Sex & the business Woman

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 12, 1 June 1926, Page 44

Sex & the business Woman

By CLEMENGE DANE

Some 'Problems of Her few Independence

The first twenty-five years of this century have seen the most remarkable development of the human intelligence since the birth of the Christian conception of right living and wise thinking in the commandment — “Thou shalt love the Lord thy ,God, and thy neighbour as thyself!” That commandment has become such a commonplace of thought that we have entirely forgotten that it has re-shaped, in practice as well as in theory, the life we live today; that we owe to it, not merely such ideals as have survived the Peace of Versailles, but the very comforts and amenities of civilised life. Christianity abolished smallpox as well as slavery; for it is the Christian ideal that suggested to the successors of the civilisations that built pyramids and hanging gardens by slave labour, that it was worth while to free the enslaved peasants and to heal the sick poor. I don’t know if it will be considered irreverent to place this new development on such a level; but at any rate I intend no irreverence if I reckon the emancipation of women as next in importance to that emancipation of humanity as a whole which Christianity achieved. Yet this second emancipation, this freeing of women that the last twentyfive years have seen, has become in its turn such a matter of course, it is already such a commonplace that women should be at liberty to shape their lives as they choose, that one is perhaps a little inclined to forget how amazing the change is, and to regard the legal and social disabilities under which women still labour almost as a matter of jest. Now that is a dangerous attitude! I THINK, too, that woman takes * the change so quietly, because she has always had, whatever lip service she may have rendered to convention, a curious inner knowledge of her real liberty, her unassailable position in the structure of society. She has chafed against the restrictions imposed upon her by her fel-low-man, or she has submitted, smiling, to them, in each case for the same —because she knew her strength, because she understood her equality, because she even suspected herself in a certain superiority of spiritual development which she quite fairly reckoned against the physical superiority of man. Physically she submitted: spiritually she smiled : it was only on intellectual ground that she felt herself neither superior nor inferior, but insisted from time to time, in the manner of Sappho, in the manner of Elizabeth — Mary Wollstonecraft Jane Austen Florence Nightingale —on an equality inexplicably denied her. For don’t tell me that a race capable of producing a Sappho at all could not have had its women playwrights and

sculptors and law-givers had it chosen. But it did not choose. It kept its women houseboundand it fell. Greece fell, with all its glory, because it so chose to deprive itself of half its strength. OUT how was it possible to deny woman equality? She was deprived of it by lack of education. Education has been for thousands of years an Eden arbitrarily fenced off from her. She made her quick little rushes into it from time to time, singing: Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s ground, Picking up gold and silver till, roaring like a bull, Man, the Tiddler, rushed at her, and she fled once more from the sacred enclosure; but always with a bit of gold

or silver clutched in her hand. Indeed, it is incredible to read the records of the incessant “fiddling’’ to which woman has been subjected, not in the remote past, but in our own times. Miss Burney, the observant mouse of a woman, records faithfully, in Evelina, the conversation of certain men of “rank and fashion” : “ ‘Devil take me if ever I had the least passion for an Amazon.’ “ T have the honour to be quite of your Lordship’s opinion,’ said Mr. Lovel, looking maliciously at Mrs. Selwyn; ‘for I have an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female.’ “ ‘Faith, and so have I,’ said Mr. Covcrley; ‘for egad, I’d as soon see a woman chop wood, as hear her chop logic.’ “ ‘So would every man in his senses,’ said Lord Merton; ‘for a woman wants nothing to recommend her but beauty and good-nature; in everything else she is either impertinent or unnatural. For my part, deuce take me if ever I wish to hear a word of sense from a woman as long as I live!”

A ND Jane Austen, who knew more about men and women than any woman then or since ) commerits as follows : “The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them

too reasonable and too well-inform-ed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.’’ Charlotte Bronte, writing fifty years later, describes a clergyman of some character, sense and humour as follows: “At heart he could not abide sense in women. He liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible.” Charlotte Bronte, wrote those lines less than eighty years ago: and they make it possible to understand the minds that thought it out of the question for a woman to give evidence in person at an enquiry, much less sit on a board, even though that woman were Florence. Nightingale, newly returned from the Crimea. But woman has at last been given

the chance of acquiring that habit of learning which has exercised masculine intelligence for so many centuries. And already—look how civilised woman has made good her claim to “halves, partner!’’ Women scientists, women painters, women novelists, women sculptors and composers, architects, engineers, explorers, heads of business firms, women lawyers, women doctors, women preachers—the list lengthens until pretty soon, thanks be to all the goddesses that care for women from

Mother Isis to Mother Goose, there will be no list of professions that women belong to, but only a new small one of professions like prizefighting, that women avoid. But this new tradition of freedom seems to me to be built up, not on the great women of history, but on the ordinary women that history doesn’t mention. The great women, the pioneers, made it possible for the rank and file to slip into Tom Tiddler’s ground, but it is the rank and file that has made the claim of equality into a fact. You could always defeat the brilliant woman by a courteous “Exceptions prove the rule!’’ but you cannot so dispose of those indispensable creatures of modern civilisation, the woman teacher and the woman clerk.

f | 'O-DAY woman, through sheer A need of bread and butter, has forced her way into the world’s market where work of every kind is bought and sold. Even the most prejudiced of the die-hards are grudgingly admitting that it is better. morally better, economically better for men and women alike, that woman should keep herself rather than be kept; that it is a sheer matter of sense and convenience that she should support herself rather than be supported. They are even

beginning to consider it not unthinkable that she should take her share, adjusted to her capacity, in supporting the country she was born in and the children she bears. Yet still the business woman’s, the working woman’s path is by no means clear. Independence has eliminated certain of her problems, but it has intensified others. Biggest of all there looms ahead of her the problcm of sex. There arc various ways of viewing this problem. There is the cominon attitude of the nice late Victorian or early Edwardian woman, the Mrs. C land on type, to whom sex is an unpleasant and not quite decent business, a legalised form of animalism. Such womenthere were

many of them twenty years ago: one comes across them still—look upon married love and its consequences, children as a sort of price that has to be paid for the dignity and comfort of being Mrs. So-and-so. Others again put up with “love” —they always speak of it in inverted commas with a sort of sneer—for the sake of satisfying their strong wish for babies of their own. Both types despise the man they submit to or eye him at least with a hopeless wonder, with a resigned—“ Men

are queer: men arc horrid: but we suppose they can’t help it!” But the worst crime of such women, such nice, decent, well-meaning, respectable, unnatural women, is that they impress their attitude to sex upon their young daughters. I wonder how many a happy marriage has not been wrecked by the affectionate cold mothers who “don’t think it nice!” or “can’t bring themselves !” to tell their young daughtors about the facts of life and love, or if they do tell their daughters what they need to know, tell it with a shiver of disgust, That is a way of dealing with the problem of sex and the business woman that is, one hopes, becoming less general.