THE LITTLE WOMAN
I.A.R. Wylie
November 1945

The famous jester, Joe Miller, probably under the influence of a Restoration banquet, once boasted that, at a moment's notice, he could make a joke on any subject. He was immediately challenged to make a joke about the King. As in those days jests about the monarchy were an unhealthy amusement, Mr. Miller had to think fast.

"The King, gentlemen," he said, "is no subject."

And thereby won his bet and withdrew his neck into safety.

Contrariwise, Woman is always a subject. Whenever lecturers, essayists, psychoanalysts, or women themselves have nothing else to talk, write or worry about, they can always propound such questions as, "Do Women ____?", "Why Don't Women ___?", or "Are Women ____?" and find an audience, if no answer. It would seem that Woman, who by accepted tradition is always a woman before she is anything else, in counterdistinction to a man who may be first and foremost a poet or a plumber, is a sort of chronic interrogation mark, the unsolved riddle of the ages, a poor bewildered and bewildering creature who in spite of her long sojourn on earth has never properly adjusted herself to herself or to her environment, let alone to her fellow-wayfarer, Man. In vain she takes up determined attitudes in various niches. Sooner or later she falls out of them, sometimes by accident, sometimes, in a fit of neurotic self-dissatisfaction, deliberately, but always to sounds of disapprobation or rude mirth from the spectators.

At some periods, as in the Victorian era, she assumes the pose of Wife and Mother and develops - as apparently inevitable by-products - megrims, vapors and the ability to faint at the sight of a mouse. Or going into reverse she may become a Career Woman who tends to strut, snort, shoot her cuffs, blow smoke through her nose, and generally behave like some strange and wondrous beast that has never been before and will never be again - in other words the Exceptional Woman who has, incidentally, no use for other women of any ilk. (It is typical that Lady Astor, the first woman member of Parliament, was, and probably still is, a violent antisuffragist. What is sauce for the goose, obviously, is not sauce for geese.) Or, consumed with managerial energies and debarred from the council chambers of her country, she may become a Femme Fatale and run it by remote control from the councilor's bedroom. Or, as a desperate compromise, she may assay to be everything at once, Wife, Mother, Career Woman and Femme Fatale, at which point the psychoanalyst steps into the picture and at umpty dollars an hour, at least once a week over a period of years, endeavors to discover what is the matter with her, and to bring her back to whatever he happens, at the moment, to consider normality.

As a one-time suffragette who knocked off policemen's helmets and sandbagged Cabinet Ministers in the cause of Woman's emancipation, I have to admit, as indeed I had to admit at the height of my crusading fervor, that next to the dinosaurus, Woman is probably nature's most outstanding failure. For the life of me, I cannot think of any sphere of activity in which she is even passably successful, except in the matter of surviving, where she obviously has the dinosaurus licked. Her most determined admirer would be hard put to it to produce one first-class genius in any of the creative arts, and more than a very few top-ranking talents in the interpretive arts. In science, Madame Curie has to be produced over and over again like a succession of rabbits out of a conjurer's hat. The Brontes and Jane Austen confront an endless chain of masculine storytellers and writers from Homer to Steinbeck. A fragmentary and dubious Sappho, a wispy Emily Dickinson, a somewhat overlyrical Elizabeth Browning, are about all the sex has to show for itself in poetry. There have been no great women painters or composers. Even in fields marked off as peculiarly their own, women, judged by masculine standards, are lamentably second rate. The best couturiers, hairdressers, home-designers and cooks are men. I suspect that, were it biologically possible, men would make better mothers.

Worst of all, women are conscious failures and consequently in a chronic state of discontent which may be divine but is certainly uncomfortable. They suffer in a way in which men - who, whatever mess they make of themselves and their environment, are always self-satisfied - never suffer. In spite of energetic and heavily sponsored drives on behalf of wifehood and motherhood and her own overemphasis on the importance of those roles, the Wife and Mother when challenged will invariably describe herself as "just a Wife and Mother." The Exceptional Woman, who reminded Dr. Johnson of a dog walking on its hind legs, in spite of struts and snorts, feels in her deepest consciousness that she is, in fact, a freak. No to be either "just" anything or freakish is not a happy state. And it is a fact that as one-half of a hapless species, women are the more unhappy.

Yet, demonstrably, they are not stupider than men. They couldn't be. Let us consider for a moment our world, governed as it is by masculine genius of every sort, from the point of view of a visiting and impartial Martian. He would see that it was, at best, a difficult setting for a very brief career. Four-fifths of it is under water. Vast tracts are uninhabitable. The climate - except, I will admit without argument, in California - has to be endured and combated. It is subject to typhoons, hurricanes, quakes, droughts and floods. It is foredoomed to extinction. We ourselves, physically speaking, appear to have been dreamed up by a plumber of the Heath Robinson variety, and that the plumbing works at all for any length of time is its most astounding feature. Thanks to an increasing number of spells and counterspells evolved by our witch-doctors, we survive an increasing number and variety of diseases but only long enough to make the dour discovery that we have been pitch-jerked without so much as a will-you-won't-you into a dance whose steps and rhythm have never been explained to us. The Martian would naturally suppose that Man, with these horrific handicaps, would bend all his energies and capacities to prolonging his life and making it, if not reasonable, at least endurable. He observes, on the contrary, that no sooner has Man discovered one cure for his disabilities than he works out a new and better way for making himself miserable.

The rocket-bomb follows penicillin as the night the day. A new technique for dealing with dreadful wounds is followed by new ways of inflicting them. Having found means to prolong his pitiable span of life Man proceeds to cut himself down in the high noon of his youth. He creates the ideals of justice and mercy only to treat his fellow-man with an inhumanity that would puzzle a normal tiger. In his domestic life he builds Better Homes, equipped with every sort of labor-saving device (though in reality labor is the only occupation that gives him any real satisfaction, and his so-called pleasures more often than not goad him to drink), and promptly lays them flat with high explosives, driving himself into the wilderness to perish with quite unnecessary discomfor. New methods of communication are followed up by customs, censorships, tariffs, frontiers, travel restrictions, and, if necessary, wars so that countries now literally within speaking distance of each other, are more isolated than in the days of sail and coach. Generalizing roughly, the Martian, on his return, would have to report that Man, having found way to make his life longer and better, at once, as though goaded by invisible Furies, sets about making it shorter and worse. And this, the Martian would decide, is just plain stupid.

It is so stupid that it is unbeatable. I maintain, in all fairness, that Woman, in Man's place, couldn't make a worse mess of things. Conceivably she might do better. At least she would not delude herself that she was making a howling success of them, which is the method by which Man keeps himself smug and relatively satisfied in the midst of his own self-invoked and insane chaos.

Yet Woman, herself a victim, makes only sporadic and feeble efforts to take the reins. And no gentleman has so much as offered her a place on the saddle with him.

II

Now Man has brains. To the Martian they may seem rudimentary, but they are at any rate good enough to enable him to find out some interesting and even useful facts about himself and his minute universe. That he uses them to his own undoing surely denotes, therefore, some emotional maladjustment, a lack of ballast and balance which we have learned to describe as a neurosis. Somewhere, at any rate, under his erratic leadership, humanity has gone wrong and figuratively taken to drink to drown its awareness of sin and failure. Since one-half of it, from the dawn of its disastrous history, has been intellectually inert and physically inadequate, the tragedy is understandable and inevitable. Any four-cylindered engine, bearing a heavy load, and firing on only two cylinders, is doomed eventually to fall apart. But why and when did the other two cyclinders stop firing? And can they be put into action again before the whole machine reels onto the scrap-heap?

We know, in spite of our erudite pretensions, very little of our origins. Peering back through the mists of history we can only dimly discern the First Man and the First Woman fighting, for no very obvious reason, to survive. In that struggle one thing is biologically certain. Though there were undoubtedly differences in point of view and temperament, there was little choose between them in muscle and brain power. (If anything the woman may have been the more agile and enduring and almost certainly, as are all female animals, she was more dangerous as an antagonist.) There wasn't much talk of any sort and none at all about Woman's Sphere. WHatever the man was, stoop-shouldered, bow-legged, low-browed, and squint-eyed, the woman was. Whatever he had to be, cunning, ferocious, and tenacious, she had to be. True, she was in addition a mother, but incidentally, casually, and with no more fuss and feathers than the man gave to the business of his no less incidental and casual fatherhood. If George Jr. survived that was all right. If he didn't that was all right too. There were, apparently, plenty more where he came from. Mother love, if such it could be called, was a very brief emotional episode, liable under prolonged pressure to turn into violent antipathy. (It was not untl much later that it began to exert a stranglehold upon the species.) Men and women hunted and fought side by side, and when they quarreled it was a matter of whose skull got cracked first. They were neither lovely, loving nor lovable. Their advance on their uncharted course toward the stars or wherever they were going, was slow and clumsy. But at any rate they were on their way together.

Then something disastrous happened and they parted company. The man went on and the woman sat down and waited for him to come back from time to time and tell her, more or less accurately, what he had been up to. Like so many convulsions in our history I imagine that the change was brought about by some trivial incident. (One is reminded of Priestley's play, Dangerous Corner, where the course of half a dozen lives hangs on the decision of one character - if I remember correctly - to pick up a cigarette box.) Perhaps on some dismal winters day some prehistoric woman, armed cap a pie for the hunt or on a raid on a neighboring larder, took the unprecedented notion to stay home and let George do it. Perhaps she had a headache, perhaps George Jr. was imminent and to be caught with him in a hand-to-hand scuffle would be to put her at an obvious disadvantage. At any rate, for whatever reason, she laid her flint aside, built herself a nice fire, warmed up the equivalent of a pot of coffee, figuratively turned on the radio and gave herself a day. She found that she liked it. (We always like the line of least resistance and it is always fatal. That woman happened to find it first was, no doubt, pure accident.)

She tried it again. By grapevine communication other women learned of the experiment and gave it a satisfactory trial. Then, of course, some sort of alibi had to be concocted. The habit of staying home had to be explained in noble and resounding terms. Or as we would say nowadays, it had to be rationalized and proved to everyone's satisfaction that Woman, far from turning sybarite and parasite, was sacrificing herself on the altar of her Duty. Whereupon her mind, always a shade more agile than George's (Sr. or Jr.), lit on Mother Love and the Woman's Sphere. Henceforward it was her business in life to keep the home fires burning (not for herself, of course, but against the return of her warrior-hunter), his slippers by the embers, and the stew simmering. She became The Little Woman, or as Fleta Campbell Springer once sardonically described her, The Blue Birdie in the Blue Nesty. And George Sr. for the first time cast lascivious glances at the Femme Fatale of his period and thought up divorce as a social out from acute domestic boredom. George Jr., overwhelmed and overburdened by Mother Love, took to the woods.

But though bored, puzzled and slightly resentful, George Sr. began to realize that Woman's new and self-ordained role in the scheme of things had its advantages even for him. Without his knowing she had, it seemed, cramped his style. There was a tiresome, restraining reasonableness about her. She killed only what she needed. She fought only when she had to. Without her plucking at his coat-tails with her everlasting "Enough's enough" he was now free to fight and kill without rhyme or reason. He in his turn had to produce an alibi - an equally lofty explanation for the scalps and carcasses with which the family cave was now embarrassingly cluttered. They became therefore not merely testimonies of his unbridled skill in destruction but tributes to the Little Woman who by this time had become one of his possessions and therefore an object of pride and responsibility. (In due course she ranked with his ox and his ass and anything else that was his.) His shield covered her. Without it, he liked to think and said so interminably, she must surely perish. The Little Woman, in her turn, was at first surprised and annoyed. But once she grasped the idea that the scalps and carcasses were tributes and that on their superior number depended her prestige among other women, she accepted them graciously and presently demanded them. In due course she began to nag for them.

Thus chivalry was established as an institution. War became Man's main preoccupation. And civilization, still in the making, bore with it in the womb of time the seeds of its own dissolution.

III

Somewhere in that massive masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West observes that the main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women idiots. By which she means, obviously, that men are actively and women passively insane. Certainly from the moment that women began confining themselves to the home and centering their happiness and raison d'etre on its inhabitants who were never intended or able to carry such an abnormal burden, they became intellectually inert and physically they deteriorated. Whereas me grew straight of limb, keen-sighted and fleet-footed, women developed knock-knees and when they ran, which was seldom, for running had become unwomanly, it was with a wobbly, teetering gait reminiscent of an alarmed duck. Their marksmanship, even in the home, became deplorable and an unfailing source of masculine humor.

Henceforward, whenever a woman suffered an urge to create something over and above such contributions to the home and family as crocheted antimacassards, hand-painted vases, or woolen scarves, whenever she had "immortal longings," she knew that she was becoming "freakish" and either suppressed or hid them, shamefacedly, as did the Brontes and a certain Mlle. Dupin, under a stalwart masculine alias. Thus the capacity to create, like her muscles, withered in her. Even in the home she became uninventive, conservative, and amateurishly second-rate. It was George who thought up the new sauce, the better stuffings, the back-saving washtubs. Since it pleased him, and it was her business in life, not to mention her livelihood, to please him (and she still retained a tough urge to survive) she stood by in respectful admiration.

"He for God only, she for God in him," Milton sang with forthright masculine modesty. He did not add, for he certainly did not realize it, that George had already begun to suffer from his own excess of divinity and that Little Woman's overpowering appreciation of it. He and George Jr. were, as they might have said, homesick, by which they meant sick of home. If they were spineless they finally yielded to its enticements and became that product of excess Mother Love and bane of the world, chronic adolescents. If they had guts they fled it, with one lofty excuse after another, to the far corners of the earth. As scientists and explorers they discovered poles and desert wastes where they couldn't live. They intruded on continents where they did not belong, and as the original inhabitants raised objections, started the glorious business of converting, or in other words, exterminating them - unless, as sometimes happened, they were exterminated first. They invented new and faster ways of getting further and further. When the Little Woman and then nest grew altogether too domestic they invented wars, decided that some foul foreigner - and this on a little two-by-four earth, small as an antheap in a ridiculous little universe - had insulted them, or what was worse, the Little Woman; and nothing less than blood, floods of it and even their own, could wash out the dishonoring stain. The Little Woman stayed home, wept, and knitted socks and pull-overs for her hero and defender. She was still faintly puzzled by him but also proud and happy to think that he was prepared to kill and even be killed for her sake. Did he not sing to her:

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honor more?

And wasn't that beautiful?

The notion that she ought to step into the fracas and bat him and George Jr. over the head on the off-chance of knocking some sense into them, as her dynamic ancestresses would have done, flickered faintly in her from time to time, but it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that, again thanks to a trivial incident, the smoldering spark burst into a small, hot flame.

The Right Honorable Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain, provided the incident. Amiably amused at the mild protests of a group of women who besides being wives, mothers and taxpayers had an unreasonable urge to become voters, he pointed out to them in a public speech that men, when they had demanded the suffrage, had cared enough to fight for it. They had torn up paving-stones, destroyed property, and broken heads. They had even died for it. The Little Woman, of course, would not and indeed could not do such things. Ergo, she didn't care enough. Ergo, since she could not fight for her rights, she hadn't any. Ergo, she must depend on masculine chivalry, exercising that well-known sway in her own peculiar sphere, the nest. And so forth and so on.

Having uttered which pious and paternal platitudes Mr. Asquith went his placid way. Soon afterward, when he was again on a public platform, a flour barrel, cunningly concealed in the flies of the auditorium, and to the shrill screams of "Votes for Women!" emptied itself over his astonished head. The fat was in the fire. Or, more poetically speaking, Mr. Asquith had involuntarily ushered in the dawn. With what can only be described as a hell of a yell thousands of wives and mothers burst out of their nests, and, according to prescription, tore up paving-stones, destroyed property, and broke heads; and though they rigidly adhered to their old feminine characteristic of avoiding the kill, save in dire necessity, many of them died.

The results were startling. It was discovered that a relative handful of human beings, unarmed save with a resolute fighting temper and a conviction of justice, could set the forces of society - armed to the teeth but with a bad conscience - right back on their heels. It was in vain that the police force reorganized itself to cope with an unprecedented situation. They didn't cope. The Houses of Parliament, in a state of panic, passed the famous (or infamous) Cat-and-Mouse Act. It didn't work. The First World War mercifully came to the men's aid and enabled them to present the Little Women with their vote without obvious loss of face. But what was really important news was the effect on the Little Women themselves of their own outrageous conduct. To that, as one of them, I can bear witness.

I am not very clear how or why I had become one of them. My adolescence had been spent in Germany, where I had acquired a lofty contempt for women in general and a slinking distrust of myself. But besides being a vigorous creature, spoiling for a fight - thought I did not know it and as a woman would certainly never have acknowledged it - I had, I like to believe, a rudimentary sense of justice. Since women, whether they were idiots or not, paid taxes, they had a right to vote. For which ostensible reason, at any rate, I plunged into the fray. To my astonishment I found that women, in spite of knock-knees and the fact that for centuries a respectable woman's leg had not even been mentionable, could at a pinch outrun the average London bobby. Their aim with a little practice became good enough to land ripe vegetables in ministerial eyes, their wits sharp enough to keep Scotland Yard running around round in circles and looking very silly. Their capacity for impromptu organization, for secrecy and loyalty, their iconoclastic disregard for class and established order were a revelation to all concerned but especially themselves.

Best of all was the discovery that when it came down to a real slugging match they were not at such a hopeless disadvantage as tradition would have had them suppose. The day that, with a straight left to the jaw, I sent a fair-sized CID officer, who was attempting to arrest an escaped "mouse," into the orchestra pit of the Pavillion Theatre where we were holding one of our belligerent meetings, was the day of my own coming-of-age. (Incidentally, I met my victim at Southampton during the war. I was on my way to France and my late antagonist passed me through the Secret Service controls ahead of all the brass hats. He explained that he knew from experience I was a good citizen, and we shook hands warmly.) Since I was no genius the episode could not make me one, but it set me free to be whatever I was to the top of my bent. Had Emily Bronte had my chance to deliver that straight left, assuredly she would have written a masterpiece thereafter that would have made her actual accomplishment look like the cramped, tormented struggles of a winged and caged eagle.

For two years of wild and sometimes dangerous adventure I worked and fought alongside vigorous, happy, well-adjusted women who laughed instead of tittering, who walked freely instead of teetering, who could outfast Gandhi and come out with a grin and a jest. I slept on hard floors between elderly duchesses, stout cooks, and young shopgirls. We were often tired, hurt and frightened. But we were content as we had never been. We shared a life of joy that we had never known. Most of my fellow-fighters were Wives and Mothers. And strange things happened to their domestic life. Husbands came home with a new eagerness, at first perhaps because they knew that the Little Woman was safe in Holloway Jail, but later because it was good to find her home, fun to hear how she had thumb-nosed that old fuddy-duddy at Bow Street or outsmarted the CID boys again. Sometimes, since she was often tired and battered, he got supper for her. He gave her the high sign when the plain-clothes police, on the watch across the way, had gone off to supper or for other causes, and gave her a leg up over the garden wall. When he was very brave he marched with banners in her processions. Little as they may have realized it they were recapturing the old comradeship that their ancestors had lost for them.

As for the children, their attitude changed rapidly from one of affectionate toleration for poor darling mother to one of wide-eyed wonder. Released from the smother of mother love - for she was too busy to be more than casually concerned with them - they discovered that they liked her. She was a great sport. She had guts. For the first time they began to boast about her, not on the strength of her domestic virtues but on the length of her prison sentences. The home, which had been showing marked signs of disintegration, was in the fire of battle being welded into a new unity. Those women who stood outside the fight - I regret to say the vast majority - and who were being more than usually Little Women, hated the fighters with the venomous rage of envy.

In the war, at the height of the struggle, the fighters put their cause aside to merge themselves in the national effort. But some of their gains remained. Shorts at Wimbledon and women in uniform testified to a revolution. It was not yet a total war and total effort was not demanded of them. They were not yet to fight and die, except by accident, in their own right. That right came to them in the Second World War. Then their capacities had to be acknowledged and accepted. They proved what many of them had already suspected, that they were physically as brave as men and often more enduring. They were born warriors who in a cause which their reason declared vital could and would fight effectively to the last ditch. After untold centuries some of them were themselves again.

Will they remain themselves? Are they too few to save too many? Will the Blue Birdie in the Blue Nesty prove too strong for them? On the answer to these questions hangs our human survival.

IV

Recently we witnessed the United Nations draw up blueprints for a world organization supposedly on a democratic basis, with a full half of its inhabitants almost entirely unrepresented. Dean Gildersleeve, as a sop tossed to the American women voters, was allowed to trot along with other minor minorities. Great Britain, who literally owed her existence to her women, sent Ellen Wilkinson and two or three others, not to speak for them, for as far as the general public was concerned they never opened their mouths in council, but to come along and watch George do it again.

The spectacle would have been ludicrous if it had not been, in its implications, tragic. It foreshadowed fresh disaster. For sooner or later, without the checks and balances of a healthy two-party system, Man's passion for power for its own sake, his unbridled creativeness, will overwhelm his platitudes and we shall have another explosion that may literally rock our physical world to its axis.

Women cannot justly blame men for this state of affairs. If they want to go back to First Causes they can blame the first woman who exchanged her birthright for what she mistakenly imagined was a sheltered life. Then they can blame themselves for treading supinely in her footsteps. If men still pat them on the head and allow them to write their speeches for them in the back office, it is for good and sufficient reason. Men, whatever else they are not, are at least professionals who treat their talents or their genius with respect. No love of home or wife or child ever stopped a man who was worth his salt from doing his duty - which is, in the first place, to whatever gifts the chance meeting of sperm and ovum have given him. If men bar the doors of their council-chambers, their universities, and their professions to women, it is because they know from experience that, at the first love-call, women however talented will toss their careers over the windmill and retire into the nest where a long, expensive training and perhaps their genius will be of no further use to them or to their world. They are the eternal amateurs and no professional, except as an off-day amusement, wants to work with amateurs. Their very attitude toward themselves and the job damns them to second-rateness.

Heaven knows, the Little Woman is not inactive in the world's affairs. She is the very heart and soul of those well-meaning, and, as things are, necessary organizations which, among their good deeds, convince Man-on-the-Rampage that, lost in wonder at his prowess, the Little Woman is waiting at home for him with bands and bandages. She tosses committees from hand to hand, like a juggler, with a brisk complacency and floods of talk that may be an endeavor to silence the still, small grunts of a disgusted ancestress. For the times demand much more of her, and perhaps in the depths of her conscience she knows it. That they are as they are is largely her responsibility. She has stood by and applauded while the other half of her species dealt her civilization blows from which it may never recover. The sands are running out fast.

If anything is to be saved, the Little Woman will have to move faster, out of the nest (which will then become, for her too, a place to return to but not to live in) and down into the dusty arena with her sleeves rolled up. Human relations, relieved at last from the crushing burden of her dependence on them, may then become what they should be, the adornment of life but not its foundations. And her children, now clinging to childhood till they find another and more permanent womb, may escape her stifling claims on them to become full-grown. Most important of all, she may recover her own fighting temper. (For pacifism is the symptom of a weak spine and a weak head or both, and leads, as we know to our bitter cost, to bigger and worse wars.) What she will fight for, if and when she takes the chance, is anybody's guess. But whatever she wants enough to fight for she can have. Actually and potentially she is very strong. Without resorting to violence - though she must be capable of violence - by merely refusing to play an idiot Martha to a lunatic Mars, she can gain her point. I believe it would be a sane one.

Will she or even can she? Habits of mind and body, centuries old, are not reversed in a decade and the experience women have had of themselves - as in Great Britain where they alone fought for their own emancipation and where, as citizens of the only country which challenged the enemy and remained undefeated, they have acquired a new pride in citizenship - may be too limited. Neither the vote, too easily won, nor the war, fought at too great a distance, has affected American women to any encouraging extent. Other progressive countries lie under the paralyzing blight of defeat. Russia, where a more vigorous conception of women's responsibilities seemed in the making, is reverting to the Woman's Sphere and significantly and sinisterly at the same time to a passionate nationalism.

But we have to hope. If we want to survive - and it seems we do - we can do no other. We have seen what the unbalanced masculine element has made of Germany and Japan and what, in extension, it has done to us. One more heave, as Churchill would say, and the unknown star beating its way toward us through uncharted space, need not bother to bump us into eternal nothingness. Our world will already be an empty, howling waste.