The Task of Social Hygiene - Havelock Ellis

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incompatible with the developed natural activities, whether of the soul or of the body, then such a protest is amply justified. But in the larger sense, "charm"—which means the power to effect work without employing brute force—is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm. And the justification for women in this matter is that herein they represent the progress of civilization. All civilization involves the substitution in this respect of the woman's method for the man's. In the last resort a savage can only assert his rights by brute force. But with the growth of civilization the wronged man, instead of knocking down his opponent, employs "charm"; in other words he engages an advocate, who, by the exercise of sweet reasonableness, persuades twelve men in a box that his wrongs must be righted, and the matter is then finally settled, not by man's weapon, the fist, but by woman's weapon, the tongue. Nowadays the same method of "charm" is being substituted for brute force in international wrongs, and with the complete substitution of arbitration for war the woman's method of charm will have replaced the man's method of brute force along the whole line of legitimate human activity. If we realize this we can understand why it is that a group of women who, even in the effort to support a good cause, revert to the crude method of violence are committing a double wrong. They are wronging their own sex by proving false to its best traditions, and they are wronging civilization by attempting to revive methods of savagery which it is civilization's mission to repress. Therefore it may fairly be held that even if the methods of the suffragettes were really adequate to secure women's suffrage, the attainment of the franchise by those methods would be a misfortune. The ultimate loss would be greater than the gain.

      If we hold the foregoing considerations in mind it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that neither in their direction nor in their nature are the methods of the suffragettes fitted to attain the end desired. We have still, however, to consider the other side of the question.

      Whenever an old movement receives a strong infusion of new blood, whatever excesses or mistakes may arise, it is very unlikely that all the results will be on the same side. It is certainly not so in this case. Even the opposition to woman's suffrage which the suffragettes are responsible for, and the Anti-Suffrage societies which they have called into active existence, are not an unmitigated disadvantage. Every movement of progress requires a vigorous movement of opposition to stimulate its progress, and the clash of discussion can only be beneficial in the end to the progressive cause.

      But the immense advantage of the activity of the suffragettes has been indirect. It has enabled the great mass of ordinary sensible women who neither join Suffrage societies nor Anti-Suffrage societies to think for themselves on this question. Until a few years ago, while most educated women were vaguely aware of the existence of a movement for giving women the vote, they only knew of it as something rather unpractical and remote; its reality had never been brought home to them. When women witnessed the eruption into the streets of a band of women—most of them apparently women much like themselves—who were so convinced that the franchise must be granted to women, here and now, that they were prepared to face publicity, ridicule, and even imprisonment, then "votes for women" became to them, for the first time, a real and living issue. In a great many cases, certainly, they realized that they intensely disliked the people who behaved in this way and any cause that was so preached. But in a great many other cases they realized, for the first time definitely, that the demand of votes for women was a reasonable demand, and that they were themselves suffragists, though they had no wish to take an active part in the movement, and no real sympathy with its more "militant" methods. There can be no doubt that in this way the suffragettes have performed an immense service for the cause of women's suffrage. It has been for the most part an indirect and undesigned service, but in the end it will perhaps more than serve to counterbalance the disadvantages attached to their more conscious methods and their more deliberate aims.

      If, as we may trust, this service will be the main outcome of the suffragette phase of the women's movement, it is an outcome to be thankful for; we may then remember with gratitude the ardent enthusiasm of the suffragettes and forget the foolish and futile ways in which it was manifested. There has never been any doubt as to the ultimate adoption of women's suffrage; its gradual extension among the more progressive countries of the world sufficiently indicates that it will ultimately reach even to the most backward countries. Its accomplishment in England has been gradual, although it is here so long since the first steps were taken, not because there has been some special and malignant opposition to it on the part of men in general and politicians in particular, but simply because England is an old and conservative country, with a very ancient constitutional machinery which effectually guards against the hasty realization of any scheme of reform. This particular reform, however, is not an isolated or independent scheme; it is an essential part of a great movement in the social equalization of the sexes which has been going on for centuries in our civilization, a movement such as may be correspondingly traced in the later stages of the civilizations of antiquity. Such a movement we may by our efforts help forward, we may for a while retard, but it is a part of civilization, and it would be idle to imagine that we can affect the ultimate issue.

      That the issue of women's suffrage may be reached in England within a reasonable period is much to be desired for the sake of the woman's movement in the larger sense, which has nothing to do with politics, and is now impeded by this struggle. The enfranchisement of women, Miss Frances Cobbe declared thirty years ago, is "the crown and completion" of all progress in women's movement. "Votes for women," exclaims, more youthfully but not less unreasonably, Miss Christabel Pankhurst, "means a new Heaven and a new Earth." But women's suffrage no more means a new Heaven or even a new Earth than it means, as other people fear, a new Purgatory and a new Hell. We may see this quite plainly in Australasia. Women's votes aid in furthering social legislation and contribute to the passing of acts which have their good side, and, no doubt, like everything else, their bad side. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who devoted her life to the political enfranchisement of women, declared, the ballot is, at most, only the vestibule to women's emancipation. Man's suffrage has not introduced the millennium, and it is foolish to suppose that woman's suffrage can. It is merely an act of justice and a reasonable condition of social hygiene.

      The attainment of the suffrage, if it is a beginning and not an end, will thus have a real and positive value in liberating the woman's movement from a narrow and sterilizing phase of its course. In England, especially, the woman's movement has in the past largely confined itself to imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same rights as men. Putting the matter more broadly, it may be said that it has been the aim of the woman's movement to secure woman's claims as a human being rather than as woman. But that is only half the task of the woman's movement, and perhaps not the most essential half. Women can never be like men, any more than men can be like women. It is their unlikeness which renders them indispensable to each other, and which also makes it imperative that each sex should have its due share in moulding the conditions of life. Woman's function in life can never be the same as man's, if only because women are the mothers of the race. That is the point, the only point, at which women have an uncontested supremacy over men. The most vital problem before our civilization to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realization of a sound eugenics. Manouvrier, the distinguished anthropologist, who carries feminism to its extreme point in the scientific sphere, yet recognizes the fundamental fact that "a woman's part is to make children." But he clearly perceives also that "in all its extent and all its consequences that part is not surpassed in importance, in difficulty, or in dignity, by the man's part." On the contrary it is a part which needs "an amount of intelligence incontestably superior, and by far, to that required by most masculine occupations." [58] We are here at the core of the woman's movement. And the full fruition of that movement means that women, by virtue of their supremacy in this matter, shall take their proper share in legislation for life, not as mere sexless human beings, but as women, and in accordance with the essential laws of their own nature as women.

      II

      There is a further question. Is it possible to discern the actual embodiment of this new phase of the woman movement? I think it is.

      To those who are accustomed to watch the emotional pulse of mankind, nothing has seemed so remarkable during recent years as the eruption of sex questions

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