
 population--Six million bachelors and seven
 million spinsters in England and Wales--The
 ostracism of the unfaithful is more often the cause
 of disease becoming serious than infidelity--The
 emotional degradation of a loveless marriage                 33


IV

THE SORDID DIVORCE

 Marriage laws to be reformed--Binding marriage in
 the Catholic Church--Bond of parenthood--The
 bond between the unattractive people--Heiresses--The
 childless--The extraordinarily attractive--Sordidness
 of English divorce--Restitution of conjugal
 rights--Suggested reform--Agreement in
 wishing for divorce should be the first cause for
 it--Questions of fortune or wealth to be fought out
 on economic grounds--Boredom the chief reason
 that people part, but too insulting to be mentioned
 in public--French _dot_--Sale of beauty--Sale of
 helpmate--Fixed allowance for “bed” and fixed
 allowance for “board”--The birth of child should
 automatically make a bond as in remote country
 places--The Saturday orgy and prudence--Drugging
 and prudence--The police court and the
 wife’s housekeeping money--A romance of the
 mining world                                                 41


V

THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN

 Edmond de Goncourt’s account of courtesans in Tokio--Urgent
 danger of delay in reform--Fear of the
 spread of contagious disease--A trades union for
 prostitutes--The good of Public Health in this
 matter the good of future generations--Clean bill
 of health gives special susceptibility--_Les
 Avariés_--Anti-social rage--The various moral standards
 of women--Dangers of promiscuity not so great
 as the dangers of a cut finger or chapped lip--The
 sale of virginity--Intoxication leads to
 promiscuity, but it is not natural to the average
 woman--The ardour of a fresh lover her greatest
 temptation--Is charm of value as a racial factor?
 The attitude of marrying women                               53


VI

BEAUTY AND MOTHERHOOD

 The terror of motherhood--Women will specialize--Lovers
 of men and lovers of children--A woman
 has an instinct for the right father for her child;
 but often chooses a bad lifelong companion for
 herself--Useless old ethical codes--Practical suggestion
 for race betterment--Sterilization of the
 unfit--Education in the laws of sexual health--Motherly
 women with no chance of children--Unmotherly
 women attractive to men and very
 good helpmates--Surgical aid for the tuberculosis
 child-producer--Prejudices--Intellectual education           63


VII

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

 Life Consciousness--The Man, the Insect, the Tree
 are representatives of Intellect, Instinct, and
 Torpid Consciousness--Henri Bergson and William
 James--The interplay of the three kinds of
 consciousness--Motherhood and the vegetative
 consciousness--Choosing the mate and the instinctive
 consciousness--The Matriarchal civilization--The
 surprises instinct prepares for intellect in dreams
 and inventions                                               70


VIII

THE IMAGINATIVE WOMAN

 Physical love, reproduction--Emotional love, a
 satisfaction or enjoyment--Scientific curiosity
 about love--Philosophic and sympathetic understanding
 of all sorts of love--Imaginative love
 makes the consciousness elemental--The glory
 and danger of imagination--Vicarious imagination
 in reading--The middle-aged suppress imagination
 in the young--Saintly beauty--Philosophy,
 Criticism, Sensuousness, and commonplace life--Madness,
 Folly, Drink, Drugging--The imaginative
 man is womanly in these respects--Weiningen’s
 _Sex and Character_--Forel, Bloch--Mr.
 Austen Chamberlain                                           78


IX

EXPERIMENTS

 Solitude and family--The home--The gay societies
 of the past--Solemn experiments in love--Civilization
 a protection from, or concealment of, the
 animal necessities--Eating in public--Privacy--When
 truth is goodness--Useful conventions--Saint
 Teresa and her men friends--Lead the way
 if you want to make an experiment; if you want
 to follow anyone, it is a sign you should follow the
 herd                                                         84


X

THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED

 The Spaniard, the Russian, the Parisian--Intellect,
 art, morals, religion, and women--Conspicuousness--The
 fight against the patriarchal goat--The
 passing love--The necessity of many friends--The
 real play of the life to come                                91




PREFACE


There is a great difficulty in writing of the women of the first ten
years of the twentieth century. This is to be the Woman’s Century. In
it she is to awake from her long sleep and come into her kingdom; but
when I look about me I find myself surrounded by the most terribly
contradictory facts. We know there is to be a revaluation of all
values--we know that old rubbish is to be burnt up, that the social
world is to be melted down and remoulded “nearer to the heart’s
desire”; but at the same time we have to recognize that in spite of the
enthusiasm of the alchemists and the transmuters of base metal into
gold, the main body of society is as yet hardly aware of the fire that
is to burn it.

In writing of this change I have to explain to one set of women, who
will think me outrageously advanced, my opinions of another set of
women, who will think me absurdly conventional.

I think I had better own up at once that as an artist I am prejudiced
against the exhibition of the necessities of nature. I am like Mr.
Galsworthy’s little toy terrier, who disliked the strong odours of real
life. Yet at the same time I have a passion for the discussion of life;
the salt of wit makes me enjoy the strongest flavours. So I present
myself and my limitations to my readers, hoping that my fervid faith in
the delight of the communion of thoughts, emotions, and sympathies will
make up for my lack of conviction in some other directions.

Before we proceed any further I think I ought to point out that the
degradation of women in the past originated in the region of the
country round Mount Ararat. The lowering of their status occurred
when the white races adopted the Assyrian Semite’s Scriptures. The
Christian religion brought us that curse cowering behind its gospel of
glad tidings; and it is most remarkable to trace the way in which the
Jews’ religion crept into Europe under the cloak of Christianity. In
heaven, the Gospel says, there is love, but neither marriage or giving
in marriage. Are we to wait for heaven or the millennium before the
present system of marrying and selling in marriage shall be abolished?
Everyone who has read a modern encyclopædia is familiar with the
fact that the first chapters of Genesis are made up of two different
narratives. One, called the Priestly narrative, from the beginning to
the first part of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis,
and continued in the first five verses of the fifth chapter. There is
nothing derogatory to women in this narrative. The unpleasant details
about Adam and Eve are in the Prophetic narrative, which is given
from the second part of the fourth verse of the second chapter to the
twenty-sixth verse of the fourth chapter. The Jews have taken advantage
of the confusion of these two contradictory stories to fix the blame
of all social evils on Eve, just as the Hesiod, influenced by Eastern
legend, fixed it on Pandora. These myths come from the same region, a
region in which women were kept entirely for the amusement and service
of men, and were humbled by every kind of insult that the Semite mind
could invent. Women have a very long score to settle with the Jews and
the Mahommedans. Even Hindoo women were comparatively respected and
free until the Mahommedans brought their ideas into Hindostan. And I
am told that in nearly every city of ill-fame in the world the profits
arising from the procuring of girls are collected by the Chosen Nation.
The Semites founded their opinion of women on fabulous legends and
false science. They assert that man gives the spirit and woman the
matter to the child. Embryology has now taught us that the parents
make exactly equal contributions of chromatin, or the active element,
to the original cell from which a child develops. It has taught us
that, originally, cells are capable of self-reproduction; that sex is
not always a vital necessity, but often a device for securing variety.
It has taught us by experiment that boys come from their mother’s
right side, and girls from her left side, and in a healthy mother the
rhythm of sex is regular. The symbolism of the Fall might indeed
apply to the history of the cell which at first contains its own force
of reproduction, but in the case of a female ovum deliberately parts
with some of its original power in order that it may be replaced by
the vital power of a male. The male cell also rends itself apart, and
becomes quite unfit for reproductive purposes until it can find another
cell with which to join. In the simple facts which have been observed
through microscopes there is no place for the overweening pride of the
Semite race in the virtue of maleness; and I can only hope that it was
ignorance and not malice that led the Jews and the Arabs to spread
false doctrine on the subject of sex. It is unfortunate that the first
patriarchs, from whom they proudly count their descent, had much in
common with the primitive goat worshippers, who were responsible for
the one-sided arrangements for sexual contentment common in harems and
the other patriarchal institutions I have mentioned.

In the great mediæval revival, the real age of chivalry and
troubadours, the knights carried their ladies’ colours to victory in
vain. The old lies are in our blood--we still believe in Eve and her
shame. White men have fought in the past, and it remains for white
women to fight now, and at last rid their sex all over the world of the
ignominy of this false doctrine.




Modern Woman:

Her Intentions




I

THE VOTE


It is my conviction that all great changes come from a force that after
many years of silence blazes with emotional, passionate enthusiasm.
That long period of torpid latent life, once it is liberated from
prison, gives driving power. Without silence and darkness no new
creature can be brought forth. Without resistance no great desire can
be felt. It is the same with the woman’s movement.

When the vote was refused, the first artillery for the woman’s army was
forged. That little request for the vote might have been granted three
years ago without making any more difference than the borough council
vote here, or the parliamentary vote in New Zealand, Australia, Norway,
Finland, and so forth, has made already. That little request, that
might have passed almost unnoticed had it been granted, has raised up
a powerful body of feeling on both sides, that will end in one of the
greatest social revolutions of the time.

Whether women are militant or anti-militant, whether they ask for the
vote in order to fight the working man or to join hands with him,
whether they content themselves with words of approval and donations,
or whether they lose their tempers in denunciation of the unfeminine
behaviour of certain brave enthusiasts--yet all the women of many
opinions are alike rousing themselves from their former deadly attitude
of quiescent acceptance.

The most violent anti-suffragette is obliged to try to understand the
questions of social reform in order to protest against them. The most
downtrodden wife is hearing rumours that even now there are laws which
might protect her from domestic tyranny. The county ladies who never
read anything but _The Queen_, _The Spectator_, or _Punch_, protest
against the struggle, but admit that it is time that women of property
had a vote now that their butlers and coachmen have obtained that
privilege. The “too old at thirty” brigade is carrying the campaign
into the ballroom and skating-rink. All this is familiar to everyone
that moves in English society to-day, and one word of terror used by
men who oppose the vote is heard on all sides. They say the vote is
“the thin end of the wedge,” and I reply gladly from my side--not only
as a suffragist, but as an onlooker at the loves and hatreds of the
sexes--I reply that the wedge is being driven every day. Every day of
delay in giving women the vote gives them a power far more deadly, a
hope more dangerous, an accomplishment far more vital. It gives them
the power of standing up for themselves, freed from the belief in the
protection of men. It gives them hope in each other. It teaches them
to speak for themselves, and discover the force of their eloquence and
the ingenuity of their resources. It is impossible to go to a meeting
of the militant party without feeling amazement at the dexterity of all
concerned. With wit, with banter, with beauty, with dignity, awkward
questions are answered, coarse jokes are frustrated, and swift as
light the laugh is turned against the interrupter.

The odd contrast between the scenes we personally witness and the same
scenes served up for breakfast by the daily press, is having some
effect in breaking up the touching faith of our foremothers in the
accuracy of newspaper reports. Women are awake to public affairs for
the first time since the matriarchal period. They are weighing the
evidence of the press, they are considering political facts. They are
said to be losing the chivalrous adoration of men. But in contrast to
the politeness of men to well-dressed, good-looking women, I would call
attention to the attitude of a respectable hospital official towards
a poor woman who, in November, 1909, brought her little boy as an
out-patient.

She arrived very early in order to be able to go to her work with as
little delay as possible, and secured a seat before the men, who came
in later. When the attendant entered, she was made to go back to the
last seat of all and wait for her son to take his turn until all the
elder males had been interviewed. “Men come first, your place is at
the back,” was all the answer she got to her protests. So much for
chivalry when a woman is poor and worn with labour. It is pathetic to
see the working woman, apologetic for her poverty, apologetic for her
womanhood, apologetic for her ill-health or any temporary need of help.
And I say that the working woman’s heroic patience has been attained
by centuries of ill-usage and _lack_ of chivalry. Most women would not
understand the idea of chivalry if it were explained to them, so little
does it come within their range of experience. We have no conception
of the size of the mass we are dealing with. In England and Wales
there are about 17 million females. Of these females, 13 million are
past childhood, roughly speaking 6 million of these are unmarried, 7
million are married or widows. About 9 million married and unmarried
women are unoccupied, or have retired from business; about 4 million
are engaged in occupations, and trying to make their own living. Of
the 16 million males, about 2 million are unoccupied or retired, 10
million are occupied, and the rest are children. Now we find from the
last census that about 7 million women are in charge of a family,
and 3 million of these are occupied in business; 6 million women are
unmarried, about 1 million of these are occupied in business, and
nearly ½ million have independent means. Making allowance for the very
young, we have about 2½ million grown women in a dependent position
without a husband or an occupation in England and Wales alone.

If one spends an afternoon studying the census returns, one sees in
all occupations the well-paid businesses are for men, and the ill-paid
for women. In general and local government, defence of the country,
and professional occupations, 326 thousand women only have subordinate
posts, but there are nearly 2 million in domestic service. Textile
manufactures, 663 thousand; dress, 710 thousand; food and lodging, 300
thousand, but in commerce and finance only 60 thousand.

Men can no longer support their daughters, and daughters cannot
command good positions in lucrative professions. There are only 7
million families, and at least 4 million grown-up women, unmarried
and superfluous as mothers. The working man tells these women to “go
home and do the washing.” “Well,” a virgin replies, “one million of us
are working at laundry and other work, under half a million of us are
amusing ourselves on independent incomes, and the rest of us have to
while away life somehow without money or occupation, so we are making a
revolution.”

The struggle for the vote is putting heart into the superfluous woman,
and it is putting the hope of reorganizing the market value of women’s
labour into her heart. We not only want work, but we want good wages.
If we have children we want to be sure they will be cared for and fed.
If we keep house we want our wages. The 12 million females that have
no independent income cry out to the ½ million that has an independent
income, in their almost hopeless struggle to win fair wages. It is
interesting to think that out of the total population of about 32½
million in England and Wales, a very little over ½ million are living
on independent incomes, and we find that there are less than 100,000
heirs, and more than 400,000 heiresses in this country. The rest, that
is 32 million, have to work or starve so as to save enough for their
old age. Each person that lives at ease is surrounded by sixty-five
people that have to struggle. Each woman that has a husband knows
that a widow or spinster stands portionless beside her. Figures are
abstractions, but behind these figures are facts and problems that are
driving us before them with such resistless cruelty that at last we are
determined to cry halt and make a fight--vote or no vote!




II

WOMEN’S INCOMES


Let us say that certain _prime donne_ can earn £25,000 a year for a few
years, that the most successful London actress may receive a salary of
£5000 a year, that a successful novelist may get a few thousands a year
by her books, that a lady doctor or dressmaker may make £1000 a year,
and you have admitted all that can be said in favour of the present
means women have of making a large income on the same lines as men. I
suppose the average successful singer is delighted with £1000 a year,
the average successful actress with £10 a week or £500 a year, the
average novelist with £300 a year, and the average lady doctor with the
same. In an institution which gives £1000 a year to its male principal,
we find the lady superintendent receiving £200 a year, and the male
secretary £350. Women find it hard to get any professional income out
of the Government offices, the Church, or the law courts. In the Post
Office and in all educational work the disparities between the salaries
of men and women is well known. And I think we may take it for granted
that the average business income of an everyday sort of woman, working
hard, is less than £100 a year. The income of a charwoman in London,
we know, is 2s. 6d. a day, or a possible 15s. a week--that is, 3d. an
hour, exactly half a man’s minimum wage.

These are a few well-known facts. The reason is that women are said to
have “other means” of earning a livelihood. First among these comes the
comfortable possibility of inheriting money from relations. Many great
heiresses and little heiresses are to be found among the conservative
forces of the land, for these women have nothing to gain and everything
to lose by changing the present state of things. They and the insurance
offices alike prosper on the present foundations of English family life.

Next comes the probably miserable alternative of marrying a rich
husband. It is a very curious thing that it is harder for a rich man
to be naturally attractive to women than it is for the camel to pass
through the needle’s eye, and the consequence is that women generally
have a more or less unhappy domestic life when they definitely marry
for a livelihood.

Then we have the adventuress, who succeeds in making a handsome income
by the unscrupulous use of her intelligence and charm. After that come
the various types of women who hire themselves or are hired out for
the relief of excitable gentlemen. And lastly the crowd of desolate
diseased refuse who pick up a living any way they can, in ways too
horrible to think of, by the practice of vulgar indecency.

All these incomes which are earned by women, either by their
tenderness and charm or by their bestiality, are, together with the
family inheritances, the real reasons why women as a sex are not made
economically independent on the same lines as men. The father of a
family longs to save his daughters from the temptations of poverty,
and if they do what he bids them he insures his life in their favour.
The husband prefers to keep his wife dancing to the tune he pays for,
so he makes her allowance dependent on his own mood of the moment. The
infatuated boy considers he is seeing life when he spends his money
recklessly on an adventuress. All these women can undersell other
women in the labour market, because they have incomes which make them
independent of what they may earn there. They are, in a kind of way,
what the strike organizers would call “blacklegs”: they make life more
difficult for the women who must work to live or starve.

Again, the magic of love is destroyed by the thought of money. And love
is very apt to evaporate when such thoughts flame up in the mind.

The hope I see for the ennobling of sex relations is that women should,
by some means never yet thought of, become independent of the caprice
of individual man.

The average middle-class Englishman, I believe, looks upon his married
life as a kind of business partnership, in which he pays money in order
that he may not be worried about the care of his clothes or his food
or his affectional needs. These things once settled and put under the
care of a sensible woman, he can devote his thoughts to business, to
betting, to cards, to golf, or any other amusement he may select to
ensure that he may not become a “dull man.” The average working man, of
course, not only marries a housekeeper, a cook, a maid-of-all-work, but
the mother and nurse of his continuous flow of offspring, and the butt
of his temper when the world has used him ill.

If any hope of eventual economic freedom is to come for the whole sex,
I stand aghast to think of all the antagonistic interests that will
have to be reconciled. It will be worse than the Budget. The wives will
have to stand out for fixed allowances. The mothers will have to make
their bargain either with their husbands or the State, whichever wants
their children most. The housekeepers will have to take their wages
like the other servants.

The women of the adventuress class are a hopeless problem. They are
worth a hundred a week at one moment, and nothing at all a few weeks
later perhaps. Their trade is so dangerous. But we can cheer ourselves
up with the statistics which tell us they are in England and Wales
numbered by thousands only, whereas we are dealing at present with the
problem of seventeen millions of women.

We have, then, four classes of women--the heiresses, the portionless
wives, the courtesans, and the prostitutes--who stand in the way of the
economic independence of women because they appear to be better off
under the present state of disorganization. The labour market for women
is of course permeated by their influence. The rich women who work for
nothing, the wives who “get round” their husbands, the courtesans who
command the “flesh market,” the prostitutes, who are ignored by the
rest of their sex, but revenge themselves on the ignorant by spreading
disease and sorrow among the happy and healthy.

The record of the overwhelming advantages of the economic independence
of women can hardly be compressed into the compass of this chapter. It
would make love marriages possible. It is almost certain that a love
marriage on the woman’s side is one of the most important elements for
good in the production of a fine race. If a girl were free to choose
according to her inclination, there is practically no doubt that she
would choose the right father for her child, however badly she might
choose a lifelong companion for herself.

This is, of course, true about both the sexes to a certain extent,
although average men are much less dainty about these matters than the
average woman. If we could remove the economic considerations from
parenthood it would help towards the invigoration of the race.

The sad part of this question is that according to all the great racial
ideals women ought to be economically independent, but, according to
all little social ideals, it seems inevitable that her independence
will be resisted to the last.




III

THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE


We cannot trust ourselves to make a real love-knot unless money or
custom forces us to “bear and forbear.” There is always the lurking
fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear upon the
Book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every first love
is born free of tradition; indeed, not only is first love innocent and
valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been taught,
and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is so
extraordinary, so unlike anything told by the poets, so absorbing, that
it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out. Sometimes one
feels a great pity for the lovers in England, because young English
girls are very apt to mistake a feeling of gratified vanity and the
emotion of a new sensation for love of some special man who happens
to make love to them at the propitious moment. Many faithful women
go through life enduring the love of a man whom they care for very
moderately, who, on his side, congratulates himself on having found a
virtuous wife. It is lucky for these people that probably the wife, in
her limited circle of acquaintances, will never meet the man who ought
to have been her mate.

I have often talked to the apparently contented mother of a family,
when some little word reveals to me that it is possible to be the
mother of a man’s children merely by putting up with his caresses while
one thinks about some other subject. Is it any wonder that the race
becomes more and more anæmic and bored with existence as generation
follows generation?

Other wives have loved their husbands with passion, and perhaps for two
years their devotion has steadily increased, but the husband meanwhile
has known many ecstasies and wearinesses. His love is like the waves,
which follow each other as periods of dullness follow moments of
rapture. Hers has been like the tide, increasing in devotion and
tenderness; but the tide turns at last, and the dancing of the waves
can do very little to stay its ebbing. I think men are justified who
say that women either love too much for their taste or not at all.

Some women say they could love their husbands better if they did not
see so much of the unromantic side of their lives. The holes in a man’s
socks are not the most endearing remembrances in the world.

The only permanent relations are founded on mutual contempt. Brothers
and sisters have no illusions about each other, and if they feel any
affection at all it is a steadfast one. Alas! the close knowledge
of weaknesses very seldom permits the affection to show through the
contempt. Married lovers have to pass from the state of love, which
is so apt to be a state of delusion, to the state of clear-sighted
affection. The ordeal is one which very few survive.

Another tragedy of love is jealousy. A man or woman is very often
jealous of the partner’s brothers and sisters, or other relations.
Those who love wish to be all in all to each other, those who quarrel
dislike to have others taking sides in their quarrels. This fundamental
jealousy of relations is ever apt to break into a flame, besides
jealousy of the more usual kind.

Mr. Harold Gorst has written a book on _The Philosophy of Love_, in
which he points out that it is unwise of a bridegroom to take instant
possession of his bride. He maintains that the usual programme, in
which a wife shows all her modesty and a husband all his love on the
wedding-night, is an absurd waste of the honeymoon, which ought to be
spent in a gradual approach to the supreme surrender. Again, wives are
too apt to give up the charming resistances which are necessary to the
satisfaction of a man’s emotional nature. Mr. Gorst cannot imagine
that a husband would tire of his wife if she kept her right over her
own body with a firm hand, and required wooing every time she yielded
to the wedding of her husband. So much for the man of the world’s point
of view.

The marriage tie is a way of keeping people together while they undergo
the various disillusions and jealousies that are inevitable, unless one
of them is prepared to give way in everything. Is there any better way?
In most cases, no.

The marriage tie will always exist, because it is the natural impulse
of the majority of young people to wish to love each other alone, and
to remain with each other for ever. The honeymoon having elapsed, they
very likely find they are about to become parents, and they spend
the intervening months in making happy preparations. Then the baby
is born, and has to be brought up until it is old enough to go to
school. If there are three children, they have to be looked after for
about fourteen years. The wife is now thirty-four, and the husband
thirty-eight. The children are placed in various schools away from
home. Is there any alternative to the rather boring life that has to be
lived out until death parts the parents? None. They are not rich enough
to travel and amuse themselves, so the wife goes on housekeeping and
calling on neighbours, and changing her servants, and the husband goes
to the City, plays golf, and reads trashy novels. The marriage tie must
always persist while these people exist.

But what are the six million bachelors and the seven million spinsters
to do? Some of them are very young; thousands of them do not wish to
marry, their sexual nature is hardly developed more than a child’s;
others are invalids, openly or secretly; and a good number are leading
illegally arranged lives because the present marriage laws do not
suit their constitutions. Among the grown-up population about half
the number are married, and the other half unmarried. Many of these
marriages are unhappy, and it is to be presumed that at least six
million of each sex do not wish to marry enough to overcome the terrors
of saying what they want for ever, and getting it.

Now, having regard to the natural variations of love, I must suggest
that the stigma might be removed from those who are not capable of
lifelong fidelity. There seems good proof that a few millions of men
and women are bringing misery upon the rest because they are treated
as unworthy of social consideration. Medical men are saying that the
disease which is undermining the health of the nation is dangerous only
because it is shameful. It could be easily cured in its early stages if
it could be treated openly and without ruining the reputation of those
whom it attacks. Even when health is retained, reputations are lost and
careers are ruined in order to prop up the tottering institution of
marriage by making it the only refuge for the respectable.

But until it is acknowledged that it is not respectable to live
together when the temperaments are incompatible, there will be no
real virtue in the married state. Never to want the same thing at the
same time is a more far-reaching cause of emotional degradation than
one violent outbreak of temper under extreme provocation. It is more
degrading to the finer feelings than a temporary alienation of marital
love. One would imagine that the men who refuse to alter the divorce
laws really do believe in the sacrament of the marriage ceremony,
instead of in the sacrament of the true love, which abides when there
is a real compatibility of temperament.




IV

THE SORDID DIVORCE


I mentioned in passing that marriage was an institution that should
not be ended, but should be mended. In the first place, let us inquire
whether the marriage ceremony is a sacrament, whether parenthood is
a sacrament, and why marriage should be binding. The Catholic Church
refuses divorce altogether on the ground that the blessing of the
Church makes the contract binding till death. Parents with children are
generally prepared to endure each other for the sake of their family.
While women are economically dependent it would be pure folly for
them to advocate marriage for a short term. Very few women succeed in
retaining their attraction for men for any considerable length of time.
Ten years of attractiveness is not to be thought of in the majority of
cases. While a man holds the purse-strings he can always find someone
to marry. A woman can offer nothing but her power of enchantment, and
most of them have to rely on the universal enchantment of innocence
which can only be offered once.

But conditions are very variable even now. Women hold the
purse-strings when they are heiresses. They are as free as men when
they are childless. Ninon de l’Enclos was irresistible until she was
eighty, apparently because she was amusing as well as fascinating.
Under such circumstances as these it is sometimes wise to seek divorce.
In England this cannot be done without outraging every feeling of
dignity and delicacy.

Unless one of the married pair is faithless, impotent, cruel, or rich
enough to leave the neighbourhood, the other cannot get a divorce. This
involves discussing the secrets of the alcove with solicitors, and a
final exposure of your domestic concerns in the law courts, for the
press and the public to take or leave as they are more or less painful
to you and amusing to them.

A very frequent method of obtaining a divorce now is for a wife, who
would not touch her husband with a besom if she could help it, to sue
publicly for restitution of conjugal rights. To a woman of any delicacy
such a demand would be degrading, even if it were made in private.
To be obliged to make it publicly as a matter of form is, to say the
least, unpleasant to such a woman. The next proceeding is taken when a
certain time has elapsed and the husband has not noticed the wife who
has to pretend to be pining for his forced caresses.

I confess it is hard to realize the state of a woman who actually can
desire the society of a man who is weary of her. I have not imagination
for that, I am afraid. The law was made by men, and men are said to
know women better than they know each other; also, we have all heard
of the charms of a captured or unwilling bride, so perhaps it is an
instance in which men have done for women what they would wish to have
done for themselves.

Whatever the reason is, the law is there, and when the husband has been
faithless and refused his wife’s embraces, he has done sufficient to
justify the court in calling him guilty of desertion and adultery, and
a decree _nisi_ is pronounced. Then, if no evidence of collusion is
forthcoming, and the court can make believe that one of the parties at
least does _not_ want to be divorced, the decree is made absolute in
six months. Can anyone realize that the present divorce law is in such
a hopelessly stupid state? There seems no possibility of using common
sense in a law court. To get a divorce you must _not_ agree together
that it is a desirable step. To get a divorce the innocent person must
speak in public of subjects no innocent person would care to mention
in private. To get a divorce from a woman you respect at all, you must
refuse to live with her, and must openly commit adultery, at the same
time making no arrangement with her as to how she is to get rid of
you. The old complaint of the inequality of the divorce laws for the
sexes is perhaps of importance, but to me it seems a small thing in
comparison to the general sordidness of the whole proceeding.

Surely the one cause of causes for a divorce is that both the parties
want it. Some simple form of procedure, such as separation on the first
application, to be followed by divorce in six months if the parties had
not made up their differences in the meantime, should be devised.

The difficulties would arise in cases in which the parties were not
agreed, and I am afraid in those instances the question of money would
nearly always be discovered to be the root of the trouble. Ladies would
be found to be unaccountably attached to their husband’s cheque-books;
and gentlemen unable to separate themselves from a share in their
wives’ dividends. But when the question of fortune or wealth enters
into the marriage bargain, why not let it be fought out on that ground?

Divorce is always brought about because of the weariness and boredom
one human being causes another. Cruelty, adultery, temporary desertion,
every kind of outrage can be borne if excitement and interest
counterbalance suffering. But the devotion of the whipped dog would
soon be exhausted if the dog could find something in the world which
interested him more than his master. Curiosity once fully satisfied,
tenderness balances on the edge of the precipice of boredom, and may
topple over at any moment.

Of course the insult of being considered a bore would be harder to
bear in most instances than the accusation of wickedness, so on the
whole it would seem advisable to keep to the good old formula of
“incompatibility of temper,” and fight out the money questions on their
own merits.

Now the merits of the money question in marriage have never been
properly arranged. In France the wife has her own _dot_, as a matter
of course; but the French have so carefully adjusted their population
to their pockets that we can only bow in silent admiration of their
unparalleled foresight.

In England a girl very often marries without any fortune of her own,
on the understanding either that she is beautiful and that the husband
is prepared to endow her with all his worldly goods, or that she is so
useful that she will really save him a good deal of money. If she is
very beautiful, her relations can generally get a settlement made on
her; if she is only useful, she is lucky if she can induce her husband
to insure his life in her favour. The merely useful wife has very
little hold on ready money. One week she may get a good sum of money,
another week nothing, for her household expenses. If she is clever and
managing, she will probably gain her husband’s confidence, and if he is
honest and has a regular income they may be very comfortable together;
but under other conditions the affairs of the household go from bad to
worse, and the wife is only a very inefficient servant, who may get her
keep, but who will certainly not get her wages.

I can only suggest that the position of wife and mother ought to
legally entitle a woman to a fixed proportion of her husband’s income,
and the position of housekeeper to a further proportion. If, as is
often the case in upper and middle-class modern marriage, the husband
and wife do not live in the connubial state, the legal allowance as
wife and mother would not be made, but the allowance as hostess and
housekeeper could be enforced as long as they remained under the same
roof. In the case of the poorer classes, where the wife does the whole
work of keeping up the home and increasing the family, the proportion
should be very much greater, so great, indeed, as to make both partners
think twice before recklessly bringing children into the world. Among
this class I think that the birth of a child might legalise the union
of the parents. This appears to be an old custom in many parts of the
world.

The working man is the greatest enemy of women’s equal value, I am
afraid. Among the mining population, where his wages are high enough
to make him independent, the woman he has married holds a very
low position--very much what middle-class women held early in the
nineteenth century. The working man of prudence and forethought is of
course limiting his family with as much care as the rest of the world.
But the others, who drive away drab intelligence by a Saturday orgy,
forget prudence, and the result is that their wives are always in the
pangs of childbirth or miscarriage. The usual self-sacrifice of women
comes dangerously near suicide in this matter. To save her husband from
a few moments of self-control she goes through months of drugging,
loses her beauty, undermines her health in the endeavour to exercise
prudence and to avoid bringing children into the world for whom she has
no hope of making provision.

A romance of the mining world, in September, 1909, is instructive
reading. One Friday night, at 10 o’clock, the husband came home with
two former lodgers, two old friends, and one stranger. They brought
plenty of beer with them. The wife was upstairs in bed, but she called
over the banisters to them to make themselves at home, and returned
to her sleep. Later on, when the men were nearly all dead drunk, one
of the former lodgers heard screams upstairs. He found the stranger
undressed and making an assault on the wife of his host. The lodger
flung him downstairs, and to his horror found that he had killed him.
He was terrified, and he and the woman left the house, calling to
the others to fetch a doctor at once. Whatever the woman and he said
to each other it was tragic, for she hurried to a pond and drowned
herself, while he went to his sister’s house and waited arrest. The
husband was severely reprimanded for his “negligence.” A woman counts
for very little in the mining districts, she takes the German position
of a kind of upper servant, in whose emotions, if she has any, none
take any interest. In the manufacturing districts the working man’s
wife is generally a breadwinner herself, and she only needs a little
enterprise to make her position much more favourable than it is at
present.

Nearly all the police court cases turn on the question of the wife’s
housekeeping allowance. It is an endless source of dispute, and if it
could be regulated, irrespective of caprice, most of the miseries of
married poverty would cease. The poor are simple, and in this truth
about them we see the truth about ourselves. We all want a regular
income, and very few of us gain from being dependent on the affection
of our family. Divorce, then, is sordid with regard to sentiment and
with regard to money, and in these ways is greatly in need of change.




V

THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN


This chapter deals with the subject of prostitution from the point of
view of public health, so that the nervous reader had better skip it.

Edmond de Goncourt has written some charming chapters in his book about
Outamaro, the Japanese artist, on the courtesans who live within the
walls of Yoshiwara. He describes the quarter as containing fifty green
houses within the walls and a hundred without the walls. They were
established by the Emperor of Japan in the eighth century for the use
of foreign princes, ambassadors, and wealthy merchants. The present
walls were built in the seventeenth century. The girls, from all parts,
are brought up like princesses, and taught writing, the arts, music,
and the archaic language spoken by the court in the seventh and eighth
centuries, which is now the language of the poets. The formalities of
the suitors are three visits of ceremony, each with its ritual of good
manners. A green house contains twenty first-class beauties and sixty
second-class beauties. They sing, play, and write verses. These are a
few translations which give some idea of their feelings:--


     “It is only when both of us are looking at it that the moon is
     beautiful; when I am alone it makes me feel too sad.”

     “This evening who will share the sweetness of life, this floating
     body in the passing world?”

     “Oh, that the moonlight might shine brightly in the waters of this
     life [the courtesan’s], but the autumn moon on the other side of
     the clouds makes me long for it” [wifehood].

     “Although I am nothing here, the moon lights up my heart with a
     ray of consolation.”

     “How often do I part from one whose shadow I shall never see again
     under the moon of dawn!”


These little moon-women are not the only members of the sisterhood in
Tokio. There are the geishas who dance and sing, and there are the old
and abandoned; but the horrible sordidness of the red blinds and the
draggled torn lace curtains one sees in the streets Charles Booth has
coloured red in his maps of London, is absent.

This question is not a mere matter of sentiment, it is one in urgent
need of immediate attention. The pitiless contempt of married women for
prostitution is bringing a terrible punishment, which is ruining the
physique of nearly every civilized race. It is now certain that the
diseases called contagious can be cured with the greatest certainty
if they are taken in hand in the earliest stages, but if they are
neglected they bring in their train every scourge that the flesh is
capable of enduring. It cannot be repeated too often that if women
do not wish to contract diseases themselves in the intercourse of
ordinary life, they must bring themselves to protect those who in the
intercourse of passional life are ignorantly or malignantly spreading
the diseases. There might be a trade union for women on the streets.
In the cause of public health, which is, in this matter, the cause of
future generations, family cannot separate itself from family, innocent
from guilty, moral from immoral. We can no longer say: Let those who
practise promiscuity suffer for their incontinence, let them encounter
the dangers they choose to face, “let their sin find them out.” We know
now that from this particular scourge of contagious disease the pure
suffer far more severely than the impure; and the races who have never
known the disease are the first to die when, by accident, they finally
come in contact with it.

So the clean, healthy youth from some remote country place is in
greater danger than the sophisticated townsman. And mothers do not
realize the dangers they and their young children run every day when,
in their ignorance of danger, they entrust their households to the
care of women servants who may be carrying contagion without even
knowing it.

The contempt that is shown towards prostitutes makes it impossible
for them to insist upon proper sanitation in the quarters where they
congregate. They are hunted from street to street, and, as they get
poorer and poorer, their condition becomes more and more of a danger to
the rest of the town.

I cannot make any suggestions as to the methods that should be used to
make the danger less terribly imminent than it is at present, but I do
suggest that the women who are uppermost should face the fact that they
themselves are in danger because the lower prostitutes have no civil
rights, no trade union, no means of redressing the wrongs they suffer
from.

M. Brieux has written a play called _Les Avariés_, dealing with this
important subject in all its aspects. One incident is that of a young
girl on the streets who is infected by a man. She is furious and in
despair, but before she goes into hospital she, in her turn, revenges
herself on as many men as she can, for the wrong done to her by one.

Can we wonder that a woman who is treated as street walkers are treated
should feel this wild anti-social rage against the society that has
first made use of her and then treated her as an outcast?

It is becoming more and more difficult to say anything definite about
the moral standards of women. Thirty years ago the chorus-girl drank
champagne and “went to the bad,” now she drinks milk and marries a
peer. Girls with beauty are finding out that prudence pays exceedingly
well. On the other hand, we have girls with brains deliberately
resolving that they will not marry. They refuse to run the risk of
living with a man whose love has become a mere habit. They boldly say
that they do not care enough for love to perform its rites, unless they
are animated with the ardour of love. Passion served up with cold sauce
as in the Shaw-Barker school of sex revolts them. Enthusiastic love is
the only excuse in their eyes for going through the rather ungraceful
gestures of love.

Bloch has asked the question if we can ever do away with the menace
to public health which promiscuity entails? He seems to think from
the evidence of history and psychiatry that men certainly, and women
probably, are not naturally unitarian in their affections; therefore
the sooner we seriously wrestle with the realities and leave off hoping
for the “something to change nature,” the better. Above all, it is most
important for women to realize at once that the most innocent contact
with the unmentioned diseases--the contact, say, of a cut finger or a
chapped lip--is enough to endanger the health, unless it is attended to
at once.

As for the aspect of the prostitution question entailed in taking
money, the sale of virginity and so forth, it comes under the general
consideration whether it is right for any woman to become the property
of a man in exchange for money. A woman who loves does naturally become
the property of the man she loves for the time being. The wiser she
is, the less she will let him know it. The money bargain I cannot
help regarding as a device invented by unattractive men whom no woman
would voluntarily look at. Again, as to women whose love affairs are
numerous, I do not think they would care to practise promiscuity unless
they were intoxicated. On the other hand, I think most women are
capable of several love affairs. I said before that their love ebbed
and flowed with the sweep of a tide, while men’s love glittered and
dulled like the shaken silver of the waves; still, there are more tides
than one in many women’s experience. We cannot read the autobiographies
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without observing that.

That love becomes very stale in time is a regrettable fact. Many women
distract their thoughts with work or amusements. But the greatest
amusement of all is flirtation. It is an amusement peculiarly fitted
to the English. In the Latin countries flirtation is admittedly not
only an amusement, but a vital part of women’s lives. It cannot be
denied that, after a time, a childless wife, or a wife who is not
absorbed in her children, begins to feel like a withered rose tree,
and a flirtation comes to her like springtime after winter. I do not
think it is often her sensual nature, but her emotional nature, that
makes a woman unfaithful to a husband of whom she has really been
passionately fond. Unfortunately there is a charm about the first
steps of a love affair, in the half-admissions and the uncertainties,
which it is almost impossible to feel after a year of married life.
The truth is that to feel a charm we must be in a state of emotional
exultation which is above the average exultations of daily life. The
great question for the race is what this feeling of charm means, and
whether it is of value to the race, and to be encouraged? Or even then
whether the destruction of our present fixed social arrangements is
too great a sacrifice to make for the vital improvement of mankind? In
the meantime, until this question of changing charm versus habitual
love can be settled, and the value of emotion as a factor in race
improvement be proved by careful inquiry into the experiences of the
parents of conspicuous children, I reiterate what I have said. Marrying
women owe it to themselves and to their children to do all they can to
make the conditions of prostitutes sanitary. Above all, they should
remember the green houses of Japan, and recognize that if women are
degraded it is generally because they have been treated with contempt,
and not because they are essentially any more contemptible than the
rest of us.




VI

BEAUTY AND MOTHERHOOD


“Americanism” is the word sometimes used by scientific men to imply
the terror of motherhood that is coming upon women. The old days when
Nelson said the two most beautiful things in the world were a ship in
full sail and a woman with child, are passed. Pain and the loss of
beauty mean something hauntingly horrible--something of a nightmare to
the modern highly strung, nervous woman. In America the question is
becoming one of national importance: as a matter of fact some women
are beginning to refuse motherhood, both there and in other parts of
the world. I do not see anything alarming in this. To me it means
that women will specialize in the future. When the unnatural economic
reasons for marriage have been removed, the natural desires of women
will be able to assert themselves. For centuries they have lied and
schemed and flattered men in order to wheedle a living out of them, and
it will take some time for the weaker sex to learn that it may really
tell the truth; to learn, indeed, that it is necessary for the good
of the race that it should tell the truth. When this is done it will
be perceived that women are divided into two distinct classes--those
that love men better than children, and those that love children better
than men. This is natural enough. In ordinary life we can see some
people prefer to associate with their inferiors, and some with their
superiors. At present the comparatively free life led by men make them
far better company, and therefore superior as a sex to women. They
do not talk as well as clever women, but their views are wide, and
as a rule they know something of the general facts of life. They are
merrier, too, and I have often thought, “It is not so much that men
must work and women must weep, but that men may laugh and women must
look shocked.”

But, as I was saying, some people prefer to look up, and others
prefer to look down on their companions. Some people, to put it more
pleasantly, like to care for and watch over others, while others want
to be cared for. So it comes about that some women do not really love
children. They may feel such a passion for a man that they long to be
the mother of his child, but that is a state of unusual exultation,
which in cold blood is repented later. On the other hand, the born
mothers--the women who really long for children, to whom it is a
terrible deprivation to live without children--are undoubtedly the
people who may best be entrusted with the future of the race.

I do not think that we shall ever get mankind to carry out the eugenic
ideal of careful breeding, but I do think we might come to a time when
the natural instinct of a woman for the fit father of her child will be
a very important factor in the arrangements made for the existence and
benefit of future generations.

We have such a lumber of useless old ethical codes to get rid of, and
such innumerable practical suggestions for race betterment, that we
hardly know where to begin. In the _Eugenic Review_ for October, 1909,
there is an excellent paper by Mr. Havelock Ellis, which explains a
newly discovered and harmless operation which can be performed without
making the slightest difference to an individual’s happiness. This
operation would prevent him or her from ever becoming a parent. It
is hoped that it may some day be used in cases where the heredity is
hopelessly bad. It would save a great deal of public expense in cases
where the dangerous person would otherwise have to be kept under
constant supervision. The great benefit of the discovery is that it
has none of the unfortunate effects which often follow from the
practice of more Eastern methods of sterilizing the unfit. Contact
with radium has also been found to lead to temporary sterility. But
although stamping out the worst class of disease and imbecility in one
generation would be a tremendous benefit, it is not the only remedy
proposed. The encouragement and training of fit men and women--I mean
the education in the laws of sexual health--would do a great deal to
save the next generations from many ills that are brought upon it by
the sheer ignorance of its parents. Here, again, we have to fight the
silly conspiracy of silence which leaves schoolboys and schoolgirls
to struggle through the early temptations of life without a word of
warning from responsible people who have studied the subject of sex.

There is no doubt that the world at present is full of motherly women
who have no chance of becoming mothers, and of unmotherly women who
have children that they do not want, or more children than they want.
It would be a great advance if these arrangements could be readjusted
by some slight change of public opinion, guided by the obvious facts of
heredity. For instance, it is a fact that some women are very fit to be
mothers, and are unattractive as wives. For others, attractive to men
as they often are, it is a sin to become mothers. A tuberculous woman
is apt to have a much larger family than a normally healthy woman,
and that tendency ought to be modified by surgical aid. Even these few
suggestions acted upon would help to make the world less full of pain
and sorrow.

But we are full of prejudices against these improvements. The old
marriage laws, the old ideas of right and wrong remain; religious
prejudice lasts far longer than religion; and the world moves on, and
everyone hears of improvements that might be made quite easily. But
nothing is done because of a public opinion which everyone supposes to
exist, but is really a bugbear invented by the Press on the strength of
a few letters from the sort of people who write letters of protest to
the public libraries. A hundred letters impress an editor, because he
forgets the millions of people who do not write letters, but pay all
the same.

One of the most serious facts which is alleged with regard to the
“Americanism” I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is that the
nervous sensitiveness from which the women of the United States suffer
is caused by their education being too purely intellectual. Now this
is probably true. I remember one of the cleverest men I have ever met,
the late Professor York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern History at
Oxford, who was an encyclopædia of information, and could assimilate
the contents of a book in a phenomenally short time, told me that
he meant to paint up the words “Damn Intellect” over his mantelpiece
at Christ Church. Intellect has been said to be the result of man’s
struggle with material facts, very useful as far as material facts
go, but absurdly misleading when applied to the all-important side of
our natures which comes under the consideration of the psychologist.
The stuffing of one’s head with a lot of undigested knowledge for
purposes of examination is not only useless in after life, but really
damaging to the vital apparatus. I was myself educated in the colleges
of Miss Dorothea Beale and Miss Buss, and I know it took me quite six
years to get out of the shell my education had hardened around me. I
don’t suppose I should ever have spread my own wings if the beak of my
destiny had not been stronger than my overwhelming education, so that
it succeeded in hammering through that shell at last.

In the next chapter I hope to show in more detail how women might
be educated to deliberately cultivate their instincts, and use them
in conjunction with the practical intellect to increase the power
of intuitively understanding the consciousness of groups and crowds
of people. Above all, how they may learn by definitely guiding the
vegetative consciousness to increase the health and beauty of their
children.




VII

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY


Intellect, then, is only a part of the life-consciousness. Henri
Bergson and William James have both agreed that the other parts deserve
our respect, and demand the attention of all practical people. They are
Instinctive Consciousness and Torpid Consciousness. Bergson, so well
known on the Continent, gives in _L’Evolution Créatrice_ a brilliant
outline of the relations of the intellectual, instinctive, and torpid
states. Briefly, he pictures vital consciousness as the centre from
which the three diverge in different radiations. The intellect which
covers an enormous field and can grapple successfully with the
superficial appearances we call facts, finds its present culmination
in mankind. The instinct which dawns in the consciousness as vision,
and deals only with one or two things, but knows them perfectly
through and through to their deepest causes, finds its culmination in
insects, especially in the elaborate societies of ants and bees. The
torpid state which, without external motion, like deep sleep, is most
creatively powerful, most enduring, and most in touch with the first
beginnings of organic life, finds its culmination in the vegetable
kingdom. The psychologists’ idea, then, for the practical future of
our race is that it should turn its attention to the cultivation of
these two modes of consciousness which have hitherto been lamentably
neglected in all schemes of education.

Bergson says that there are many questions the intellect can ask but
can never answer, which the instinct could answer, but, unprompted by
the intellect, would never ask.

The practical turn psychology has taken lately has a very deep
significance for women. For the adolescent girl and the woman
with child are the very types of the power of mysterious torpid
consciousness which is so little understood by the most learned men.
The ancients have believed that a mother’s impressions stamp themselves
on the child and determine its type. I mean, for instance, that a woman
surrounded by Burne-Jones’s pictures would be likely to have children
resembling that type. The whole matter is one of the deepest interest,
and one guiding principle stands out from all our uncertainties on
the subject, which is, that a woman with child should not use up her
vitality in other directions, that she should for the time being live
the life of a fruit tree, and nourish herself, and sun herself without
care and without intellectual distractions.

It is said that in deep sleep the creations of our imagination are
conceived; and that the state of impending motherhood should be one of
rest, and the quiet enjoyment of beauty and peace if it is to have a
good result.

I am not saying all women should be mothers, nor am I saying that
mothers should not have intellectual pleasures, but I do agree that
they should not have intellectual tasks, and above all that they should
be protected from worry, anxiety, and irritation. If the care of
mothers became a national question, I believe the saving in the care of
lunatics and unemployables and criminals would be incalculable.

The torpid consciousness is one which women who are to be mothers
should respect. I believe it is a state cultivated to a high degree by
the Eastern mystics, who have given us glimpses of the psychic powers
to which it can give birth. It is intimately connected with a control
over the emotional storms which affect most people and govern their
conduct. The Eastern sage does not starve his emotional nature, but
learns to direct it, while he is in a state of apparent torpor. So I
believe the wise mother might, if she gave herself the opportunity,
direct the future character of her child in the best sense of the word.

At present the torpid consciousness is hardly understood at all, but
the instinctive consciousness has been studied, although it is talked
of with a contempt it is far from deserving. I admit that to some
extent instinct is the enemy of civilization, but at the same time
civilization is the enemy of instinct.

The old matriarchal village community seems to be the ideal state of
an instinctive race of people. I do not say it is possible now, but it
certainly seems a good way of conducting affairs on a dignified basis
without the family unit.

Temperance with an occasional orgy is a prescription ordered for a
patient by a modern doctor, and that exactly describes the life of the
old matriarchal village. In the first place, it was situated near the
equator, and everyone could do without clothes. The village children
grew up together under the care of the elder men and women, with no
curiosity about the unseen. They worked in the fields and perhaps
hunted a little, but they all lived like brothers and sisters. They
had a central grove of sacred trees in their village, with a dancing
ground; the huts were round the grove, and then the belt of cultivated
land was called the “guardian serpent.” Beyond that was the jungle,
with paths leading to other villages. In the spring the Saturnalia was
celebrated, and the young men left their homes and visited the other
villages, scattered in the neighbourhood beyond the jungle-paths, to
celebrate the festival with song, wine, and dance. The orgy lasted a
few weeks, during the blossom time, when there was no work required at
home. It ended in a good deal of love-making, after which the young
men returned to their homes sobered, and ready to work in their own
villages for another year. Nine months later, when the weather made
it well to remain indoors, the children were born, and were called
the children of the sacred grove or the tree, and no one talked of
fathers. The men of the tribe cheerfully undertook the education of
the children, and maintained them on communal principles. It sounds
almost as socially elaborate as a hive, and the whole business appears
to have been carried out on purely instinctual lines. Perhaps I ought
to add that all can read for themselves about these matriarchal customs
in a book called _The Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times_, by J. F.
Hewitt, and in Tiele’s _Outline of the History of Ancient Religions_,
also in Risley’s _Tribes and Castes of Bengal_. The life was perhaps
too austerely virtuous for the majority of mankind, but it had its
advantages.

Instinct is an animal faculty cultivated by an outdoor life, which we
to a great extent have swamped in our all-pervading intellects. It
is a power of the consciousness which appears to act without effort,
and to increase its power as we decrease our mental struggles. Very
often when after fussing over a lost object or forgotten name we cease
to trouble ourselves, and employ our clamorous minds in some other
direction, the consciousness of the name or place appears like the sky
from which the clouds have cleared away. It is in the interplay between
intellect and instinct that the practical value of the new school of
psychology will be found. Our instincts need to be stimulated by the
curiosity of our intellects. We have an extraordinary and inexhaustible
power of inventing surprises for our intellect, both in our dreams
and in inventive states of meditation. Some people call these things
manifestations of the subconsciousness. I prefer to think of them as
manifestations of the long-neglected powers of the instinct. We know
that many insects who have never met their parents in their lives, yet
carry out their destinies as if they had received the most careful
personal instruction. The truth about instinct appears to be that it
is a race-consciousness--a kind of wireless telegraphy which can be
set in motion between sympathetic centres without passing through the
mental machinery at all. It almost seems as if our brains, our nervous
plexuses, and our glands[1] each had a manifest consciousness of their
own, and it is not until we can set in motion an interplay of the three
that we shall gain all we can, either from the intellect, the instinct,
or the torpid creative consciousness.

When women come in for their share of control in affairs, there is no
doubt we shall make further use of these more feminine aspects of vital
consciousness.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] As to the study of the functions of the glands, many interesting
discoveries have been mentioned in the medical journals during the last
few years.




VIII

THE IMAGINATIVE WOMAN


Now women can look at love from a great many points of view. If it were
not so, Byron would hardly have been justified when he said:


     “Love is from men’s lives a thing apart,
     ’Tis woman’s whole existence.”


Women can look upon love as a physical act which enables them to
become mothers. They can look upon it as a sanctification or a means
of enjoyment. They can look upon it as a subject of scientific
curiosity, in which mood they logically compare facts and come
to sage conclusions. They can consider their own temperaments
and peculiarities, and take into account their personal bias and
characters, philosophically. Or they can use their imaginations
to alter all the conditions which life has imposed upon them, to
transcend all the limitations of incarnation, and, having passed beyond
philosophy, science, emotion, and experience, bathe in the love between
the fixed stars and comets rushing from the spaces beyond. They can
take dim legends and embroider them with rich details. In a word, the
imaginative woman from her childhood has known dreams of such rare
beauty that nothing life shows her is good enough. She passes from
disappointment to disappointment. She never finds in one place or one
person the wonder that description had made her see in her mind’s eye.

Thousands of less imaginative women long for the impossible. They
are fed on romantic stories and live in the more or less commonplace
imagination of the novelists or playwrights they patronize. Thousands
of tired men have this same love of vicarious sensation--anything
that lifts them out of the drab of their surroundings into a merry or
sentimental atmosphere is a relief.

Life seems hopeless to the middle-aged. Most of them once thought they
could put it right in a week if they had a free hand. They try, they
fail, they marry and spend the evening of their lives trying to destroy
the illusions of their children as quickly as possible, so that they
also may “settle down” to hard facts. To excuse himself a thinker will
say, “I know the dangers of cultivating the imagination; I know that
unless it is nipped in the bud this wild flower of the mind will twine
its tendrils round me, cover me with its shadows, intoxicate me with
its fragrance, and destroy reason and physical health.” In answer,
I admit there are dangers, but on the other hand if the possibly
evil weed is cultivated by wise gardeners, it may show itself at last
as the most splendid flower of the soul. The cultivator of flowers
that sterilizes the bud and diverts the life-force into creations of
elaborate beauty has found the physical side of the religious mystery
called the Coronation of the Virgin. The imaginative power that has
reached this point transmutes human nature, whether philosophic,
scientific, sensual, or physical, and it is then that the soul may
be said to have attained the regenerate state which makes for the
unnatural beauty we call perfection of culture.

The imaginative woman may reach the degree of joyous saintly beauty,
or she may stop short at the next stage in which she is enough of a
philosopher to recognize the great variety of temperaments to be met
with among her fellow-creatures, and to greet them all alike with
sympathy and interest. She may not reach the philosophic or really
sympathetic stage, she may remain in a third stage, where her mind
can coldly classify her fellow-creatures with critical discretion,
and laugh at them all cynically. Or she may not be able to perceive
clearly, but may be carried away perpetually by her own feelings and
sensations, in the fourth degree of unawakened ignorance. Lastly, she
may abandon the four regions of beautiful image making, sympathy,
perception, and sensation, and deliberately devote herself with
common-sense prudence to the patient task of getting her daily bread
and reproducing her species until she dies of it. On the other hand,
she may go mad, she may become silly, she may drown her disgust with
life in alcohol or drugs, or she may irritate her feeble dream-power
with novelettes. These states of degenerate imaginations are the worst
curses of the woman’s sphere as it is at present understood. Good hard
work, rewarded by a decent income, varied by motherhood and love, is
the best cure for these vapourings.

The men who have a good deal of womanhood in their natures suffer and
enjoy through their imaginations in the same way, and it is interesting
to observe that a really virile man has no trace of imaginative power
in his composition. He cares for nothing but tangible reality. When men
of imagination talk to him he has not the smallest conception of what
they mean. I think it was Goethe who said that he felt the universe in
his arms when he embraced a woman. What I am obliged to call a virile
man feels nothing of the kind, he is merely amusing himself like Don
Juan, or any cat or dog. However, Don Juan is a rarity.

It is very difficult to classify temperaments without alluding to
Weiningen’s _Sex and Character_. That book has been followed by other
classics on the subject by Forel and Bloch, but I only want to remind
my readers that in Weiningen’s book they will find, set out at length,
the ingenious theory that virile men and feminine women are the rarest
creatures on earth, and that the great majority of us are made up of
various proportions of the two sexes. He further suggests that happy
unions are those in which the proportions of sex in the two lovers
together make up one virile man and one feminine woman. For instance, a
man who was one-eighth feminine should marry a woman who was one-eighth
masculine.

I am told that Mr. Austen Chamberlain repeatedly made the very careless
statement that “men are men, and women are women,” in a speech
delivered in 1909. He evidently has not acquainted himself with the
elementary science of sex. Is it not time that the books alluded to
above should be made generally accessible? Then our younger statesmen,
at least, might come to the platform with some less absurd refrain than
that obsolete inaccuracy. Let me assure Mr. Chamberlain that German
science and research have proved that the contrary statement would be
rather more exact.




IX

EXPERIMENTS


We are all speculating about the changes to be brought about in this
century from which we women hope so much, and a great many people are
making practical experiments. Myself, I am of that tranquil nature
which willingly follows the advice of Punch when he says: “Never
practise what you preach, to do so is to hold up your opinions to
obvious ridicule.”

I must confess to an altogether selfish concern for my own comfort.
I dislike the home because it means that one has to live with people
who are privileged to behave without politeness in each other’s
company. Most of us share the feeling, I think, that we like to be the
worst-behaved person present. This can only be achieved satisfactorily
to all when one lives by oneself. My own experiments have mostly been
in the attempt to modify the solitary life with an exactly pleasant
proportion of social life. I was brought up in a large family until I
was twenty-three, and I lived the orthodox married life for four years,
so that I have given home and the family as much trial as seemed
necessary.

As a hermit with mitigating friends and enemies, and the various
societies I have helped to run, my life has been unusually full of
varied interests. I have no regrets, because my failures have been some
of my most valuable experiences, and my moments of bitterness have been
the cause of my greatest contentment.

At the same time, one is horribly afraid that one might induce courage
in some other person whose heart is too tender to get through trouble.
One is rather apt to dread the grey life of a patient woman without any
kind of artistic talent, who makes a muddle of her affairs because she
religiously practises instead of preaching.

Some people say that example is better than precept; but in the case
of social reform and the need of a real change in public opinion, my
experience shows me that precept is no good at all, if one is suspected
of inventing it to serve one’s own purposes of self-indulgence. I own
I have indulged myself by leading a solitary life as described above,
therefore I do not propose to try to destroy the home and family life.
Those who are suffering from the home want to do away with it. With
philosophic calm I can suggest improvements and ways of escape that
would make it bearable, but would not destroy it. As a matter of fact
the home is in a very poor way just at present. Public-houses, clubs,
restaurants, the servant difficulty are all devastating it. Still, it
does not do to say we are glad, so I register the fact with as long a
face as I can pull, and trust my readers will recognize the sad truth
in the same serious spirit.

But, to return to experiments, let us go back a little in time, and
we find that all gay societies, such as that under Louis XIV and XV
of France, The Empire and the Second Empire, practised every kind of
experiment. Yet one looks upon Rousseau, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shelley,
and Godwin as the real pioneers of experiment, because they made a kind
of religion of their protests against convention. Of late years it has
become the fashion to solemnly register a protest every time one omits
to register one’s marriage.

It is partly my stupid objection to public indecency that makes me
object to the advertisement of marriage, legal or illegal. One has to
clean one’s teeth, some people have to marry, but for the life of me
I cannot see the use of talking about either of these necessities.
Surely the whole object of modern civilization is to conceal the fact
that we are animals. It is true that we have begun to make a public
art of eating, but although we permit ourselves to munch in public,
we disguise the nature of our food, and we have sternly suppressed
the more ancient freedoms of the dinner-table. We no longer think it
polite to go about when we suffer from catarrh, and it is seldom that
we encounter unpleasant expectorations, except in the immediate haunts
of admittedly hooligan circles.

They say that nowadays it is possible to talk of any subject as long
as one does so with sufficient delicacy and avoids the words of the
gutter and the club smoking-room. Still, I admit that it is difficult
to explain that just as we feel that every other necessary function
of nature should be performed without attracting attention to it,
so I feel that I would rather not be informed every time the bold
experimenters in marriage see fit to take a partner.

When outspokenness is for the public good, when a “hushed-up disease”
becomes disastrous simply because it is “hushed up,” then there is some
meaning in making a gospel and parade of the truth. But I really think
it is time we accepted the convention that men and women seek each
other’s society in order to exchange ideas.

Strangely enough it is often the case. A woman has only to talk and
listen well, and she will find that the less she desires love the more
friendliness she will receive from men. Saint Teresa of Spain was an
excellent example of this. I suppose she had more warmly affectionate
friendships with men, without a shadow of scandal, than any other
woman. A perfectly frank woman will generally keep men as her friends,
they will not dare to be her lovers unless she deliberately ceases to
be frank.

Unfortunately experimenters have to be original in order to be
successful. The people for whom I am sorry are those who are led into
making experiments which are unnatural to them by the hypnotic power of
seductive example.

Save us from our imitators is the cry of all great poets; and the only
valuable advice one can give is, if you must experiment be careful that
you lead the way and are not seduced by the example of anyone else.
If by nature you must follow, it is a sign that you are a gregarious
animal, and had better remain with the main body of the herd. The real
experimenters are quite ready for solitude, and when they have found
fair country and good pasture the rest of the herd will come over in a
body with one accord. It is no use perishing with cold on the way to
the Pole, unless you have the capacity to find it. Much better stop at
home by the fireside.




X

THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED


The stately Spaniard, graceful as a tree swaying in its dance with the
wind, savage and noble.

The Nihilist Russian, watching in her lair, instinctive and ready to
kill. Her hatred of government marking her as the free barbarian.

The Parisian, knowing the correct convention of a funeral or an
adultery, civilized and logical to her glove-tips.

Of the three women the two first are simple, but civilization is
complex, and it may mean to be cultivated with regard to intellect like
the Jesuits, art like the Greeks, morals like the Irish, or religion
like the Arab.

In which way will the women of the future develop? Will she strive
like the frequenters of the _salon_ of Madame de Rambouillet to excel
in intellect, or like Saint Teresa of Spain as a religious mystic? We
have seen both these types, and I have no doubt that we shall see many
shining examples of morality, but at the moment I cannot think of any
conspicuous woman of whom no one has whispered scandal. For in these
days if people do not trip in one direction, it is said it is because
they prefer to trip in another; and soon it will be taken as a sign
of evil life that one should live in a desert on bread and water. I
mention in passing that our late Queen is usually admitted to have been
conspicuously moral. In the arts we have seen, and hope to see again,
great women novelists and actresses. In history we have an array of
splendid uncivilized women immortalized from all time--Medea, Electra,
the Roman empresses, Queen Maive of Connaught, the Russian heroines.
Whether they excelled most as noble savages or as gloriously barbaric
haters of ordered life, I cannot stay to consider.

For I want the women who read this book not to dwell upon the past, but
to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy,
to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose. Are we going
to be like the very badly dressed lady of title, whom we heard the
other day imploring us to behave ourselves like other people, just as
we dressed like other people, in order not to be conspicuous! Or are we
really going to make something out of this brilliant opportunity given
us by the “refusal of the vote,” and the quickly spreading passion of
enthusiasm which is moving the women of all nations to make a fight
against the patriarchal faith of the goat-worshippers.

Mr. Gorst says that the object of life is making (moral) love. I think
the object of our life is to make experiments, as gardeners make
experiments in floriculture. I quarrel with absorption in the family
because family jealousy is a bar to that kind of social intercourse
which is the only education worth having, and the only experience which
can lead to any result worth having. They say in France, “Love is a
play in which the acts last five minutes, and the _entr’actes_ for any
time you like.” If it filled the whole of life it would only mean that
life would be as short as that of the ephemeral winged creatures of
the insect world. Family love cannot absorb us if we wish to survive.
We are complicated, and our possibilities of social and political
intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry. Let us then
start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a little more
purpose in our method and delight in our hearts.

Women want the vote, it is true, but what they want more, and what they
are getting, is strength to hammer through the prisons which have kept
them for many centuries packed away conveniently for use on occasion.
They are all coming out into the daylight for the first time within our
memory, and now the real movement of life begins.

We want to change public opinion about divorce, contagious diseases,
and forethought with regard to breeding. We want married women to
recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex, to make
allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are greatly indebted
for our culture to individuals who do not desire to be parents.

In conclusion, all I can say is, “Talk! talk! talk!” We are more moved
by one conversation than by many eloquent discourses. After all, what
is so permanently delightful as communion of ideas? So once again I
say, “Go on talking until the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized
women have found out all they can learn from each other. Plenty of men
will be glad to help them in their discoveries.”




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