The following article originally appeared in the
New Witness, January 25th, 191. The American Chesterton Society put it in the most recent edition of their
Gilbert Magazine. Did I mention you should get a subscription? DO SO, THUS COMMANDETH ... well you should!
HERE!!!
The Prudery of the Feminists
In the ultimate and universal sense I
am astonished at the lack of astonishment.
Starting from scratch, so to speak, we are all in the position of the first
frog, whose pious and compact prayer was "Lord, how you made me
jump!" Matthew Arnold told us to see life steadily and see it whole. But
the flaw in his whole philosophy is that when we do see life whole we do not
see it steadily, in Arnold's sense, but as a staggering prodigy of creation.
There is a primeval light in which all stones are precious stones; a primeval
darkness against which all flowers are as vivid as fireworks. Nevertheless,
there is one kind of surprise that does surprise me, the more, perhaps, because
it is not true surprise but a supercilious fuss. There is a kind of man who not only claims that his stone is the
only pebble on the beach, but declares it must be the one and only
philosopher's stone, because he is the one and only philosopher. He
does not discover suddenly the sensational fact that grass is green. He
discovers it very slowly, and proves it still more slowly, bringing us one
blade of grass at a time. He is made
haughty instead of humble by hitting on the obvious. The flowers do not
make him open his eyes, but, rather, cover them with spectacles; and this is
even more true of the weeds and thorns. Even his bad news is banal. A young man
told me he had abandoned his Bible religion and vicarage environment at the
withering touch of the one line of Fitzgerald: "The flower that once has
blown, for ever dies." I vainly pointed out that the Bible or the English
burial service could have told him that man cometh up as a flower and is cut
down. If that were self-evidently final, there would never have been any Bibles
or any vicarages. I do not see how the flower can be any more dead, when a
mower can cut it down, merely because a botanist can cut it up. It should further be remembered that the
belief in the soul, right or wrong, arose and flourished among men who knew all
there is to know about cutting down, not unfrequently cutting each other down,
with considerable vivacity. The physical fact of death, in a hundred horrid
shapes, was more naked and less veiled in times of faith or superstition than
in times of science or skepticism. Often it was not merely those who had seen a
man die, but those who had seen him rot, who were most certain that he was
everlastingly alive.
There is another case somewhat
analogous to this discovery of the new disease of death. I am puzzled in
somewhat the same way when I hear, as we often hear just now, somebody saying that he was formerly
opposed to Female Suffrage but was converted to it by the courage and
patriotism shown by women in nursing and similar war work. Really, I do
not wish to be superior in my turn, when I can only express my wonder in a question.
But from what benighted dens can
these people have crawled, that they did not know that women are brave? What
horrible sort of women have they known all their lives? Where do they
come from? Or, what is a still more apposite question, where do they think they
come from? Do they think they fell from the moon, or were really found under
cabbage-leaves, or brought over the sea by storks? Do they (as seems more
likely) believe they were produced chemically, by Mr. Schefer on principles of
abiogenesis? Should we any of us be here at all if women were not brave? Are we
not all trophies of that war and triumph? Does
not every man stand on the earth like a graven statue as the monument of the
valour of a woman?
As a matter of fact, it is men much
more than women who needed a war to redeem their reputation, and who have
redeemed it. There was
much more plausibility in the suspicion that the old torture of blood and iron
would prove too much for a somewhat drugged and materialistic male population
long estranged from it. I have always suspected that this doubt about manhood
was the real sting in the strange sex quarrel, and the meaning of the new and
nervous tattoo about the unhappiness of women. Man, like the Master Builder,
was suspected by the female intelligence of having lost his nerve for climbing
that dizzy battle-tower he had built in times gone by. In this the war did certainly straighten out the sex tangle; but it
did also make clear on how terrible a thread of tenure we hold our
privileges--and even our pleasures. For even bridge parties and
champagne suppers take place on the top of that toppling war-tower; an hour can
come when even a man who cared for nothing but bridge would have to defend it
like Horatius; or when the man who only lives for champagne would have to die
for champagne, as certainly as thousands of French soldiers have died for that
flat land of vines; when he would have to fight as hard for the wine as Jeanne
D'Arc for the oil of Rheims.
Just as civilization is guarded by
potential war, so it is guarded by potential revolution. We ought never to
indulge in either without extreme provocation; but we ought to be cured for
ever of the fancy that extreme provocation is impossible. Against the tyrant within, as
against the barbarian without, every
voter should be a potential volunteer. "Thou goest with women,
forget not thy whip," said the Prussian philosopher; and some such echo
probably infected those who wanted a war to make them respect their wives and
mothers. But there would really be a symbolic sense in saying, "Thou goest
with men, forget not thy sword." Men
coming to the council of the tribe should sheathe their swords, but not
surrender them. Now I am not going to talk about Female Suffrage at
this time of day; but these were the elements upon which a fair and sane
opposition to it were founded. These are the risks of real politics; and the
woman was not called upon to run such a risk, for the very simple reason that
she was already running another risk. It
was not laws that fixed her in the family; it was the very nature of the
family. If the family was a fact in any very full sense, and if popular rule
was also a fact in any very full sense, it was simply physically impossible for
the woman to play the same part in such politics as the man. The
difficulty was only evaded because the democracy was not a free democracy or
the family not a free family. But whether this view was right or wrong, it is
at least clear that the only honourable basis for any limitations of womanhood
is the same as the basis of the respect for womanhood. It consisted in certain
realities, which it may be undesirable to discuss, but is certainly even more
undesirable to ignore. And my complaint against the more fussy Feminists (so
called from their detestation of everything feminine) is that they do ignore
these realities. I do not even propose the alternative of discussing them; on
that point I am myself content to be what some call conventional, and others,
civilized. I do not in the least demand that anyone should accept my own
deduction from them; and I do not
care a brass farthing what deduction anybody accepts about such a rag as modern
ballot paper. But I do suggest that the peril with which one half of
humanity is perpetually at war should be at least present in the minds of those
who are perpetually bragging about breaking conventions, rending veils, and
violating antiquated taboos. And, in nine cases out of ten, it seems to be
quite absent from their minds. The
mere fact of using the argument before mentioned, of women's strength
vindicated by war work, shows that it is absent from their minds.
If this oddity of the new obscurantism means,
rather, that women have shown the moral courage and mental capacity needed for
important concerns, I am equally unable to summon up any surprise at the
revelation. Nothing can well be more important than our own souls
and bodies; and they, at their most delicate and determining period, are almost
always and almost entirely confided to women. Those who have been appointed as
educational experts in every age are not surely a new order of priestesses? If it means that in a historic crisis
all kinds of people must do all kinds of work, and that women are the more to
be admired for doing work to which they are unaccustomed, or even unsuited, it
is a point which I should quite as easily concede. But if it means that in
planning the foundations of a future society we should ignore the one eternal
and incurable contrast in humanity; if it means that we may now go ahead gaily
as if there were really no difference at all; if it means, as I read in a
magazine to-day, and as almost anyone may now read almost anywhere, that if
such and such work is bad for women it must be bad for men; if it means that
patriotic women in munition factories prove that any women can be happy in any
factories; if, in short, it means that the huge and primeval facts of the
family no longer block the way to a mere social assimilation and
regimentation-- then I say that the prospect is not one of liberty but of
perpetuation of the dreariest sort of humbug. It is not emancipation, it is not
even anarchy; it is simply prudery in the thoughts. It means that we have
Bowdlerized our brains as well as our books. It is every bit as senseless a
surrender to a superstitious decorum as it would be to force every
