Feminism Today
By LADY THE time has at last come when the self-respecting intelligent woman need no longer call herself a feminist. , During the first fifty years of our century the great women were all feminists—the Pankhursts, Josephine Butler, Virginia Woolf and the rest. Even Eleanor Rathbone, who died at the turn of the half-century, and whom Mr. Gollancz • in his autobiography calls " the greatest woman of her day," was a great feminist—perhaps the last of them. At any rate, it is a fairly safe guess that the great women of the next fifty years will not be known for their feminism. We need not seek far for the cause of this change. The battle is over. The women have won. There are scarcely any positions of power or responsibility in which we should be surprised to find women. They have even faced up to and accepted some of the harsher fruits of their victory. How often has one not read some version of that ever-recurrent lament in the correspondence columns of the Press : " Has the modern man lost all sense of chivalry ? An elderly lady boarded a bus during the rush-hour today, loaded with parcels, but not one man rose to offer her his seat. This act of, surely, common courtesy was left to me. (signed) Another Elderly Lady." To which comes the inevitable reply : " No man is going to give up his seat to a ' lady ' after the treatment I received from one last week. When r offered her mine she declined it curtly, saying she didn't want chivalry from (signed) Mere Male."
Though the main feminist battle is over, there are of course skirmishes still going on in the outlying parts of our social life. As happens after all prolonged wars, various pockets of resistance still remain to be reduced, and there is a certain amount of " cleaning-up " to be donp. All honour to the determined Amazons who conduct these minor but heroic ' operations. There is the " Society for Moral and Social Hygiene," with its paper The Shield 'and it battle for sex- equality and justice in public morality. 'There is "St. Joan's Social and Political Alliance," and many other devoted organi- sations. Apart from these, there are countless unorganised individuals, men and women, who note with regret the back- ward areas where anti-feminism still lurks, aware of criticism but obstinate. For.example—Oxford and Cambridge, where women cannot dine at the high table " of a man's college, and no head of a woman's college has yet been Vice-Chancellor. The House of Lords, where peeresses in their own right cannot take their seats. Above all the Civil Service, where women are still paid less than men for the same work. But, despite these ugly relics of sex-jealousy and obscurantism, the main feminist fight has indeed been won, and active young women today are off to fresh wars and problems new.
Is it too early, in fact, to begin detecting the signs of reaction, perhaps even a hint of dead-sea fruit in the mouths of the victors themselves ? In his Aftermath Mr. Churchill wrote : " Justice, that eternal fugitive from the councils of conquerors, had passed over to the opposite camp." One seems to catch hints that his process is already at work among some of the women of today. With a few of them it takes the form of a vague feeling that they have won more freedom than they bar- gained for. With others, there is a definite move to rebuild the shattered male image. Witness Miss Monica Dickens' forthright pronouncement to the numerous readers of Woman's Own: "Men are born with a lord and master instinct. They think they are the rulers of the earth, and of course they are. Women are not equipped to rule."
Any counter-feminist movement of this kind is enormously strengthened by a parallel change in women's ambitions. The rest;,tution of motherhood to a more honourable and exciting place in our national life has undoubtedly gone hand-in-hand with the decline in feminism. It is possible to trace echoes of these social changes in many unexpected quarters—for example in women's attitude to the marriage service. I can remember a time when the bride-to-be eagerly debated the pros and cons of including the word " obey " in her promise to love honour and obey ' her husband. More often than not the " obey " was quietly dropped. Nowadays I am assured that this once burning question is never even mentioned. Similarly the brides of the 'twenties and 'thirties frequently had the " procreation of children " omitted from the declared purposes of marriage. Not so today.
Incidentally, it seems probable that some of our latter-day feminists, if they had their way, would again alter the marriage service to suit our social needs. These people advocate a legal wage to be paid to every wife by her husband, for her services as wife, mother and housekeeper. Thus the familiar words of the bridegroom would take on a new and up-to-date ring : " With thy housewife's wage I thee endow." The " housewife's wage " is ludicrous and impracticable. But it is, nevertheless, a bold solution to a real problem. Even if the answer these reformers give is the wrong one, the problem they point to still remains. It is the eternal problem of achieving true partnership in marriage.
After the marriage service, clothes. Here again a definite movement in favour of " feminini " fashions appears to have set in. Slacks and jeans are no doubt all right for utility purposes; and during the war a temporary concession to the military spirit was responsible for hideously wide padded shoulders, epaulettes and other attempts to make women look like Guards officers. But, apart from these aberrations, women's clothes have consistently swirled their owners into a more and more feminine world, befrilled and bouffant, of laces, shawls, stoles, hoops and crinolines.
Even in the women's colleges, where in the old days a certain mannishness of attire was apt to denote the intellectual, today you would find no more than the usual quota of brogues, mannish tweeds, shirts and cropped heads to be found, say, among the gardening population of any normal English village. It is a far cry from the story of the much-loved female don, of whom someone once said : I never can decide whether she is a man dressed up as a woman or a woman dressed up as a man," to which a celebrated university wit replied, " A man dressed up as a man."
Old-fashioned feminism involved one curious paradox, which may, in the words of Karl Marx, have " contained the seeds of its own decay." While setting out to champion womanhood the feminists ended by suggesting that woman's true destiny was to turn, as near .as possible, into a man; to have what men have, do what men do, be what men are. Today, with so many " male " opportunities open to her, woman is rediscover- ing with pleased excitement that she is capable of certain activities and experiences of the utmost value absolutely denied to man. In other words, the austere and noble cult of feminism is rapidly melting away into the sunnier practices of feminity. Not mere fluffy feminity, but all the pleasures and responsibili- ties involved in being a woman, a wife and a mother. But, while the new cult is excellent in itself, it would be sad if women allowed the pendulum to swing back too far in the new-old direction. Nature has so designed them physically that they will always be handicapped to a certain extent in any work they undertake, outside the home, in competition with men. They will always need a special spur to drive them along these difficult roads; in the old days the feminist movement and all the forces behind it provided the spur. Today, we still need women in greater numbers in all kinds of public and semi- public work. But they are never again going to sacrifice the " feminine " side of their dual natures on these altars, however worthy of devotion they may be. Perhaps the spur will turn out to be that most human of all human itches—the itch to climb Mount - Everest. In this case " Mount Everest " stands for the combinatidn of family life with a career.
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