I

It is therefore legitimate to consider the composite picture of woman presented to us by the beliefs and opinions recorded by men. These opinions are curiously contradictory and at the same time generalised. In spite of the intense interest felt in individual women, generalisations about women are common, whereas generalisations about men are made warily, if at all. Men are fellow-creatures of many different kinds: conclusions are drawn about classes of men, such as kings, statesmen, or warriors, angry men, foolish men, or strangers; but nothing less than a universal attribute of humanity is attached to all men, such as that men are mortal, or subject to Fate, or inconstant. But it is seriously believed by Moslems that women have no souls. Thousands of Christians believe that women are not intelligent. Mystics believe that women are on a lower plane of spiritual development than men. Women have no sense of justice, no sense of honour: women cannot be trusted with political power: women are all the better for a good beating with a stick. These generalisations reflect man as the dominant sex, conscious of his superiority. But one comes at once upon contradictions. Every great man has been inspired by some woman. The hand that rocks the cradle indisputably rules the world. A woman was the first cause of original sin, but a woman was the Mother of God. What does this mean? Half of the picture is tinged with vague contempt, and the other half with vague reverence. Apparently the average man sees woman alternately as an inferior being and as an angel.

One must conclude that he is looking at her through a distorting medium. His conception of her as an inferior being is natural, in a man-made State, and were she really inferior it would stop there. His vague reverence for her remains to prevent this conclusion: it is certainly a compensation for something, a distorted recognition of some half-guessed-at power in women. It looks as if man knows that the inferiority of woman is a fiction, that his domination of her and his refusal to admit her to his own level are not justified. In the background there lurks a fear of reprisals. The distorting medium contains fear as one of its elements.

In men’s societies of a primitive or arrested type where the etiquette of conduct betrays its origin, one can see clearly man’s fear of woman. Woman possesses some mysterious power which must be averted by elaborate taboos. A woman can ruin a man’s chances of success in hunting or fishing by touching his gear. A woman’s shadow can blight a religious ceremony. Women are particularly to be feared when they are menstruating or in childbed. The most terrible ghost is that of a woman who dies in childbed. In more developed societies men burn old crones as witches in possession of the evil eye. And even to-day, especially in politics, men find it difficult to rid themselves of the uneasy suspicion that women are dangerous.

This fear proves the artificiality of man’s domination. One can be sceptical of any claim to superiority which throws such a shadow. Natural domination, that domination of skill and experience which is expected of a physician in a sick-room, or of a captain on his ship, establishes itself without arrogance and fear, and is exercised within its natural limits in particular directions. The physician does not interfere with navigation; the captain claims no divine right of authority over medical prescriptions. But the domination claimed by men over women has been a kind of magical quality, an absolute and divine right of authority, a mass domination, and, like all other mass dominations, rooted in fear.

But men’s fear of women proves only that women are not naturally inferior and subordinate. It does not prove that they are different from men. There remains the other side of the picture, however, with its sentimentalised ideal of women. A reverence for woman as a mother appears clearly: the mother is elevated to a place in heaven and worshipped as the Mother of God, or as the Mother of the Gods. Now motherhood is an undisputed function of women which they do not share with men. At the lowest estimate of their powers all women are potential mothers. Men are born of women, and of women only. It must be an important function, for men have tried to belittle it. The theology of the masculine world branded Eve as the first cause of evil, and explained the pains of child-birth as a just punishment from heaven. Still more significant, however, is the fact that Adam and Eve were created by a masculine God in a garden, and that the theologians could not leave them there. It was necessary to bring them from the plane of abstract art on to the plane of humanity. But only a woman can create human beings, and therefore it was the woman who had to bring them out of the mythical garden into reality—a confession of failure for the theologians, and they wreaked their revenge on Eve. Yet in spite of themselves they were driven to attribute to a woman the decisive action which transformed the figments of a male God into men and women.

But motherhood was smirched with original sin. Later on it was still further belittled. Women were regarded as mere receptacles, passive receptive bodies which created nothing. Men must have felt that motherhood was important, or they would not have tried to explain it away altogether. But the sentimental ideal of woman as the mother still persisted, especially among men, and could not be explained away: so, finally, motherhood was allowed by popular opinion to be a creative function, but of a purely physical nature, and it was further defined as the sole justifiable function of women. Mr. Rudyard Kipling expressed this very neatly when he said that blind Nature made man for several ends and woman for only one. In Oriental countries the still more logical conclusion is drawn that women justify their existence only by producing men-children. In a society committed to this point of view childless women are failures in life, and the unmarried woman is a ridiculous nuisance. If social remedies such as polygamy, suttee, infanticide, or euthanasia are not put into practice, the phrase “superfluous women” comes into existence, and the State is shaken by the problem of what to do with its superfluous women.