Anthony M. Ludovici

“ For the only power that rules Woman with an iron hand, the only power that moulds her destiny and actuates her behaviour and aspirations, she can never desert; and that is a power far more inexorable and irresistible than the power of man. It is the power of Life itself, with which she is much more deeply, secretly and thoroughly in touch than we are, or could ever hope to be. We are an amputation from Life, to which we return only at odd intervals, as it were to pay tribute: she is Life’s uninterrupted stream that receives this tribute. ”

“ For it is precisely in the moments of our greatest weakness, when we feel uncertain, when we have made mistakes and know that we have erred, that the preachers against life and the body, and against the fundamental instincts and desires of Mortal Life, will seem to be right, will seem almost to convince us that they are right. Like vultures they wait afar off till they see the body of our trust and hope in life, the corpse of our clean conscience, prostrate on the ground, and then down they swoop and devour the carrion that is their natural food. ”

“ Watch the career of the girl who sells herself to the modern taskmaster of commerce or industry! Could anything be more tragic? Could any satyr bring about grosser degradation of health and spirits? What sympathy or horror or righteous indignation can you rouse in the moral toads, who inveigh against prostitution, by pointing to the rounded shoulders, the loveless life, the listless eyes, the bloodless cheeks and hands of the typewriter or other machine drudge? ”

“ All the exalted emotions that possess an artist at his work, all the solemn misgivings that beset a responsible man when he feels he is determining the future of Man, ought to surge in the breast of him who contemplates matrimony. To feel that emotion which the modern world calls “love” may excuse a man for forming an illicit union, but, alone, it does not justify him in concluding so grave a contract as marriage.
The disadvantages of the monogamic marriage are chiefly confined to its effects upon the individual, and are of a nature that the State can, as a rule, afford to ignore and to waive. ”

“ But where is the freshness, where, therefore, the joy of companionship with some one whose mind one has thoroughly explored, whose every word, comment, or exclamation one anticipates five or six seconds ahead? Where is the exquisite quality of the companion in one whom one knows as well as oneself, whom one has had endless days, weeks, months and years to study, to listen to and to understand? The most gifted brain can be circumnavigated if it be lived with daily. The richest storehouse of spirituality can hardly hold out against daily depredation. ”

“ Noble as they are in themselves, they can claim in addition the highest possible sanction and testimonial that it is possible for a human character to receive—the sanction and testimonial of Human Survival itself, without which no virtue on earth can hope to last or to prevail, and by the side of which the mere applause and approval of one or many generations of men is but as a pair of bellows puffing in the wind. ”

“ The philosopher knows the wilderness it is in. He knows that on the mountain peaks all around, the vultures are waiting hungrily to see it make its first mistake, to see it writhe under its first misfortune—or its first “guilt” as they like to call it. He knows with what extraordinary vigilance they are tracking its footsteps, so that they may be there in time, so that they may be at its side in the first moment of its doubt in Life, to tell it that Life is sinful, that lust is sinful, that sex is sinful, that the World, the Flesh and the Devil are interchangeable terms. ”

“ So intense is this feeling of power and of slavery at the same time, so exquisite is the scale of emotions that run from the bottom note of absolute subjection to a human being to the top note of supreme sovereignty over a human being—so that the girl bids and her bidding is done, and the man bids and his bidding is done—that it is probably the richest experience, as spiritual sensations go, that anyone can have. While it is being undergone the self-preservative instinct of both parties is entirely suspended. ”

“ We tell them that somewhere in the Far Away, in the Never-Never-Land—not in the Backwoods of Superior Bunkum—there is a True Woman, a hybrid of a misunderstood Joan of Arc and a glacier. She is alone glorying in her True Womanhood. No man has fashioned her. She has no fashioning—or fashion either, for that matter!—and she simply sits and exults in her manless, childless, splendid independence! Towards this ideal we bid our sisters strive—nay, some of our sisters themselves bid their sisters strive; and we have not enough decency left to blush at our perfidy, at our blackguardly deception! ”

“ I feel I must offer some explanation here in regard to the precise relationship of the social instinct to order. Some will object, and quite rightly, that all order is not social order, and that all rhythm is not gregarious rhythm. There is the natural rhythm (and therefore the natural order) of birds’ songs, of insects’ buzzing, of horses’ and most animals’ movements, of fish in water, of corn waving in the wind. Whatever be the strength or weakness of our social tendencies, therefore, we must, as animals, feel instinctively and deeply akin to the phenomenon of rhythm and its charm. ”

“ Puritanism, always so hostile to sex, would fondly like one to believe that sex is no longer one of the first considerations of Life, even for women. It would give a good deal, and has given a good deal, to convince everybody that one can “get on without it”! And, indeed, its values and atmosphere have now reared so many thousands of wretched, lank, bloodless and lifeless men and women who can get on without it, and who do get on without it, that quite a large number of people are beginning to believe that Puritanism is right. ”

“ Society in England seems resolutely determined not to face and answer the question: Is prostitution necessary or unnecessary? If it is necessary to the kind of civilization we have evolved, then the only honourable, the only humane, the only magnanimous course to take, is to face it bravely and honestly, and do all we can for those women who are contributing their lives to a public service, just as we do all we can for soldiers and sailors in war-time, and for all public workers who perform useful and dangerous duties for the public weal. ”

“ We do not shrink from pain, as Schopenhauer did, we do not magnify it or concentrate upon it, as he did, and condemn the whole of existence because of it. We do not call our glorious history, as the King of the Animals, the Martyrdom of Man, as Winwood Reade did. We call our history the Triumph of Man; and it is because we wish to maintain it as the triumph of man that we face it with spirit and positiveness. ”

“ After having reduced man to a mere shadow of his former self, after having atrophied, besmirched and slandered the sex instinct until it was literally ashamed to show its face (fancy, the fundamental instinct of life [Pg 34] being ashamed to show its face!) —after having heaped up so much odium on the waning innocence of sexual beauties and the sacred joys of procreation that shame descended upon them like a deadly and withering shroud—no wonder that there were some, nay, thousands, who were ready to acknowledge that there was a life away from the fundamental instinct of life! ”

“ There is the prostitution of healthy rosy-fingered youth in hundreds of other walks of life, and nobody, or scarcely anybody, stirs to point it out. The young girls who to-day are sent by their parents at the age of sixteen to twenty to bow their heads for forty-three hours a week before a typewriter, or a ledger, or a stamping, cutting or folding machine, get ill just as quickly, lose their beauty just as surely, and grow depressed and spiritless just as rapidly, as the sexual prostitute, and they get only a sixteenth or less of the prostitute’s entertainment out of life into the bargain. ”

“ For in England, not only are there barely sufficient men to go all round; but there are not nearly sufficient positive men for the preponderating number of positive girls. And since innocent girls are absolutely unconscious of the causes of their misery when they meet and marry the negative man, you find in England and all countries like it, hundreds and hundreds of positive women who will affirm—nay, who are ready to prove—that marriage is the most unexciting thing in existence, and that Life itself is the most unexciting phenomenon in the universe! ”

“ It destroys that trust, that confidence, that humble and willing subservience, which are at once a young woman’s instinct and her joy. It poisons the first hours of her maturity, of her self-realization, of her taste of life’s deeper waters; but, above all, it revives in her precisely those emotions and prejudices which ought to have been stifled for ever—her high-school doubts and qualms regarding the general desirability of her Maker’s scheme for mammalian fertilization.
She may forgive this first tragic disenchantment. It is doubtful whether she ever forgets it. ”

“ I have called my work A Vindication, because I sincerely meant it as a book friendly in spirit to the female sex, and one in which the worst that can be said about them is shown to be but the outcome of their best, or at least but the result of a misuse or abuse of their best. I have attempted to show that their virtues, like their vices, are all derived from the unalterable vital instincts which their evolutionary rôle, as the mothers of the race, have gradually implanted in them and fixed in them for ever. ”

“ One can watch with equanimity the negative young Miss of narrow hips, still narrower chest, and even still narrower outlook, succeeding in captivating her negative affinity. Such dramas leave one unmoved. But to witness exuberant Life itself, obliged to be content with creatures who are mere mementoes of Life, mere echoes of Life; to see exuberant Life itself unnoticed, unselected, feared, shunned, and shelved!—to anyone who has any feelings at all, such an experience must be too painful ever to be forgotten. ”

“ Unbeknown to the girl’s consciousness, though of course she has been aware of the phenomenon, every month Life has prepared her—her body has dressed itself, so to speak, for the act that will lead to the consummation of her destiny,—no wonder that after all these months and years of silent waiting and waiting, and elaborate and minute preparations for the guest, that there should be some bustle, some joyful apprehension, when a potential guest is at hand, or actually waiting. ”

“ Look at the girl! Provided that he is not watching her too closely, her eyes are scanning every inch of his body, with a penetration, an attention, a fierce criticism, that is allowing no detail to escape, no indication of virile potency to go unnoticed. Her hands may be cold, even moist with emotion; but Life in her is neither cold nor moist: it is at white heat, working its hardest, and deciding for her whether it shall be Aye or Nay! ”

“ To watch the face of an elderly, negative spinster when a really healthy boy loses his temper, is to witness in one human countenance the whole history of the long conflict between those vultures of which I have spoken and the artless yea-sayer to Life.
Later on, if he is carefully handled, this boy will take his love seriously; he will cling to the girl he chooses in a manner that will make that same spinster marvel at his determination, and he will be as fierce and as serious in his desire for the woman of his choice as he once was over his games, over his hates, and over his meals. ”

“ The fact that Miss A’s influence on young girls may lead many to try the experiment is one of the most perilous consequences of the negative spinster’s existence in our midst. She, in her own person, constitutes a lure to the negation of life’s joys, to the contempt of the body and its demands, and to the disdain of the other sex, which is next door to sex-antagonism. Her mind is merely an instrument seeking intellectual justifications for her body’s inferiority. ”

“ To speak of the higher organic life on this globe as sexual, therefore, is merely to state in other words, that all higher organic life is doomed to die, and must be replaced by new life. Abolish death and you abolish the meaning and the need of sex and reproduction. Abolish sex and reproduction, and, if you cannot establish eternal higher organic life, the higher organic life of the globe must for ever perish. ”

“ The vanity in her soul, therefore, soon forms a league with the instincts of her body. Her soul also wants power, and this power her body guarantees to give her, if only she will snub the importunate high-school portions of herself, and neither balk nor overlook its designs. Above all, her soul is aching with curiosity concerning the secret of life, and the happiness of life; and as her body’s irrepressible lust of life is always at hand to lend support to any intellectual inquisitiveness, a combination of forces is effected that is as formidable as it is usually triumphant. ”

“ Had they not heard from their earliest childhood onwards, that the soul was everything and that the body did not matter? Had they not had it dinned into them at every turn along their life’s path, that a pure soul can make up for any physical defect, even foul breath? ”

“ The luxuriance of the child’s positiveness must be pruned. The human being must be reared for society. He must be taught the limitations of his freedom; above all, he must be taught taste and discrimination: what to select and what to reject. And there is perhaps no more solemn moment in life than when a full-grown man or woman, in perfect possession of all the necessary intellectual equipment for the task, approaches his universally yea-saying junior to discipline it—that is to say, to determine its “yea,” to limit it, and to confine it only to a certain set of things. ”

“ I repeat, therefore, that while we have the power to make Woman miserable and ill—a power which for the last 250 years in England we have exercised with ever-increasing folly—we have no more right to boast that we have moulded or directed her evolution than we have a right to boast of having shaped the stars and the moon. And those women who allow us this boast and who accuse us of having arrested their development (whatever that may mean) , or of having distorted their true individuality, fall with treacherous perfidy to their sex, into the ranks of Woman’s worst enemies. ”

“ All those who speak of a “true Womanhood” to be sought and found away from us and from the children we give her, would do both Woman and the world a kindness, a great and inestimable kindness, in henceforward for ever holding their tongues on the subject of Woman.
We try to soothe our consciences; we try to slur over our social mistakes; we sneakingly pretend to ignore the [Pg 26] fact that our social life is wrong; and we, and even some women themselves, preach the accursed doctrine that there is a true Womanhood to be sought and found in women alone, by women alone, for women alone! ”

“ The most cursory study of any woman’s opinion about her fellow-creatures will always reveal the same fact, that they are not based at all upon the intrinsic value of people, but on the way people treat her. This is a comparatively harmless trait so long as woman has no power; the moment, however, that she is placed in a position of wielding power, her errors of judgment affect public life, and she only accepts those men as her ministers, advisers or directors who can prostrate themselves with the best grace at her feet, and appeal most irresistibly to her vanity. ”

“ Deep passion does not grin in this way. It is either too deeply stirred, or it is too shy, to make an open exhibition of its feelings. Besides, it is greatly agitated and anxious about the issue.
The vain, negative woman, moreover, is always conscious of an observing public when she is in the company of her admirer, and her triumphant glances at onlookers in such circumstances are a sort of challenge to them to contemplate her in the full intensity of her joy. Part of the gratification of her vanity consists in drawing the envious looks of other women upon her. ”

“ Her top wave came with her nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first years—all years of bewilderingly beautiful ripeness, when every fibre in her body was agog, on the qui vive, harking for the approach of the mate that would justify all this sumptuous and generous preparation; harking timidly, though eagerly, for him who would consummate her expectant womanhood, give the only genuine value that they could claim to all her wondrous charms, and reveal herself to herself in all her wealth of ancestral virtues, gifts and skill. ”

“ She keeps him up to the mark, and will quickly rap his knuckles if the incense he is burning at the altar of her self-esteem is the least bit stale, or burns with only a moderate fury, or is swung with any sign of diminished zeal. The passionate woman, on the other hand, will bear anything from the man she really desires, except—absence.
The vain woman’s hatred is roused, not by a refusal to cohabit with her, but by a noticeable lameness in her worshipper’s flattering fluency. She hates those who wound her vanity, not those who cheat her will to Life and its multiplication. ”

“ Have you ever experienced the fierce love that immediately flashes out of the mother in the form of the heartiest and most unjust indignation at your unintentional trespass? If you know all this, like myself you can entertain no doubts concerning the untold joys that Woman’s life, alone with the child, can and often does bring her. To regard her relationship to man (without its natural consequences) as her sexual consummation, or even as her sexual pleasure, is, therefore, simply the most crass and most hopeless form of primitive barbarism. ”

“ Truth to tell, woman is less happy with the grown-up schoolboy type than with the latter type, but this she only finds out later. Her conscious choice, supported by the values of the age, inclines her to the type over which she can exercise petty power, and this man, who believes in “chivalry,” who believes in playing “cricket” (or “playing the game”) with his womenfolk, and who accepts the whole of the tinsel of false sentiment that women have succeeded in drawing over the natural relations of the sexes, has become the beau ideal of Anglo-Saxon society. ”

“ Where it is true, it ought to be a subject of shame, as showing marked physiological inferiority; and where it is not true, it is never anything more than a hoax for exercising moral power over a foolish husband. For thousands of men nowadays are convinced that whether a woman be healthy or unhealthy, well or badly formed, there is something sweetly and edifyingly “unselfish” about motherhood. Western Civilization has not produced a greater lie, or a more pernicious lie than this; for it makes abnormality a virtue, and physiological inferiority a claim upon our admiration! ”

“ It is precisely because women are so deeply in touch with Life, so secretly and unconsciously Life’s ally, Life’s ambassador, Life’s custodian, that they cannot help being miserable and in pain nowadays. The voice of Life inside them tells them emphatically that things are wrong, that the muddle man has made of Life is tragic, cruel, insufferable. As Life’s unconscious advocate, Woman is essentially opposed to modernity, however much she may seem in favour of it. When she appears to be most in favour of it, she is only following modern man and his ideals most closely. ”

“ Every journalist, novelist, poet and public man, with but few exceptions, takes the first principles of Feminism for granted. No one seriously doubts, for instance, that woman has exercised a beneficent influence over civilization; the absurd idealism which represents woman as the unselfish, self-sacrificing, partner in human life, is almost universally accepted. Everybody is inclined to regard man as the unmoral (non-social or anti-social) and woman as the moral (social) sex, and to hold the sexes as otherwise perfectly equal. ”

“ In order to love her, however, I do not find it necessary to exalt her to a plane on which all her sturdier, more vital, and more “dangerous” characteristics are whittled down to mere sweetness. Those to whom the love of woman depends upon so gross an idealization of her nature as to cause them to overlook or deny that “wickedness” in her, which is at once her greatest vital strength and her most powerful equipment as the custodian and the promoter of life, will find very little to sustain them in this love throughout the present volume. ”

“ If we observe Nature herself engaged upon the same task that constitutes woman’s principal concern in life, we observe the same unscrupulousness. Nature stops at nothing to achieve this end. All means are good to her: rapine, deception, falsehood, usurpation of rights, bullying, stealth, robbery, invasion, and complete indifference to quality and desirability.
Life in Nature is a continuous process of inter-racial and intra-racial struggles for power and supremacy, with no principle, except the one of “more life” in each race or species, governing the whole. ”

“ Immersed as Woman obviously is, up to her shoulders in the business of Life and its multiplication, let it be said plainly and unequivocally: all those who teach her that any other business is her business, all those who, in face of the dilemma of modern problems, confuse her with tales about a true Womanhood away from Life and its multiplication; all those, in short, who beguile her with promises of happiness, contentedness, or even comfort, without her primary adaptations to man and the child, are liars both unscrupulous and criminal. ”

“ One German writer has suggested that the creative power itself is the outcome of an excess of absorbed semen in the blood. But even the artist’s mental gifts, though correlated with a quality that is frequently irresistible to women, are an unsound reason for a girl’s mating with him. All women should remember that artists cannot marry them without committing adultery. For, if Woman is wed to Life before she marries, the artist is certainly wed to his particular muse. ”

“ From the moment he rises from the couch—not refreshed, but having rejoined the continuous stream of Life for a moment, only to pay it tribute—he becomes for a while purely social, purely asexual, turning his mind to other matters, pleased to turn his mind to other matters, and retaining the woman who is his mate, no longer from pure desire (let all women thoroughly grasp this) , but from pure morality, pure sociability;—aye! and supporting her children too, no longer as a sexual accomplice or confederate, but as a social agent, prompted thereto by his social instinct. ”

“ If, on the other hand, they belong to the modern herd of arrogant, overdressed townsmen, whose only mainspring is vanity, and who find in the favour of a poor starved female body the highest flattery that their stupid, fatuous lives can offer them, they will fancy that this young wife’s eager attention when they speak, and her delirious laughter when they attempt to be witty, constitute a tribute to their intellect and wit. They will flatter themselves that the little woman has been captivated by them. ”

“ Without sensuality we could not advance from one generation to another; without a love of the flesh and its joys human nature and the animal creation would come to an end in half a century. In this sense, seeing that to-day we are all Puritans—if not in deed, at least in thought—I have the best possible proof of how little woman has influenced civilization for the good. For woman is chiefly sensual. If then she had influenced civilization for the good, she must have checked Puritanism. ”