: The Good Englishwoman by Williams Orlo - Women Social conditions; Women Great Britain

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A FEW REMARKS FROM THE MAN IN THE SIDECAR

My uncle Joseph, a solitary man, once broke the silence of a country walk by asserting with explosive emphasis: "I don't see how any man can understand women." I assented vaguely, and he went on: "How can we ever grasp their point of view, my dear boy, which is so totally different from ours? How can we understand the outlook on life of beings whose instincts, training, purpose, ambitions have so little resemblance to ours? For my part I have given up trying: it is a waste of time. Never let a woman flatter you into thinking that you understand her: she is trying to make you her tool. The Egyptians gave the Sphinx a woman's face and they were right. Women are so mysterious." And the south-west wind took up his words and whispered them to the trees, which nodded their heads and waved their branches, rustling "mysterious, mysterious" in all their leaves.

I do not argue with my uncle Joseph, especially on a country walk when the south-west wind is blowing. So I took out my pipe and lit it in spite of the south-west wind, saying to myself: "You silly wind, you silly trees, you know nothing of wisdom. You would catch up anything that my uncle Joseph said and make it seem important." And the south-west wind solemnly breathed "important" into the ear of a little quarry, in the tone of a ripe family butler. "There is just as much, and just as little, mystery about men and women as there is about you. It depends how much one wants to know. So far as there is any mystery, as a matter of fact, it is much more on the side of men, who are far more incalculable, far more complex than women in their motives and reactions. But men are lazy, you silly old things, and it saves a lot of trouble to invent a mystery and give it up rather than sit down before a problem to study it. Men have thousands of other things to think about besides women, but women, who have not the same variety, are so devilish insistent, that they would keep men thinking about them all their time if they could. So, in self-defence, men have pacified the dear things by calling them mysterious, which is highly flattering, and by giving them up for three-quarters of their days. Uncle Joseph has probably been arguing unsuccessfully with Aunt Georgiana, as he always will, because he never took the trouble to master her mental and emotional processes. But that does not prove the general truth of his proposition. His is just the mind which grows those weeds of everyday thought the seeds of which thoughtless south-west winds blow about as they do the seeds of thistles. Go off and blow those clouds away, you reverberator of commonplaces."

Throwing up his hands with a shriek of "commonplaces," the wind flew up over the hill ruffling its hair as he passed.

I think I was quite right not to answer my uncle Joseph and to rebuke the south-west wind. People are so tiresomely fond of uttering generalisations which they do not really believe and on which they never act. It is surely no less foolish to say that women are complete mysteries than to say that one understands them perfectly. Every individual understands a few men and a few women, or life would be impossible. Besides, understanding has its degrees which approach, but never reach, perfection. Samuel Butler somewhere says that the process of love could only be logically concluded by eating the loved one--a coarse way of saying that perfect love would end in complete assimilation: it is the same with the relation of knowledge. Happily love between human beings of opposite sexes can exist without being pushed to this voracious conclusion: so can understanding.

It may be true that women have quicker intuitions than men, though only over a limited range of subjects: but men, on the other hand, are more widely and studiously observant, besides being far more interested in the attainment of truth as the result of observation. Patient induction is, after all, an excellent substitute for brilliant guessing. Women would be extremely disappointed if men really acted on the "mystery" theory and took to thinking or writing as little about woman as the majority think or write about the problem of existence. Nothing, however, will prevent men from talking and thinking about women, and a glance at any bookshelf will prove that they do not always do so in complete ignorance of their subject. Balzac, who was no magician, was not entirely beside the mark in creating the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and Lady Teazle is a recognizable being. George Meredith's Diana seems to have human substance: Mr Shaw's Anne in "Man and Superman" and Mr Wells' Anne Veronica, though founded on masculine observations, are admitted by women to be reasonable creations. The laziness of men, I repeat, and the vanity of women are responsible for the legend of woman's inviolable mystery. The laws of gravitation were a mystery till Newton used his observation: the mystery still remains, but the experiments of Newton and other physicists has driven it further back. So it is with the human soul. Each one is a mystery, but observation and familiarity can penetrate a number of its veils, leaving only some of the intimate recesses unexplored, and even these recesses are threatened with exposure as our knowledge of telepathy and of the subconscious elements increases.

There are certain experiences of women which a man cannot share, certain aspirations and fears at whose poignancy he can only guess, certain instinctive impulses of which he is not directly conscious: but he can surmount the barriers in some measure by the use of his eyes and ears. If, therefore, he choose to record what his eyes and ears tell him, he is not exceeding the limits of masculine capacity. My uncle Joseph could hardly deplore so unpretentious a line of approach. A mere man may be content to leave Miss Dorothy Richardson and Miss May Sinclair delving gloomily in the jungles of feminine psychology where he would fear to follow them, and yet feel that, without presumption, he may hold some views about his natural complement. The question is what views are right and what are wrong. The war has changed many things, and man's views about his natural complement among them. Most people, with that useful faculty of oblivion for which we thank Providence, have forgotten what they thought in 1914: if there were such a thing as a mental gramophone which could record their thoughts of five years ago, they would be extremely surprised. Things that seemed absurd then have now been taken for granted, and it is possible that many things taken for granted then may be shown to have become absurd. It has certainly become ridiculous to speak of the "weaker sex," except in a strictly muscular sense. Women have revealed capacities for organisation and disciplined effort in large bodies, especially in this country, for which the epithet "surprising" is but feeble. Has this fact alone not caused a revolution of ideas? If we have not all accepted it yet, we shall all soon have to accept the principle that, in all but purely physical exertion, men and women have equal potential abilities. The potential ability of women is still in need of development, for they are starting some centuries behind the men, but the inevitable result will be the recognition of "equal opportunity." To what sociological crisis this may lead, I do not know, and as this is not a sociological treatise, I need not prophesy: but it is an element that must count heavily in any review of old ideas.

Another element which must count is the franchise, which will, of course, be extended in the near future till there is no inequality between the sexes in this respect. Women are political beings with vast possibilities of becoming a political force. They will play a more and more important part in the history of the nation. They will dance a new dance in the ballet of humanity. That recently so familiar figure in a short skirt of khaki and close-fitting cap, seated firmly but not too gracefully astride a motor bicycle rushing with its side-car, and often its male passenger, through the traffic is more than a phenomenon, it is a symbol. The air has whipped her cheeks pink and blown loose a stray lock above her determined eyes. What beauties she has of form or feature are none of them hid. She is all the woman that the world has known, but with a new purpose and a new poise. For good or ill she has entered the machine, and we came to look on her with an indifferent and familiar eye. But what will she do, what will she think, whither will she carry us in that side-car of hers? To all her ancient qualities she has added a new one: object of desire, mother of children, guardian of the hearth, mate of man or virgin saint, she has now another manifestation, that of fellow-combatant; some say, also of adversary. One might almost say that, bending over the handle-bars of her machine, with her body curved and her legs planted firmly on the footboard she mimes the very mark of interrogation which her changes of social posture present. A living query in khaki, she is a challenge to the prophet and the philosopher. One who is neither will let the challenge pass, sure only of one thing--that develop as she may and carry us where she will, the tradition of the good Englishwoman is safe in her keeping.

It is hardly necessary to say that any criticism of the Englishwoman in these pages is not an attack upon her: nor is any approbation to be considered a defence. At least I pay this much respect to my uncle Joseph that no woman shall flatter me into defending her: she is more than capable of doing this for herself. But, beyond this, I quite fail to understand what a friend of mine meant when he suggested that I should write in defence of women. "Against whom or against what?" I asked, but his explanation was not lucid. I gathered that he had in mind the complaint sometimes heard that women have ceased to be women in order to become inferior men; that they are getting hard and conceited; that they turn up their noses at the domestic virtues, at marriage and the whole conception of life as duty, and that they think only of having "a good time." The isolated instances given as grounds for this complaint are, I am convinced, not typical. That women have developed and broken through the far too narrow restrictions of a hundred years ago is only a matter for thankfulness: something is always lost in every adjustment, but more is gained if the adjustment is natural. The flighty girl whom most grumblers of this kind have in mind is only a fraction, and a very imperfect fraction, of the Englishwoman. A far more serious line was taken by Henry Adams towards the end of his life, when he became finally convinced that he was a man of the eighteenth century living in an unfamiliar world whose guiding forces he could not fathom. Musing over the enormous mass of new forces put into the hand of man by the end of the nineteenth century, he wondered what should be the result of so much energy turned over to the use of women, according to the scientific notions of force. He could not write down the equation. The picture of the world that he saw was of man bending eagerly over the steering wheel of a rushing motor car too intent on keeping up a high speed and avoiding accidents to have leisure for any distractions. The old attraction of the woman, one of the most powerful forces of the past, had become a distraction, and woman, no longer able to inspire men, had been forced to follow them. Woman had been set free: as travellers, typists, telephone girls, factory hands, they moved untrammelled in the world. But in what direction were they moving? After the men, said Henry Adams; discarding all the qualities for which men had no longer any interest or pleasure, they too were bending over the steering wheel in the same rapid career. Woman the rebel was now free and there was only one thing left for her to rebel against, maternity, or the inertia of sex, to speak in terms of force. Inertia of sex, the philosopher truly remarked, could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force was working irresistibly to overcome it. What would happen? Henry Adams gave up the riddle, grateful for the illusion that woman alone of all the species was unable to change.

Superficial observers might say that this movement has been accelerated by the war. Hundreds of homes have loosened their ties in the stress of war, thousands of unrebellious daughters have left their narrow walls at the call of patriotism and are now unwilling to return to them. They have learnt to live in the herd with their own sex, and prefer it to living with their own sex in the pen; physical danger and discomfort are no longer bogeys to frighten them; they have been "on their own," and "on their own" they intend to stay. All very true, no doubt, with the added complication of serious competition between the sexes in a restricted labour market. At the same time, these superficial observers forget that there has been an extraordinary return to the traditional relations between men and women during the war. The inspiration of the woman has never been stronger; once more, after many years, men have fought for their women and the women have regarded their champions with gratitude; women have tended and worked for men in greater numbers and with greater alacrity than ever before in the history of the world; the comradeship between the sexes has grown warmer and stronger without destroying the still more natural relation, for marriage as an institution has enjoyed a season of abnormal popularity. In a country at war, especially in a country invaded, men and women return to the relations of extreme antiquity; the men fight to protect the home and the family, which they alone can do. If they are beaten, the home is destroyed and the women are ravished.

We in England have escaped this last simplification: we have been lucky, but we have lost the directness of the lesson. Nevertheless, it is patent enough to thoughtful people. War has revealed men and women pretty much as they always have been, and the revelation will not be forgotten. The apprehensions of a Henry Adams, after the five years of war, do, in fact, appear to be exaggerated. The futility of all that vast array of mechanical force which so appalled him has been thoroughly exposed: ideas have come to their own again as the only things that matter. In his search for ideas and in their application man can well afford to listen to women: nor will he be backward in doing so. For my part, I cannot see him racing towards the future alone in an evil-looking 120-horse-power car, leaving women dustily in the distance. I prefer to come back to the khaki figure on a motor-bicycle with a man in the side-car, the woman guiding but in the service of the man, the man a passenger but in transit to his work. And the picture is not, as it may seem at first sight, an inversion of older relations, for it has always been the woman who drives. Men can attract women, seduce them, bully them, desert them and hypnotize them, but they cannot drive them; yet a wise woman can drive almost any man. This art is not likely to be lost by the sex in this or any other country, it is therefore important that the driving should be in the right direction.

This is the chief responsibility that the future lays on the Englishwoman: she must have good hands and a clear head, and it would perhaps be well if she could improve her head without spoiling her hands. Man, regarded not as a passenger but as an animal, is spirited but docile. If the women of this country ever made up a corporate mind to secure any desirable end, they could drive the men towards it with ease, provided they chose the right bits and bridles: and those bits and bridles will be the old patterns. It is the women who think there is no need to drive with skill but trust to their power to progress by themselves on their own machines that make the mistake. When it comes to a tug of war they find their inferiority to the stronger animal. But, my dear ladies, there need be no tug-of-war if you use the forces which are already in your hands. You would have got the suffrage long ago if you had all really wanted it. And when you did get it, it was not by assaulting policemen in small sections and chaining a few of yourselves to Cabinet Ministers' railings; you got it by exercising an old force, the force of admiration. Your services in the war won you the admiration of all Englishmen, and what an Englishman will not do for women he admires cannot be imagined.

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