XXIV. THE HELPLESSNESS OF WOMEN.

It is the fashion in these days to talk very grandly and much about the equal rights of women with men, their equal capacity for nearly all occupations, offices and honors, and above all their right to regulate and control their own affairs, whether political, financial, social or domestic. I, as a woman, stand up stoutly for my own sex; I do most firmly believe them to be in all but brute strength the equal of man, and in spiritual and moral strength very frequently his superior. I admire women, I love women, I long and work for the advancement of women; but, as a woman not without powers of observation and a wide experience of the world, I cannot but see a certain side of the truth not often brought forward by women, and not at all understood by men, and this is the inherent helplessness of woman in a struggle with man.

Possibly this helplessness is largely due to hereditary prejudice on the part of man, hereditary self-distrust on the part of woman, but it is also largely due to the inherent natures of the two sexes. Every virile man has a vein of brutality in his composition, more or less deftly buried beneath the surface of his civilization, and every woman is at heart timid of encountering this brutality—that is to say, every womanly woman is.

Almost any man brought into business relations with a woman not his employee meets her propositions or arguments with either an air of good-natured tolerance, or disquieted contempt, or skeptical scrutiny, or of magnanimous acceptance, perhaps harder to bear than any other of the demonstrations of his superiority.

Let a woman try to argue a political point, or point of statecraft, or political economy with a man, and she usually receives some such answer as the famous insult offered by Gladstone, I think, to some titled woman who earnestly implored him to advocate some measure. Listening with an amused smile to all she had to say, he simply ejaculated at the end, “Oh, you darling!” and passed on, as carelessly good-humored as if he had been listening to the prattle of a pretty child. Or, if the man is not as benevolent as Gladstone, he may reply in the spirit of Napoleon, who assured Mme. de Staël that the most valuable woman in his empire was the one who has borne most sons for France; or again, after the manner of Henry VIII. of England, who bade the nuns who tried to argue for their right to live their own lives in their own way: “Go spin, you jades; go spin!”

To epitomize the three utterances, women in general are to men in general either “darlings,” or mothers of children, or household and domestic machines. Within these limits woman receives admiration, protection and a certain amount of appreciation from every grade of men, but let her step outside these limits, let her try to meet man upon his own intellectual or authoritative platform, and her disadvantage is at once made apparent, and her helplessness to overcome it stares her in the face.

No man ever meets her and converses upon momentous subjects precisely as he does with another man, and until this is the case there are no true equal rights for the woman. The woman seeks an interview with her business man or lawyer; she wishes certain things done and done at once; the business man or the lawyer assures her with an air of indulgent patience that what she suggests cannot be done, at least not in her way and at her time; that to sell, or to buy, or to invest, or to do whatever it is she wishes to do is not possible, or if possible not desirable, and she had better leave it all in his hands and rest secure that he will do what is for the best. Now just here comes in the helplessness of which I speak. The woman feels confident that the thing she wishes could be done, and that it would be well that it should be done, but she lacks the habit of command, the self-confidence, the weight of will, that would enable her to hold her own without agitation or struggle.

A woman can no more hold her own against the well-trained masculine mind in matters of business, the law or politics, than she can against the well-trained masculine muscle in a pugilistic encounter, and this is what I mean by the inherent helplessness of woman. She may be better informed than the man, she may have a deep-rooted conviction that she is right, but she does not dare to take the thing into her own hands and manage it in a manner contrary to that advised by the man, who claims to know that she is wrong.

Another point of a woman’s inherent helplessness is her sensitiveness. The man’s sneer, or his half-veiled contempt for her opinion, or his exaggerated politeness and deference, all tell upon her courage and beat it down as if with blows of a fist or the stinging cuts of a whip. She feels wounded, hurt, ashamed even, while remaining sure that she is in the right. She withdraws from the contest, apparently defeated; but, like Galileo, secretly murmuring, “But nevertheless it does move.”

In fact, Galileo is a conspicuous illustration of my theory. He had quicker perceptions and a keener insight, more courageous theories and more faith in his own intuitions than the whole college of cardinals with the pontiff included; but when he propounded these theories he found himself opposed to the solid phalanx of the ages in the form of a governing class, who intended to remain governors. He was defeated by frowns and sneers and smiles and jeers, behind which lay the power of life and death. Beaten down and overwhelmed, he signed the recantation of his profession of truth, made an humble apology for having been brighter than his masters, and went away muttering the recantation which we have quoted. I wonder how many women have walked out of the office, the study, the back parlor, the vestry, when they have held an interview with some male arbiters of their destinies, their heads upright, their cheeks glowing, their eyes bright with anger and unshed tears, their hearts hot with defeat and humiliation, muttering to themselves in one form or another, “But for all that it does move!”

Another element is woman’s helplessness in her relations with man in her love of being loved, and this desire in its various developments is perhaps the root of a woman’s nature. Every woman has it, even the coarsest termagant, the hardest and boldest wrangler for her rights—every one of them in the core of her heart longs to be loved by somebody, to be the first object in somebody’s life, to have some one to whom she may turn and be sure of welcome and of sympathy. It is one of the very best and most precious factors of womanhood, but, alas! it is one of its most terrible dangers.

A woman with no one to love her is the most miserable of creatures. She loses half her value in her own eyes. She is unable to do justice to the best of her nature. She either hardens and becomes cold, defiant, bitter and narrow, or she withers and languishes like spring flowers in an east wind. Perhaps she does not know her own need. Perhaps she scoffs at love and declares herself strong enough to live without it, and says, as did a famous literary woman:

“I am of the oak oaky, and do not understand women who are of the vine viney, and must have something to cling to.”

And yet this very woman clung to her kindred, and her adopted child with a really noble devotion. Sometimes a loveless woman cherishes a dog, a bird, a cat, and bestows upon the little brute a wealth of love enough to enrich a monarch; sometimes she buys the love of a companion or of a servant; sometimes she becomes a philanthropist and distributes her unused affection over whole armies of orphans and phalanxes of widows; sometimes if she is of a certain temperament she becomes “a religious” and joins a sisterhood, devoting their lives to good works and their hearts to God. In that case she tells herself that she needs no earthly outlet for her affections; that her entire nature is turned into the channel of adoring love for the Divine Being, and she probably feels that she thus secures a higher place in his affections than her more mundane sisters can hope to hold.

It is a heroic choice, a noble life, but who can doubt that it must hold moments of chill disappointment, of withering insufficiency, of terrible despair? In this world human creatures live in bodies. They are surrounded by earthly needs and cares and sympathies, and to deny or to starve all these is to defeat the very purpose of our being. A mortal woman needs mortal love, and she will seek it in one form or another, if she is at liberty, as surely as a housing pigeon seeks her dovecote or a perishing deer seeks the water.

I do not say that this all-powerful thirst applies always or entirely to the love of man and woman naturally terminating in marriage. A woman cares for the love of her own sex, for the love of her employees, for the love of her friends, her circle, her society, be it a large or a small body. Men say women have a passion for admiration, an appetite for flattery, a thirst for applause. True, true enough! But all these cravings are but forms of the great craving for love which lives at the root of all. One who loves does admire, does flatter, does applaud. These are some of the almost invariable signs and signals of love, and the instinct of the woman leads her to seek these signs and signals, although her reason whispers that they are false lights, mere igni fatui poorly counterfeiting the real sun and moon of her existence, and very likely to lead her into a dark and dismal bog, whence she issues mired and torn and weary.

It is not well to accept these shams, even though we bitterly tell ourselves that since we cannot have the real thing we will take what at least resembles it. If a person cannot have diamonds, she had better not try to persuade herself or the world that Rhinestones are just as good, although she may choose to wear them; but, just as there are women who will glitter, though it be in Rhinestones, so there are women, and probably the majority of the sex, who will have that ornament more precious than diamonds—that crown of love which proclaims its wearer a queen indeed, and if it be but a pinchbeck and tinsel crown she will wear it all the same, although her own aching heart cry incessantly:

“It is no crown. I am no queen. My kingdom has gone from me, and I am desolate.”

Well, to come back rather tardily to our mutton—to the discussion of woman’s helplessness in her relations with the other sex.

She hates to do or say anything to forfeit her position in any man’s estimation. Of course she does not expect or wish her broker, her lawyer, her pastor, or her political antagonist, or her intellectual opponent to be “in love” with her, in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, but she does want, probably unconsciously to herself, that he should feel attracted to her; that he should like, admire, speak kindly, perhaps tenderly, of her to other persons; that he should be sorry to see her go and glad to have her come again. All this natural and instinctive desire underlies her whole conversation and conduct, weakens the strength of her opposition to what her intuitions warn her is false or dangerous, softens her phraseology and not very infrequently prompts her to say in the end:

“Very well, you know best. I will do what you say,” when the indignant common sense at the back of her mind is clamoring:

“That’s nonsense! It isn’t at all as you say! I shall lose my money, or my case, or my success, if I do thus and so!”

Every woman knows that, though she be wise as Minerva, pure as Diana, regal as Juno, or even beautiful as Venus, if she wearies a man, if she claims the time and attention he wants to bestow upon his business, his pleasure, or more especially upon himself, he ceases to wish for her presence—in fact, he grows tired of her—and in the end feels her to be a bore, and avoids her. I suppose most women would rather die than to know they were thus regarded by any number, perhaps any one, of the men of their acquaintance, and if they feel themselves in proximity to any such position they will hastily sacrifice any theory, any scheme or any advantage, and withdraw from the position their reason bids them hold with tenacity.

And here, of course, is the point I have intended to make. The woman’s need of love, of liking or of approval from man is a terrible element of weakness in her nature. She is her own enemy. She is made helpless by her own best and sweetest characteristic. The motto of her career is, after all, no more than this, although the motto must be expanded to its very widest and most general limits:

“All for love, and the world well lost!”