1 Eugene Schuyler (1840-90) was U.S.A. Secretary of Legation at Petersburg, 1873-6, and travelled in Central Asia in 1873.-A. M.
2 It is usual in Russia for a washerwoman when washing linen to take it to a river, stream, or pond, to rinse it.-A.M.
by falling trees; workmen fall from a roof, and seamstresses become consumptive. All real work is done with loss and peril of life. To hide this and not to see it is impossible. The one salvation in this situation, the one exit from it that a man of our time, shifting on to others the labour and peril of life, may not have, in accord with his own outlook on life, to call himself a scoundrel and a coward-is to take from others only what is essential for life, and himself to do real work at expense and risk to his own life.
A time will soon come, is already coming, when it will be a shame and a disgrace not only to eat a dinner of five courses served by footmen but to eat a dinner that has not been cooked by the hosts themselves; it will be a shame not only to drive out with fast trotters but even in a common cab when one can use one’s own legs; on work-days to wear clothes, boots, or gloves in which one cannot work, or to play on a piano costing £120 or even £5, while others, strangers, are having to work for one; or to feed a dog on milk and white bread while there are people who have no milk and bread; and to burn lights except to work by, or to heat a stove in which food is not cooked, while there are people who lack fire or light. To such a view we are inevitably and rapidly advancing. We already stand on the brink of that new life, and to establish that new view of life is the task of public opinion, and public opinion of that kind is rapidly forming itself it is women who form public opinion, and in our day women are particularly powerful.
CHAPTER XL
As is said in the Bible, to man is given the law of labour, to woman the law of child-bearing. Although with our science nous avons change tout ca, the law of the man as of the woman remains unaltered, as the liver remains in its place,-and the breach of it is still inevitably punished by death.
The only difference is that the general evasion of their duty by all men would be punished by death in such a near future as may be called the present, but the evasion of the law by all women would be punished in a more distant future. The general infringement of the law by all men destroys men at once, its infringement by all women destroys the next generation; but the evasion of the law by some men and some women does not destroy the human race, but deprives the offenders of their reasonable nature as human beings.
The neglect of the law by men began long ago in those classes which could coerce others and, ever widening, it has continued to the present time and has now reached to insanity-to an ideal of neglect of the law, to the ideal expressed by Prince Blokhin and shared by Renan and the whole educated world: machines are to do the work, while people will become bundles of nerves enjoying themselves. Evasion of her duty by woman used to be almost unknown.
It manifested itself only in prostitution and isolated crimes of abortion. Women of the wealthy classes continued to fulfil their law when the men had ceased to perform theirs, and consequently women’s influence became stronger and they continue to govern, and ought to govern, men who have infringed the law and consequently lost their reason.
It is often said that women (Parisian women, especially those who are childless) have become so bewitching, utilizing all the arts of civilization, that they have mastered man by their fascinations. This is not only wrong, but is just the reverse of the case. It is not the childless woman who has mastered man, but the mother, the one who has fulfilled the law of her nature while man has neglected his.
The woman who artificially makes herself barren and bewitches man by her shoulders and curls, is not a woman mastering man but a woman who, depraved by man, has descended to his level, like him has abandoned her duty, and like him has lost every reasonable perception of life.
From this mistake has arisen that wonderful nonsense called ‘women’s rights’.
The formula of those rights is this: ‘Ah! You, man,’ says the woman, ‘have violated your law of real work, and want us to bear the burden of ours. No! If that is so, then we, as well as you, can make a pretence of labour as you do, in banks, ministries, universities, academies, and studios; and like you we also wish to avail ourselves of other people’s work and to live only to satisfy our lusts under pretext of a division of labour.’
They say this and show in practice that they can make a pretence of work not at all worse, but even better, than men.
The so-called feminist question arose, and could only arise, among men who had infringed the law of real labour.
One has only to return to that law and the feminist question cannot exist.
A woman having her special, unquestionable, and unavoidable labour, will never demand the right to share also in man’s work in mines or in the ploughing field. She could demand only to share the sham labour of the wealthy classes.
The woman of our class was stronger than the man and still is stronger, not on account of her charms, not by her adroitness in making the same pharisaic pretence of work as man, but because she did not evade the law; because she bore that true labour at risk of life and with utmost effort-true labour from which the man of the wealthy classes had freed himself.
But within my own memory woman’s fall her infringement of her duty-has begun, and within my memory it has spread more and more widely.
Woman, having forgotten her law, has believed that her strength lies in the fascination of her allurements, or in her dexterity in the imitation of the sham work done by men.
But children are a hindrance to both of these.
And so with the help of science (science is always ready to do anything nasty) within my memory it has come about that among the wealthy classes dozens of methods of preventing pregnancy have appeared, and appliances for preventing childbirth have become common accessories of the toilet; and so the women-mothers of the wealthy classes who held power in their hands are letting it slip in order to compete with street-women and not be outdone by them.
That evil has spread far and spreads farther every day, and soon it will have reached all the women of the wealthy classes; and then they will be on a level with the men and like them will lose every reasonable sense of life. And then for that class there will be no recovery: but there is yet time.
For all that, more women than men still fulfil their law, and so there are reasonable beings among them, and therefore some women of our class still hold in their hands the possibility of saving it.
Ah!-if those women understood their worth, their power, and used these in the work of saving their husbands, brothers, and children-saving mankind!
Women-mothers of the wealthy classes, in your hands alone is the salvation of the men of our world from the evils from which they suffer! Not those women who are occupied with their figures, bustles, coiffures, and their attractiveness for men, and who against their will, by inadvertence and in despair, bear children, and hand them over to wet-nurses;1 nor yet those who attend various university lectures and talk about the psychomotor centres and differentials, and who also try to avoid child-bearing in order not to hinder the stupefaction they call their ‘development’,-but those women and mothers who, having the power to avoid child-birth, simply and consciously submit to that eternal, immutable law, knowing that the hardship and labour of that submission is their vocation.
Those are the women and mothers of our wealthy classes in whose hands, more than in any others, lies the salvation of the men of our world from the evils that oppress them. You, women and mothers, who consciously submit to the law of God, you alone in our unhappy perverted circle which has lost the semblance of being human, you alone know the whole true meaning of life according to the law of God. And you alone can by your example show men that happiness of life in submission to God’s will, of which they deprive themselves. You alone know those raptures and joys, seizing your whole being, and that bliss which is ordained for man when he does not evade God’s law.
You know the joy of love of your husband, a joy not ending, not broken-off like all others, but forming the beginning of a new joy of love
