CHAPTER XVI.
The Correspondence Continued.
No. 2.—Letitia to Lesbia.
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‘Since writing my last, conversation with an unprejudiced friend—though she is not your equal in any way, Lesbie—has led me to consider the other side of the question. As regards Mrs Grundy’s prudery, may it not be a matter of self-defence? I mean defence of female dignity. If all men could be trusted to be reverent toward nude beauty, if even men in general could be trusted not to be vulgar and vile,—not to make scurrilous obscene jests upon it, well and good. But you know that is not the case, and therefore the only way for women to act is to frown down all exhibition of the kind to common and coarse-minded people. The objection can be removed, no doubt, but only by training the youths of the rising generation to be something very different in their demeanour from what their forefathers were. Let them be licentious as they will upon one condition—asceticism is no virtue in men; but let them be so with reverence toward all women. If they can make their passions into a heart religion, let there be no restraint upon them, short of injuring others. But so long as they cannot, or do not, the women of society are right in keeping a straight-waistcoat upon them in the matter.
Akin to this is the marriage question. You may not be a marrying girl, Lesbie; you may be fit for the higher life—virginity is the higher life in women, I admit—but I am not, and I look to annexing a husband some day, to love, honour, and obey me. And most certainly I should never consent to my husband having any other wife beside me. I may spare him for a few liasons and irregularities upon occasion, and I might claim a few myself; but I would have no one to be practically a rival wife, either upon the premises or elsewhere. And you will find, if you inquire, that women who cohabit with a man outside legal marriage have also this monogamic instinct. It is easy enough to see why. A harem of concubines is a drove of domestic animals, the toys of their owner. Look at King Solomon, the man of wisdom, who, notwithstanding his wisdom and his multitudinous wives and concubines, could declare that all things under the sun are vanity and vexation of spirit. He could not, then, have felt much more respect for his women than a huntsman feels for his hounds. It is a truth which happily the world is more alive to in these latter days, that formally to attach a plurality of women in any sense or manner to one man, is a direct negation of woman’s dignity. The opposite—polyandry—would be far more natural, even upon physical grounds, and it would moreover have this advantage upon moral grounds, that a man has no dignity of that sort to lose. But I do not propose to enter upon further discussion of that question. The point I am now contending for is that the puritanical code of morality which you and I feel inclined to kick against, is no proof that women are puritanical and bigoted at heart; it is only a proof that the brutality of men has obliged women to resort to defensive measures.
‘Men at large still refuse or neglect to do their duty by the female community, and their sin recoils upon their own heads in the shape of a distorted, pinched, uncomfortable, unsound society, making discontent, jealousy, and bitterness rife, and breeding mysterious physical as well as mental maladies. I guess this hits the blot, Lesbie, and I long to see prudery and bigotry on our part swept away, mais que messieurs les assassins commencent! Let men begin the reform by conceding to women their full rights in all matters; then these secondary symptoms of the social disease will disappear fast enough, that is my notion about it.’
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No. 2.—Lesbia to Letitia.
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‘Granting, my dear Lettie, that the causes of society’s hollowness be what you say, I cannot agree with you that it rests only with men to initiate the remedy. There must be something more than mere acting on the defensive which induces so many among our sex to hang back against their own development and elevation; I account for it by the slavish habits of mind which have been inculcated upon the female race, and which must be eradicated before anything material can be done to better the world. We want one like the Hebrew prophet to sound in our ears his warning:—“Rise up, ye women that are at ease, hear my voice, ye careless daughters. Many years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women,” etc., etc.
‘This reminds me that there is a part of the question we have hitherto left out of sight, the effects of a false system of religion. I do not mean by this that one sect or body is false as compared with the rest; I mean that a fundamental falsehood underlies and dominates them all. The subjection of woman in religion cannot but have a vast effect upon her social status, and this notwithstanding the fact that what may be called priestcraft rather than religion is losing its hold upon Western nations. The hold it still retains is mainly supported by female influence, and if that influence is perverted to the degradation of the sex to which it chiefly belongs, how can we wonder that many women who ought to know better hug their chains? Train up a girl in the way she ought not to go, and when she is old she will find it hard to turn into the right one. I do not deny that Christianity may be a trifle better than the other systems, for the reason that it upholds monogamy. But these old-world religions, one and all, are based upon the genuine original sin—that of deposing the female from her spiritual dignity and setting up the male in her place. Nothing but a radical change of front can cleanse Christianity or any other theological system from this congenital and inherent stain. There is one partial exception, I allow. The Roman Church has within her—more, however, in her practice than in her doctrine—the saving germ of Madonna-worship, which of course means practically woman-worship. Whether that germ will bud and blossom, and so the old hierarchy be saved from extinction along with the other creeds, remains yet to be seen. My uncle believes it will: for myself I cannot say. In any case, I see cause for satisfaction in the rapid spread of secularism both in England and on the Continent. Before you can build up the true, you must clear away the false; and though it may be painful to many good kind souls to have their early beliefs undermined, yet that is but a temporary trial, an indispensable condition of attaining finally that which Is really satisfying. It does not give pain to everyone, either. For instance, last Sunday I asked one of my Frogmore bicycling friends why he attended service at Dulham so often, as I knew he was not what is commonly called pious. ‘Because, Miss Newman,’ he replied, ‘the thwack of your uncle’s stick across the shoulders of fanatics who despised women is grateful and comforting to me as cool streams to the hunted hart, or as Epps’s cocoa for breakfast to the person who hunts him.’ And I believe, Lettie, that is really the secret of Uncles Spines’ popularity as a preacher. He treats Christianity impartially,—-always ready to do justice to the golden grain, but equally ready to burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. The chaff, however, which I desire to see burnt—whether it exists in the Bible, the Koran, or elsewhere—is the usurpation by man of woman’s place in spiritual interests. That, to my mind, is the only theology worth discussing; all else is rubbish. This would be rubbish too, were it not that the relations of women to men and to each other in this world are falsified and spoilt by the false religious position. You, Lettie, lay all the blame on man’s arrogance; I, for my part, hold that we are at least equally to blame, because if women generally were to insist upon a reversal of the relations of the sexes in religion, men, even those most opposed to the change, would have no alternative but to submit. Any religion in the world, deprived of the countenance of its women, would fall to pieces like a house of cards. The game, therefore, is really in our own hands.’