Three Guineas (24 page)

40 and 41. The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwyn, pp. 18, 26. In a fragment of a letter Mary Kingsley writes: ‘I am useful occasionally, but that is all — very useful a few months ago when on calling on a friend she asked me to go up to her bedroom and see her new hat — a suggestion that staggered me, I knowing her opinion of mine in such matters.’ ‘The letter,’ says Mr Gwyn, ‘did not complete this adventure of an unauthorised fiancé, but I am sure she got him off the roof and enjoyed the experience riotously.’

42. According to Antigone there are two kinds of law, the written and the unwritten, and Mrs Drummond maintains that it may sometimes be necessary to improve the written law by breaking it. But the many and varied activities of the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century were clearly not simply or even mainly directed towards breaking the laws. They were, on the contrary, endeavours of an experimental kind to discover what are the unwritten laws; that is the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires. That such laws exist and are observed by civilized people, is fairly generally allowed; but it is beginning to be agreed that they were not laid down by ‘God’, who is now very generally held to be a conception, of patriarchial origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times; nor by nature, who is now known to vary greatly in her commands and to be largely under control; but have to be discovered afresh by successive generations, largely by their own efforts of reason and imagination. Since, however, reason and imagination are to some extent the product of our bodies, and there are two kinds of body, male and female, and since these two bodies have been proved within the past few years to differ fundamentally, it is clear that the laws that they perceive and respect must be differently interpreted. Thus Professor Julian Huxley says: ‘. . . from the moment of fertilization onwards, man and woman differ in every cell of their body in regard to the number of their chromosomes — those bodies which, for all the world’s unfamiliarity, have been shown by the last decade’s work to be the bearers of heredity, the determiners of our characters and qualities.’ In spite of the fact, therefore, that ‘the superstructure of intellectual and practical life is potentially the same in both sexes,’ and that ‘The recent Board of Education Report of the Committee on the Differentiation of the Curriculum for Boys and Girls in Secondary Schools (London, 1923), has established that the intellectual differences between the sexes are very much slighter than popular belief allows,’ (Essays in Popular Science, by Julian Huxley, pp. 62-3), it is clear that the sexes now differ and will always differ. If it were possible not only for each sex to ascertain what laws hold good in its own case, and to respect each other’s laws; but also to share the results of those discoveries, it might be possible for each sex to develop fully and improve in quality without surrendering its special characteristics. The old conception that one sex must ‘dominate’ another would then become not only obsolete, but so odious that if it were necessary for practical purposes that a dominant power should decide certain matters, the repulsive task of coercion and dominion would be relegated to an inferior and secret society, much as the flogging and execution of criminals is now carried out by masked beings in profound obscurity. But this is to anticipate.

43. From The Times obituary notice of H. W. Greene, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, familiarly called ‘Grugger’, 6 February 1933.

44. ‘In 1747 the quarterly court (of the Middlesex Hospital) decided to set apart some of the beds for lying-in cases under rules which precluded any woman from acting as midwife. The exclusion of women has remained the traditional attitude. In 1861 Miss Garrett, afterwards Dr Garrett Anderson, obtained permission to attend classes . . . and was permitted to visit the wards with the resident officers, but the students protested and the medical officers gave way. The Board declined an offer from her to endow a scholarship for women students.’ (The Times, 17 May 1935.)

45. ‘There is, in the modern world, a great body of well-attested knowledge . . . but as soon as any strong passion intervenes to warp the expert’s judgment he becomes unreliable, whatever scientific equipment he may possess.’ (The Scientific Outlook, by Bertrand Russell, p. 17.)

46. One of the record-breakers, however, gave a reason for record- breaking which must compel respect: ‘Then, too, there was my belief that now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done — and occasionally what men have not done — thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women towards greater independence of thought and action . . . When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.’ (The Last Flight, by Amelia Earhart, pp. 21, 65.)

47. ‘In point of fact this process [childbirth] actually disables women only for a very small fraction in most of their lives — even a woman who has six children is only necessarily laid up for twelve months out of her whole lifetime.’ (Careers and Openings for Women, by Ray Strachey, pp. 47-8.) At present, however, she is necessarily occupied for much longer. The bold suggestion has been made that the occupation is not exclusively maternal, but could be shared by both parents to the common good.

48. The nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood are frequently defined both by Italian and German dictators. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of man and indeed the essence of manhood to fight. Hitler, for example, draws a distinction between ‘a nation of pacifists and a nation of men’. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of womanhood to heal the wounds of the fighter. Nevertheless a very strong movement is on foot towards emancipating man from the old ‘natural and eternal law’ that man is essentially a fighter; witness the growth of pacifism among the male sex today. Compare further Lord Knebworth’s statement ‘that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed,’ with the following statement by another young man of the same social caste a few months ago: ‘. . . it is not true to say that every boy at heart longs for war. It is only other people who teach it us by giving us swords and guns, soldiers and uniforms to play with.’ (Conquest of the Past, by Prince Hubertus Loewenstein, p. 215.) It is possible that the Fascist States by revealing to the younger generation at least the need for emancipation from the old conception of virility are doing for the male sex what the Crimean and the European wars did for their sisters. Professor Huxley, however, warns us that ‘any considerable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia, not of decades.’ On the other hand, as science also assures us that our life on earth is ‘an affair of millennia, not of decades’, some alteration in the hereditary constitution may be worth attempting.

49. Coleridge however expresses the views and aims of the outsiders with some accuracy in the following passage: ‘Man must be FREE or to what purpose was he made a Spirit of Reason, and not a Machine of Instinct? Man must OBEY; or wherefore has he a conscience? The powers, which create this difficulty, contain its solution likewise; for THEIR service is perfect freedom. And whatever law or system of law compels any other service, disennobles our nature, leagues itself with the animal against the godlike, kills in us the very principle of joyous well-doing, and fights against humanity . . . If therefore society is to be under a RIGHTFUL constitution of government, and one that can impose on rational Beings a true and moral obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such principles that every individual follows his own Reason, while he obeys the laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the State while he follows the dictates of his own Reason. This is expressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the problem of a perfect constitution of government in the following words: Trouver une forme d’Association — par laquelle chacun s’unisant à tous, n’obeisse pourtant qu’à lui même, et reste aussi libre qu’auparavant, i.e. To find a form of society according to which each one uniting with the whole shall yet obey himself only and remain as free as before.’ (The Friend, by S. T. Coleridge, vol. I, pp. 333, 334, 335, 1818 edition.) To which may be added a quotation from Walt Whitman:

‘Of Equality — as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself — as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.’

And finally the words of a half-forgotten novelist, George Sand, are worth considering:

‘Toutes les existences sont solidaires les unes des autres, et tout être humain qui présenterait la sienne isolément, sans la rattacher à celle de ses semblables, n’offrirait qu’une énigme à débrouiller . . . Cette individualité n’a par elle seule ni signification ni importance aucune. Elle ne prend un sens quelconque qu’en devenant une parcelle de la vie générale, en se fondant avec l’individualité de chacun de mes semblables, et c’est par là qu’elle devient de l’histoire.’ (Histoire de ma Vie, by George Sand, pp. 240-41.)