VIII

This raises the question of public life for women. There is certainly room for creative womanhood in the public life of the State. The modern State is a highly organised system of government resting upon other systems, such as those of finance, law, and industry; but these complicated organisations ramify downwards until they touch the lives of all the individuals who compose the nation. The point at which they do so is a fitting point for the public activities of women. Women have already begun to mediate between the system of law and the individuals upon whom punishment by imprisonment is imposed; they have called attention to the impossibility of reforming offenders in a prison which ignores individuality and the psychology of the individual. It is true that such mediation is at present usually subject to the veto of the controlling system, and is therefore limited; a disability which is likely to hamper women until the value of women’s work is recognised as equal to that of men. But the obscure dissatisfactions of our time, caused by the discrepancy between institutional and human values are, on the one hand, compelling women to penetrate into public life, and, on the other hand, threatening the stability of all institutions. If women are true to themselves their full co-operation with men is inevitable.

This means that women must carry their womanhood with them into all occupations, otherwise the advantage of their entry into public affairs will be entirely lost. Besides, a woman who tries to do a man’s work in a man’s way pays too high a price for the effort. A man can be formal and abstract without losing his human qualities or ceasing to be creative, since his energies are distributed in that way, but a woman cannot. She must expend more energy than he does to achieve the same formal outlook; she must abandon the creative love for the individual which is essential for womanhood; and, because she has killed herself spiritually, a formal woman is twice as formal as any man, and her work is necessarily barren. Most women are instinctively aware of this danger and protect themselves from the hardening of traditional routine by simple indifference to their work and an escape into marriage as soon as possible. But this is merely an evasion of the problem which women must solve in the next generation or two, the problem of leavening the organised systems of society with human values so that mechanical routine is reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile, women are obviously in their proper place in any occupation which deals directly with human beings.