| <The Saturday Review May 30, 1868>
| <Affronted Womanhood>
| <pb n="707">
| Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the 
| difference that lies between sectarian sins and personal 
| immoralities, between the intellectual untruth of a man's 
| creed and the spiritual evil of his own nature.  Rigid 
| Calvinism, for instance, which  narrows the issues of divine 
| grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a 
| select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid 
| Calvinist, simply continuing to believe in predestination 
| and election as he was taught from the beginning, may be a 
| generous, genial, large-hearted man.  An inventor scheming 
| out the deadliest projectile that has yet been devised is not 
| necessarily indifferent to human life on his own account; 
| nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious 
| destinies of his country, and the infinite superiority of his 
| countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious 
| nationally.  In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his 
| own fireside, and though, in his quality of American, of 
| course able to whip universal creation, in his mere quality 
| of man quite ready to take the lower seat at the table, and to 
| give honour where honour is due. This kind of distinction 
| between the faults of the sect and the person, the nature and 
| the cause, is very noticeable in women; and especially in all 
| things relating to themselves.  Individually, many among 
| them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as 
| little capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it.  Being 
| used from the cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take 
| to it kindly, as a part of the inevitable order of things, and 
| kiss the chastening rod with edifying humility; but, 
| collectively, they are the most impatient of rebuke, the 
| most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of all 
| created things sought to be led or driven.  The woman who 
| will bear to hear of her faults without offering a word in 
| self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly 
| if hard pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when 
| told that her foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that 
| she is no worse than nature meant her to be.  Personally she 
| is willing to confess that she is only a poor worm groveling 
| in the dust ~~ perhaps an exceptionally poor worm, if of 
| the kind given to spiritual asceticism ~~ but by her class 
| she claims to be considered just next door to an angel, and 
| arrogates to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim 
| in her own behalf.  Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, 
| as <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> knows.  They 
| are selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty 
| ~~ where does the list end? and human nature in the 
| abstract is a bad thing too, given over to lies and various 
| deadly lusts; but women, as women, are exempt from any 
| special share in the general iniquity, and only come under 
| the ban with the rest of universal nature, with lambs and 
| doves and other pretty creatures, not quite perfection 
| because of the Fall, which spoilt everything, and yet very 
| near it.  As children of the rash parents who corrupted the 
| race they certainly suffer from the general infection of sin 
| that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the sons, 
| they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of 
| theirs that their cooperative virtues by sex override their 
| positive vices by race.  As individuals, they are worms; as 
| human beings, they are poor sinful souls; but by their 
| womanhood they are above rebuke.
| Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little 
| delusion about the sacredness of their sex, and the 
| perfections belonging thereto by nature, that any attempt to 
| show them the truth, and convince them that they too are 
| guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a 
| fallen humanity, and in certain things special to themselves, 
| is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of affronted 
| womanhood.  A man who speaks of their faults as they 
| appear to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and 
| unmanly, and the rage of the more hysterically indignant 
| would not be very far below that of the Thracian Maenads, 
| could they lay hands on the offending Orpheus of the 
| moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and 
| touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to 
| the initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who 
| perhaps know no better.  The whole life and being of 
| womanhood  must be held sacred from censure, exalted as 
| it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that will not bear 
| reasoning about, to
| <pb n="708">
| something very near divinity.  Even the follies of fashion 
| must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke, on the 
| ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the 
| question; for how should a poor male body know anything 
| about trains or crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman 
| feels in making herself ridiculous or indecent in appearance 
| and a nuisance to her neighbours? while, for anything 
| graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a manner high 
| treason against the supremacy of the sex to assume that 
| they deserve either ridicule or rebuke.  Besides, it is 
| indelicate.  Women are made to be worshipped, not 
| criticized; to be reverenced as something mystically holy 
| and incomprehensible by the grosser masculine faculties 
| and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it, when vile man 
| takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard mechanical 
| tests of truth and common sense, and to show the world 
| how much alloy is mingled with the gold.  This is in ethics 
| what the Oriental's reserve about his harem is in domestic 
| life.  The sacredness of a Mahomedan's womankind must 
| be so complete that they are even nameless to the coarser 
| sex; and not, <p> "How is your wife?" "How are your 
| daughters?" </p> but <p> "How is your house?" </p> is the 
| only accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Hassan 
| about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas.  In much the 
| same way our women must be kept behind the close gilded 
| gratings of affected perfectness, and, above all things, 
| never publicly discussed ~~ much less publicly 
| condemned.
| It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the power of 
| logically reasoning out a position and its consequences, that 
| women should thus demand to be treated as things superior 
| to the faults and follies of humanity at large.  They are 
| clamouring loudly, and with some show of justice, for an 
| equal share in the worlds work and wages, and it is 
| wonderfully stupid in them to stand upon their womanly 
| dignity and their quasi-sacredness when told of their faults, 
| and measured according to their shortcomings, not their 
| pretensions.  If they come down into the arena to fight, they 
| must fight subject to the conditions of the arena.  They 
| must not ask for special rules to be made in their behalf ~~ 
| the blunted weapons on the one side, and impregnable 
| defences on the other.  If they demand either mystic 
| reverence or chivalric homage they must be content with 
| their own narrow but safe enclosure, where they have 
| nothing to do but look at the turmoil below, and accept with 
| gratitude such portions of the good things fought for as the 
| men to whom they belong see fit to bring them.  They 
| cannot have the good of both positions ~~ the courtesy 
| claimed by weakness, and the honour paid to prowess ~~ at 
| one and the same time.  If they mingle in the  
| <hi rend="italic"> <f> melee </f> </hi> they must expect as 
| hard knocks as the rest, and must submit to be bullied when 
| they hit foul, and to be struck home when they hit wide.  If 
| they do not like these conditions, let them keep out of the 
| fray altogether; but if they choose to mingle in it, no 
| hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the 
| shrieks, will keep them safe from hard knocks and rough 
| treatment.
| Time out of mind women have been credited with all the 
| graces and virtues possible in a world which <q> </q> has 
| defiled.  To be sure they have been cursed as well, as the 
| causes of most of the miseries of society, from Eve's time 
| to Helen's, and later still.  <hi rend="italic"> <f> Teterrina 
| causa, &c. </f> </hi> But the praise alone sticks, so far as 
| their own self-belief is concerned, and men, who create the 
| curses, may arrange them to their own liking.  The poet 
| says they are <q> </q>; the very name of mother is to some 
| men almost as holy as that of God, and the most solemn 
| oath a Frenchman can take in a private way is not by his 
| own honour, but by the name or the head or the life of his 
| mother.  As wives ~~ well, save in the old nursery doggerel 
| which sets forth that they are made of <q> </q> ~~ as 
| wives certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs.  But then 
| only a husband knows where the shoe pinches, and if he 
| blasphemes during the wearing of it, on his own head be 
| the guilt, as is already the punishment.  As maidens they 
| are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of humanity, 
| and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to 
| the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic 
| world we are told to look for the time when the moral 
| supremacy of woman shall be the recognised law of human 
| life, and the reign of violence and tears and all iniquity 
| shall therefore be at an end.  Thus the moral loveliness of 
| collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught 
| from their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of 
| experience, and women naturally keep them up to the mark 
| ~~ theoretically, at all events.  Yet for all this lip homage, 
| of which so much account is made, women are often 
| ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of their superior 
| pretensions as often fall below men in every quality but that 
| of patience.  And patience is eminently the virtue of 
| weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking 
| broadly and allowing for exceptions.  But what women do 
| not see is that all this poetic flattery comes originally from 
| the idealizing passion of men, and that, left to themselves, 
| with only each other for critics and analysers, they would 
| soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous moral 
| finery, and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising 
| truth.  And this would be the best thing for them in the end.  
| If they could but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, 
| they would rise beyond the power of much that now 
| degrades them.  If they would honestly consider the 
| question of their own shortcomings when told where they 
| fail, and what they could not do, and what they would be 
| sure to make a mess of if they attempted, they would prove 
| their title to man's respect far more than they prove it now 
| by the shrill cries and indignant remonstrances of affronted 
| womanhood.  This is the day of trial for many things ~~ 
| among others, for the capacity of women for an enlarged 
| sphere of action and more public exercise of power.  Do 
| women think they show their fitness for nobler duties than 
| those already assigned them, by their impatience under 
| censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching?  Are 
| they qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by 
| assuming an absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of 
| sacrilege to deny?  If they think they are on the right road 
| as at present followed, let them go on in heaven's name.  
| When they have wandered sufficiently far perhaps they will 
| have sense enough to turn back, and see for themselves 
| what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had 
| they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small 
| degree.  Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, 
| <hi rend="italic"> <f> per se, </f> </hi> a special 
| unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered 
| comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, 
| through ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching 
| that comes by rebuke.  Nothing is so damaging in the long 
| run as exaggerated pretensions; for by-and-by, after a 
| certain period of uncritical homage, the world is sure to 
| believe that the silver veil which it has so long respected 
| hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too sacred for 
| public use is too poor for public honour.  If the faults of 
| women are not to be discussed, nor their follies 
| condemned, because womanhood is a sacred thing and a 
| man naturally respects his mother and sisters, then women 
| must be content to live in a moral harem, where they will 
| be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the outside 
| world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and 
| the workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection 
| and have to accept the man's law of <p> "no favour."  </p> 
| It must be one thing or the other.  Either their merits must 
| be weighed and their capacity assayed in reference to the 
| place they want to take ~~ and in doing this their faults 
| must be boldly and distinctly discussed ~~ or they must be 
| content with their present condition; and with the mystic 
| sanctity of womanhood accept also the moral seclusion 
| belonging, by their very nature, to things too sacred for 
| criticism and too perfect for censure.  It rests with 
| themselves to decide which it is to be.