ILLUSTRATIONS.

REVOLTED WOMAN

I.—Woman Up to Date.

‘Certain Women also made us astonished.’—Luke, xxiv. 22.

She is upon us, the Emancipated Woman. Privileges once the exclusive rights of Man are now accorded her without question, and, clad in Rational Dress, she is preparing to leap the few remaining barriers of convention. Her last advances have been swift and undisguised, and she feels her position at length strong enough to warrant the proclamation that she does not merely claim equal rights with man, but intends to rule him. Such symbols of independence as latch-keys and loose language are already hers; she may smoke—and does; and if she does not presently begin to wear trousers upon the streets—what some decently ambiguous writer calls bifurcated continuations!—we shall assume that the only reason for the abstention will be that womankind are, generally speaking, knock-kneed, and are unwilling to discover the fact to a censorious world which has a singular prejudice in favour of symmetrical legs.

Society has been ringing lately with the writings and doings of the pioneers of the New Woman, who forget that Woman’s Mission is Submission; but although the present complexion of affairs seems to have come about so suddenly, the fact should not be blinked that in reality it is but the inevitable outcome, in this age of toleration and laissez faire, of the Bloomerite agitation, the Women’s Rights frenzy, the Girl of the Period furore, and the Divided Skirt craze, which have attracted public attention at different times, ranging from over forty years ago to the present day.

Several apparently praiseworthy or harmless movements that have attracted the fickle enthusiasm of women during this same period have really been byways of this movement of emancipation. Thus, we have had the almost wholly admirable enthusiasm for the Hospital Nurse’s career; the (already much-abused) profession of Lady Journalist; the Woman Doctor; the Female Detective; the Lady Members of the School Board; and the (it must be allowed) most gracious and becoming office of Lady Guardian of the Poor.

Side by side, again, with these, are the altogether minor and trivial affectations of Lady Cricketers, the absurd propositions for New Amazons, or Women Warriors, who apparently are not sufficiently well read in classic lore to know what the strict following of the Amazons’ practice implied; nor can they reck aught of the origin of the Caryatides.

Again, the Political Woman is coming to the front, and though she may not yet vote, she takes the part of the busybody in Parliamentary Elections, and already sits on Electioneering Committees.

In this connexion, it should not readily be forgotten that Mrs. Brand earned her husband the somewhat humiliating reputation of having been sung into Parliament by his wife at the last election for Wisbech, and thus gave the coming profession of Women Politicians another push forward. The dull agricultural labourers of that constituency gave votes for vocal exercises on improvised platforms in village school-rooms, nor thought of aught but pleasing the lady who could sing them either into tears with the cheap sentimentality of Auld Robin Grey, melt them with the poignant pathos of ‘Way down the Swanee River’, or excite their laughter over the equally ready humour of the latest soi-disant ‘comic’ song from the London Halls. Think upon the most musical, most melancholy prospect thus opened out before our prophetic gaze! What matter whether you be Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Rotten-Tim-Healeyite, or a member of Mr. Justin MacCarthy’s tea-party, so long as your wife can win the rustics’ applause by her singing of such provocations to tears or laughter as The Banks of Allan Water or Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, or whatever may be the current successor of that vulgar chant?

But the so-called ‘New Purity’ movement, and novel evangels of that description, most do occupy the attention of the modern woman who is in want of an occupation.

We smile when we read of the proceedings of Mrs. Josephine Butler and her following of barren women who are the protagonists of the New Purity; for woman has ever been the immoral sex, from the time of Potiphar’s wife to these days when the Divorce Courts are at once the hardest worked in the Royal Courts of Justice, and the scenes of the most frantic struggles on the part of indelicate women, who, armed with opera-glasses and seated in the most favourable positions on Bench or among counsel, gloat over what should be the most repellent details in this constant public washing of dirty private linen, and survey the co-respondents with delighted satisfaction. The intensity of the joy shown by those who are fortunate enough to obtain a seat in court on a more than usually loathsome occasion is only equalled at the other extreme by the poignancy of regret exhibited by those unhappy ladies who have been unsuccessful in their scheming to secure places.

And, again, the reclamation of corrupt women, if not impossible, is rarely successful, for ‘woman is at heart a rake,’ and, as Ouida says, who has, one might surmise, unique opportunities of knowing, she is generally ‘corrupt because she likes it.’ Thus, throughout the whole range of history, Pagan or Christian, courtesans have never been to seek. They have, these filles de joie, always succeeded in attracting to themselves wealth and genius, luxury and intellect; and through their paramount influence, Society at the present day is corrupt to extremity. The Evangelists of the New Purity, who hold that the innate viciousness of man is the cause of woman’s subjection and inferiority, can have no reading nor any knowledge of the world’s history while they continue to proclaim their views; or else they know themselves, even as they preach, for hypocrites. For woman has ever been the active cause of sin, from the Fall to the present time, and doubtless will so continue until the end. It is not always, as they would have you believe, from necessity that the virtuous woman turns her back upon virtue, but very frequently from choice and a delight in sin and wrong-doing. How then shall the New Purity arise from the Old Corruption?

‘Who can find a virtuous woman?’ asks Solomon (Prov. xxxi. 10), and goes on to say that her price is far above rubies: doubtless for the same reason that rubies are so highly valued—because they are so scarce.

The trade of courtesan has always been numerous and powerful, and has been constantly recruited from every class. Vanity, of course, is the great inducement; love of dress and power, and greed of notoriety, are other compelling forces; and a joy in outraging all decency and propriety, of defying conventions of respectability and religion, is answerable for the rest.

This kind of woman makes all mankind her prey, and has no generous instincts whatever. Everything ministers to her vanity and lavish waste. It is a matter of notoriety that men of light and leading are drawn after her all-conquering chariot, and that in three out of every four plays she is the heroine.

She is cruel as the grave, heartless as a stone, and extravagant beyond measure. Her kind have utterly wasted the patrimony of thousands of dupes, and having reduced them to beggary the most abject and forlorn, have sought fresh victims of their insatiable greed.

They have ruined kingdoms, like the mistresses of Louis XIV. and XV. of France; they have brought shame and dishonour upon nations, like the dissolute women of Charles the Second’s court, who toyed with his wantons at Whitehall while the Dutch guns thundered off Tilbury; they have risen, like Madame de Pompadour, to a height from which they looked down upon diplomatists of the Great Powers of Europe—and scorned them; and the blood shed during many sanguinary wars has been shed at their behest. Courtesans have married into the peerage of England, and, indeed, some of the oldest titles—not to say the bluest blood—of the three kingdoms derive from the king’s women: Nell Gwynne, whose offspring became Duke of Saint Albans; Louise de Querouaille, created Duchess of Portsmouth; Barbara Palmer, made Duchess of Cleveland; and others. Lais and Phryne belong not to one period, but to all eras alike; Aspasias and Fredegondas are of all countries and of every class.

But ‘pretty Fanny’s ways’ are many and diverse. It may be that she is incapacitated or restrained from living as full and as free a life as she could wish. Very well: then she becomes a New Puritan, whose self-appointed functions are to those privy cupboards in which repellent skeletons are concealed; to the social sewers; and, in fine, to all those places where she can gratify the morbid curiosity which actuates the New Puritanical mind, rather than the hope of, or belief in, achieving anything for the benefit of the race.

If she has no wish to become a New Puritan, there be many other modern fads in which she may fulfil a part. She may, as a New Traveller, show us the glory of the New Travel, in the manner of that greatly daring lady, the intrepid Mrs. French-Sheldon, who, travelling at the heels of the masculine explorers of African wilds (carried luxuriously in a litter, accompanied with cases of champagne and a large escort of Zanzibari porters), went forth to study the untutored savage in his native wilds. But when the untutored presented themselves before this up-to-date traveller unclothed as well as unread, that very properly-tutored lady screamed, and distributed loin-cloths to these happy and yet unabashed primitives. She delivered an address before the British Association on her return from that unnecessary and futile expedition, in which she tickled the sensibilities of the assembled savants by describing how she kept her hundred and thirty Zanzibari coolies in order with a whip. She told the members of the Association that ‘she went into Africa with all delicacy and womanliness.’ Possibly; but judging her out of her own mouth, she must have left a goodly portion of those qualities behind her in the Dark Continent.

Other women travellers—of the type of Miss Dowie, for instance—are more unconventional, if less adventurous. She, a true exemplar of the women who would forget their sex—and make others forget it—if they could, climbed the Karpathian mountains in search of a little cheap notoriety, clad in knickerbockers, jacket, and waistcoat, and redolent of tobacco from the smoking of cigarettes. Her adventures added nothing to the gaiety of readers, nor to the world’s store of science; but we were the richer by one more spectacular extravaganza.

This is that somewhat repellent type, the mannish woman, who is not content to charm man by the grace and sweetness of her femininity, but must aspire to be a poor copy of himself. The type is common nowadays, and the individuals of it have gone through several phases of their singular craze. These are they who walk with the guns of a shooting party; who tramp the stubble and arouse the ill-humours of that creature of wrath and impatience, the sportsman who is eager for a drive at the birds. These women, not dismayed by the butchery of the battue, look on, and even carry a gun themselves; but they are the nuisances of the party, and flush covey after covey by showing themselves to the wary birds when they should be crouching down beside some windy hedge, in a moist and clammy October ditch.

‘Let us be unconventional, or we die!’ is the unspoken, yet very evident, aspiration of the Modern Woman; and, really, the efforts made in the direction of the unconventional are so uniformly extravagant that we almost, from sheer weariness and disgust, begin to wish she had gone some way toward adopting the alternative.

The New Woman will know naught of convention, nor submission. Her advocates do not hail from Altruria; they are aggressive, and devoured with a zeal for domination, in revolt from the ‘centuries of slavery’ to which, according to themselves, they have been compelled by Man. ‘Man,’ shrieks one, ‘is always in mischief or in bed.’ But she will have this changed; not, indeed, in the present generation of vipers, which is stubborn and stiff-necked in its wicked ways; but she will see, and urges her fellow-women to see also, that proper principles are spanked into the coming generations. Considering, however, that the nursery has ever been the woman’s peculiar province, surely the blame, if blame there be, must rest with her for the past and present faulty upbringing of the race. If ‘proper principles’ have not already had their part in the education of man, surely that must be owing solely to woman’s flagrant dereliction of duty.

Instances, neither few nor far between, may be urged of wives and mothers, possibly also sisters and maiden aunts, who have raised men to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable industry. True, indeed, it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to deny their influence and its beneficent effects; but to use it as an argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a non sequitur of the most absurd description. The influence wielded by those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to themselves and their sex; because they were, in a word, so womanly. The influence of the New Woman upon the man is, and shall be, nil, because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man fight for supremacy.

Women’s advocates come and go like summer flies, provoking to wrath by their insistent buzzing, but, when caught and examined, proving to be insignificant enough. They have their little day, and cease to be. Who, for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person who floated into publicity on the ‘Marriage a Failure’ correspondence of the Daily Telegraph, some few years ago, and, in the heyday of her notoriety, wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel, The Wing of Azrael? Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of greater licence.

And so the game proceeds: each woman daring a little further than her fellow-adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection; of freedom in contracting marriages and licence in dissolving them; each newcomer shocking the sensibilities of women readers with delightful thrills from the impropriety, expressed or implied, that runs through her pages as inevitably as the watermark runs through ‘laid’ paper.

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