women panjang

WOMEN
:'''ii!'^Mi'


THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
0¥ CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
WOMEN

WOMEN
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF mcmxxii
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
Second Printinff, Augutt, 1919
Third Printing, February, 1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
HQ
IZZI
W8Q6
CONTENTS
I The Women Are Splendid, 9
II Characteristics of Women, 37
III Why Men Love Women, 71
IV Women in Love, 103
V The Best of Both Worlds, 137
2039407

I THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID

I THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
Superficially, amid all the destruction which
has accompanied its progress, the war may seem
to the inquiring mind to have created new
orders and new activities; but in fact it has
served, biologically, only to provide opportunities
for the growth and development of activities
already present in embryo. It is as though
that hackneyed historical remark that occasions
produce Napoleons had become universalized.
In every country, among neutrals, one would
infer, as well as among the belligerents, circumstances
have given rise to fresh needs, and the
needs have provoked at any rate partial substitutions
of one thing for another; until, still
with our minds groping under the shock of realities
so violent, we have come to th'Vik of everything
as changed. This is an illusion. Noth-
[9]
WOMEN
ing changes, except by miracle; and the world
is essentially the same, as human beings are the
same. Only the streams of human activities
have been diverted.
Apart from the diversion, often rough enough,
of men and men's minds from the peaceful
channels of ordinary life into those rules and
apathies inseparable from a military regime,
there has been nothing more frequently noted
in England and in Germany than the psychological
and executive development of women amid
the bizarre conditions of war-time. In every
country the women, hitherto increasingly restless
and unsatisfied by the social opportunities
provided for them, have become what is called
"splendid." They have first of all grasped the
primitive and inescapable fact of the war; and
they have proceeded to meet that fact with a
steadfastness that has moved the more sedentary
of their own sex, and the less observant of the
other sex, to a kind of triumphing wonderment
at such adaptability. Not all men and women
have they so moved; because there are always
eager minds speculating—dashing hither and
thither like water-skaters upon the surface of a
[10]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
stream—which have been preoccupied with the
incessant readjustment in the affairs of mankind,
that strange complex which is never simplified,
never still. Much was foreseen by
these eager minds. Much is still foreseen
—
not, it is true, definitely; but with imagination,
which, having grasped a conception, yields,
expands, and imperceptibly embraces all manifestations
without ever losing its hold upon the
essential thought. It was noticed that in England,
with which country this essay is principally
concerned, the women were the first to
grasp the significance of the German invasion
of Belgium. While men were appalled or made
resolute or irresolute by this calamity, still arguing
about responsibility and right, about such
relatively academic questions as the State and
the Individual, about financial stability and raw
materials, imports, exports, and the interruption
of commerce and the humanities, the women
already heard guns, already saw the Germans
in our streets, already glimpsed the horrors of
sack and pillage. While men still imagined that
continental women (so different from our own,
so distinctly and mysteriously "other women"
[11]
WOMEN
as a species separate from their own wives and
daughters) were accustomed to being raped, so
that the hardships of war were to them among
the inevitable distresses of life, women knew
that the Belgian women were their sisters.
Some—the intellectual women, for the most
part, and thus imitative of the masculine attitude
—were callous; but the majority, instinctively
and maternally selfish, were stung to an excited
perception that without a solid wall of male flesh
between themselves and the Germans they might
fare as tragically as Belgian women had already
done. Moreover, they had an interest in life
at last. Their instinctive hunger for emotion
was immediately gratified. Passion for that
illusory benefit—the vote—was stilled. Dreams
of rational and responsible life were abandoned
in this first thrilling shock of armaments.
Here, they said in effect, is war; and war is a
woman's affair. Intrinsically it is a woman's
affair. Men may fight because they are made to
fight, on the score of dynastic interests, of commercial
interests, on all sorts of ostensible
grounds; but the individual man, deep in his
heart, where he keeps that secret emotion that
[12]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
moves him to splendours, fights for us. Men
always have so fought: they always will continue
to fight for us. They fight for our safety, for
the continuance of their kind; and we are the
mothers of the race. It is here to be read in
the histories of all humanity. That truth, once
perceived, and pride in the fighter thus aroused,
has never been lost sight of. It is the fact that
amid all the horrible vanities to which the war
has given rise in Englishwomen they have never
faltered in their genuine and admirable acknowledgment
of this everlasting debt to Englishmen.
If the women have been quite unpardonably
"splendid," if some of the younger among them
have carried their acknowledgment to a point
of voluptuous sentimentality, it must never be
forgotten that, as a whole, they showed from the
first a definite sense of fundamental reality, and
were instinctively ready to sacrifice their individual
men to the greater necessity of the hour
as they conceived it. One may read into this,
if one will, a barbarous insensibility, a detached
selfishness, or a wonderful and bewildering kind
of patriotic self-sacrifice. Whatever the interpretation,
the fact is undeniable.
[13]
WOMEX
The immediate local activities of women were
more open to question; but they arose from this
perception that the war must be fought by men,
stimulated by women. Heedless of many things
in the shape of decency and patience, they armed
themselves, in parts of the country, with white
feathers which they presented to casually-met
young men who appeared as though they had not
volunteered for the army. The idea was to
bring sinners to repentance. Old ladies accosted
stationary young men with the indignant
question: "How is it you are not in the army?"
Some even of those in uniform were asked, in
moments of great and violent depression, how
it was that they were not at the front. There
were, accordingly, moments when it seemed as
though the sex's one conception of warfare lay
in the uniforming of every male in the country.
They set themselves most vigorously to their task
of recruiting. In every town and suburb and
village they discussed the single men (in those
early days it was the single men who were
wanted for the army, on the widely-diffused, but
fallacious, assumption that their departure interfered
less with the working of affairs, the sta-
[14]
THE AVOMEN ARE SPLENDID
bility of the home, and economic outlay in matters
of separation allowances) who ought to
"go." They were not just. They were rather
excited. They were easily led, as they still are
led, by the most crude newspaper stunts. As a
sex they were not, and are not, peculiar in that
respect. Nevertheless, those most subject to the
influence of press stunts are always those who
believe themselves either unaffected or safeguarded
by the action of the proposed course.
For a time mothers ruled out from this form of
patriotic persecution their own sons, with whose
temperaments, or juvenile ailments, or special
talents for safe employment, they were familiar.
This did not last. The ruse was observed,
and frustrated by abusive disclosure. When
fashionable women, and those of the middleclass
(whose feeling for their young men is pride
rather than the passionate intimacy of close domestic
association), had recognized that it was
the correct thing for their own unmarried men
to apply for commissions, they quickly began
interviewing their male servants (such as they
could spare), the lads in the villages, and the
young men they met and knew, for the purpose
[15]
WOMEN
of filling the ranks. A holy zeal moved them,
and they became disgusting in the eyes of many
men—even of those men vv^ho felt no immediate
indisposition to shed their blood in a cause which
they believed to be just. The women's instinct
was true. They had found a metier. The
army must be made, as we all knew, if the war
was to continue. And it needed a woman's hand
to make it. Not Lord Kitchener, but the women
of England, made the new armies.
The attitude of the women of England was
expressed, once and finally, by the old lady in
the most-hated recruiting poster. "Go, lad!"
said she, to a rather C Ill-looking youth. "It's
your Duty!" The urge took other forms. The
more finessing ladies said, "I know you want to
go!" "We don't want to lose you; but we think
you ought to go," sang the cajoling music-hall
artiste. Heigho! How long ago it all seems,
and for how long have the slackers been heroes,
and died, and suffered untellable horrors which
the women glean and emotionally, exultingly,
repeat to each other! There was no compulsion
in those days: there was moral suasion. It was
the women of England who engineered the moral
[16]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
suasion. These women were ably seconded by
even the most thoughtless girls in the country,
ever delighted by a uniform (though it be only
that of a special constable or a commissionaire).
It became self-evident, as a music-hall song of
the time expressed it, that:
"The lads in khaki get the nice girls,
And the lads in blew get the nice girls tew."
Some there were among the lower orders (whose
lack of fashion makes fashion less exigent, and
whose affection is more roughly expressed in
a desire for constant association with those they
love) who shielded their sons and lovers for
months. They said : "Let every other man go.
My Jim's not going." They disliked the war.
In general, however, the instinct for war was
greater than any individual humaneness, or horror,
or selfishness. The obstinate feminine
pacifists, too individualistic in their attitude to
life, were overborne. The army was made.
It was made because the women of England saw
the reality of the war. I shall never forget
that on the day war was known to be declared
I found myself in a railway carriage with a
[17]
WOMEN
young couple. The youth, with his mind not
yet dominated by the new fact, indicated heavy
clouds without, and carelessly (or perhaps to
introduce a diversion) said: "A black day."
The girl, brooding, her face dark but unconsciously
obstinate, answered: "Yes, a black
day for England." The youth, whose wavering
eyes suggested a mind full of irrelevancies, still
apparently thought of the weather. Already the
girl was seeing the truth of the state of war,
and her stronger nature was rising to meet the
terrific emergency. She was seeing her lover
in a fresh aspect, judging him anew. I wonder
how long it was before that youth was in the
army. I wonder if he is dead, or maimed, or a
lice-eaten prisoner in some German camp. I
do not wonder at all about the immediate cause
of his joining the army. He was not conscripted.
He was sent.
ii
Having set in motion the huge plans for making
a continental army out of peace-loving Englishmen,
the women were faced with a new
difficulty. The withdrawal of men from civil
[18]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
employment left many places to be filled, and
the recalled men of greater age were not to be
had in inexhaustible numbers. It is much the
same during a taxi-famine, when one would
give one's evening shoes for any horse-drawn
vehicle. Others have secured the old growlers;
the supply is insufficient. One falls back upon
an altogether different device for getting home.
The difficulty of labour shortage was again met
by women. It was as though the difficulty was
for them no more than an opportunity. Everywhere
women showed themselves—especially
women with no experience whatever—ready
to fill positions hitherto reserved for men.
Women clerks swarmed to our offices; women
road-sweepers laboured in our suburban streets;
women appeared as conductors upon our omnibuses
and tramcars; women ticket-collectors,
women window-cleaners, chauffeuses, women
police, and inexhaustible women-friends for our
wounded soldiers, rose as if by magic from
every side of this mystifying land of latent energy.
"We can do it. Let the men go," they
said in effect. The word "let" became in a few
weeks the word "make." No longer were
[19]
WOMEN
women to wait and watch, nerveless and tearful,
as one had imagined them to have done through
all the hopeless dawns of the Victorian period.
They could and w^ould act, both indirectly (as
heretofore) and directly. They did so. Some
of them were competent, others not. The story
is told of a lady who twice consulted a phrenologist;
on the second occasion after spending six
weeks in employment as a Government clerk.
"Wonderful!" said the phrenologist. "When
you came to me six weeks ago your heart governed
your head. Now your head governs your
heart!" This is a true story. We who have
seen the rush of women into Government and
commercial offices, into factories of every kind,
into sensible masculine garments, into outdoor
employments, into practically every department
of active life (including what has been unkindly
called the khaki and cosmetic brigade), can testify
to the adaptability and energy of the sex.
Many women in offices are more careful than the
men they replace; and if they are often erratic,
talkative, and "difficult" (what Mrs. Slopes says
men call "capricious") the physical causes of
this "difficulty" must not be forgotten, and the
[20]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
devoted service of the women must be set oflf
against their native peculiarities. The devotion,
it is true, is not universal, as annoyed
employers testify. Women respond to slackness
in a department of work as readily as men
can do, and they take advantage of slackness
with a bravado that makes the action aggressively
impudent to the disconcerted male. They bluff.
Man, untrained, has no weapons against an employe
who bluffs. The shouting or the severe
reprimand which cows a dependent man has no
effect upon a girl—no visible effect. She draws
the tips of her fingers along her employer's table,
her head down, her lips compressed; and she
becomes obstinate. If she is very able to bluff,
she smiles kindly. For this reason, some employers
will welcome back their men from the
war. The same mysteriousness which in ordinary
love-making lends allure to a woman is aggravating
in other circumstances. The employer
cannot be in love with all his women-assistants.
They would not allow it. They have not enough
esprit de corps for that. And so he is rather irritated.
With men, he tells you, you know
where you are. Not so with women. The sim-
[21]
WOMEN
pie-minded crude fellows who run our businesses
in their middle-age do not know how to deal
with the other sex. The other sex takes advantage
of them. What with tea at every opportunity,
groups of chatterers, occasional flirtation,
and the thousand slacknesses possible in
every office where the employer has too much
work to attend to personally, there is a new atmosphere
in our commercial houses and Government
departments. The women have arrived.
It is all part of the glorious fun of war.
Offices, fortunately, are not the only places
to which our women have been drawn in the
emergency of war. They have taken up work
that is done with the hands, and women (most
women) work better with their hands than with
their heads. They are accustomed to doing
things with their hands; and whereas clerical
work is uninteresting and does not wholly absorb
all available attention, manual work is
something the progress and completion of which
may be a source of pride. There is something
to show for it, unless the work be the purely
mechanical filling of shells, or something of that
kind. To drive a motor-car is a different thing
[22]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
again. To conduct a tramcar is less thrilling,
but it is varied in interest. It is better than
housework. To police a park—an unappetising
task—is at least to walk about in the open
air. And in all these things there is a beautiful
new sense of responsibility. There is the
feeling that they are doing things they never
thought, until the time came, they could do.
There is a colour of romance, of adventure, in
the everyday life of war-time that no peace task
can give. There is a sense of power. Women,
the sentimentalist says, are changed by the war.
Not a bit of it. They are only happy in it.
Whatever their own uniform—and it is very
strange and amusing to see with what delight our
girls and women adorn themselves with uniforms
and ribbons denoting war-service—they
do remain through it all, as they will continue
steadfastly to remain, essentially the creatures
they were before the war. The rosebush is not
less a rosebush before it blooms than when it
performs its annual miracle. If during the last
four years women have surprised weak men
(and the dullest of their own sex, still fuddled
with a sense of sex inferiority) by their energy,
[23]
WOMEN
their folly, their caprice, and their marvellous
and unwearying "splendours"; if they have
shown themselves hard, stubborn, cruel, and
quite primitive in their pursuits and admirations,
the surprise is due to previous misconception.
They have not changed. It is only
that some poor silly poetry-believing men, lost
in the vapours of Victorianism, are seeing women
for the first time, as though the prism were
broken and the heart vouchsafed. The experience
to humanity is worth while, as every manifestation
of essential nature is to the observer
worth while, although it is one of the experiences
which are being bought nowadays at such
a terrible price. It is startling; but it is good
for clear thinking. It is a step into the open.
It is another, and a most vitally important,
stage in the development of that sex-hatred
which is going to be the most absorbing conflict
of the future.
iii
In trying to account for the extraordinary attraction
which war has for women it is hard to
steer a path between emotional muddle-headed-
[24]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
ness and cynicism. Emotional muddle-headedness
sees only a vague "splendour," without
attempting to explain the splendour as anything
but a response to the fervour called patriotism;
cynicism, equally stupid in its negative attitude,
shrugs shoulders and smiles knowingly in
order to hide ignorance of the secret. The explanation
probably lies beyond the range of the
ordinary brain, such as mine; and so I will not
try to do more than to offer a tentative one. It
seems to be the fact that the average woman is
deficient in any profound power of imagination
—the intuitive perception and co-ordination of
consequences and a general power to grasp
things as wholes. Instead, women have a
vehement but shallow sympathy with suffering
—principally, since that is the most visible to
them, of physical suffering. They have always
admired physical strength and physical courage,
because in all times of violence, from the most
primitive to the present, physical strength and
physical courage have alone afforded women
adequate protection against the excesses of rival
combative males. Physical strength in men,
with its complement of stirring deeds, rouses
[25]
WOMEN
the imagination of women as no more delicate
attributes can do. The strong man, going triumphantly
upon his way among men less physically
strong, has an elan, a punch, in his conduct
and in his general bearing towards waiters
and such like people, which is irresistibly
attractive to the slavish instinct of women.
Women in this respect are like children attacked
by those more vigorous than themselves, instinctively
relying upon the retribution to be inflicted
by parents ("I'll tell mummer of you!") or by
something called "my big brother." It is the
outcome of their relative physical inferiority.
We always over-estimate the value of powers
which we do not ourselves possess. When they
are used, or are liable to be used, by those inimical
to us, we particularly respond to that counterpower
which is made to remove personal danger
by the exertion upon our behalf of greater
strength of a similar character. This is so in
imaginary as well as in true things, as when our
pulses beat more rapidly at stage discomfiture of
the villain by some splendour, or fortunatelytimed
intervention, upon the part of the hero.
Weak ourselves, we love strength, we love any-
[26]
THE WOIMEN ARE SPLEXDID
thing that is simple and physically heroic.
When the hero of In Kedafs Tents (that most
characteristic of the works of Henry Seton Merriman)
is in danger, of which the hitherto recalcitrant
heroine alone has an inkling, it is said
that "his smile of cool intrepidity made her heart
leap." Our own hearts, stimulated to the action
by an adroit author, perform a similar feat. It
is a form of weakness, of falsely-induced emotion
(at least, of false standards of emotion,
since emotion ought not to respond to any sort
of faked stimulus) ; but in fiction as in life we
can forgive everything—every peccadillo—except
hesitancy or complexity of motive, or obscurity
of action. We are so conscious of weakness
and inefficiency in ourselves, that our sentiment
rushes out to any semblance of strength, of
determination, though it be only papier-mache
painted to seem to be a rock. We love the selfish
man or woman more than the unselfish, the
assertive more than the modest, because unselfishness
offends that tragic impulse which makes
us desire to see the visible and incontrovertible
triumph of matter over mind. In half our marketable
fiction the hero is a person of honourable
[27]
WOMEN
strength, and inferior intellectual capacity, opposed
to a subtle demon of complexity. The
less imaginative we are, the. more a blow seems
to us to clinch the argument. At last, we feel,
there is something tangible in this world of
muffled discontents and wounds and endurances.
The Lady of Shalott was half-sick of shadows,
it will be remembered. She did not say she
was half-sick of painted lathes. They would
always deceive her. So selfishness, that tough
and temerarious disregard of others, summons
a train of servants. The selfish man, as no
other, has his continued conquests, because, in
his disregard, and his lack of imaginative sympathy,
he seems to lead, to go straight to his
goal: as has the rake, who exliibits strength in
another guise. As the song—again from that
institution, the music-hall, which of every other
is the most closely in touch with contemporary
human nature—so perfectly and so truly expresses
it:
"The worse you are, the more the ladies like you."
Not virtue do we love—especially if we are
women; but performance, arrogance, persist-
[28]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID '
ence, self-concentrated heedlessness of consesequences,
deeds of reckless daring or of physical
vehemence that make the flesh creep and the
pulses beat more fast. The rake has his harem:
the strong man, no less, has his legions of adorers—
as passionate as the moth—among weaker
or hermaphroditic men as well as among women.
He may be without perception or kindness (and
any callous self-gratification necessarily involves
a kind of obtuseness), without most of
the major and the minor virtues ; but he is what
he has always been, the woman's ideal of a man.
He "does" things. He may do them splendidly
or clumsily (but the man who does anything
splendidly is more frequently of a diff'erent type —a nervous, highly-strung type, not corresponding
to the feminine ideal). He meets emergency
with thumping action, with forceful energy
;
weighs it not with subtle thought. Women do
not like thought. It fascinates some of them,
and they fear it; but they do not love it. In
love it is their enemy, and so they suspect its corrosive
influence throughout life. To them it is
as horrid, as disconcerting, as a blackbeetle.
They repel it. Only in times of peace, of genu-
[29]
WOMEN
ine stagnation, do our Bunthornes arise; and
then their triumph is due to the fact that they are
charlatans, and not the real article at all.
That—the love of strength and the strong man
—is one reason for women's love of war. It
creates the part of the strong man as nothing
else can do. It clothes him in uniform. It
breaks the routine of life. Women detest nowadays,
and as war has always been popular with
women they probably always have detested, the
routine of life; because so many of them suffer
weary years of imprisonment in which their
dreams and juvenile pretences and egotisms are
slowly choked by this deadly poison of routine.
Moreover it must be borne in mind, as a far
deeper cause, that in general women have not
the resources in peace time that men have.
Ennui is more common among them than among
men. In a later chapter I shall attempt an explanation
of this; but it is enough here to point
out that women must have emotional excitement.
It is essential to them if they are to live any life
that is not merely the monotonous passage of
days. The ordinary life of ordinary women
does not produce excitement: their excitements
[30]
THE WOISIEN ARE SPLENDID
in general are inventions. This is what drives
them to gossip, to scandal-mongering (at which,
of course, sedentary men are more adept, though
most men gossip less than their women-folk and
listen in stupor to the narratives of their wives
and sweethearts). With war the case is different.
Indignations and excitements are everyday
affairs. The discovery of a pacifist, the
morning newspaper's horrifying outrage, the
thrill of some brave deed; always the subtle
grinding dread that the Entente Powers may be
defeated. All these things act as a tonic.
When to that tonic is added a call to willing
service; when they can feel that they too are
"doing" something—not to help the country but
secretly to gratify the incessant craving of their
vanity—war has few horrors that are not made
worth while. The eager awaiting of news from
beloved and sacrificed men, the joys of their
return on leave, the dreadful excitements of
death and wounds, of lamentation and mourning,
of hurried wooing and sweet surrender—all
these have their call in the various kinds of
women. Even frenzy is better to them than
slow enervation by the loss of beauty, of el as-
[31]
WOMEN
ticity, by the starvation of tlie emotional faculties.
The relation of the sexes, also, has been affected
profoundly. The truth will probably not
be seen until after the war. Now, when we are
so excited, when war-marriages have become a
habit and when many young girls seem to have
no occupation but the delights of association
with military men, there is no possibility of
striking a balance sheet. Clearly some of the
liberation is good; but a greater proportion is
very likely evil. The serious flirtations of wartime,
the passionate farewells, even the secret
abandonments in so many instances to the sexual
act, justified sufficiently to the parties as it is
upon sentimental grounds, are alike an extraordinary
call to the sensations and an extraordinary
satisfaction of them. Greedy as she is of
emotional excitement, and stirred quite out of
conventional timidity and self-disguise and prudery
by the sense of strength and strength of sacrifice
which she has called into being, woman
lives intensely in war-time as she could never
live in peace. She is transfigured, unshackled.
Already essentially militarist, she is tasting all
[32]
THE WOMEN ARE SPLENDID
the joys of romance, all tlie tremblings of actual
contact with death and passion, about which in
normal times she can only read. The sense of
this contact with vital and dreadful things is immense
to women. Their suppressed love of so
many things is being gratified as never before.
Their love of excitement, their love of strength
in men, their love of surrender to such strength.
More continuously and more completely sensual
than men, they are living in a marvelling
delirium of the senses; or they are tasting in
new occupations the sense of new responsibility,
of new power. Afterwards, in the reaction, as
I have tried to show later, they may have to pay
a bitter price ; but if war has one effect more than
another upon the poor struggling nature of mankind
it is that it blots out the future. We live
precariously from day to day. No wonder
there is a momentary spread of fatalism among
us. No wonder that we so convulsively put
aside thoughts of what sorrow is still to come.
The only thought we can entertain is for today,
and, at some distant hour, for some further
instalment of happiness when the excitement
shall be renewed, purged of all the morbid hu-
[33]
WOMEN
mours of dread that make us now so reckless.
Snatching at happiness, at power, at the fulfilment
of all those ambitions that have in the past
been stultified ; intoxicated by the zest and endurance
and horror of a life which takes cognizance
of the ruins of France and Belgium, of Serbia
and Russia, women are enjoying this war. They
would exclaim with horror at an accusation so
terrible if it were applied individually. Nevertheless
you cannot purchase splendour for nothing.
Splendour has its price, as happiness has
its price, and excitement. The women are
splendid.
[34]
II CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN

II CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
One or two of the characteristics of women as
they have been noticeably displayed in the course
of the war have been indicated in the first chapter.
Those were the love of physical strength,
which is an almost universal passion, the faculty
of imitativeness (which is not peculiar to the
sex, and which indeed is exhibited largely in a
merely superficial degree, as in obedience to
fashion); the blind determination to pursue an
instinctively-grasped notion to its extremity; and
the passion of cruelty. The passion of cruelty
is very strongly marked in most women. There
is in them a love of torture which in men is reserved
to certain much-execrated tyrants of old,
and to those whose religious or other sensual
mania causes them to gloat over wounded animals,
to dismember insects, and so on. When
a horse struggles in the roadway the spectators,
[37]
WOMEN
clutching each other as the horse plunges, but
never running beyond eye-range, are for the
most part women. Men actively interfere: women
watch. Women love the death-scene; they
morbidly enjoy wakes, and all the details of
death. Where men laugh and make tedious
jokes about obstetrics, women, when alone together,
coarsely discuss the subject in neverending
detail. Their conversation turns constantly
upon it. Physical abnormalities absorb
them. The little girl who goes nearer and
nearer to one who is in pain is the type of her
sex. Where men are callous and turn away,
unless they are moved by the desire to help,
women stand watching from a sheer love of sensation.
Self-torturers are more common among
women than among men. So are drug-takers.
Men have other outlets; they work off their distempers
more readily; women, the pure egoists,
or, as a modem phraseology has it, the pure
"introverts," dwell upon their injuries or their
sins, and take pleasure in self-inflicted pain,
whether mental or physical. It is a need of their
beings.
Determination is another characteristic in
[38]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMET^
women which is diflferent in kind from determination
in men. Men are told they must do a
thing, or they are told that they cannot do a thing,
or they think that a thing should be done for certain
definite reasons or ends. Accordingly they
do the thing. Women are dissimilar. They
instinctively wish to do something other than
that which they are told to do. They sink helplessly
under the suggestion that they cannot do
it, for their confidence is bravado; and, feeling
sure that any proclamation of inability is true,
they brood on their weakness and turn assertion
into fact. Finally, they are not in the habit of
rationalizing their inclinations. From time
immemorial they have been made to believe in
inspiration. Accordingly, they await the bidding
of God, or the bidding of impulsive love;
or, reaching an unwarrantable conclusion, they
hold tenaciously to it on the ground that, being
women, they are divinely gifted with instant
vision of truth. This attitude of mind is ineradicable.
Asked why they "know" that such an
one is in love with such an other, they assume
the expression of Monna Lisa and reply, sufficiently,
"I know/' It will be interesting, in a
[39]
WOMEN
moment, to analyse this preposterous claim to
deep-seated wisdom.
The imitativeness of women is a very strange
phenomenon. Men are imitative in ideas, in
manner, in general attitude. They observe
something in another man that delights them,
and they begin to imitate the delightful object.
In personal matters men imitate individualistically.
When they imitate in the herd one may
suspect that they do it to please their wives. Almost
all masculine imitativeness in clothes, for
example, is not personal, but due to wifely interference.
Thus, after marriage a man is
dressed in accordance with his wife's taste; before
marriage he dresses to please the girl he
believes to have made up her mind to marry
him; only in adolescence is he the purely imitative
cub. On the other hand women habitually
imitate in droves. The girls in a suburb are
often so much alike in appearance, in style, and
in drawl, that one is never sure to whom one
must take off one's hat in casual encounter.
Only by the assumption of such herd-imitativeness
can one account for the painful vagaries
of feminine fashion. One has seen thousands of
[40]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
girls and women dressed in styles that are manifestly
unsuited to them as individuals. In a
period when slimness and short skirts are the
ideal (because they happen to be the commoner
lot) one knows that a long skirt indicates—not
the rebel, not the conscious individualist, but
the unhappy girl with flat feet or bandy legs, who
is forced by sheer necessity to avert her face and
pass the fashion by. The plump girl screws
herself into the fashion. No matter if her
ankles are rotund, if her corsets move ridiculously
as she walks (she can't see the movements,
and other girls, although amused, do not tell her
about them) : she must be in the fashion, or hide.
That is one easy instance. A less obvious one
is the use of popular colours irrespective of complexion.
This is criminal, but it is due to stupidity
or to the morbid passion of self-immolation.
Another is the following of fashion in
the matter of hats. Must they be small, they
are small. Large, they are large. With
strings, they are worn with strings. Apart from
personal idiosyncrasy in the matter of carriage,
our girls look as much alike as they can manage
to do. And yet, pathetically, each one will tell
[41]
WOMEN
her lover that she is "not like other girls." This
is untrue. She is as like other girls as she can
be in all externals. She conforms as nearly as
possible to the prevailing type.
The love of physical strength in men has been
dealt with. In one way it is to be explained by
the notion that brute force is a powerful protective
agency. It certainly is that. But protection
is not all that women desire. It is not
nearly all. Moreover, the man with physical
strength who also has brains is less popular than
the stupid bully. Granted that brains and physical
strength in combination are rare, there is still
to be offered a partial explanation of the preference
for strength. While women are not, as a
rule, profoundly intellectual, they are quite extraordinarily
quick-witted in matters tending to
their own advantage. In love, which I believe
will always be the principal affair in a woman's
life, the man with brains is difficult to manoevre.
He can be cheated, as he so often is, by
women of lesser refinement, because, being modest
and regarding himself as unattractive, he is
grateful to any girl who seeks him in his isolation.
But he is also moody, fractious, sus-
[42]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
picious, and tangential. Unless he is hopelessly
and sigh-provokingly dull and unloverlike. But
the man of strength, without brains, is a different
proposition. He can be sported with. As the
brain of the elephant is to that of man, so is this
fine fellow's brain to that of women. He can be
roused. All the animal strength in him, promising,
altliough she does not know it, healthy children
and inexhaustible domestic communion, is
fine to behold, and is roused by feminine attractiveness,
astuteness. He advances, sure in his
pride of body that he is worthy the great sport
of coquetry. The woman withdraws, teases, escapes,
exulting in the thrilling sex game. She
is all taut, as if with steel and elastic, the ideal
toreador. She is transfigured. A new ichor
runs in her veins. Not only does this type of
man offer her the magnificent target for her
arms: he is better yet. He pursues. The man
with fine character may dubitate too long, may
count the cost to the woman of any failure in
married life. He hesitates, and is lost in the
maelstrom of things fore-calculated. The man
of brains may torment himself and the woman
with a thousand sophistries and scruples. The
[43]
WOME^^
man of strength, emotionally clumsy, reeking
though he may be with dulness and essential
stupidity, yet is the delight of the sporting
woman. From him alone can she expect capture.
Flushed and excited and confident, he responds
to her darts. The ineffable joy of surrender
is alone to be obtained through the strong
man. He may bore her, may ill-treat her; he
may be bovine or selfish or cantankerous. In
the love period he alone can gratify her fancy,
because her fancy is based upon instinct. He
is the potential father of her children.
11
The woman's belief in her mysteriousness,
her own delicacy of mind, and her own piercing
insight into all emotional matters whatsoever, is
a truly astonishing factor in her daily conduct.
It is this belief which sustains her in many a humiliation.
The more stupid she is, the more she
hopes to mystify. It is as though, striving to
reach her soul, one played a silly game of hide
and seek, ending with a struggle, a pulled curtain,—
and the discovery that the cupboard is
[44]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
bare. The mysteriousness of women is thus a
sedulously cultivated legend. The great mystery
is that there is no mystery at all: only a
pretence. And yet not wholly a pretence, for
so many women are self-deluded. While men
rub against other men, like and dislike, quarrel,
are reconciled, are irreconcilable, women cultivate
their greedy ego. To any man not wholly
sedentary—the male author is almost certainly
one who has a streak of the feminine in his nature:
hence his egregious vanity—egotism is a
natural enough symptom of health. Egotism I
take to be a sort of self-complacency, a self-confidence.
Egoism is the turning inward of the
mind, the habit of regarding all events as they
solely relate to the egoist. That is why women
are all egoists and mostly egomaniacs. While
men can perform disinterested acts, women
are gratifying their vanity in acts which only
seem to be disinterested. Vanity is the key
to their hearts, the prime secret of their natures.
Watch the difference between a girl and a young
man dressed in new clothes. How sheepish
and uncomfortable he is, in case anybody shall
notice him: how his collar hurts and his coat
[45]
WOMEN
catches him under the arms! But a girl—how
different! Watch her assurance, her pretty selfconsciousness,
her swift glances demanding
approval. No sheepishness there! Does she
know one well, there will be a sidelong look, a
gradual gravitation towards one, a wait in expectation
of praise. Then, the delay unbearable,
a quick whisper, "How d'you like my
new dress?" Seriously, solemnly, the requisite
praise is received. If one is very inexperienced,
as, alas! many young men were inexperienced
in the days before the war, one is touched with
the pathos of such a timid wish to please, such a
lack of confidence in her own judgment. "Do
I look nice?" "God bless you, dear; you're
charming!" Poor, poor innocent young man!
He is enthralled by her captivating shy whisper
in reply: "I'm so glad you like me." More
confidentially, in solitude, in the myth-making
mood: "You see, I'm very . . ." Then the
male's long servitude begins. If he is very
young such endless disclosure appears astounding—
a revelation of the secret tenderness of the
girl's soul. He is drunken with visions of
shrinking reserves, beautiful aspirations, wrongs
[46]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
endured, generosities to girls less pretty, or less
"nice," or less well-dressed than this one girl in
her native element. He leaves her, treading
air. "She's wonderful, wonderful!" he exclaims
(as though he were a character in one of
Henry James's later novels) . But she isn't wonderful
at all. She is simply practising. Her
revelations, breathless, inconsequential, are the
necessary relief to her ego; and, what is more,
she is engaged in perfecting the imaginary character
to which she will defer all through her life.
It is a sort of idol-worship, this imaginary
character and the part it plays in a woman's life.
Just as children invent a familiar or alter-ego,
to whom they confide things, with whom they
play, and share love and adventures, so every
woman has this fictitious self to which she bows
and pays homage. A woman is thus always two
persons, and she deceives herself and others by
the contradiction which persists between her
normal and legendary selves.
It is not the normal self that is supposed to
know everything by heaven-sent flashes of intuition.
It is the "other" self. The normal self
is the one that gets easily discouraged, that says
[47]
WOMEN
"Oh, Fm no good," that drudges and obeys and
discontentedly goes through with the practical
affairs of daily life. The legendary self knows
everything. If the legend makes from the blue,
from sheer contrariness or skittishness, a dogmatic
assertion regarding a man, a woman, an
"affair," and in fact any human relation, the
normal woman humbly accepts it as being quite
specially revealed from God knows where. She
proclaims it as such a revelation. "How do you
know?" she is asked. It is sacrilege against her
legendary self, which is like Shakespeare in
Matthew Arnold's painful sonnet
—
"Others abide our question—thou alone art free."
She replies, "I know^ That is why, for so many
centuries, it has been a recognized splutter on the
part of men that it is a waste of time to argue
with a woman. It is like arguing about facts
with the disciple of a visionary. The disciple
is not sure what his master would reply, but he
devoutly assumes that no challenge is valid.
Disciples are rare: women are always with us.
That is why we generalize about women, and
not about disciples.
[48]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
Destroy the legendary woman, and the normal
woman dies. The legendary one is her soul.
She has no other. That is why a woman instinctively
dreads a man with brains. It is in
case he slay or mortally wound her soul, which
is her legendary self. It is ever of her legendary
self that she speaks in confession to
young men, receives inspirations about the legend
as she talks. She first of all differentiates
herself from any other young woman whatever.
This effect assured, she narrates her various
"misunderstandings," often with an unobtrusive
glance at her subject, watching the result of the
monologue, instinctively testing its verisimilitude,
its sham candour; developing and consolidating
the legend at every word. There is often
no intention to deceive. The tale flows, and a
girl's tongue is a free instrument, and her brain
is abnormally quick in such matters. The legendary
figure is exalted. The Queen can do no
wrong. Deep in her heart the girl enthrones
herself. That is why women so rarely achieve
disinterested action. That is why, as a modem
observer has remarked, women are not really
interested in anything at all, although they can
[49]
WOMEN
simulate interest in any subject whatsoever.
Their first interest lies, not outside their own
lives, but within their own hearts. Sometimes
the self is like a Queen, swelling with a gorgeous
sense of power; sometimes it is like a dead baby,
to be morbidly fondled and wept over with
shocking abandonment to grief; sometimes it is
a mocking sprite, sometimes a tragic child. It
takes every form. It lives and grows with every
frustration as with every sorrow. Joys do not
develop the ego: sorrows do. Loneliness does.
The lonely person would in any case have to invent
an ego, for the mere relief of solitude and
silence. The woman, so often condemned to
lonely hours, has one ready made. It is her
child, her mother, the imperious voice of all the
wisdoms of all the ages. And it is a bubble,
which a corrosive mind can destroy at one encounter.
iii
It is the duality which has been described that
makes any man's relation with a woman so peculiar.
Mrs. Slopes ascribes to physical causes
much of the so-called "capriciousness" of wo-
[50]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
men. There is no doubt great truth in her suggestion.
Physical causes may account for what
I have been discussing above. I shall presently
mention other phenomena which I attribute to
physical causes; but I am not a materialist, and
so I have not yet reached the point of regarding
women as mere earth. It is an old-fashioned
belief, certainly as old as Fielding, that women,
no less than men, act according to the impulse
dominant at the specific moment. Mental causes
(i. e., natural reaction to and from circumstances,
and all those mysteries of personal influence
and relationship) must account for much
that is otherwise unaccountable. What is so
evident, however, and in this they differ from
men, is that women are bom with incipient
mania, the mania of the ego. That mania, encouraged
from early days by fellow members
of their sex (to be precise, by their mothers),
grows with every inhibition. The natural impulse
of frankness, developed more or less in
boys until they reach the age of puberty and
secretiveness, is checked in girls. Always they
are forced inwards upon the so-called mysteries
of their sex. All their thoughts are the result of
[51]
WOMEN
hearsay and introspection. They have had in
the past, in early years, no such large out-spreading
life open to them as boys have had. They
may try to be like their brothers ; they play boys'
games from emulation or from beautiful naive
affection; but at last they draw away from the
young masculine disdain of these brothers; and
in that moment of agonized withdrawal the legendary
woman is born. There comes a time
when the legendary woman is a necessity. She
is the offspring of vanity out of vacuum.
The period between that hour of estrangement
and the later coming-together of the sexes in
what most writers upon sex describe sentimentally
as the time of mating is the formative period.
In boys this is a question of physical growth and
routine education. In girls it is a question of
rapid maturing, of great introspection. The
consequence is that, respectively, girls are very
much more mature than boys at the moment of
reconciliation. Through long living with the
legendary girl they have become neophytes of
the first water. They are full of moods and intuitions,
hesitatingly profound in all perceptions
relating to sex. They have now an immense ad-
[52]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
vantage in these matters; untold opportunities
for experimenting upon the confused young
male with his head full of the things that a young
man ought not to know, prurient-minded, but almost
grotesquely idealizing so far as the women
of his own family are concerned. Some of them
do not use those opportunities. They live remote,
and get gawky and provincial or suburban
in bearing. Others go very gaily into the attractive
vortex of life. They dance, they play
tennis. With strong bodies, and this strange reserve
that comes from the mystic adoration of
legend which is all the time in progress within
them, they may well baffle the simple analysis of
their contemporary males. "I can't understand
you," say these reddening boys, aghast at an unscrupulousness
that offends against the schoolboy
code (not always a defensible code) . "Men
never do understand women," gently and triumphantly
respond the myth-worshippers. It is a
preposterous claim, direct from the inner legendwoman.
It has never yet been authenticated.
E pur se muove! It will never be overthrown as
a claim, because men are either (1) cynics, and
therefore silent in melancholy; (2) sensualists,
[53]
AVOMEN
and therefore gross and disgusting in their concern
with women in one aspect alone; (3) simple
persons, frankly adoring the legend; (4) too
gentle men to synthesize their unavoidable perceptions
(which they regard as treason to the
ideal) and so to destroy the legend. The legend
could be destroyed if we all wished it to go; but
we do not wish it to go because it would affect the
exquisite illusions of courtship and reduce the
most intimate social relation to the dust and
ashes of a scientific text-book. That is the
reason the legendary woman lives secure in the
hearts of our egomaniacs. Without her they
would die for lack of spiritual nourishment. No
wonder they fight hard to preserve the pathetic
illusion. No wonder their hearts are veiled and
secret. Given brains by an unkind providence,
women must, for the sake of their all-powerful
instinct, use those brains to one end alone.
Hence their dualism: hence the mingled contempt
and admiration with which they are regarded
by the majority of men*
[54]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
IV
I have said in the previous section that girls
are always forced inwards upon the so-called
mysteries of their sex, and that all their thoughts
are the result of hearsay and introspection. I
believe this to be one of the encouragements
given to hysteria in women because it provides
them with an inescapable preoccupation, or obsession.
The feminine obsession is sex. In
spite of what a recent writer has said about the
part which sex plays in the lives of men, I must
be allowed to record the belief that sex is not a
male obsession and that it is casual and periodical
in its demands upon a man's attention.
This is not to say that sex is anything but the
principal power in men's lives. I believe it to
be the principal power. One knows, of course,
that there are men whose idea of life is defined
by the notion of unlimited sexual indulgence.
To normal men, however, these living exponents
of pornography are extraordinarily unpleasant.
My work has brought me into rather intimate
contact with many men, of all grades of life, and
of all varieties of character. I will not pretend
[55]
WOMEN
to expect that they reveal the whole truth about
their sexual lives. I have myself never done
such a thing. But I have talked with these men
in all sorts of moods, have received all sorts of
confidences; and I can assert that our talk has
never revealed the kind of men tliat one reads
about in suffrage newspapers, and that while
they have been apparently frank about their own
sins, they have invariably shunned the man
whose talk is merely sensual. One and all, they
have avoided his company. I avoid his company
myself. I therefore suggest that as I have
known many of these men intimately, been constantly
with them at all times and in all moods,
received many confessions, and ranged the gamut
of possible topics in conversation with them, it is
untrue to say that sex is a constant preoccupation
with men. It is untrue to say—as the writer
referred to above has done—that it composes
nine-tenths of their lives. They have many interests.
With women the case is different. Their interests
are fewer. In fact I do not believe they
have any at all. It is still very true that most
women desire marriage as an end and as a con-
[56]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
summation in their lives. They are still required
by convention, and often by inclination,
to play with dolls in their earliest years. They
are still extremely fascinated by babies. They
still desire babies of their own. The desire
leads to curiosities, to reflections. It leads to
a curious concealed mental life. Now a German
writer has divided women into two distinct
types: they are, he says, the mother and the courtesan.
The mother is one who seeks to satisfy
her wish for children; the courtesan is one who
seeks only the gratification of her sexual impulses.
These are often very obscure in action
(I no longer quote the German writer, nor do I
wholly accept his interesting generalization), for
they take many different forms. It is known that
male children betray sexual emotion at a very
early age. Great details have been given of these
manifestations. Less, however, is known of the
early sexual instincts of women. Most writers
assume that women are physically unconscious
of sex hunger until love has awakened the wish
for intimate communion with the beloved. It is
said that many wives remain unawakened during
the whole of their lives. That may quite well be
[57]
WOMEN
so. The Uranian is as much a monstrosity
among women as among men ; the nymphomaniac
is a woman in the grip of morbid disease. But
while the physical desire for sexual union may
be in abeyance, the mental preoccupation, however
shrouded, however unconscious, may still
be (as I believe it is) very constant. Prudery
in young women arises from evil and concealed
knowledge. Self-consciousness in face of peculiar
topics is due to discomfort arising from such
concealed knowledge. Laughter in music-halls
is loudest from women in response to jokes that
are purely sexual in character, even though the
allusions may be recondite. One bookseller in
the West-end of London once said of an obscure,
and I believe undesirable, book about an immoral
nun: "We call that the ladies' bible, because
so many young girls come in to order it."
Prurient novels are mostly written by women,
as they are read by women. Publishers tell me
that of all the manuscripts submitted to them
which are unpublishable by reason of their pruriency
fully nine-tenths are the work of unmarried
women who use pseudonyms, either male
or female.
[58]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEX
I take especial notice of this last point because
it is the fact that such books are written,
for the most part, as the expression of a powerful
and unappeased instinct. They are not few.
They are accordingly not negligible. They do
suggest that what I have said above is true.
They lead me to another suggestion. It is commonly
believed, and facts are at my command
which support such an assumption, that men who
engage in the production of creative works are
men of stronger sexual impulses than the majority
of their fellows. Authors and artists, let us
say, are believed to be immoral fellows. They
are supposed to be promiscuous. It is perhaps
true that for the production of emotional works
(and if art is without emotion it is dead and
quickly buried) such men require more emotional
stimulus than they would otherwise need.
Being more sensitive they are also more quickly
responsive. Inclination is in them quickly
roused, urgent, passionately and rapidly slaked.
Their amours are frequently brief, but they are,
briefly, frequent. It has been computed by one
who observes these matters that the extreme duration
of an "affair" is two years. This is the
[59]
WOMEN
limit. Many of them are much shorter. In
the literary and artistic world the number of "affairs"
of which one hears the naively simple
details is considerable. Owing to the code of
that society these things are conducted openly,
and are not concealed, because they cannot be
concealed.
Now, among all the arts to which women since
Aphra Behn have turned as if by right, since it
is the art which they (as well as men) can practise
without tedious preliminary routine, the art
of novel-writing is the most popular. It is a
remarkable fact that women's novels in general
are more often mediocre than acquaintance with
the authors would lead one to suppose. When
they write, women seem to betray an immaturity
which their talk does not indicate. I suggest that
the cause of this lies in the introspective character
of women in their formative years, in the
lack of practical experience, and in the largely
derivative nature of women's opinions and knowledges.
I do not wish to speak, in this connection,
of the kind of novel-writing that produces
earthly rewards, or even of the writing of prurient
novels, published and unpublished. The
[60]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
kind of novel I refer to is that written since the
days of Miss Bumey—in which the author seeks
to create a world like unto that in which she herself
moves, with a leading feminine character
who shall be a glorified version of the author's
self. A heroine, in a word, who is a sort of
human embodiment of the legendary woman.
She is flavoured to taste, of course, and is the
victim of the carnal desires of men ; but it is the
fact that in practically all the novels of women
(I except, of course, those of George Eliot, which
are not novels at all, but imaginary compilations)
the dominant interest has been one of sex.
I will go further, and point out that the majority
of feminine novels of any individuality have
been the work of unmarried women. Nobody
cares for the married works of Madame d'Arblay
or Charlotte Bronte. Marriage has meant in
many cases the extinction of the habit of novelwriting.
It is possible that the assumption of
household responsibilities explains this falling
away ; but a passionate natural need is not easily
destroyed, even in a new situation. Once a bom
writer always a writer. I suggest, however,
that with women all eff'ort at creative work is sex-
[61]
WOMEN
ual in origin. I think the actual writing, the first
direct occasion of literary or artistic work, is often
due to emotional frustration, to some failure
in the normal road to happiness; but the impulse
lies below that. Often it is precocious. In
women writers sex is also often extremely precocious.
Sex, repressed, produces strange
flowers. It produces various kinds of vice; it
produces hysteria; it produces, I think, as a
painful relief to emotional faculties overcharged
with feeling and with pain, the serious and pathologically-
instructive article, which we call the
"woman's novel." Novel-writing, among women,
is thus a form of hysteria.
That inexperience of practical life to which
I have referred is a severe handicap to women,
even in their personal affairs. It makes them
alternately over-confident and over-timid. Be
the friend of any woman who impresses superficial
observers (I include under that head
women who summarily observe and attribute infallibility
to their insights) as self-assured; and
you will almost always find below this assurance
[62]
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
a secret and often charmingly-betrayed shyness
and timidity. Reserve, such as young girls are
taught to cultivate on sexual matters, and which
the best of them retain in all personal affairs
whatever, leads them to leave questions unasked,
to pretend to knowledges which they lack (in the
hope of picking them up, so to speak, as the game
proceeds), and to leave their judgments immature.
Thus we find so much tendency to imitation
among women. By seeming to behave like
others one is using a protective colouring. I
have heard innocent girls laugh at jokes they did
not understand simply for fear of seeming ignorant
or unsophisticated, while sophisticated girls
elaborately pretended not to understand these
same jokes for fear of being thought "not nice."
So this undeveloped knowledge of life is a hindrance.
It leads to a thousand sensitivenesses,
to tears, to nights of untellable pain. Women
have to obtain their knowledge in secret, by subterfuge,
by guessing (what is called "feminine
intuition"). It makes them mentally very
unequal. They show strange maturity here,
woeful lack of development there. This is the
case with even intelligent women, who in any
[63]
WOMEN
extended discussion, in which values are seriously
challenged, are driven in upon their usual
sex devices of silence and mystic airs of dim
understandings. It also makes their responses
both to ideas and to actual facts very uncertain.
It makes them curiously unhappy, suspicious,
jealous. It gives them a sense of inferiority.
Jealousy arises from the sense of inferiority.
Jealousy arises when the ego does not send its
reserves quickly enough to the temporary demoralized
front line defences. Just as ill-breeding
comes from a sense of inferiority (though here
the legendary woman is not invoked, but only an
angry, blustering "I'm as good as she is . . . any
day!"), so does jealousy spring up from a sense
of being at a disadvantage. That is when legend,
being a woman, leaves her adorer in tht
lurch. Legend, as it were, has a puncture.
Very obscure indeed is the sort of vicarious
jealousy that women display. A girl canno
know a young man of approximately her owi
emotional age without adopting an attitude o
responsibility towards him. She may have n«
expectation of marrying him, may have not th'
least intention of marrying him. But she wil
[64] ,
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
most tremendously care about the other girls he
knows. She will be jealous of them. She may
even warn him against them, of course solely
in his own interest, and because a woman's instinct
is more sure than a man's, etc. She is not
in love: she is jealous. I have over and over
again observed the process of the feeling. I
have seen the faces of girls watching a young
man flirt with another girl. Hostility, dread,
anger—all these feelings have been displayed
behind smiles. I have heard new urgent notes
come into a girl's voice as she demanded information
about some other girl whose acquaintance
a man had just made, about another woman
whom he had long known. Not love was there,
but jealousy. The questions were not those of
interest: they were startlingly forced from a suddenly-
shocked heart. It would almost seem
from this that women, for some reason, dread
the loss of any one of their male friends. It is
a vicarious jealousy; but it perhaps has its root in
the knowledge that as a rule a man married is
a man cut off from other woman friends.
Women extraordinarily distrust other women;
[they deliberately manoeuvre to bring about en-
[65]
WOMEN
tanglements between men and women, and between
other women; and they are oppressed by
a feeling of the helplessness of men in face of
unbridled and unscrupulous advances from these
other, and peculiarly "not nice," women. They
are perhaps so instinctively aware of the vagaries
of sex as to find their thoughts running
sharply to a succession of ideas that have as yet
no reality. They are apprehensive, meticulous
in all relations concerning members of the other
sex. The explanation may be that women live
in a world of illusion, and that any shock from
the world of outside experience brings extraordinary
agitation into their systems. They have
no grasp of general ideas: the egomaniac's reactions
are always personal, and she naturally assumes
similar processes in others. As their unhappiness,
their delights, their dreams, are all
vague and torturing, so a sudden new fact or factor
is like a pebble thrown into this unsubstantial
fabric, tearing it. It is like an affront to the legendary
woman. The possibility that a man may
look otherwhither for his confidante, his friend,
his beloved, pierces deep into that painful humility
that women betray when they no longer guard
[66] ^
CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN
their hearts. The legendary woman is felt to be
in peril. There flashes into a woman's mind the
always woundingly concealed suspicion that her
idol has no power over other mortals, but only
over herself. From a Queen, the legendary
woman becomes a child. If the first instant of
jealousy, of dread, be fulfilled, the idol becomes
a dead baby. Gone is the apparent firmness, the
determination, the clear-sighted criticism of
which adoring lovers and husbands boast to their
unmarried friends. Women, without acknowledged
rights in a man, and authority over
his way of life and his clothes and his heart, are
still defenceless. They will always, in the long
run, be reducible to tears.
[67]

Ill WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN

Ill WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
Before coming to the true subject of this chapter,
in which I want to give some of the reasons
for men's love, it may be amusing to indicate one
or two minor points. In the first place the real
reason for love on the part of the male is that
he responds emotionally to a belief that some one
or other of his women acquaintances is in love
with him, or at least is not so indifferent as to
put out of court the notion that she might be
willing to marry him. I know that this is not
the first stage, nor even the first crystallization,
proposed by Stendhal, whose extraordinary book
de rAmour is packed with subtle and suggestive
things. To Stendhal the first steps are those of
admiration, the desire to kiss the beloved, hope.
There follows embroidery upon the lady's perfections.
In a rough sense it is true that admiration
is the key to love ; but one may admire, and
wish to kiss, without loving. In fact one does
[71]
WOMEN
frequently kiss without loving. Some men never
love in a true sense; though they may hanker.
Many marriages are achieved by sheer feminine
determination, or by mere usage. Marriage is
a habit. But when one reaches the stage of hope
it is because there has been some curious and indefinable
turn upon the part of the woman which
renders not wholly absurd the notion that she
has an inclination to love. If to admire were to
love, we should love more frequently than we are
supposed to do. It is true that most men, in a
superficial sense, love often; that is to say, they
are easily attracted by prettiness and grace; and
the more candid among them will admit, as Mr.
Galsworthy points out of one of his heroes, that
they were always more or less in love. They are
capable of being superficially in love with almost
any pretty girl. It is only when that superficial
attraction becomes deep enough to come in contact
with the critical faculty that any turmoil begins.
And the critical faculty is aroused by
some responsive attraction on the part of the
woman. There follows a quick reaction. It is
almost like a panic. "Do I want this to go any
farther?" asks the man. "Is it good enough?"
[72]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
According, then, to the determination of the
woman, the next step is reached. Initiative lies
with her. But if she presses, the male almost
certainly shies, unless he is very callow. The
combat then most interestingly begins.
As a rule, I should say that the pretty girl can
marry almost any man who strongly attracts her.
The game, if she be astute enough (I do not suggest
any design), is in her hands. Mr. Shaw
wrote somewhere once that every time a girl sees
a man she is "encouraging" him. That, like so
many of Mr. Shaw's views, is a little Victorian;
but it is not altogether false. Assuming it to be
true, as I have said above, that a pretty girl may
choose at will among her male acquaintances, it
will be obvious that she must show a preference
for some over others. A girl who is discreetly
impartial has no suitors. A girl with brains and
a tongue has only brave ones. Directly the girl
shows a disinclination for the society of one man
he retires (unless he is very thick-skinned, in
which case, presumably, he deserves the snub direct).
As soon as she favours one above the
others she is directly encouraging him to think
that her feeling for him is peculiar. It is then
[73]
WOMEN
that he hopes ; it is then that her standing is in the
balance. If she be too clearly encouraging she
is a minx, since the word "minx" implies design.
If she has no object but pleasure, she becomes a
coquette. It is hard; but in our self-conscious
species there is no alternative. No girl not lost
to decorum, not emancipated from the rule of
opinion, can be seen very often with a tolerably
juvenile man without having it assumed that she
is willing to encourage him in hopes of marrying
her, or that she is desirous that such an inclination
should be created. Often a good girl, with
a naturally frank temperament, will bring great
pain to herself and her friend by a too definite
partiality for his society. An engagement will
be made for her in a twinkling, and the fat will
be in the fire. The engagement may then,
through pressure, be ratified as genuine; the constant
association may cease (to some shaking of
heads) ; or, defying propriety, the girl may so
act as to retain her freedom at the loss of her
pristine reputation. In the former case the man
has received confirmation of his belief that she
loves him; in the second case he feels injured,
and perhaps becomes expostulatory and even
[74]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
rather angry at having been duped—thereby doing
great injustice to the girl, but not to her sex,
since she is exceptional; in the third case he is
either very much in love and still hopes that the
continued relation is a mark of hesitation, or he
deceives himself into the belief that he is not in
love with her and that he is going to have a good
time in her society. In the third case the acquaintance
cannot long continue. One of the
parties may wish it to do so; but jealousy intervenes,
f No association between two members of
the opposite sex can long subsist without something
approaching love arising upon one side or
the other. Platonic friendships involve restraint
upon amorous inclination on the part of
one of the friends. Therefore continued objectless
acquaintance sooner or later produces quarrels,
estrangements, unhappiness. Human beings,
it would seem, are so constituted that they
must believe themselves subtly first in the eyes
of their most desired intimates. Any man or
woman who, having an intimate relation of this
kind, turns to a third party for extended company,
at once breaks the earlier relation. \ It
may feebly persist for a time; but gradually it
[75]
WOlNIEy
wastes, and is as though it had never been. The
lover withdraws love, ashamed, humiliated; turns
yet again, and is caught up into new interests,
new society. Old associations no longer count.
The quondam friends, once so confiding, are
strangers. Memories fade. The episode is finished.
ii
The situation I have described is something
different from an "affair." It is a situation in
which there has been kept up at any rate an appearance
of camaraderie without caress. The
"affair," which may range through all varieties
of emotional excess, is otherwise. It may arise
when there is proclaimed love upon both sides,
without, however, the determination for marriage.
It may arise when marriage is out of the
question, or when marriage is for a time intended.
There may be love upon one side and
half-love upon the other. It may culminate in
social flight or in a very extreme flirtation in
which neither party intends permanence. Eventually
it concludes in a quarrel or in a gradual
estrangement. It has been a passing love, with-
[76]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
out roots; but with the various inclinations of
love gratified to a point finally at the discretion
of the woman. A married woman probably carries
an affair farther than an unmarried woman,
who has her whole future to consider. Consequently
affairs with unmarried women subside
more normally than those with married women.
The married woman, having endured a disappointment,
having had distaste aroused, and having
had developed within her a desire for revenge
upon the cause of her disappointment, becomes
more quickly reckless. She counts the
cost less; she knows as nobody else can do the
sweets of stolen intercourse. The unmarried
woman has more prudence. She withholds her
sacrifice longer, and often makes no sacrifice.
Life is before her. To the married woman life
is already half passed. She has taken her
plunge. One affair finished, her appetite must
be appeased. Insensibly she skids a little.
There is very nearly always time for an unmarried
woman who is not at heart a courtesan to
recover her ground. At the worst she can convert
the affair into a marriage. At the best she
can withdraw flying all her colours, a little bat-
[77]
WOMEN
tered by the excitement, but still in excellent condition
to reflect upon the chances of life and of
matrimony.
iii
Some men like "affairs" because they are stimulated
by them; but most men have a hankering
for marriage. For one thing, a girl of aff'airs is
too experienced; she knows too much, or cannot
altogether manage to appear as though she did
not know too much. She conveys the impression
that she is soiled. It may be that she is not
soiled at all, but only made wise. Neverllieless,
to the ordinary man, whose notions of the woman
he marries are taken from novelettes and from
her own revelations of the legendary self, there
is something excessively good in marrying somebody
who has never—it would almost seem
—
loved before. He feels her innocence to be a
guarantee of future good conduct. He feels
safe. She will be there, for ever his, innocent,
wise, good; the beautiful safeguard for his own
continence. Other women are—well, other
women. His wife, like his mother, will be "different,"
She will carry on the good tradition.
[78]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
It is perhaps natural that he should gloss over
his own curiosities, his own affairs, his own
rather tougher and case-hardened nature. His
wife at least will be pure, the inspiration of his
days, etc. f Men like something stable. They
wish to feel that love and company await them
through life. So only the gay dog and the cynic
and the unfortunate lover cherish the single life.
These men are but half men. They are chaffed,
remonstrated with, by their married friends.
They are told that they ought to get married;
that by remaining single they are missing the
greatest joys of life. The married man, for
some reason, is an enthusiast for the marriage of
others. In such wise also does the trapped bird
act as the decoy, it is said. The truth being that
the happily-married man exults in a condition
for which his heart has all his life secretly
yearned. He has found safe harbourage. The
thrills and excitements of all the enthralling
possibilities behind a smile or a frown, a glance
or an averted head, have been too unsettling for
him. One may love and love again; but in the
end love that seems to be final in its unbreakable
shackles of matrimony offers him the sort of
[79]
WOMEN
resources that led women of old to take the veil.
Not that he renounces all the pleasures of love.
They are assured to him. Only that he flies the
temptations of the bewildering devils who abound
in the path of the unmarried young man. There
comes a time in the life of man when he can no
longer endure amorous uncertainty. The game
has lost its first savour. He wants to be sure of
one woman for ever. It is a dream.
)
IV
In early days, when puberty begins, the boy
is physically very inquisitive. However much
secret vice may prevail at this time, schoolboys
in general are frankly physical. They talk and
think a good deal of filth; but their concern is
largely a curiosity about their own bodies, and
has much to do with natural functions of other
kinds as with the functions of sex. Sexual curiosity
is developed rather later, and it takes crude
forms—jests which are largely imitative and selfconscious,
abortive wonderings about the sexual
act, about birth, and so on. Only in association
with these so mysterious creatures girls do boys
[801
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
become morbidly sexual. There is so much they
do not know; the possibilities of intelligent conversations
with elder people are so few, and the
relations with parents so muddled, that boys are
driven to their thoughts and to common malpractices
for relief. When they are older still they
begin to find a quaint pleasure in the society of
girls, and they often find the girls so self-possessed
in all such matters that they are once more
baffled and exasperated. The crudity of their
own impressions, their own desires, is emphasized
to a ridiculous degree. They are everywhere
hampered and dissatisfied, unless they
come upon girls of a lower order than themselves
who have their own sexual instincts strongly developed.
For the most part, however, the adolescent
male, strictly physical in his interests,
and not at all fitted for any of that subtle playing
with fire which is the girl's principal concern,
is helplessly stupid and ignorant. His
thoughts are often busy enough, but they lack
penetration and instruction. He is ready at the
first touch to fall sentimentally in love with an
older woman, to exalt her above everything he
has known, as being infinitely beautiful and mys-
[81]
WOMEN
terious. This green-sickness endures for a little
while, a strange bewilderment of heats and chills,
of intolerably exaggerated devotions and wounds;
and then it subsides as the bitter realization
comes of the woman's greater personal interest in
an older male. Duels, tragedies, violences of
all kinds occupy the mind of the unhappy youth.
He is displaced, is cured ; and he proceeds for a
time to be extremely cynical and juvenile about
the sex. He is unpleasant at this age; but his
devotion, however sentimental, has a pathetic
strength in it, and he is left awkwardly fronting
a world of sex in which he has already found
himself discomfited. He may turn away from
women for years, or, driven by imperious need
or baulked curiosity, he may seek solace in the
shudderings of bought embraces. That depends
upon the point to which his amorous desire has
been excited, upon his home training, upon his
opportunities. Also it depends upon his associates,
who dominate him at this time of life.
Pique is strong, imitativeness is very strong
among adolescent youth. Undergraduates, for
example, are easily affected by the prevailing
tone of their set. In any case, however, the
[82]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
idealism of the young man generally divides
women at this time into two classes. It is possible
for a youth to be exactly what young Marlow
was in the time of Goldsmith. Whatever his
sexual experiences he is still extraordinarily
nervous in the company of girls of his own class,
whose apparently greater understanding of life
disarms him and causes him to regard them with
a callow heart, however much he may upon the
surface show the bearing of a man of the world.
It is at this point that a young man is liable
to be "got hold of" (as the vulgar saying of
mothers has it) by a girl with determination
greater than his own. If she be in his own
class, the issue is probably simple. If she is a
girl whose acquaintance is made by casual encounter
in these sweepstakes called "monkeys'
parades," the consequences may be various. An
entanglement may arise, urged forward by pertinacity,
by tears and threats, by subtle appropriation.
The young man may find himself in a
great difficulty, social and moral. He may be
ruined for life. Or, at the price of self-respect,
he may recover his liberty. Thereafter he may
eschew the society of casual acquaintances of the
[83]
WOMEN
other sex, or he may again adventure, more warily,
until he becomes an expert at the game. In
that case his respect for women will go the way
of other ideals, and he will conclude that every
girl is to be had for the asking, or for the trouble
of taking. He will become a man of paltry affairs,
and, as the appetite grows by what it feeds
on, he will become insatiable. He will become
a rake, and his successes will be innumerable.
That is because his taste will draw him naturally
to girls of particular characteristics, who play the
sex-game crudely and take their own jaunty risks
with life. Success will make him intolerable,
and he will degenerate. That is his lot in life.
The alternative is a kind of priggish severity
which will not prevent the young man from envying
the victor in so many amorous conquests.
He will long for conquests of his o^vn, but, letting
I dare not wait upon I would, he will have to content
himself with becoming the blind and elated
victim of more refined tactics. He will pass
through various loves, all the more or less reminiscent
of green-sickness, but less acute, and
equally the product of pleased vanity; and the
girl who stoops to capture will ultimately enjoy
[84]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
possession of his income and his person. He
will idolize her for a time, and at length, rather
puzzled at what the man in Mr. Granville
Barker's play called "this damned subtle world,"
he will submit to the ruthless regimen of life,
which binds us all about with the shackles of
custom and half-hearted assumptions of happiness.
He will believe himself to be happy, and
he will actually enjoy certain curious moments
of pride and happiness, because love and marriage,
however dubious in their origins, are productive
of all sorts of acute and precarious delights.
All this is true only of a section; but it
needs to be dwelt upon here because it is germane
to our subject. It shows men to walk very foolishly
in the paths of love, and it shows at least two
types (both of them very common) to be extraordinarily
inferior in sexual intelligence to
their feminine counterparts.
The male, then, in his attitude to love, is more
unsophisticated than the female. He is more
sentimental. At any rate after the maturing of
his sexual character, whatever his experience, he
[85]
WOMEN
is capable of saying in his own mind: "dear
little thing," and "poor little darling," about a
woman larger than himself. That is the extreme
limit of sentimentality; for it shows him besotted.
But pity is a very constant element in male love.
It is the cause of many engagements, many marriages.
Pity is aroused (as well as gratification)
by the yearning eyes of a girl who has made up
her mind to marry shortly. Unhappiness at home
is in some classes of society a sure card to play,
and is responsible for some strange weddings.
"They don't understand me . . . mother's awful
!
I don't know what I shall do. I can't stand it
much longer!" "Poor little girl," says the
young man, his mind darting to possibilities.
"Look here, we should be beastly poor, and all
that; but . ..." Stevenson was much puzzled
to account for many of the marriages he saw in
being at every turn. Is it such a puzzle? Even
a good girl may sometimes hint, if her love be
great, or her need desperate. Hints—the uncontrollable
tone in a voice, the checked sentence,
the accidental word;—and a train of strange
thought is laid in the combustible mind of a
young man. Can it be? Would she think of
[86]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
me? Would she marry me? What an uncertainty
it is! How hard to be sure; to conquer
male self-love and take the plunge. Who has
not seen marriages arranged, and the youth
hopelessly ignorant of the plans for his future?
How often, in the small towns, in the suburbs of
larger towns, are marriages created by opinion!
There are a few meetings, a little tennis, a hint or
two, a confusion or so; and everything is done
without fuss and without the least wound to
modesty! In London we are perhaps different.
In Chelsea and in Fitzroy Square, certainly, we
take less heed of opinion. Elsewhere it is
the great matchmaker. But I insist that initiative
lies with the girl. It is for her to chill.
Every smile she gives is a lure to the average
man. How tame this loving seems when one
has known the other, with its long weeks of butterfly
alternations, of vacillation, of siege and flight,
of vehement feeling. But it is the kind of love
that populates these islands with obedient and
steadfast citizens. The love that thrills is the
love of the chase. It is inconstant, exhilarating,
and full of divine cajolery. It is not married
love; because our men wish in marriage for
[87]
WOMEN
something not quite so dazzlingly uncertain. It
is the love of flirtations, of passions, of affairs, of
fine sweeping dashes to the pinnacles of feeling.
When we are married we chuckle half-timidly at
such memories. We become coarse, as married
men tend to become coarse, although they do
not know it. The oddest little speeches and embraces
and passionate instants lurk once again
behind our current thoughts, warming hearts and
narrowing eyes with secret joy. The recollections
bring our coat-collars over our ears in
dread. For the rest of that evening we are very
attentive to our wives, very gentle and benign.
We listen to their conversation. As the evening
wears, that rare mystical expression comes into
their eyes. They are communing with the legendary
woman, who nowadays smells slightly of
camphor. What things memories are, to the sentimental!
To the unsentimental, what unbearable
pain they bring!
vi
(^But the emotions that in after days evoke memories
are very powerful. They are the deepest
and truest emotions in our lives. Beside them
[88]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
the steady pressure of friendship is a dead
thing, the husk of loving, with the heart away.)
We may have many friends, we may have what
is called a genius for friendship ; but the aspiration
that fills our hearts is for a beloved woman
to ease our pain. It is not now of common men
that I speak, for common men slip easily into
marriage with a "suitable" girl, and we sometimes
enviously observe engaged couples, dull
and sober, walking rhythmically in the twilight,
secure in a very week-day affection. There, we
say: tliose people have their desire: why not I?
That is in our abject moments of modesty, when
we no longer sneer at humdrum contentment, but
instead are dissatisfied with our own restlessness,
our own fastidious disposition to choose
the unattainable in life. In their hearts all men
believe the woman-legend. Those least prone to
believe it are the rather emotionally inexperienced,
who have in youth had sisters, or who
have had shocks from the sisters of their
friends. The men of the world, who have a
less fine sense of fastidiousness, and to whom
all girls are dear little things and real pals and
those other remarkable phenomena of the senti-
[89]
WOMEN
mental male mind, half-drunk with its own lees,
believe to the last in the regenerative power of a
good woman. They yearn for marriage, which
is to effect a change of heart comparable to that
which idealists await in our present enemies.
Most of them are conscious, after marriage, of
disappointment: all think before the event that
their own marriage will be different, a perfect
harmony. When married men betray (it is extraordinary
how seldom they explicitly betray)
their disappointment, unmarried men think to
themselves: "Well, I wouldn't have married her
myself." How do they know? How does anybody
know the circumstances that led up to a
marriage? Is there a more secret process in the
world?
(^It is to be observed that all men of character
—even those who are supposed to be self-sufficing—
are extremely lonely. They live remote.
They are not gregarious, as are common men;
and even if they have many friends they remain
secret, conveying little of their sighing wish for
any denouement v/hich shall free them from the
load of memory, of sense of personal responsibility.
They are lonely and tired. Their
[90]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
thought is that if a true woman gave her love,
they, her humble adorer, would be able to find
blessed peace. It is with them the longing to
be once again children.') When Sir James Barrie
pretends that what every woman knows is that
men are children he is cleverly and sophistically
turning the glove inside out. He is giving
women a straight tip. He is betraying a male
secret, not exalting a feminine knowledge. He
is flattering women, and appealing to their vanity.
No wonder Sir James Barrie is the favourite
playwright among women. He tells them what
pleases; but the fact is not there. The fact lies
in the weary desire for rest. Rest, that promise
in so many hymns of the Eternal Father, is what
men most desire. Memory goes back to days of
mother and the soft breast upon which as children
they could always recover their courage and good
heart. That is the first longing of men. That
is what prepares them to love. The rest is auxiliary.
Apart from very exceptional men, the sexual
instinct can be appeased without love. In ordinary
courtship the sexual appeal obviously counts
for a good deal; because, as Mr. Shaw says,
[91]
wo:mex
most people have nothing to give in marriage but
the sexual relation. They have, that is to say,
no spiritual communion. \With the best types of
men, however, the sex relation is secondary to
the relation of the spirit. They ride for ever
seeking—not God, as the poem says, but understanding
and sympathy. With other men, with
the world as a whole, they are content to show
their success, their endeavour, their activity.
Their ideal is a woman to whom they may express
their failure. The desire to serve, which is very
strong in the hearts of all good men, comes from
humility and from pride in the beloved, j I do
not now speak of that masculine trampling of
other men which forms daily life. We can all
fight, if we are called to do so. But, to women,
men who crave for reality have this odd and
passionate desire to appear no otherwise than as
penitents. We relinquish, in the strength of
our love, the gesture of normal behaviour.
Failure, all that dreadful treasure of disappointment
that we store in our hearts, squeezed
though it may be from ostensible triumph, is the
thing we go back to in memory. The things we
[92]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
have longed for and have never got. Those
things we long to confess. ( To rest and to confess,
to be made whole and to be comforted.
To be understood! To have a wife who, knowing
all our weakness, has yet the strength to
love us and to be proud of our love. The technique
of love-making does not attract men of
integrity. It seems to them to be waste of time.
What they think they need a>re the objects I have
detailed above. These are the love aspirations
of men. They are rarely more than aspirations,
because women also require comforting;
and when women appeal to men for comforting
the breakfast must have been intolerably bad,
or the day quite too distressingly exacting, if
during the first year of married life male sympathy
is not forthcoming. Afterwards, no
doubt, with puzzled disappointment upon both
sides drying up the wells of tenderness and
longing, both are harsh. Neither then, perhaps,
struggles to adjust the differing rhythms
of mood. But at first, when the flush of rapture
is still warm, only inarticulateness, only
cowardice, can account for the failure of unity
[93]
WOMEN
in mood. There is no peace, because men and
women alike are egoists when they are in emotional
conflictA
vii
Having spoken of lawful love, I must mention
that experimental love has other fascinations.
Coquetry is not a specifically feminine accomplishment;
though in a girl it is more charming
and in a man holds more coldness of heart. A
girl coquette may be a rogue: a male coquet
is almost certainly a selfish fellow with a sense
of his own value. There is great attraction in
the girl coquette if she is fresh: her movements
beguile die eyes; her little gleaming darts of
intelligence please the flushed and excited mind:
her mystifications intrigue and delight the imagination.
That is one kind of love, no doubt,
and it is a kind that gives light pleasure and
light pain (though the pain has its daggerlike
strokes to the heart). Another kind arises
when the girl is of a more sensual type than
the man, as often happens. It is then she who
has set the pace, she who instructs her lover in
the art of loving. Her arms entangle him; he
[94]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
is lost, breathless, hot and exliilarated. He is
taken quite out of his ordinary self, seduced
by the constant temptations that are revealed to
him. So stifling a love, which is the rousing of
lust rather than a sweeter affection, cannot last.
The man is a mere instrument to such a woman.
She can hold him for a year, for two years;
but in the end his feeling is one of aversion.
He is done with her. The instinctive courtesan,
she has played hard, perhaps, for happiness;
but she has known only one way of winning
love, and it is not the true way. It is not first
of all through the senses that man loves—if he
is capable of loving. It is through quite other
faculties. It is through imagination, and humour,
and pity, and admiration. His love is
made when he forms a smiling or engrossing
picture of the girl's nature; when, though he
may be terrified out of his life, he feels that
he would risk anything for the possession of the
beloved; when he feels at once a schoolboy and
an old man. See the exchanged glance of true
lovers—what is there? On the girl's side a
glance for reassurance, quick, sidelong; on the
man's side a puzzled, questioning scrutiny.
[95]
WOMEN
What is she? he is asking. And he is suddenly,
vehemently realizing, behind his sang froid, just
exactly how frightened of her he is. He will
never stop being afraid, because she is physically
weaker than himself. If she were not
by diis fact placed absolutely outside his combative
range we should hear less of the mysteriousness
of women. The mysteriousness
would vanish. As long as women are physically
the inferior sex they will be compelled to
be mysterious. Their determination may be (it
so often is, that I would almost venture to class
determination as a feminine characteristic)
much stronger than that of men. It is certainly
more unquiet and assertive. But it can only be
combated by physical force; and physical force
is the one weapon which most men will never
apply to their wives. So this young man who
is in deadly fear of his sweetheart—a fear that
he cannot define, because it defies definition
—
is typical of his sex. He is afraid, for she is
a stranger to him, as he is to her—as they both
will be strangers to each other for the rest of
their lives, striving vainly after knowledge until
[96]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
the day comes when the pursuit will cease to
interest.
I wonder what the girl is thinking all this
time. She does not know what her lover thinks
of her. If he is wise he will never attempt to
tell.
viii
He will never attempt to tell if he is wise,
because he will make a mess of it. He does not
always know what he thinks. But the extraordinary
thing is tliat he knows as much about his
beloved as she knows about him. He is deeply
in love—let us say; he is full of terror, of
admiration, of all the things proper to be mentioned
by sentimentalists. And in between his
admiration and terror his judgment is unceasing.
Thousands of tiny memories are there
like the finest strands of a spider's web, delicate,
imponderable, trembling out the signals
of a telegraphic code to the brain. He is remembering
every circumstance connected with
old meetings, old talks; a laugh, a sudden bewitching
charm, a sullenness. He is thinking
[97]
WOMEN"
of his first recoil at a hardness in her voice,
and his passionate joy at so many other tones.
Gestures, phrases, contacts with her hair or her
lips, delicious pleasures of unexpressed thought,
of understanding without speech. These are in
his memory, firm and sure and exquisite. The
web is weaving, and the pride in her is strong.
And all the time, without treachery or disloyalty,
without wavering in his love and his steadfastness,
the lover, admiring, amused, bewitched,
and afraid, is baffling the world by his
expression. He stands regarding the woman
he loves, and loving her profoundly. And all
the time he is consciously, and unflinchingly,
seeing through her; seeing the vanities upon
which her tender breast feeds her fears of him,
her angers with him, her discomforts and triumphs,
cajoleries and inexpressible reliefs.
(.He is seeing her a child and a woman, a coward
and a heroine, a human heart that lives in
a world of illusion. And he is not cynical, but
only a man watching his beloved. How strange!)
But he must never tell. Women are far too
serious to endure the true picture. They have
too much that is "heroic" in their temperament.
[98]
WHY MEN LOVE WOMEN
To see life and character clear, and to laugh
without cruelty or pain, is a power denied to
all but two or three women. If it were a widespread
gift we should all laugh ourselves into
apoplexies.
[99]

IV WOMEN IN LOVE

IV WOMEN IN LOVE
In the superficial account given in the last
chapter of the attitude of men to love and to
the women whom they love, I have intentionally
avoided dwelling upon the subtleties of emotional
reaction. These are very great, and
they are still inexplicable. The alternate attractions
and repulsions to and from the beloved
are more strongly felt by men than by women,
because male concepts are clearer and more
importunate than those of women. With women
the recognition of love is a sort of penultimate
stage; because to them the consummation of
love is the great moment of their lives—the
dividing line, if they could but know it consciously,
between growth and endurance of that
fate which is character. To men marriage is
an incident; confession of love the beginning of
doubt. By confession I do not mean avowal to
the beloved, although avowal is often succeeded
[103]
WOMEN
in highly sensitive men by an active aversion, a
sense almost approaching the paroxysm of the
claustrophobe. The first reaction occurs at the
moment of recognition, because for most men
this recognition implies a perception of weakness
in their will. It is associated in the minds
of men with submission to a stronger force.
They are then (often blindly) aware of the
finesse and dissimulation of the beloved. Hatred,
that near neighbour of love, is bom. The
eternal struggle begins between these two emotions.
If the feeling is one of fascination, the
struggle may be brief. Denied opportunity for
the coup de grace, the woman may lose her victory,
because fascination, involving passionate
attachment, consumes like fire. Presently, the
stronger the fascination the sooner the consumption,
love so violently aroused subsides. Its
place is taken by indifference or by aversion.
It will be remembered that when, in "A Nest of
Gentlefolk," Lavretsky's wife perceives aversion
in her husband she knows the battle to be
lost. It is then that the second or alternative
woman so often achieves her gain. No phrase
is better understood in relation to marriage than
[104]
WOMEN IN LOVE
that which says a man has been "caught on the
rebound." Here there may be likeness or significant
unlikeness between the two women. It
is immaterial at the moment; but the fact is familiar,
and need not be laboured.
Assuming passion to be aroused in a less
degree, the woman, whether she be as expert
as Madame Lavretsky or a mere instinctive
craftsmen, has still to work very dexterously in
order to complete her conquest. She is hardly
ever unconscious of the situation, for her acuteness
in this one great knowledge of her life is
unquestioned. Almost always the man, conscious
throughout of defects, incompatibilities,
sometimes even (in himself) of horrors, is torn
between distaste and desire. John Tanner,
when he calls Ann Whitefield a vampire and a
hypocrite, is not so grotesque as sentimentalists
like to believe. He feels himself in the trap of
destiny. Men will go—driven by an imperious
need which they cannot deny—within a hundred
yards of the beloved's dwelling, and will recoil,
horror-laden. They will vehemently decline to
have anything more to do with the woman who
has entangled them. She becomes, not a syren,
[105]
WOMEN
but a creature wholly base, whose defects are
more clearly seen in this moment succeeding
intoxication than at any time before marriage.
They will fly coolly and frantically (for in love
there is a kind of frenetic coolness) determined
to have nothing further to do with the woman for
whom so recently they have been ready to dare
all. The mood persists, but is shaken by another
mood spent in contrasting the newly synthesized
basenesses with the irresistibly recalled
and adorable qualities of the loved woman.
The cruelty of perception, the desperate yearning
of love, form a conflict incalculable in the
breasts of these men. It is feeling against
thought, knowledge against overmastering impulse.
A hundred times a day, excitedly weighing
this and that—a harsh tone, an unsuspectingly-
revealed callousness, an uncontrolled insensitiveness—
against the fever that possesses
them, men waver like reeds in a storm. They
are without will, without resource. This is the
first paroxysm. It is renewed, more profoundly,
but with new variations and with a kind of
despondent fatalism, when the rubicon has been
crossed. Very young men often cry off on
[106]
WOMEN IN LOVE
the day following a proposal and acceptance.
Mothers understand this. Women understand
it. Rarely does the shuddering attempt at
eleventh hour escape succeed. The girl's vanity
is involved. One may read the history of the
succeeding struggle in many actions for breachof-
promise; but these actions are confined almost
to one class, they are often begun from a sort
of vengeful jealousy months after the event,
because the young man has betrayed another
inclination (it may be that the plaintiff has until
that hour disbelieved in her failure), and most
jilted girls take other measures. They either
remain silent dirough pride, or they content
themselves with vilification and frequently with
insinuations against the young man's physical
state, or they more expertly attain their original
object and hold the recalcitrant lovers to their
word. Nevertheless, the recoil is a psychological
factor to be reckoned with. It is very common,
even in its crude attempt at evasion (as
indicated above). The secret revulsion, I
should say, is practically universal, except in the
physically very robust, who take life as it comes.
This sense of women as tricksters is deep-
[107]
WOMEN
seated. Few men trust women. In spite of all
sentimental talk with a contrary trend, distrust
of or a contempt for all women is more common
than genuine love for one woman. She is felt
to be professional in this particular incident of
life. That is because she has made marriage,
or at least the sexual act, her lifelong preoccupation.
She has thought of it since she could
think at all, and her instinct is stronger even
than her preoccupation. To a woman the sense
of avowed love is a triumph. To a man, whatever
his momentary elation, which is excitement
and not deep-seated joy, it is a moment of dread
and anxiety, a moment of unsettlement—almost
of demoralization.
ii
I have stated the proposition in a crude form
which may make it appear grotesque. It is
difficult to avoid this appearance, because so
many of the incidents peculiar to what is called
"mating" have a sort of grotesqueness when they
are divorced from the glamour with which each
individual case is surrounded by the protagonists.
There are men who will deny the reaction:
[108]
WOMEN IN LOVE
most women would deny it. This strange complexity,
however, is really inseparable from the
love relation—the mixture of hostility and reverence.
I have known lovers who hated one
another. Brutality between married people will
possibly be recalled by many of my readers, a
palpable hatred which does not stop short of
physical violence. The impulse to cruelty towards
the beloved is common. In women it
often takes the form of a frigidity that is expressively
known as "sulking." In men, so
much greater is the complex of emotion, it may
become tyranny, or fear, or a kind of snarling
meanness that is compounded of those two. A
story is told of a man of exceptional strength of
character and firmness of will who—in an unwonted
burst of candour—said to his wife:
"The power you have over me is extraordinary.
I am afraid of you." Not all of us are capable
of such candour. We hide our fear beneath a
temporizing kindness and nonsensical condescension.
The fear is genuine: it is without
immediate cause, but lies deep in sexual hostility
and a knowledge that in love women are the
masters.
[109]
WOMEN
They ought to be the masters: they are the
specialists. They have become involved in the
web of sex while men are still juvenile and still
preoccupied with the outcome of school games,
with the stuff they have been learning, with
that cubbish disdain which is in reality a selfconsciousness
born of inexperience and fear.
When it is said that men cannot understand
women it is really meant that they are impregnated
by a sense of feminine unscrupulousness
and the kind of emotion which President Wilson
described once as being "too proud to fight."
Once in a web they have no power to fight: they
may try to fly, as one does in a dream, with
legs which are curiously leaden and trembling.
In vain does the impulse arise. The forbidden
danger is too alluring.
What, then, is the real attitude of women to
this extraordinary behest of nature? Are they,
too, afraid? Do they, too, approach the danger
with dread and fascination? Few of them.
When a girl is uncertain—as may happen in the
case of two persons of strong personality who
see beyond propinquity into the void of the
future—we say, perhaps, that her sexual in-
[110]
WOMEN IN I.OVE
stinct is at variance with her judgment. We
doubt her judgment, and we think of her instinct
as representing the essential woman. Her brain
has been snared with admiration of some quality
in the man; but we know she will not love
unless her instinct finally approves. She belongs
to a higher type of woman, or she has
suffered painful experience. Her nature is less
simple in its manifestations than is that of the
majority of her sex. Upon her choice hangs
the possibility of disaster. Most women have
no such qualms. They have made up their
minds earlier. With them, hesitancy is not prolonged
to the point of possible loss: it is a
sportive part of the sex game, to provoke lovemaking
more ardent. It is a delightful experience
for a woman to believe herself loved. It
is the moment for which she has waited all her
life.
ill
From early days she has planned to be loved
and mated. Only a few—and these exceptional
—are denied this professional impulse. For
them the issue is clear from the outset, quite
[111]
WOMEN
primitively seen. To be convinced of the general
truth of this, one has only to observe the
novels they most admire. They are novels of
feminine surrender. They are novels in which
the heroine at last succumbs to the urgent wooing
of the hero, or to the desires of her own physical
nature. Many girls have luxuriated in the
first volume of Richardson's Pamela, than which
there is probably no more exciting pursuit of
virginity. In the eighteenth century this was a
woman's book (while Fielding's masculine contrast,
Joseph Andrews, was not so clearly a
woman's book, by reason of its humanity and
laughter) : it still remains a woman's book.
Among modern novels it is the erotic tale that
finds most readers among women. I will go
so far as to assert that any novel which contains
a marriage at first left unconsummated, with
the ugly intrigues of the wife to indicate her
willingness for cohabitation forming its subsequent
motif, is infallibly a success with women.
Their savage curiosity in following the theme is
unmistakable. It is an index to their predilections.
They have one thought only; and in pursuit
of that will endure a perfect tedium of de-
[112]
^
.
WOMEN IN LOVE
tails and doublings until the desired end is
reached. It is almost a recipe for successful
novel-writing. A study of marriage which does
not dwell upon the physical relation is to them
intolerable.
The maturity of girls in the very earliest episodes
is remarkable. One has only to watch
them with schoolboys, all very self-conscious,
all very sentimental. One sees the youths trying
to look as though they enjoyed the experience,
as boys look when the first pangs of
cigarette-sickness are approaching; but one sees
that the directing intelligence is that of the girls.
They are taking a prim and enjoying interest in
every thrilling danger. It is the girls who lie
most readily to their parents. The boys may
stammer; the girls are assured. The more experience
they can gain of this kind of flirtation
the more expert they will be in the real life that
is opening to them. A boy of fourteen is a
tyro; the girl of the same age is an adept. She
will manage to enchain, if she is pretty and
confident, several cavaliers. They will think
themselves terrible fellows in their attempts to
secure solitary interviews. The game is always
[113]
WOMEN
the same. It is painfully crude to the observer;
but the girl's address is unfailing. She
has the matter in hand. Already she is practising
her skill. Only when she is sure of herself,
of her power to deal singly with these croaking
youths, will she abandon the group contest.
The group has given her the sense of strength.
Thereafter the single lover best serves her turn
and the legendary girl springs like a slender
shoot within her consciousness. From that moment
she is a woman. She has a tale to tell, a
myth to incubate.
The woman's first thought about a man of
whom she has hopes—not yet as a husband, but
as a cavalier—is the degree of his consideration
among other women. She has no standards of
her own; but if he pleases, or is desired by,
others of her sex, his value in her eyes is increased.
It becomes worth while to exert her
efforts to keep him by her side. She will immediately
be capable of jealousy upon his account.
If she is too mature in instinct, without
the charming wisdom that plays with experiment
and develops very dangerous allure, she will
proceed, as the phrase is, to "take possession"
[114]
WOMEN IN LOVE
of him. That is to say, she will allow her jealousy
to be seen. Stolidly, perhaps, she will
press his inclination until her too warm clasp
is perceptible. The male reaction will occur.
He will detach, uncomfortably, with a shamefaced
desire to escape. He may even feel a
sudden burst of self-confidence in his power to
please the sex. She has been stupid. This
drives her to other youths, until at last she attains
proficiency in her art. The more accomplished
craftswoman will not "take possession."
Secure in her prettiness, or perhaps smarting
under the sense of unjustifiable rivalry upon
the part of another girl, she will seem to turn
away; she will play the coquette; her heart will
chill. She will find how easy it is to make
the male tongue stumble by means of a light
touch with her delicate finger or the smallest
approach of her tender cheek. It will delight
her as nothing else could do. If she is wise
she will remain unspoiled; but she will secretly
despise the side of youths which can make them
such easy material for experiment. The impulse
to experiment, once born, is hard to eradicate.
It becomes so strong that it often renders
[115]
WOMEN
a young and pretty girl unstable and self-willed.
Power being tasted too early, she will find herself
doing everything too easily. Efifort will
be untempting to her. Failing great character
she may become a mere flirt, the cause of chagrins
and angers, the cause of happiness to nobody
at all. The stupid girl has the better
chance of making and providing happiness.
The flirt, spoilt by early success, tends to be a
butterfly; and life is too hard for her, so that
she becomes discontented or makes discontent
for all who cross her path. The stupid girl, if
she rid herself of the possessive instinct, may
attain happy marriage, and through marriage
her desire. The flirt may remain unmarried,
or she may succumb in sudden temptation to the
first rake who keeps her dangling. After all,
there are male flirts; and the male flirt plays
the game with even greater heartlessness than
his female equivalent. She, in the last resort,
may be a moth; but he may be a monster, because
he will have a clearer head, and he will
have at least some shallow preoccupations quite
outside the sexual range. He will have friends,
and detachment. The woman flirt is immersed
[116]
WOMEN IN LOVE
in the technical details of her profession. She
is therefore more liable to be caught by disregard
(which no woman can endure), may suffer
the pains she has so often inflicted, and may
fall a victim, simply because her past conquests
have made affairs too easy for her, and left her
silly heart at the mercy of its own vanity.
IV
The attitude, then, of men and women to
the first intimations of love is entirely different.
To the man (as to the rare woman of strong
character) it is a time of emotional turmoil, of
active distress. To the woman it is a time of
such engrossing delight and triumph that her
being is pervaded by new significance. Charm
that lay dormant rises in her; graces appear;
her nature burgeons. This is not the case with
man. All the thrilling transfiguration of the
world which is recorded in the songs of poets
is a sweet memory of adolescence. Men rarely
feel this supreme unquestioning sense of wonder
after the age of first love. In mo'^t it may
occur at sixteen, or thereabouts, when they
[117]
WOMEN
deeply love a woman older than themselves.
At the extreme limit men take love as poetry
no later than the age of twenty-one. In men
amorous rapture is a mark of emotional amateurishness.
In England and America men of
any education do not marry early, and so the
beginning love is always a sweet memory that
retains its glamour because it has been without
completion. It is like a half-recalled melody
which strays into the memory and stirs the
attention only until it has been fully recaptured.
The reason for this is easily explained, and has
often been explained. It is that the mental
attentiveness of men is diverted to other matters,
and when the mind is occupied with a diversity
of interests it is less susceptible than it
might be to the claims of an overmastering
passion. There may be attractions, there may
be many slight and superficial loves—so that
men may constantly and readily be emotionally
affected by any girl whom they meet;—but prolonged
distress is rare. "Men have died, and
worms have eaten them; but not for love." In
all probability it is only in periods of low vitality
that men fall passionately in love. Con-
[118]
WOMEN IN LOVE
valescents recovering from severe illnesses; those
whose circumstances (of loneliness, or of discouragement
in work or careers) are such as to
reduce their mental efficiency; those whose time
is unoccupied, as is the case with the wealthy
or the holiday-maker;—these are the passionate
lovers among men of any maturity.
One can well understand why it should be
different with women. Few of these have the
concentrated energy to pursue a purely disinterested
path. They do not appear to be able
to go far without a sense of social support, of
appreciation. They have no such resource of
self-respect as men have. Their energies are
dissipated. They must have friends to console,
or lovers, for the real or fancied troubles that
beset them. Appeals for sympathy are constantly
made by women, whereas men who need
sympathy over some disaster are generally too
proud to seek it. If they are so unnerved as
to try to get sympathy from a woman they will
find that a degree of intimacy is exacted which
makes both confider and confidante conspirators.
A woman cannot give, or appear to give, sympathy
without forcing confidences and without
[119]
WOMEN
making personal emotional claims. That is a
danger, because claims beget softness and softness
breeds a sort of spurious love and interreliance.
If the woman then desires marriage
she generally achieves it.
I say if she desires marriage advisedly, because
while all women desire marriage, they
do not necessarily desire marriage with particular
men. They do constantly await with superstitious
awe the bidding of instinct as to possible
mates. Many writers make much of this instinct,
the fallibility of which is demonstrated
by many unsuitable marriages. While instinct
plays its part, no doubt, impulse and occasion
are really the deciding factors in such matters.
I have never meant to suggest that in the relations
of the sexes, in the attitude of women towards
men, there was any analogy with the common
proceedings of the spider and the fly. I
have never suggested anything so crude. That
may be left to scientists who do not believe in
individuals, but only in species. This essay is
based upon observation of individuals. Sympathy
is often more genuinely given by sisters
or by mothers or by those who are not sexually
[120]
WOMEN IN LOVE
attracted by the men who are involved. It is
never given without a counter-claim. The
woman gives sympathy out of a kind of vanity;
for she is flattered at being made the repository
of a secret. She smiles with secret pleasure at
the tale of a tragedy—oblivious of the tragedy
in her exultation at feeling a personal power.
If one wishes to flatter a woman one confides in
her: one does not imagine that the pity she expresses
represents her true attitude. Her true
attitude is one of gratification. In the noblest
of women this gratification is subtle. It is
merged in the desire to appear helpful, to respond
to the expectation that has been formed
of her. She is proud and happy : her sympathy
is not an outflowing of kindness but a response
to her desire to be of importance to somebody
or something outside herself. Mother-love is
very largely due to such an emotion. It is due
to the sense that baby is dependent upon her for
everything. It is as tliough she gloatingly said
to the baby: "You can't do anything without
me." Women love dogs and cats in the same
manner—responding to the expectant love which
makes these dogs and cats rather demonstrative
[121]
WOMEN
in their habitual affection. Where men are
able to obtain food for self-respect in concentration
upon business or other interests, women
are entirely dependent upon personal relations
for their life material. They are so puzzled
and uncertain about the legitimacy and even the
existence of their legendary selves, and are so
entirely ashamed of the retiringness they perceive
or think they perceive in their daily selves,
that they crave as normal (not hermaphroditic)
men cannot crave for anything that gives them
importance in their own eyes. To themselves
they have no importance. All importance must
be created from without. They live in the esteem
of their fellow-creatures. They are helpless
and useless without it. The sense of uselessness
is their secret grief. They rely wholly
upon artificial status, artificial stimulant. That
is why, in the first dawning of interest in a man,
they are so strongly influenced by the esteem
in which he is held by other women.
V
In this reliance upon outside stimulus is, I
think, to be found one of the secrets of feminine
[122]
WOMEN IN LOVE
mental processes. I have already said that they
must have excitement. Men do not require
excitement to anything like so great an extent.
Men can generate excitement for themselves.
They do not need sensation or self-torture to
the degree in which it is essential to women.
If they require it they have readier means than
women of obtaining it. They are capable of
being interested in all sorts of things—at the
lowest in the technique of their work; at the
highest in aesthetic or business ambition. With
women ambition is a rarer attribute. It does
not go very frequently beyond the small range
of social status or successful marriage. The
excitement they need is of a different character.
Women must have emotional excitement. It is
essential to them. Denial produces physical
effects too terrible to be simply imaginary.
The nymphomaniac is only an extreme and
specialized case of this general and insatiable
craving. They are, as Stendhal says, always
and everywhere avid of emotion, even though it
be nothing more than "les plaisirs de I'enterrement
en Ecosse"—a most ironic and poniardlike
example. They seek this excitement, the
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WOMEN
supreme need of their natures, at all times, even
in time of war, as we may gather, apart from
personal experience, from a reading of Mr.
Arnold Bennett's cruel and panoramic expose
The Pretty Lady, with its remorseless analysis
of the war activities of women of leisure.
They seek it in sensation of every kind—from
the Sunday newspapers to the various selfinflicted
tortures of hysteria; but in general sex
supplies the greater part of feminine excitement.
Women are always trying to import into
their too-restricted imaginings some of that excitement
of which they can get so little in celibate
or monogamous life. It is only in times
of acute stress that there is enough excitement in
their own lives completely to absorb tliis craving.
That is why women—especially women
with a tendency to hysteria—thrive on crises.
Possibly the explanation of all this lies in physical
causes. Women cannot generate real emotion.
They are perhaps always, and inevitably,
receptive rather than creative. They cannot beget
life. The seed of thought, of feeling, as of
life, must always by nature come from without^
As in their highest
—
or at least in their most
[124]
WOMEN IN LOVE
useful—function they must be fertilized by the
male sperm, so in emotion they must be impregnated
from without or else remain sterile.
vi
If the suggestion I have made above be accurate,
as I believe, it has considerable significance
in relation to the feminine attitude to love
and marriage. It is clear that it would explain
why, in spite of the appearance and the
common assumption that men are the pursuing
sex, the contrary is true. Marriage would be
seen as a necessity for women, because without
response from men, who not alone explain
women to women but actually create the mental
life and form the emotional life of women, they
would for ever be groping in aimlessness. I
suggest that the need of women for men is more
insistent than the need of men for women, because
without men the lives of women would be
wholly empty. They have within themselves
no creative impulse; but must always receive
this impulse from something outside themselves.
This necessity would explain far more reasonably
than any other that has been advanced the
[125]
WOMEN
failure of women to rise to the real heights of
performance in the major arts. Lack of opportunity
is the cause assigned by women themselves
to this generally admitted inferiority.
Any study of the position of women in various
stages of history negatives this view. If one
finds the explanation in this sexual disability,
however, the problem is simplified. I have already
suggested that the creative gift works in
men strongly sexual in temperament—that it is
in fact sexual in origin. Also I have suggested
that frequently the creative effort in women is
by way of arising as a result of sexual frustration,
producing works imitative of male works
in character but erotic in tone, or producing different
forms of hysteria. Hysteria is in many
instances the product of sexual frustration (just
as in men hysteria is the result of sexual perversion
and many neurotic diseases the result of
sexual intemperance). I gave as one example
of hysteria the writing of novels by women; but
the form of art may vary though the cause may
remain constant. But all these points—so far
as they apply to women—go back to the same
cause. The preoccupation of women with sex
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WOMEN IN LOVE
would be due to the instinct that without men
they have no lives at all. It is that instinct
which would account for early experimenting
with love, with the technique of love-making,
with the impulse to jealousy, etc. It would account
for the extraordinary need of women for
emotional excitement, for self-torture, and so on.
It would account for the preference for physical
strength in men because that strength carries
with it the probability of fuller sexual life.
I have said that women are first drawn to a
man who has the admiration of other women.
This would not necessarily mean that they are
more herd-like than men; but that the muchvaunted
instinct for a true mate is not an infallible
instinct at all. It would go back to the instinct
of fashion. Just as a woman, seeing a
hat or a garment worn by another woman, is
quickly observant and even envious, so that she
desires just such another for herself, so, seeing
a man favoured by other women, she calculates
her own power to attract that man. Before
marriage there is a great deal of sexual rivalry
between women: it is to be observed in all
women, exemplified in that vicarious jealousy to
[127]
WOMEN
which I have referred in the second chapter of
this book. After marriage there is less rivalry;
but the married woman, besides frequently
weaning her husband from his male friends,
also evinces jealousy of all other women. She
needs him for herself. It is not simply that she
complains, as the wife did in Little Tich's song,
"I found him first"; it is that she dreads any
interruption of her own emotional stimulus.
When she no longer is jealous, she no longer
loves, which means that she loves another man.
)
Even complaisant wives are still capable of fits
of extreme jealousy; but their complaisance is
due to the fact that they still love and still believe
themselves to have some vital share of their
husbands' affection. They still, that is, believe
themselves to be of some quite especial value to
him, which no other women can impair.
vii
In the act of love itself women are more
sensual than men. Their shrinking, which is
due partly to shyness (not necessarily, as some
men imagine, to prudery) is voluptuous in
character. Their abandonment is greater. To
[128]
WOxMEN IN LOVE
them a kiss is not simply the meeting of lips;
it is the occasion for embrace, for mimic surrender.
The joy of surrender is glimpsed or
tasted many thousands of times in advance.
When she is in love every woman is a voluptuary.
She is not only physically yielding and
clinging, completely passive; she is also submissive
intellectually and emotionally. She
desires only to respond to the wish of the beloved,
to be moulded by him as putty is moulded.
To her loving is a triumph of surrender, an
abandonment of self. It is momentary Nirvana.
Moaning, she receives caress with the same
passive indulgence that a baby shows in receiving
nourishment. She is at peace, half-swooning,
absorbed in sensation. Not her part to
think still, to retain self-consciousness, to symbolize
the instant. That is for men. It is for
men to think, to regret, to fear, with a comical
mixture of startling associations and questionings.
It is the case that many men, if they are
inexperienced in love, are astounded at the
abandonment of the beloved. It is a revelation
to them. They are ashamed of having such
power. They are excited and exultant, but they
[129]
WOMEN
are ashamed and afraid. The woman is neither
ashamed nor afraid.
viii
It is the woman, nevertheless, who requires
repeated assurances of love. She requires constant
renewal of the original sensation of being
captured. She is also unbelieving in love that
is not demonstrative.*' A lover whose sole wish
is unobtrusively to give his mistress pleasure
will find that she is indeed capricious; but he
will never guess the reason unless he be educated.
From the moment of avowal, the woman
desires to continue (though at heart she knows
that to be impossible) her dual role of queen
and slave. The desire to be queen is the wish
to offer sacrifice to her legendary self; the desire
to be slave to the wish of all that is sincere
in her sensual self. She wishes all her life to
be queen and slave, to consolidate her legend
and canonize her legendary self, and to feed
inexhaustibly her greed for self-immolation.
Only in the eyes of her lover, and in his arms,
can she feel that she has true individuality.
Otherwise she is aware of her nothingness. She
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WOMEN IN LOVE
is the human ovum, which can only have significant
life when so fertilized. Her passion
takes different forms; but in the main it arises
from her need for a real personality. Only in
another, in a man, can she find it. Just as all
her life she has only lived when other people
have thought of her, have been interested in
her (so that she is the embodiment of what I
should like to call, without censure, the characteristic
of vanity), so in love it is essential
that she shall be what her lover makes of her
For him she lives. For her his kisses are re
assurances. For her his love is—not, as in the
reciprocal relation, a source of shamed glad
ness, buried in self-restraints and other occu
pations—the source of her being. Only in love
can a woman be said to live. His love is nour
ishment; her love is a voluptuous abandonment
a final justification of her existence. That is
the difference between masculine and feminine
love. It is the explanation of the familiar
phrase about woman's whole existence. Defrauded
by some dreadful accident of a love
upon which he has set his heart, a man continues
soberly to perform his task in life. He goes
[131]
WOMEN
from day to day, wearily, until passion cools,
and his knowledge of things inexpressible deepens
and grows more clear. He is full of grief;
but his soul remains unscathed. Though the
endurances of the hours be indescribably those
of agony unappeasable, yet he retains his hold
upon other realities and is reinforced by his own
steadfastness. He is like the poet who says:
"When I meet the morning beam
Or lay me down at night to dream,
I hear my bones within me say,
'Another night, another day.'
Therefore they shall do my will
Today while I am master still."
If a woman be defrauded of the love she covets
it is as though she were at sea, weeping and
helpless, in contrary winds. She becomes reckless,
the pliant and unresisting victim of a thousand
torments and accidents. She is without
sense of direction, without will to steer. Wild
blame and self-blame are all her thought. She
may threaten herself savagely with moral disaster,
vehemently attributing the responsibility
to the beloved. His letters, mementoes of hours
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WOMEN IN LOVE
in his company, poignant memories, are brought
out for the sake of the pain with which they
can fill her heart. The tortures which in love
and in possession of the beloved she wantonly
inflicts upon herself, in sheer physical reaction
from impulse to impulse, are as nothing in comparison
with the hysterical tortures self-inflicted
by a woman denied the fruition of her hopes.
She may long cling despairingly to the illusion
that all is not lost; her morbid fancy may continue
to picture secret joys which will never be
hers. Finally, among all these distresses, anything
may happen to her. She is no longer
controlled by habit or obedience to the laws of
society. Then indeed, as Byron said:
"There is a tide in the affairs of women,
Which, taken at the flood, leads—God knows
where!"
[133]

V THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

V THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
As society has grown more sophisticated life
has grown very much more complex, and the
never-ending development and patterning has
made new variations in all our affairs. The rise
of middle-class wealth has thrown upon the
world large numbers of women who lack the
sublime instinct of aristocracy and the drudgeimpulse
of the poor. They have in their bosoms
a restlessness that is produced by an instinctive
sense of incongruity. Women of the aristocracy,
accustomed to be obeyed, to be kept as ornaments,
and to take their position for granted,
have little shame in their acceptance of a superficial
form of existence. They are surrounded
in youth by those living the life they expect to
lead, and they are perfectly ready to carry on
the tradition of this luxuriousness and expensive
dependence. With an education of accomplishments
they securely enter the marriage-market,
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WOMEN
relying upon sex and breeding to secure a house
and servants and an income almost large enough
to meet their wants. Poor people similarly feel
that they have a place in the material world;
although one hears talk among the well-to-do
about an industrial ferment which can hardly
be confined to male workers. In fact one knows
from the increasing disinclination of workinggirls
to enter domestic service that the love of
independence is growing among them; and so
it may perhaps be inferred that the restlessness
goes down to almost the poorest people in the
land. But the really notable feature in the life
of modem women is the rise of a class which
has the instinct to work without the economic
need to work. It is this fact which has brought
about the general feminine unrest of recent
years. This fact, at least, coupled widi the
postponement of marriage by men who have
greater difficulty than ever before in making
an income sufficient to support a family in the
kind of life to which they are accustomed.
These girls of the middle-classes have perhaps
two or three generations of working or professional
men behind them. They are better edu-
[138]
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
cated, on the whole, than the aristocratic classes.
They are still not well educated; but they have
that little knowledge which is a dangerous thing.
They have read the novels of Mr. Wells, they
have read some Nietzsche, they have read an
elementary history of England and done some
sums, and they have talked among themselves
a great deal. The immediate result of this has
been, in these classes, a curious blustering denial
of the slavish instinct, a violent asservation that
"Jill's as good as her master." I was once told,
for example, by a really educated woman, how
painful it was to hear girls at the Oxford colleges
for women "showing off" (intellectually) before
the young undergraduates. "They were so ignorant,"
she said; "and the men knew ten times
as much as they did; and it made me ashamed
to hear them giving such exhibitions of their
own ignorance." This "showing off" is of
course simply the ill-breeding of the parvenue.
It is a phase; but it is a notable phase. It indicates
the character of the unrest that has come
upon women of the middle-classes, who can by
no means bear to be neglected. It is a variation
of the dominant impulse of the sex—to live
[139]
WOMEN
in the eyes of others. If these girls had been
sure that they were learned, and if they had
had a conviction of their own intrinsic value,
they would have had no need for display. All
immodesty arises from a sense of inability to
cope with a situation by sheer virtue. The
decay of religious acceptance, which in the past
(and still in the present among women of some
types) satisfied the morbid humility of women
of low vitality, has led to a rise in the respect
given to intellectual attainments. It has also
served, among girls of the middle-class, to modify
the drapery of the legendary woman. She
now has the shrewd eyes of the school-mistress,
and less frequently the far-seeing wistfulness
of the priestess of some holy and immaculate
faith. The aggressiveness of the modern girl is
bluff, like her self-assurance. She still cries;
she still yields to suasion; she still requires male
support and applause. Her nature remains, but
she has slightly altered her methods and her
secondary aims. The verb "to please," with
middle-class girls, has a little lost its attractiveness,
"Please him?" they say. "Pooh! Why
should I?" That is quite a reasonable position
[140]
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
to take up, if one can hold to it. Many of her
sisters no longer please men. They go to the
opposite extreme. Not pleasure, but displeasure,
do they give, to their agony. Nevertheless,
deserting her former desire to please, the modem
girl, at the worst, must have an alternative.
She must still use every effort to impress the
male. She has not changed. She is still the
same. The only alteration lies in the use of
fresh armaments and the development of a new
offensive.
ii
Accompanying the new stunt, if one were very
unsophisticated, one would expect to find a
ready abandonment of many of the privileges
hitherto accorded to women in virtue of their
dependent position. One would expect to find
equality, so to speak, working both ways. It
does not, and I am afraid it never can, so work.
In this connection I am not going to speak of
the chivalry of gentlemen, or of the attractiveness
of the home, or of the symbolism of the
cradle. I am going, I hope, to say something
more to the point. It is perfectly true that the
[141]
WOMEN
behaviour of women is nowadays at times altogether
intolerable; that they are ungracious in
their manner of accepting courtesy from any
person who respects their physical inferiority.
This is all a part of their unconvinced "uppishness,"
and may pass, corroded by criticism.
The greatest detractors of women in this connection
are themselves women, which—if it be not
imitative detraction, borrowed from the adjacent
and impressible male—is a preparation for discontinuance.
The point that has struck me is
that one cannot, as a man, treat a woman as an
intellectual equal. One cannot press one's advantage.
She is quick, ruthless, unscrupulous
in assertion and perversion of fact; all of
which practices may quite as well be charged
to the account of the volatile man. We are
probably all acquainted with men who can lead
us an intellectual dance into absurdity or confusion.
That is not the trouble. The thing is
that one can and does pin that man and scathingly
reveal to him the fact that he is an intellectual
will-o'-the-wisp. One can press him
relentlessly. One can be rude to him. With
a woman all this is impossible; because her
[142]
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
whole object in arguing at all is to impress one,
her whole triumph is to have succeeded in her
aim. It is not that she is a bad loser—I make
no such accusation, for she is often both magnificent
and pathetic; but that she cannot support
the strain of prolonged argument, and that, realizing
the source of her anxiety in deploying her
forces, one is intellectually hampered, even to
paralysis. One feels a point at which her
knowledge gives out, and her fear arises. She
breaks off action, as the naval communiques say;
or she takes refuge in pretence; or she is reduced
to incoherence and finally to a sort of
physical collapse, against which she struggles in
vain. From that first moment of obvious strain
one is courteous, because there is little pleasure
to be obtained from out-manoeuvring an inferior
who admits defeat. It is like a professional
chess-player sparing a tyro the humiliation of a
short game. It is a discomfort. There is always,
without any exception known to me, that
constraint in intellectual relations with a woman.
It is not due necessarily to male egotism or selfconsciousness.
It is due to the fact that a
woman is incapable of thinking originally (ere-
[143]
WOMEN
atively); that she is incapable of thinking or
arguing disinterestedly, from pure love of truth
;
that she is always half-consciously and guiltily
bluffing herself and trying to interest her auditor
in—not her argument, but her own ego. In
others she has her life, intellectually as emotionally.
She is not sufficient to herself. Defeat
is for her not simply a question of intellectual
inferiority; it creates in her bosom a
state of wounded vanity from the knowledge that
she has not pleased or impressed as a woman.
iii
Women, being unoccupied and rather vainly
eager, have turned to politics. They have sought
to obtain violently a right which I regard as
unquestionable; and have encountered the stubborn
resistance of obstinate men. They have
been "splendid," and the vote has been accorded
them. They now have something approaching
political equality with men. They have also demanded
education. They do not want education
for its own sake, for the love of knowledge: they
want it because its glitter has caught their eye.
"If only I had education," they say, '^shouldn't
[144]
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
I be fine!" As though education were a costume
in which they will be decked to admiration!
But they remain, after years of higher education,
abominably ill-educated ; and they will never be
well-educated until they desire education for
its own sake and for the sake of knowledge.
What happens is that at the period from seventeen
onwards, when men are working with determination
to obtain knowledge and its corollary,
understanding (since they know that upon
their own eiforts depends the whole of their
personal future), women generally are not
working at anything except their prime and
peculiar craft. At this their success is not so
much a question of unwilling application as of
ready intuition and delightful experiment. It
comes easy. The sense that marriage awaits
them, and that it is the goal of their lives, is
still constant; and this, which is a perfectly
warrantable expectation and, as I have said, an
unbreakable law of their nature, robs them of
incentive to work at a task for which they have
no such natural impulse. Their prettiness at
that period, and the inclination of their sex,
coupled with their power to attract men as at
[145]
WOMEN
no other time in their lives, causes them to play
the customary pranks of the sex game. It is all
splendid fun; but it is not conducive to hard
work, the development of mind, or the success
of those who set the education of women as the
highest aim known to them. Women at this
time are lazy, pleasure-loving, chocolate-eating,
intellectually unambitious creatures; and, while
this is tragic to the earnest feminist, there is
nothing to be done while both men and women
remain human beings who obey the dominant
impulse. You cannot make sow's ears out of
silk purses or scholars out of eager, lively girls.
There are in life neither rewards nor punishments,
one is told; but only consequences and,
one might add, causes. And in this case the
cause has been suggested.
iv
All the same, the war has produced great
activity among women. The consciousness of
splendour—which is the feeling that they are
really doing something in their own eyes and
in the eyes of men; the tremendous excitements
inseparable from war—which have really given
[146]
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
them an emotional thrill in every class and in
almost every relation;—these have provoked
such a joy as women have never known. As
one member of the sex wrote recently to The
Daily Mail, "among all my women friends I
have not come across one pacifist woman. I
do not say there are no such women in existence,
but I am very sure that there are fewer
women in favour of an indecisive peace than
there are men." This sums up the position in
a very small number of well-chosen words. It
represents the attitude of women simply and
without theory. It states a fact. Women are
occupied and delighted and ready to continue
the war because they are conscious of being
able at last to exert usefulness. They are united
as a sex. How long it will be before war palls
upon them one cannot say. Until the women
among its citizens acquiesce, no nation in Europe
can be brought to its knees. The women
are running this country with very fair efficiency,
considering the fact that they do not yet exercise
the vote or lead our armies or take part in meetings
of the War Cabinet. As Ruskin once said,
women do not make wars, but they are alwavs
[147]
WOMEISr
responsible for their continuance. That is a
truth, or at least a true saying. The war continues
because the women of all the nations are
living bathed in its reality. Not the bloody agony
of the fighting; not the horror of shell-fire
and never-ending cannonade. Not for them the
sight of friends and comrades destroyed in an
instant and blown to charred fragments. Nor
the torment of daily subjection to unnameable
squalors and disgusting spectacles and a nervous
strain such as no men have ever yet endured in
the world. Soldiers are not lovers of war.
They experience its ugliness, its cumulative cruelty;
and they know war to be foulness inconceivable.
They fight because most of them believe
that only by so fighting can they help it to
reach an end. For women the reality of war is
a different thing. It is a time for swelling
hearts at the physical and nervous braveries of
desperate men. It is a time for eager response
to every kind of stimulus, the sense that they are
at last in touch with life. It is a time for resolute
endurance of all the sufferings of others.
Women alone see the true splendour of war.
They alone are able to pierce the horrors which
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
they cannot imagine, and to see the shining core
of courage and sacrifice which they have never
once ceased to applaud. The braveries and decorations
of war-time stir them profoundly. It is
not that they bother about the remote or proximate
causes of the war, because, like most of
us, they depend for their facts upon the daily
newspapers. It is the fact of the war that exalts
and exhilarates them ; not the principles that
underly the fact. Upon the tide of excitement
they have risen to enthusiasm. In every street,
and in every town, one may see women in their
new uniforms, busy and happy and eager.
They are working with zest for the prosecution
of the war. They are keeping up the spirit
even of most of our elder statesmen, with an infectious
delight in all the magnificent performances
of our troops, and our sailors, and above
all our women. In drawing-rooms, in offices,
in factories and garages and camps they are
at last working with a common will, and talking
about the war, and showing the indomitable
spirit of Englishwomen. As the lady who
wrote to The Daily Mail said: "Among all my
women friends I have not come across one pac-
[149]
AVOMEN
ifist woman." Men sometimes have leanings
to pacifism; but they are unsupported by those
whose instinct for war is at present all-powerful.
Englishmen have been modest; and nobody with
heart and eye could say any word of the private
soldiers and ordinary sailors which would not
be an impertinence. These men have seen and
felt things which they are not yet able to bring
themselves to describe. They are reticent about
details, and they are candid about their detestation
of war in general. They are modest and
kind and thoughtful. They become uneasy under
the voluble praise of old ladies whose patriotism
takes them that way. They do not much
care, I gather, about the press talk of "lads"
and "boys," etc. But they are men. It has
been left to the other sex to be run by the newspapers
as a special and profitable stunt.
But the war will have an end one day, and
the glad rags of khaki and blue will be shed;
and there must be some disbandment of our armies
of women. Soldiers returning from field
and camp will look to find opportunities for
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
work and wage-earning. Special war-created
work will be discontinued. Factories will no
longer require girls to fill shells; offices will no
longer need as many women clerks; omnibuses
and tramcars and taxicabs may revert to prewar
conditions. If the men come back, even
decimated though the armies of all countries
will be after a war that has destroyed, one is
told, twenty-five millions of human lives, they
will come back with tlie expectation of employment.
However true it may be that after a war
in the past soldiers have begged their bread in
the streets, that cannot be assumed as a possible
sequel to a war such as this has been. There
will be too many of them. One soldier or
a hundred soldiers begging bread may cause
little disturbahce; but a million soldiers without
bread would produce a revolution. For
many months now our celebrated Ministry of
Reconstruction has had schemes for restoration
of men to civil employment. There will no
doubt be some artificial inflation of post-war
manufactures in order to meet the urgent crisis
of labour excess. We are told that with worldstocks
of raw materials exhausted there will be
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WOMEN
work for all. I cannot criticize such statements,
because I am not a seer or practical economist.
But I am sure that the return of our soldiers
will involve unemployment for many thousands
of women. The work they have been
doing will cease; their unique opportunity for
expansion and self-glorification will be gone.
They will not be ministering angels or indefatigable
war workers. They will be back again in
competition with men. With the quite definitely
righteous determination not to be blacklegs,
they will seek to maintain equality of
wage, the principle of which has been recently
conceded. Whether they will form unions upon
a large scale I cannot say; but only in union
can they hope to do battle. What will happen
to them?
Marriage, of course, is their staple trade;
and marriage is an essential part, as I see it,
of the social fabric. Marriage, however, is not
going to be for all women. Even at the best,
there will be many women who will find their
legend and their practical activity insufficient
to save them from maidenhood.
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
"For the lads in khaki will take the nice girls,
And the lads in blew will want the nice girls tew."
And although every man's taste in women—if
one may judge by what one sees in public places
—varies and is altogether incalculable, marriage
will never, under monogamy, be possible
for all women. Work will have to be sought
by those who do not marry. But they will find
themselves in conflict with the very men whom
they now celebrate. Shorn of their splendour,
thrown back into a state of disillusion and a
dreadful restless desire for the emotional excitement
of today, with prices high and wages
as low as competition in the labour market will
make them, women will find themselves at grips
with another kind of reality than war. First
of all, it is probable that our young men will
be fastidious in the choice of wives. Already
the younger men, spoilt by emotional adulation,
are getting wary and critical, and the still
younger ones are sharply becoming aware of
the deficiencies of girls of their own class and
age. With so much to be done, and with so
much to occupy their attention, and the whole
world open for their activity and exploitation,
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WOMEN
men will require something more than sex from
the women they marry. They will be chary of
marrying their intellectual inferiors. Pretty
faces and attractive ways will be too cheap to be
valuable. So far from women demanding education
for the sake of liberty and vanity, the
case will be that men will demand from women
something more than women, by their nature,
can readily supply. Secondly, men fighting for
life and country are in a different mood from
men fighting for a livelihood. The ruthlessness
in battle which war has taught may be illustrated
in time of peace. No longer will men's hearts
be soft towards the little women across the sea
who have been so splendid. They will be hard
towards those who would snatch from them the
primary means of obtaining life itself. Then
will the word "splendid" stink in the nostrils of
women. The men will not listen to tales of
brave lads and heroes. They will not want
adulation, but bread and meat and clothing.
They will not tolerate the babble of inconsequent
old ladies who stream witli patriotism. They
will rather grimly and vengefully deal with
such irrelevances. They will want work. If
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
the women also want it there will be a difficulty
which will involve definite conflict.
No doubt there will ultimately be adaptation.
The general flow and interaction of life is persistent,
and a hundred years hence natives of
England will see only the main currents of this
time. But to us, who are submerged in these
whirling waters, life is a maelstrom. I suppose
women will drop their specious patriotism,
which is only a form of vanity; and will gradually—
because they do not readily persist in unpopular
opinions—accept the mental notions of
the returning men. There may be a strong reaction
in favour of the wish to please men.
That will be the case if men return truculent, for
one gives anything to a truculent person, through
some strange shrinking dread of the consequences
of refusal. This arrangement, however,
will not account for all women. There
are others. There are women v/ho will not,
who, by force of circumstances, cannot adapt
themselves. It is from these women, and from
conflict with these women, that the fierce sex
war will arise. That it will arise I have no
doubt.
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WOMEN
How long it will be prolonged, who can say?
That it will be a war of attrition I believe.
There must insensibly be modifications in all
these affairs, and we shall live perhaps to see a
compromise attained. One thing is clear, according
to my experience. If there is a genuine
sex-war, based upon the struggle for life, men
will be all upon one side. The women will no
longer be able to have it both ways, as at present.
They may demand without giving, as they
do now, without realizing how little return they
can make for the gifts they receive; but they
will not as a sex be able to carry that demand to
its conclusion without giving. They also will
have to contribute, and at present the only thing
they have to contribute is their sex. Every liberty
they gain will carry with it a corresponding
duty. They may yet learn the bitter truth that
without men they are sterile, and the relation of
the sexes may then be so rectified that gradually
a fair partnership is achieved. At present,
while many of them can execute cheerfully and
effectively, the majority of women cannot initiate.
They have not in themselves, as individuals,
that self-respect that enables men to en-
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
dure. The endurance of women, noble though
it so often has been, must have as its object the
subjection or the service of man. They are absolutely
dependent for moral support upon the
other sex. Any association with women will
prove this. I am told by one who has had
twenty years of association with women in business
that on the whole they are admirable
workers, but never capable of continuous selfreliance.
Sooner or later they require help and
will appeal for it, abandoning all pretences.
They will go to pieces suddenly, collapsing without
appreciable cause. They cannot take a
blow. In honesty and loyalty they are not, my
friend thinks, in business inferior to men. In
capacity they are inferior, but not necessarily so
under good leadership. What is lacking is
physical stability. In every emergency their
reaction is emotional. If one is displeased
with them they entirely lose morale. Upon the
consideration in which they are held rests the
whole of their happiness in work. Remove that,
and they are dishevelled children, weak and
vicious and despondent. At all times and in all
circumstances they are (to their misfortune in
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WOMEN
times of distress, but to their incredible fortune
in all that consideration which makes for feminine
happiness) predominantly sexual. They
remain women. Nothing on earth, not even
press stunts or the worship of the legendary
woman who has taken to khaki and gaiters, can
change them. At heart tliey will remain for
ever a sex without power to create. They may
for a time be arrogant and domineering; but I
do not think they will find men to accept this attitude
who are not themselves hermaphrodites.
If they fight for livelihood in competition with
men they will find men tough and unchivalrous.
They will find that they can no longer have it
both ways, no longer make the best of the material
world and tlie world of sex. They cannot,
as it were, be both masters and mistresses.
That will be the issue of the sex war. Triumph
for women would end in sterility in all tlie arts
and enterprises of the modem world. Triumph
for men might produce the education of women
and the improvement of the world; but for a
couple of generations the world would be almost
unbearable for the most typical women, bereft
of the approval from which they draw their
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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
emotional life. Compromise, which is the probable
ending, will almost certainly result in an
undeliberate return to the state of things existing
before the war. Nature will be too strong
for women; and they will strive to be what they
believe the men to wish. They will have learnt,
though by means of ungrasped intuitions of
truth, that so long as they cannot create they cannot
attain to power except by and through men.
And I have suggested that the lack of the power
to create is due to a physical cause. It does not
seem to me possible to overcome that physical
cause. All efforts to escape from tlie consequences
of it are the workings of hysteria, and
the duality which produces hysteria is the conflict
of mind and body, the frustration of sexual
impulse, by will or otherwise, and the consequent
effort of the sexual impulse to exert itself
against inhibition.
July-August 1918
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