What is Coming? by H. G. Wells
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H. G. Wells >> What is Coming?
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Never had the relations of men and women been so uneasy as they were in
the opening days of 1914. The woman's movement battered and banged
through all our minds. It broke out into that tumult in Great Britain
perhaps ten years ago. When Queen Victoria died it was inaudible; search
_Punch_, search the newspapers of that tranquil age. In 1914 it kicked
up so great a dust that the Germans counted on the Suffragettes as one
of the great forces that were to paralyse England in the war.
The extraordinary thing was that the feminist movement was never clearly
defined during all the time of its maximum violence. We begin to
perceive in the retrospect that the movement was multiple, made up of a
number of very different movements interwoven. It seemed to concentrate
upon the Vote; but it was never possible to find even why women wanted
the vote. Some, for example, alleged that it was because they were like
men, and some because they were entirely different. The broad facts that
one could not mistake were a vast feminine discontent and a vast display
of feminine energy. What had brought that about?
Two statistical factors are to be considered here. One of these was the
steady decline in the marriage rate, and the increasing proportion of
unmarried women of all classes, but particularly of the more educated
classes, requiring employment. The second was the fall in the
birth-rate, the diminution in size of the average family, the increase
of sterile unions, and the consequent release of a considerable
proportion of the energy of married women. Co-operating with these
factors of release were the economic elaborations that were improving
the appliances of domestic life, replacing the needle by the sewing
machine, the coal fire and lamp by gas and electricity, the dustpan and
brush by the pneumatic carpet cleaner, and taking out of the house into
the shop and factory the baking, much of the cooking, the making of
clothes, the laundry work, and so forth, that had hitherto kept so many
women at home and too busy to think. The care of even such children as
there were was also less arduous; creche and school held out hands for
them, ready to do even that duty better.
Side by side with these releases from duty was a rise in the standard of
education that was stimulating the minds and imaginations of woman
beyond a point where the needle--even if there had been any use for the
needle--can be an opiate. Moreover, the world was growing richer, and
growing richer in such a way that not only were leisure and desire
increasing, but, because of increasingly scientific methods of
production, the need in many branches of employment for any but very
keen and able workers was diminishing. So that simultaneously the world,
that vanished world before 1914, was releasing and disengaging enormous
volumes of untrained and unassigned feminine energy and also diminishing
the usefulness of unskilful effort in every department of life. There
was no demand to meet the supply. These were the underlying processes
that produced the feminist outbreak of the decade before the war.
Now the debate between the sexes is a perennial. It began while we were
still in the trees. It has its stereotyped accusations; its stereotyped
repartees. The Canterbury Pilgrims had little to learn from Christabel
Pankhurst. Man and woman in that duet struggle perpetually for the upper
hand, and the man restrains the woman and the woman resents the man. In
every age some voice has been heard asserting, like Plato, that the
woman is a human being; and the prompt answer has been, "but such a
different human being." Wherever there is a human difference fair play
is difficult, the universal clash of races witnesses to that, and sex is
the greatest of human differences.
But the general trend of mankind towards intelligence and reason has
been also a trend away from a superstitious treatment of sexual
questions and a recognition, so to speak, that a woman's "a man for a'
that," that she is indeed as entitled to an independent soul and a
separate voice in collective affairs. As brain has counted for more and
more in the human effort and brute strength and the advantage of not
bearing children for less and less, as man has felt a greater need for a
companion and a lesser need for a slave, and as the increase of food and
the protection of the girl from premature child-bearing has approximated
the stature and strength and enterprise of the woman more and more to
that of the man, this secular emancipation of the human female from the
old herd subordination and servitude to the patriarchal male has gone
on. Essentially the secular process has been an equalising process. It
was merely the exaggeration of its sustaining causes during the plenty
and social and intellectual expansion of the last half-century that had
stimulated this secular process to the pitch of crisis.
There have always been two extreme aspects of the sexual debate. There
have always been the oversexed women who wanted to be treated primarily
as women, and the women who were irritated and bored by being treated
primarily as women. There have always been those women who wanted to
get, like Joan of Arc, into masculine attire, and the school of the
"mystical darlings." There have always been the women who wanted to
share men's work and the women who wanted to "inspire" it--the mates and
the mistresses. Of course, the mass of women lies between these
extremes. But it is possible, nevertheless, to discuss this question as
though it were a conflict of two sharply opposed ideals. It is
convenient to write as if there were just these two sorts of women
because so one can get a sharp definition in the picture. The ordinary
woman fluctuates between the two, turns now to the Western ideal of
citizenship and now to the Eastern of submission. These ideals fight not
only in human society, but in every woman's career.
Chitra in Rabindranath Tagore's play, for example, tried both aspects of
the woman's life, and Tagore is at one with Plato in preferring the
Rosalind type to the houri. And with him I venture to think is the clear
reason of mankind. The real "emancipation" to which reason and the trend
of things makes is from the yielding to the energetic side of a woman's
disposition, from beauty enthroned for love towards the tall,
weather-hardened woman with a spear, loving her mate as her mate loves
her, and as sexless as a man in all her busy hours.
But it was not simply the energies that tended towards this particular
type that were set free during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Every sort of feminine energy was set free. And it was not
merely the self-reliant, independence-seeking women who were
discontented. The ladies who specialised in feminine arts and graces and
mysteries were also dissatisfied. They found they were not important
enough. The former type found itself insufficiently respected, and the
latter type found itself insufficiently adored. The two mingled their
voices in the most confusing way in the literature of the suffrage
movement before the war. The two tendencies mingle confusingly in the
minds of the women that this movement was stirring up to think. The Vote
became the symbol for absolutely contradictory things; there is scarcely
a single argument for it in suffragist literature that cannot be
completely negatived out of suffragist literature.
For example, compare the writings of Miss Cicely Hamilton, the
distinguished actress, with the publications of the Pankhurst family.
The former expresses a claim that, except for prejudice, a woman is as
capable a citizen as a man and differing only in her sex; the latter
consist of a long rhapsody upon the mystical superiorities of women and
the marvellous benefits mankind will derive from handing things over to
these sacred powers. The former would get rid of sex from most human
affairs; the latter would make what our Georgian grandfathers called
"The Sex" rule the world.
Or compare, say, the dark coquettings of Miss Elizabeth Robins' "Woman's
Secret" with the virile common sense of that most brilliant young
writer, Miss Rebecca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine
limitations in the opening chapters of "The World's Worst Failure." The
former is an extravagance of sexual mysticism. Man can never understand
women. Women always hide deep and wonderful things away beyond masculine
discovery. Men do not even suspect. Some day, perhaps--It is someone
peeping from behind a curtain, and inviting men in provocative tones to
come and play catch in a darkened harem. The latter is like some gallant
soldier cursing his silly accoutrements. It is a hearty outbreak against
that apparent necessity for elegance and sexual specialisation that
undercuts so much feminine achievement, that reduces so much feminine
art and writing to vapidity, and holds back women from the face of
danger and brave and horrible deaths. It is West to Miss Robins' East.
And yet I believe I am right in saying that all these four women
writers have jostled one another upon suffrage platforms, and that they
all suffered blows and injuries in the same cause, during the various
riots and conflicts that occurred in London in the course of the great
agitation. It was only when the agitation of the Pankhurst family, aided
by Miss Robins' remarkable book "Where are you going to ...?" took a
form that threatened to impose the most extraordinary restrictions on
the free movements of women, and to establish a sort of universal purdah
of hostility and suspicion against those degraded creatures, those
stealers and destroyers of women, "the men," that the British feminist
movement displayed any tendency to dissociate into its opposed and
divergent strands.
It is a little detail, but a very significant one in this connection,
that the committee that organised the various great suffrage processions
in London were torn by dispute about the dresses of the processionists.
It was urged that a "masculine style of costume" discredited the
movement, and women were urged to dress with a maximum of feminine
charm. Many women obtained finery they could ill afford, to take part in
these demonstrations, and minced their steps as womanly as possible to
freedom....
It would be easy to overstate the efflorescence of distinctively
feminine emotion, dressiness, mysticism, and vanity upon the suffrage
movement. Those things showed for anyone to see. This was the froth of
the whirlpool. What did not show was the tremendous development of the
sense of solidarity among women. Everybody knew that women had been
hitting policemen at Westminster; it was not nearly so showy a fact that
women of title, working women, domestic servants, tradesmen's wives,
professional workers, had all been meeting together and working together
in a common cause, working with an unprecedented capacity and an
unprecedented disregard of social barriers. One noted the nonsensical
by-play of the movement; the way in which women were accustoming
themselves to higher standards of achievement was not so immediately
noticeable. That a small number of women were apparently bent on
rendering the Vote impossible by a campaign of violence and malicious
mischief very completely masked the fact that a very great number of
girls and young women no longer considered it seemly to hang about at
home trying by a few crude inducements to tempt men to marry them, but
were setting out very seriously and capably to master the young man's
way of finding a place for oneself in the world. Beneath the dust and
noise realities were coming about that the dust and noise entirely
failed to represent. We know that some women were shrieking for the
Vote; we did not realise that a generation of women was qualifying for
it.
The war came, the jolt of an earthquake, to throw things into their
proper relationships.
The immediate result was the disappearance of the militant suffragists
from public view for a time, into which the noisier section hastened to
emerge in full scream upon the congenial topic of War Babies. "Men,"
those dreadful creatures, were being camped and quartered all over the
country. It followed, from all the social principles known to Mrs. and
Miss Pankhurst, that it was necessary to provide for an enormous number
of War Babies. Subscriptions were invited. Statisticians are still
looking rather perplexedly for those War Babies; the illegitimate
birth-rate has fallen, and what has become of the subscriptions I do not
know. _The Suffragette_ rechristened itself _Britannia_, dropped the War
Baby agitation, and, after an interlude of self-control, broke out into
denunciations, first of this public servant and then of that, as
traitors and German spies. Finally, it discovered a mare's nest in the
case of Sir Edward Grey that led to its suppression, and the last I
have from this misleading and unrepresentative feminist faction is the
periodic appearance of a little ill-printed sheet of abuse about the
chief Foreign Office people, resembling in manner and appearance the
sort of denunciatory letter, at once suggestive and evasive, that might
be written by the curate's discharged cook. And with that the aggressive
section of the suffragist movement seems to have petered out, leaving
the broad reality of feminine emancipation to go on in a beneficent
silence.
There can be no question that the behaviour of the great mass of women
in Great Britain has not simply exceeded expectation but hope. And there
can be as little doubt that the suffrage question, in spite of the
self-advertising violence of its extravagant section, did contribute
very materially to build up the confidence, the willingness to undertake
responsibility and face hardship, that has been so abundantly displayed
by every class of woman. It is not simply that there has been enough
women and to spare for hospital work and every sort of relief and
charitable service; that sort of thing has been done before, that was in
the tradition of womanhood. It is that at every sort of occupation,
clerking, shop-keeping, railway work, automobile driving, agricultural
work, police work, they have been found efficient beyond precedent and
intelligent beyond precedent. And in the munition factories, in the
handling of heavy and often difficult machinery, and in adaptability and
inventiveness and enthusiasm and steadfastness their achievement has
been astonishing. More particularly in relation to intricate mechanical
work is their record remarkable and unexpected.
There is scarcely a point where women, having been given a chance, have
not more than made good. They have revolutionised the estimate of their
economic importance, and it is scarcely too much to say that when, in
the long run, the military strength of the Allies bears down the
strength of Germany, it will be this superiority of our women which
enables us to pit a woman at--the censorship will object to exact
geography upon this point--against a man at Essen which has tipped the
balance of this war.
Those women have won the vote. Not the most frantic outbursts of
militancy after this war can prevent them getting it. The girls who have
faced death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite factories--there is a
not inconsiderable list of dead and wounded from those places--have
killed for ever the poor argument that women should not vote because
they had no military value. Indeed, they have killed every argument
against their subjection. And while they do these things, that paragon
of the virtues of the old type, that miracle of domestic obedience, the
German _haus-frau_, the faithful Gretchen, riots for butter.
And as I have before remarked, the Germans counted on the suffragettes
as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in this war.
It is not simply that the British women have so bountifully produced
intelligence and industry; that does not begin their record. They have
been willing to go dowdy. The mass of women in Great Britain are wearing
the clothes of 1914. In 1913 every girl and woman one saw in the streets
of London had an air of doing her best to keep in the fashion. Now they
are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a
clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for
that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to
absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in
war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"--with the
air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar
cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short
skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt to mysteries about the waist;
she wears a comic little hat over one brow; there is something of
Columbine about her, something of the Watteau shepherdess, something of
a vivandiere, something of every age but the present age. Her face,
subject to the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the back of
a spoon, with small features and little whisker-like curls before the
ears such as butcher-boys used to wear half a century ago. Even so, she
dare not do this thing alone. Something in khaki is with her, to justify
her. You are to understand that this strange rig is for seeing him off
or giving him a good time during his leave. Sometimes she is quite
elderly, sometimes nothing khaki is to be got, and the pretence that
this is desired of her wears thin. Still, the type will out.
She does not pass with impunity, the last exponent of true feminine
charm. The vulgar, the street boy, have evolved one of those strange
sayings that have the air of being fragments from some lost and
forgotten chant:
"She's the Army Contractor's Only Daughter,
Spending it now."
Or simply, "Spending it now."
She does not pass with impunity, but she passes. She makes her stilted
passage across the arena upon which the new womanhood of Western Europe
shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to be something like a
truce in the fashions throughout Europe for some years. It is in America
if anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and the fashion will be
kept alive....
And so we come to prophecy.
I do not believe that this invasion by women of a hundred employments
hitherto closed to them is a temporary arrangement that will be reversed
after the war. It is a thing that was going on, very slowly, it is true,
and against much prejudice and opposition, before the war, but it was
going on; it is in the nature of things. These women no doubt enter
these employments as substitutes, but not usually as inferior
substitutes; in quite a number of cases they are as good as men, and in
many they are not underselling, they are drawing men's pay. What reason
is there to suppose that they will relapse into a state of superfluous
energy after the war? The war has merely brought about, with the
rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which the world was
ripe. The world after the war will have to adjust itself to this
extension of women's employment, and to this increase in the proportion
of self-respecting, self-supporting women.
Contributing very largely to the establishment of this greatly enlarged
class of independent women will be the great shortage for the next
decade of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablement of the
war. The women of the next decades will not only be able to get along
economically without marriage, but they will find it much more difficult
to marry. It will also probably be a period in which a rise in prices
may, as it usually does, precede the compensating rise in wages. It may
be that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family.
This will be a third factor in the fixation of this class of bachelor
women.
Various writers, brooding over the coming shortage of men, have jumped
to the conclusion that polygamy is among the probabilities of the near
future. They write in terms of real or affected alarm for which there is
no justification; they wallow in visions of Germany "legalising"
polygamy, and see Berlin seeking recuperation, in man power by
converting herself into another Salt Lake City. But I do not think that
Germany, in the face of the economic ring that the Allies will certainly
draw about her, is likely to desire a very great increase in population
for the next few years; I do not see any great possibility of a
specially rich class capable of maintaining numerous wives being
sustained by the impoverished and indebted world of Europe, nor the
sources from which a supply of women preferring to become constituents
in a polygamous constellation rather than self-supporting freewomen is
to be derived.
The temperamental dislike of intelligent women to polygamy is at least
as strong as a man's objection to polyandry. Polygamy, open or hidden,
flourishes widely only where there are women to be bought. Moreover,
there are considerable obstacles in religion and custom to be overcome
by the innovating polygamist--even in Germany. It might mean a breach of
the present good relations between Germany and the Vatican. The relative
inferiority of the tradition of the German to that of most other
European women, its relative disposition towards feminine servitude, is
no doubt a consideration on the other scale of this discussion, but I do
not think it is one heavy enough to tilt back the beam.
So far from a great number of men becoming polygamists, I think it would
be possible to show cause for supposing that an increasing proportion
will cease even to be monogamists. The romantic excitements of the war
have produced a temporary rise in the British marriage rate; but before
the war it had been falling slowly and the average age at marriage had
been rising, and it is quite possible that this process will be
presently resumed and, as a new generation grows up to restore the
balance of the sexes, accelerated.
We conclude, therefore, that this increase in the class of economically
independent bachelor women that is now taking place is a permanent
increase. It is probably being reinforced by a considerable number of
war widows who will not remarry. We have to consider in what directions
this mass of capable, intelligent, energetic, undomesticated freewomen
is likely to develop, what its effect will be on social usage, and
particularly how it will react upon the lives of the married women about
them. Because, as we have already pointed out in this chapter, the
release of feminine energy upon which the feminist problem depends is
twofold, being due not only to the increased unmarriedness of women
through the disproportion of the sexes and the rise in the age of
marriage, but also to the decreased absorption of married women in
domestic duties. A woman, from the point of view of this discussion, is
not "married and done for," as she used to be. She is not so
extensively and completely married. Her large and increasing leisure
remains in the problem.
The influence of this coming body of freewomen upon the general social
atmosphere will be, I venture to think, liberalising and relaxing in
certain directions and very bracing in others. This new type of women
will want to go about freely without an escort, to be free to travel
alone, take rooms in hotels, sit in restaurants, and so forth. Now, as
the women of the past decade showed, there are for a woman two quite
antagonistic ways of going about alone. Nothing showed the duplicate
nature of the suffragist movement more than the great variety of
deportment of women in the London streets during that time. There were
types that dressed neatly and quietly and went upon their business with
intent and preoccupied faces. Their intention was to mingle as
unobtrusively as possible into the stream of business, to be as far as
possible for the ordinary purposes of traffic "men in a world of men." A
man could speak to such women as he spoke to another man, without
suspicion, could, for example, ask his way and be directed without being
charged with annoying or accosting a delicate female.
At the other extreme there was a type of young woman who came into the
streets like something precious that has got loose. It dressed itself
as feminine loveliness; it carried sex like a banner and like a
challenge. Its mind was fully prepared by the Pankhurst literature for
insult. It swept past distressed manhood imputing motives. It was pure
hareem, and the perplexed masculine intelligence could never determine
whether it was out for a demonstration or whether it was out for a
spree. Its motives in thus marching across the path of feminine
emancipation were probably more complicated and confused than that
alternative suggests, and sheer vanity abounded in the mixture. But
undoubtedly that extremity is the vanishing extremity of these things.
The new freewoman is going to be a grave and capable being, soberly
dressed, and imposing her own decency and neutrality of behaviour upon
the men she meets. And along the line of sober costume and simple and
restrained behaviour that the freewoman is marking out, the married
woman will also escape to new measures of freedom.
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