I
There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and written round the Woman Question.
For more than half a century—since Mill wrote his famous Subjection, indeed—it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr; more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in fervid endeavours—indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex, and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of the other—to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty deeds done.
At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary (severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new—and, I hope, a more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.
To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman, very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man, has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties; yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement and, in hers, to those of the Race.
Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly; stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble and a wondrous March of Progress.
And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists—or are sufficiently broad-minded to be both—the history of Life is seen to have been a history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power, as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanent Idea, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees materialising in the objective. Very much as bricks are grouped about the pre-conceived plan of a house, and could not be assembled in the building of the simplest tool-hut without predetermination of the site of every brick, and of the relation of every brick to every other.
And in all those past ages of conflict, bringing Order out of Chaos, Progress out of Order, and an ever-increasing domination of blind Energy and Inorganic Matter by Mind and Purpose, the fighting male it has been who, in his conquest of the Earth as in his conquest of other fighting males, both brute and human, has borne the greater heat and burden of the day. Women have striven also—toil has been the crux of their development as of their mates. But men have striven twofold. While women toiled in the security of homes, the sword, the blunderbuss or press-gang, or the equivalent of these, according to the epoch, awaited men and still await them at most street-corners of the arduous male career.
Women have suffered more, psychically; because this way lay their nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more, materially; because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women were privileged to be aware of theirs—by the affliction thereof.
The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race. As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture, practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.
It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude designs. Thus she was the first artist.
The fighting male was—by necessity—destructive. He invented a club. The female was—by privilege—constructive. She invented the needle (a fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however, increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to (and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and further sway.
II
I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as the most intelligent of crustaceæ) that same instinct of protection of the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.
A crab, being encased in an unyielding shell, is able to increase its growth only by "casting" its shell and developing one of larger size over its increased bulk. During the interval between casting an old shell and acquiring a new one, the crab in its soft, pulpy condition is readily injured, or falls prey to its natural enemies. To protect itself as well as may be, it shelters in rocky crevices or in other available hiding-places. This shell-casting occurs in both sexes, of course. But the circumstances under which the change is made differ widely in the sexes. For while the male-crab has no protector during his defenceless, shell-less state, his shell is cast a month or more earlier than occurs in the female; after which he feeds up, in order to be in superior fighting trim for her protection during her shell-casting phase. Fishermen describe him as then spreading himself over her as a hen covers her chicks, and in her defence desperately attacking all comers. The result of such protection of the female is that, although males are larger and fiercer, "hen-crabs" are numerous, while males are scarce.
The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females. Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need arise, he fights to the death in their defence.
With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner thus comments in Woman and Labour (an example of that I have ventured to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its species, sex has attained its highest æsthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."
(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)
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One does not profess that such protective rôle of males—beast and bird and crab—is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious. Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in reproduction