CHAPTER XII
The Nature of Woman and Her Significance in the Universe
Meaning of womanhood — Instinct for pairing or matchmaking — Man, and matchmaking — High valuation of coitus — Individual sexual impulse, a special case — Womanhood as pairing or universal sexuality — Organic falseness of woman — Hysteria — Difference between man and beast, woman and man — The higher and lower life — Birth and death — Freedom and happiness — Happiness and man — Happiness and woman — Woman and the problem of existence — Non-existence of woman — Male and female friendship — Pairing identical with womanhood — Why women must be regarded as human — Contrast between subject — Object, matter, form, man, woman — Meaning of henids — Formation of woman by man — Significance of woman in the universe — Man as something, woman as nothing — Psychological problem of the fear of woman — Womanhood and crime — Creation of woman by man’s crime — Woman as his own sexuality accepted by man — Woman as the guilt of man — What man’s love of woman is, in its deepest significance
CHAPTER XIII
Judaism
Differences amongst men — Intermediate forms and racial anthropology — Comparison of Judaism and femaleness — Judaism as an idea — Antisemitism — Richard Wagner — Similarities between Jews and women — Judaism in science — The Jew not a monad — The Jew and the Englishman — Nature of humour — Humour and satire — The Jewess — Deepest significance of Judaism — Want of faith — The Jew not non-mystical, yet impious — Want of earnestness, and pride — The Jew as opposed to the hero — Judaism and Christianity — Origin of Christianity — Problem of the founders of religion — Christ as the conqueror of the Judaism in Himself — The founders of religions as the greatest of men — Conquest of inherent Judaism necessary for all founders of religion — Judaism and the present time — Judaism, femaleness, culture and humanity
CHAPTER XIV
Woman and Mankind
The idea of humanity, and woman as the match-maker — Goethe-worship — Womanising of man — Virginity and purity — Male origin of these ideas — Failure of woman to understand the erotic — Woman’s relation to sexuality — Coitus and love — Woman as the enemy of her own emancipation — Asceticism immoral — Sexual impulse as a want of respect — Problem of the Jew — Problem of the woman — Problem of slavery — Moral relation to women — Man as the opponent of emancipation — Ethical postulates — Two possibilities — The problem of women as the problem of humanity — Subjection of women — Persistence or disappearance of the human race — True ground of the immorality of the sexual impulse — Earthly paternity — Inclusion of women in the conception of humanity — The mother and the education of the human race — Last questions
Index
FIRST OR PREPARATORY PART
SEXUAL COMPLEXITY
INTRODUCTION
All thought begins with conceptions to a certain extent generalised, and thence is developed in two directions. On the one hand, generalisations become wider and wider, binding together by common properties a larger and larger number of phenomena, and so embracing a wider field of the world of facts. On the other hand, thought approaches more closely the meeting-point of all conceptions, the individual, the concrete complex unit towards which we approach only by thinking in an ever-narrowing circle, and by continually being able to add new specific and differentiating attributes to the general idea, “thing,” or “something.” It was known that fishes formed a class of the animal kingdom distinct from mammals, birds, or invertebrates, long before it was recognised on the one hand that fishes might be bony or cartilaginous, or on the other that fishes, birds and mammals composed a group differing from the invertebrates by many common characters.
The self-assertion of the mind over the world of facts in all its complexity of innumerable resemblances and differences has been compared with the rule of the struggle for existence among living beings. Our conceptions stand between us and reality. It is only step by step that we can control them. As in the case of a madman, we may first have to throw a net over the whole body so that some limit may be set to his struggles; and only after the whole has been thus secured, is it possible to attend to the proper restraint of each limb.
Two general conceptions have come down to us from primitive mankind, and from the earliest times have held our mental processes in their leash. Many a time these conceptions have undergone trivial corrections; they have been sent to the workshop and patched in head and limbs; they have been lopped and added to, expanded here, contracted there, as when new needs pierce through and through an old law of suffrage, bursting bond after bond. None the less, in spite of all amendment and alteration, we have still to reckon with the primitive conceptions, male and female.
It is true that among those we call women are some who are meagre, narrow-hipped, angular, muscular, energetic, highly mentalised; there are “women” with short hair and deep voices, just as there are “men” who are beardless and gossiping. We know, in fact, that there are unwomanly women, man-like women, and unmanly, womanish, woman-like men. We assign sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come to add contradictory ideas to our conceptions. Such a course is illogical.
In private conversation or in society, in scientific or general meetings, we have all taken part in frothy discussions on “Man and Woman,” or on the “Emancipation of Women.” There is a pitiful monotony in the fashion according to which, on such occasions, “men” and “women” have been treated as if, like red and white balls, they were alike in all respects save colour. In no case has the discussion been confined to an individual case, and as every one had different individuals in their mind, a real agreement was impossible. As people meant different things by the same words, there was a complete disharmony between language and ideas. Is it really the case that all women and men are marked off sharply from each other, the women, on the one hand, alike in all points, the men on the other? It is certainly the case that all previous treatment of the sexual differences, perhaps unconsciously, has implied this view. And yet nowhere else in nature is there such a yawning discontinuity. There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals, between chemical combinations and mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds. It is only in obedience to the most general, practical demand for a superficial view that we classify, make sharp divisions, pick out a single tune from the continuous melody of nature. But the old conceptions of the mind, like the customs of primitive commerce, become foolish in a new age. From the analogies I have given, the improbability may henceforward be taken for granted of finding in nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that a living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side or the other of the line. Matters are not so clear.
In the controversy as to the woman question, appeal has been made to the arbitration of anatomy, in the hope that by that aid a line could be drawn between those characters of males or females that are unalterable because inborn, and those that are acquired. (It was a strange adventure to attempt to decide the differences between the natural endowment of men and women on anatomical results; to suppose that if all other investigation failed to establish the difference, the matter could be settled by a few more grains of brain-weight on the one side.) However, the answer of the anatomists is clear enough, whether it refer to the brain or to any other portion of the body; absolute sexual distinctions between all men on the one side and all women on the other do not exist. Although the skeleton of the hand of most men is different from that of most women yet the sex cannot be determined with certainty either from the skeleton or from an isolated part with its muscles, tendons, skin, blood and nerves. The same is true of the chest, sacrum or skull. And what are we to say of the pelvis, that part of the skeleton in which, if anywhere, striking sexual differences exist? It is almost universally believed that in the one case the pelvis is adapted for the act of parturition, in the other case is not so adapted. And yet the character of the pelvis cannot be taken as an absolute criterion of sex. There are to be found, and the wayfarer knows this as well as the anatomist, many women with narrow
