Cicely Hamilton

“ In every city worthy of the name, in every city that is anything more than an enlarged manufacturing slum, there stands, in brick or stone, some witness to the force and reality of the communal impulse in art. It was an impulse that seldom reached woman; who stood apart from the communal life, who knew not the service that brings with it sense of fellowship, who had not so much as a place to be proud of. Even to-day a woman takes her husband’s nationality, and the place that was her own is hers no longer. She has drawn no inspiration from the thought that she is a citizen of no mean city. ”

“ There were the nights when York flamed and the days when thick smoke hung over it; and the morning when aeroplanes fought overhead and two crashed within a mile of the camp. There was the night of pitched battle with a rabble of the starving, grown desperate, which rushed the guard suddenly out of the darkness and beat and hacked at the doors of the sheds which contained the hoarded treasure of food. Theodore, with every other man in the camp, was turned out hastily to do battle with the horde of invaders—to shoot into the mass of them and drive them back to their starvation. ”

“ When the Distribution Office—like his Hepplewhite furniture, his colour-prints and his English glass—was with yesterday’s seven thousand years, it is more than possible that Theodore Savage, looking back on his youth, saw existence, till he neared the age of thirty, as a stream of scarcely ruffled content. Sitting crouched to the fire in the sweat-laden air of his cabin or humped idly on a hillside in the dusk of summer evening, it may well have seemed, when his thoughts strayed backwards, that the young man who once was impossibly himself was a being whom care did not touch. ”

“ Its existence, at any rate, justifies us in regarding marriage as essentially (from the woman's point of view) a commercial or trade undertaking. By marriage she earned her bread; and as the instinct of self-preservation drove man forth to hunt, to till the soil, to dig beneath it—to cultivate his muscles and his brain so that he might get the better of nature and his rivals—so brute necessity and the instinct of self-preservation in woman urged and enjoined on her the cultivation of those narrow and particular qualities of mind and body whereby desire might be excited and her wage obtained. ”

“ Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued—till a passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed—to save her, to get her away!... ”

“ I do not think that a man can understand how bad most of our work in art and literature really is, for the simple reason that he cannot see the lie in it. He believes, for instance, that we are such creatures as we represent ourselves to be in most of the books we write; we only try to believe it. Wherein is all the difference between a blunder and a lie. We cannot even draw ourselves, our passions and emotions—because we are accustomed to look at ourselves, our passions and emotions, not with our own eyes, but through the spectacles with which he has provided us. ”

“ The ruin of a world could not rob him utterly of his heritage of all the ages; part of that heritage no ruin could touch, since he had treasure stored in his heart and brain for so long as his memory should last. But for Ada, whose world had been a world of cheap finery, of giggling gossip and evenings at the cinema, there remained from the ages—nothing. Gossip and cinemas, flowered hats and ribbon-trimmed camisoles—they had left not a wrack, save regret, for her mind to feed on.... As the workings of her vacant little soul were laid bare to him, he understood how dreadful was its plight ”

“ I am not of those who are entirely satisfied with woman as she is; on the contrary, I consider that we are greatly in need of improvement, mental, physical and moral. And it is because I desire such improvement—not only in our own interests but in that of the race in general—that I desire to see an alteration in the conditions of our staple industry. I have novii intention of attacking the institution of marriage in itself—the life companionship of man and woman; I merely wish to point out that there are certain grave disadvantages attaching to that institution as it exists to-day. ”

“ As in every social system from the beginning of time, the community was welded to a conscious whole not by the love its members bore to each other, but by hatred and fear of the outsider; it was the enemy, the urgent common need to be saved from him, that made of man a comrade and a citizen; the peril from outside was the natural antidote to everyday hatreds and the ceaseless bickerings of close neighbours. ”

“ It may, of course, be urged that woman's claim to reverence and respect is based on far higher and surer ground than mere intelligence, or even character—on the fulfilment of her duties as wife and mother. Personally, I fail to see that any very great measure of respect or reverence is dealt out to her on this or any other ground—except, perhaps, now and again on paper; and even if it were, I should not, under present conditions, consider it justified. As long as the fulfilment of those duties is not a purely voluntary action on the part of woman, it gives her no claim upon any one's respect. ”

“ To a race that had realized the peril of knowledge there would be two alternatives only; renunciation—the creed of blind ignorance and savagery—or the guarding of science as a secret treasure, removed from all contact with the flame that is human emotion. There had been elder and long-past civilizations in which knowledge was a mystery, the possession and the privilege of a caste; tradition had come down to us of ancient wisdom which might only be revealed to the initiate.... A blind fear massacred its scientific men, a wiser fear exalted them and set them apart as initiates. ”

“ If we are more or less politely incredulous when we are informed that we are leading an unnatural existence, it is not because we have no passions, but because life to us means a great deal more than one of its possible episodes. If we decline to listen with becoming reverence to disquisitions on the broadening effect of motherhood upon our lives, the deep and miraculous understanding that it brings into our hearts, It is not because we are contemptuous of maternity, but because we have met so many silly persons who brought babies into the world and remained just as silly as they were before. ”

“ With an eye on the osier-heap she worked that she might please and, finding occupation, brooded less; learning imperceptibly to look on the new world primitive as a reality whose hardships could be mitigated by effort, instead of an impossible nightmare. As she wrestled with present difficulties—the daily tasks she dared no longer neglect—the trams, shop-windows and chiffons of the past receded on her mental horizon. Not, fundamentally, that they were any less dear to her; but the need of placating an overlord at hand took up part of her thoughts and time. ”

“ ONE peculiarity of the trade at which so many women earn their livelihood I have, as yet, hardly touched upon. It is this: that however arduous and exacting the labour that trade entails—and the rough manual work of most households is done by women—it is not paid except by a wage of subsistence. There may be exceptions, of course, but, as a general rule, the work done by the wife and mother in the home is paid for merely by supplying her with the necessaries of existence—food, lodging, and clothing. ”

“ When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this.... And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts ... and the primitive passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving.... ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred and hunger and lust. ”

“ Nor does one imagine that such a son, when he grew of an age to understand, would think the less of his mother because he knew that he was no accident in her life, but a choice; because he learned that his birth was something more than a necessary and inevitable incident in her compulsory trade. One does not imagine that he would reverence her the less because he saw in her not only the breeding factor in the family, but a being in all respects as human as himself, who had suffered for him and suffered of her own free will ”

“ The intrigue—if intrigue it were—ended on the day of the cuffing and hairpulling; her Lothario, awed by his spitfire or unwilling to tackle an outraged husband, avoided her company from that day forth and Ada sank back to domesticity.
She, too, in the end accepted the loss of the world that had made her what she was, ceased to search the horizon and strain her eyes for the deliverer; whereupon—having nothing to aim at or hope for—she lapsed into slovenly neglect of her home, alternating hours of clack and gossip with fits of sullen complaining at the daily misery of existence. ”

“ When we quarrel or argue with an average man we know perfectly well that the vantage of the ground is ours; we know perfectly well that defeat, for us, will not bring humiliation in its train; that our antagonist, imbued with the conviction of his own intense and inherent natural superiority, will take his victory as a matter of course, and think it no disgrace to us that we have been routed by a higher intelligence than our own. We have not much to lose by defeat, we are not degraded by it—because we are the weaker side. ”

“ If, after four or five generations of freer choice and wider life, woman still persists in confining her steps to the narrow grooves where they have hitherto been compelled to walk; if she claims no life of her own, if she has no interests outside her home, if love, marriage and maternity is still her all in all; if she is still, in spite of equal education, of emulation and respect, the inferior of man in brain capacity and mental independence; if she still evinces a marked preference for disagreeable and monotonous forms of labour, for which she is paid at the lowest possible rate ”

“ In their pressing anxiety to avert the peril of hunger they were heedless of a peril yet greater; their search had attracted the attention of others—scarecrow vagrants, the rabble of the roads, who saw them from a distance and came hurrying in the hope of treasure-trove. The first single spies retreated at the order of superior and disciplined numbers; but with time their own numbers were swollen by those who halted at the rumour of food, and there hovered round the searchers a shifting, snarling, envious crowd that drew gradually nearer till faced with the threat of pointed rifles. ”

“ There must be something extraordinarily and unnaturally contemptible about a woman who, her own bargain made and means of livelihood secured, will not help another to secure hers; and it is that motive, and not a rapturous content in their own unclouded destiny, not an unhesitating conviction that their lot has fallen in a fair ground, which makes of so many married women industrious and confirmed match-makers. What has been termed the "huge conspiracy of married women" is, in fact, nothing but a huge trade union whose members recognize the right of others to their bread. ”

“ As the year rolled over him, Theodore came to know the earth as primitive man and the savage know it—as the source of life, the storehouse of uncertain food, the teacher of cunning and an infinite and dogged patience. When the weather made wandering or fishing impossible he would sit under shelter, with his hands on his knees, passive, unimpatient, hardly moving through long hours, while he waited for the rain to cease. ”

“ Male humanity has wobbled between two convictions—the one, that she exists for the entire benefit of contemporary mankind; the other, that she exists for the entire benefit of the next generation. The latter is at present the favourite. One consideration only male humanity has firmly refused to entertain—that she exists in any degree whatsoever for the benefit of herself. In consequence, woman is the one animal from whom he demands that it shall deviate from, and act in defiance of, the first law of nature—self-preservation. ”

“ To this they had come, these people who once were human—the beast in them had conquered the brain ... and like fire there blazed into his brain the commandment: “Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge! Thou shalt not eat ... lest ye die.”
The command, the prohibition, had suddenly a new significance. Was this, then, the purport of a legend hitherto meaningless? Was this the truth behind the childish symbol? The deadly truth that knowledge is power of destruction—power of destruction too great for the human, the fallible, to wield?... ”

“ If humanity had only been created in order to reproduce its kind, we might still be dodging cave-bears in the intervals of grubbing up roots with our nails. It is not only the children who matter: there is the world into which they are born. ”

“ Faith saw him as a tribal Lord of Hosts, the celestial captain of his worshippers; if his worshippers walked humbly and paid due honour to his name he would stand before them in the day of battle and protect them with his shield invisible—would draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, show himself mightier than the priests of Baal and overthrow the altars of the Philistines.
A god whose attributes are those of a warrior, of necessity is not omnipotent; since he fights, his authority is partial—assailed and disputed by those against whom he draws the sword. ”

“ If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a trade on the part of woman—the exchange of her person for the means of subsistence—it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which that trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in the matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market. Which brings us at once to the fact—arising from the compulsory nature of the profession—that it is carried on under disadvantages unknown and unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods. ”

“ Behind their entanglements and line of sentries the little garrison lived as on an island in the flood of anarchy and ruin—a remnant of order, defending itself against chaos. And, for all the discipline with which they faced anarchy and the ruthlessness with which they beat back chaos, they knew (so often as they dared to think) that the time might be at hand—must be at hand, if no deliverance came—when they, every man of them, would be swept from their island to the common fate and become as the creatures, scarce human, who crawled to them for food and were refused. ”

“ More than once in my life I have been struck by the beauty of a man's honest conception and ideal of love and marriage—a conception and ideal which one comes across in unexpected and unlikely persons and which is by no means confined to those whose years are still few in number and whose hearts are still hot within them. ”

“ The constitution of the tribe—the origin and keystone of the social system—had been, in the beginning, as much a matter of reckless chance as the mating of himself and Ada; small wandering groups of men, who had come alive through the agony of war and famine, had been knit together by a common need or a terror of loneliness, and insensibly welded into a whole, an embryo community. ”

“ One wonders what it has meant for the race—this persistent desire of the man to despise his wife, this economic need of countless women to arrest their mental growth? It has amounted to this—that one of the principal qualifications for motherhood has been a low standard of intelligence. We hear a very great deal about the beauty and sanctity of motherhood; we might, for a change, hear something about the degradation thereof—which has been very real. To stunt one’s brain in order that one may bear a son does not seem to me a process essentially sacred or noble in itself ”

“ As he questioned his new-made comrades and heard their answers, there died in Theodore’s heart the hope that these people into whose midst he had stumbled—these people living like the beasts of the field—were but dwellers on the outskirts of a world reviving and civilized. Of men existing in any other fashion than their own he heard no mention, no rumour; there was talk only of a camp here and a village there—where men fished and hunted and scratched the ground that they might find the remains of other’s sowing. ”

“ I do not know whether such a deliberate attitude towards the responsibilities of motherhood is general, but it seems to me essentially feminine, implying, as it does, the consciousness that it is not enough to bear a child, but that the child must be born of a clean body and come in contact with a clean mind—that the actual bringing of a new life into the world is only a small part of motherhood. It is the circumstances under which the child is born and the circumstances under which it is reared to which women attach infinitely more importance than men are apt to do ”

“ It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us—the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul ”

“ When the ordinary man and the ordinary wife no longer stand towards each other in the attitude of patron and patronized the virtues of both will need overhauling—that is all.
Nor does one see how the advancement of marriage to the position of a voluntary trade can work for anything but good upon the children born of marriage. Motherhood can be sacred only when it is voluntary, when the child is desired by a woman who feels herself fit to bear and to rear it ”

“ A State whose growth would be rooted in the mystery of knowledge and fear of human passion; whose culture and civilization would be moulded by a living and terrible tradition of catastrophe through science uncontrolled.... And, so long as the tradition was living and terrible, the initiate would stand guard before his mysteries, that the world might be saved from itself; only when humanity had forgotten its downfall and ruin had ceased to be even a legend, would the barrier between science and emotion be withdrawn and knowledge be claimed as the right of the uncontrolled, the multitude. ”

“ Small wonder, then, with that age-long tradition behind her, that when she is forced out into the world, unorganized and unprepared, she finds it hard to get even a living wage for the work of her head and hands—and that when you speak of a sweated you mean a woman’s trade.
There is, so far as I can see, only one way in which woman can make herself more valued, and free herself from the necessity of performing duties for which she gets neither thanks nor payment. She must do as men have always done in such a situation—shirk the duties. ”

“ No one was in authority; their commanding officer had been killed outright by the bursting of the first bomb, one of the subalterns lay huddled in the roadway, just breathing. So much they knew.... In the beginning there was relief that they had come through alive; but, with the passing of the first instinct of relief, came understanding of the meaning of being alive.... The breath in their bodies, the knowledge that they still walked the earth: and for the rest, vagrancy and beast-right—the right of the strongest to live! ”

“ Marriage, with its accompaniments and consequences—the ordering of a man’s house, the bearing and rearing of his children—has, by the long consent of ages, been established as practically the only means whereby woman, with honesty and honour, shall earn her daily bread. Her every attempt to enter any other profession has been greeted at first with scorn and opposition; her sole outlook was to be dependence upon man. Yet the one trade to which she is destined, the one means of earning her bread to which she is confined, she may not openly profess. No other worker stands on the same footing. ”