V

In this weakness of women’s conscious life we have the key to men’s domination over them. It is the domination of the more articulate over the less articulate consciousness. Man is the intellectual organiser of life. He arranges life in patterns, or, as has been already suggested, translates it into conscious forms, and he is therefore more interested in the nature of his patterns than in the material out of which he composes them. He begins, where woman ends, with the individual human being and individual experiences; his aim is to lift these into a world of enduring and proved forms. The Platonic idea, for example, is a purely masculine conception. It is possible that man’s world of ultimate abstractions is another aspect of the world from which woman works towards the individual, and that his consciously constructed philosophy, if it were perfected, would coincide with the content of her intuitive wisdom. Thus a circle would be completed in which woman seeks to express the infinite in terms of the individual life, while man seeks to express the individual in terms of the infinite. The difference between them remains, however, not merely a difference in aim but a difference in equipment. Woman is the gateway through which the wisdom of the unconscious comes to be translated by man into conscious form. Her wisdom, derived from unfathomable sources, must be expended upon life incarnate and narrowed into the practical details of everyday circumstance. Her intelligence is fettered, as it were, to actual life, and is best stimulated by concrete situations. Man, on the other hand, moves away from human life: his intelligence ranges freely in a world of speculation and can create perfectly abstract universes of knowledge. His work consequently takes visible shape beneath his hand: it can be tested; it can be destroyed and shaped again; it can achieve completion. The work of woman has none of these attributes: she has no objective proof of success; in the last resort she must depend upon her subjective valuations. Thus the more organised and objective certainties of men impose themselves easily upon women. Men can prove their theories even when they are wrong; women cannot prove their intuitions even when they are right. In his world, that of organised form, man dominates woman naturally.

But woman should dominate man in her own field, the creation of free and harmonious individuals; for the potential progress of humanity may be determined by man, but its actual progress is determined by woman. In a society which recognises the domination of men and denies that of women, the creative work of both is hampered. The danger for men lies in that very quality of detachment which gives their work its value. Left to themselves they become more and more detached, substituting for the fluctuations of life a stable and systematic perfection of theory which is rigidly imposed upon individual members of society. Religion becomes a creed, morality a code of law, government a party machine: even art, which is of all their activities the most accessible to the vitality of unconscious life, is intellectualised and engenders theories of æsthetics instead of works of art. Human beings become mere pegs on which to hang the theories, economic units, and man, the heir of all the ages, is in danger of being crushed under the weight of his own machines. The financial machine in our own day is an excellent example of masculine activity pushed to extremes: it has been successfully detached from human values so that it exists for the production of money and not for the production of goods and services to humanity. The mere individual has ceased to be of any importance, and even the inventions or discoveries of his intelligence are valued only in terms of money. It is a curious paradox that men who, as individuals, are surer of themselves than women, and who command their conscious energies more freely, should inevitably create systems to which the individual is subordinated. A system of this kind is not necessarily an evil, but when it makes no allowance for women’s values, for their sense of the significance of human life and the individual human being, it moves to its extreme logical conclusion and becomes inhuman.

This over-emphasis of masculine activities was conceivably necessary at a point in history when civilisation was in its infancy and the need for organisation was greater than the need for individual freedom. Perhaps at such a point the domination of men over women began. But the discrepancy between human and institutional values is now so great that even men feel it acutely; it has disquieted women for some time and is forcing them into the open. It looks as if during the next few generations the really creative New Woman will emerge, for conventional morality is no longer so powerful among women, and they are gradually deserting the blind alleys into which they rushed in their first efforts at self-assertion.

It does not follow that women by themselves can save humanity. Men must face their own problems, and women are naturally ill-equipped to create new forms of society. But it is the business of women to create the creators of social forms, and they cannot escape a certain responsibility for the present tension in our organised life. Absolute domination by either sex is no longer necessary; the modern world needs the creative work of both. Woman by herself loses a sense of proportion, just as man by himself loses touch with reality. Man’s intellectual conclusions must be checked by woman’s intuitive knowledge of the human spirit, and woman’s spontaneous wisdom must be helped by man’s intellectual vision. Both are creative although they depend upon each other: there is no room on either side for false pride or humility.