Jane Ellen Harrison

“ The attempt, then, to confine man or woman within the limits of sex, to judge of right or wrong for them by a sex standard, is, I think, dangerous and disastrous to the individual, dangerous and disastrous to the society of which he or she is a unit. This is felt and acknowledged about man. We do not incessantly say to a man, "Be male, your manhood is in danger." Such counsel, we instinctively feel, would be, if not superfluous and impertinent, at least precarious. A man sanely and rightly refuses to have his activities secluded into the accident of sex. ”

“ Sex, we have found, is a splendid and vital instinct with a singular power of inter-penetrating and reinforcing other energies. But it is an instinct that has for its attendant characteristics, among primitive peoples, pugnacity, in later civilisation, intense egotism. Always and everywhere it tends to be exclusive and individualistic. This exclusiveness of sex seems permanently and inexorably imposed by ineluctable nature. Now, if the object of life were the reproduction, the handing on of life, we should say, and rightly say, to woman: "Be womanly: be wife and mother." ”

“ Dare we say as much of "woman"? The whole Woman's Movement is, to my mind, just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man's prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman's privilege of womanhood: it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity. On the banners of every suffrage society, one motto, and one only, should be blazoned ”

“ Intellect as contrasted with instinct, is the tool-maker, is essentially practical, always ultimately intent on action. To a few of us—and we are happy, if sometimes lonely—knowledge, which began with practical intent, becomes an end in itself, an object for rapturous contemplation. But to most human beings, and these are the best of our citizens, knowledge is the outcome of desire, and is always forging on towards action, action which necessarily takes shape as increased dominion over the world of nature and humanity. ”

“ The institution of the Man's House was unquestionably an advance in civilisation; but what is good for a time is not therefore good for all time. The full reasons for its breakdown are too complex for discussion here, but one cause of inadequacy is clear. Good and useful though the Man's House was for man, it left out half of humanity, woman. It civilised man by releasing him from sex, or, rather, by balancing his sex instincts which gather round his home with his "herd" instincts, his comradeship which centred round the Man's House. ”

“ We are apt to speak of certain virtues as "womanly," certain others as "manly." It is "womanly" to be meek, patient, tactful, modest. It is manly to be strong, brave, honourable. We make here, I think, an initial mistake, or at least, over-statement, apt to damage the morality of both man and woman. To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honourable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane, to have social virtue. To be womanly is one thing and one only; it is to be sensitive to man; to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman. ”

“ Sex, then, like other strong instincts, is anti-social and individualistic. In its primal form it induces, perhaps more than any other instinct, pugnacity; in its later and more diffused form, as the emotion of love, it is exclusive through its intensity of focus.
Now, this intensity of focus, this egotism, is often confused with altruism, and is labelled "Devotion to another." Society, it will be urged, may suffer from the exclusiveness of sex, but is it not ennobled by the spectacle of utter self-devotion, the devotion of the lover to his mistress, of the wife to her husband. ”

“ We have shed these savage instincts. Pugnacity about sex is really out of date, as irrelevant to humanity as the horns that the buffalo exhibits in fighting for his mate. I am not so sure that pugnacity in relation to sex is really obsolete, since sex is still shadowed by its dark familiar, jealousy. But let that pass. The instinct of sex is anti-social, exclusive, not only owing to its pugnacity; it is, we have now to note, anti-social, exclusive, owing also to the intensity of its egotism. ”

“ The egotism of self-assertion atrophies life by over-focus, but the egotism of self-abasement adds to this morbid over-focus a slackening and enfeebling of the whole personality, which defeats its own end and repels where it would attract. The important thing is to clear the air and see plainly that this sex-devotion, this egotism of self-abasement, is not altruism. It causes none of the healthy reactions of altruism, none of that bracing and expanding and uplifting of the spirit that mysteriously comes of "giving ourselves to something other and greater than ourselves." ”

“ When we exhort a woman to be "womanly," we urge her to emphasise her relation to the other sex, to enhance her sensitiveness, already, perhaps, over keen, to focus her attention on an element in life which nature has already made quite adequately prominent. We intend to urge her to be refined, we are in peril of inviting her to be coarse.
The moral and social danger of dividing the "humane" virtues into two groups, manly and womanly, is evident. ”

“ Many motives move a man and a woman to marriage, but of these not the meanest is a healthy and hungry egotism.
But surely, it will be urged, self-devotion cannot be akin to egotism. The self is "lost in another." "Hence the purifying, elevating nature of the flame of love, which burns up all the dross of selfishness," etc., etc. But does it? Can any honest man or woman say that he or she, with single-hearted devotion, desires solely the good of the beloved one? A man desires his wife's happiness. That happiness comes to her through another, not through him. ”

“ Egotism, the self-regarding sentiment, is, like pugnacity, an element that has worked and does work for civilisation. The self-regarding sentiment is indeed the very heart and kernel of our volition, and hence of our highest moral efforts. Moreover, all passion, all strong emotion, intellectual passion excepted, is in a sense exclusive and egotistic; but of all passions sex-emotion is nowadays perhaps the most exclusive, the most egotistic. ”

“ But the maternal instinct in the main is a thing healthy indeed and happy, but nowise specially holy. It is an extended egotism. Our ego, we are nowadays taught, is not limited by our own personality. It extends to wife and husband, to children and relations, to our clothes and possessions, to our clubs and associations. The extended ego, like the personal ego, is apt to be at war with herd-altruism. Love of my own children does not necessarily lead to love of yours. A woman will often shamelessly indulge about her children an egotism that she would blush to exhibit for herself. ”

“ You cannot have a strong emotional focus on two things at the same time. Of this natural and inevitable sex-egotism society is, of course, wisely tolerant. This man and woman will ultimately do society a supreme service, and for a time she accepts as inevitable that they should be, in common parlance, "no good." Society en masse has a good deal of common-sense, but in the more intimate clash of individual relations sentiment is apt to obscure clear vision, and the necessarily egotistic and exclusive character of a sex-emotion [8] is sometimes overlooked. ”

“ The social conscience is sensitive nowadays. Our very religion has come to be not a matter of personal salvation, but rather the sense of sharing a life greater than our own and somehow common to us all.
And yet, all said and done, a man or woman is generally (not always) the better and the bigger for passing through the experience of le grand égoïsme à deux. Because of the frailty of our mortal nature he can have this experience only towards one human being at a time, and that one must be of the opposite sex. ”

“ If sex, then, is egotistic, exclusive, if it needs balance by a broader humanity, what are the chief non-egotistic humanising tendencies? What master passions can we oppose to the individualism, the exclusiveness, the pugnacity, the egotism of sex? The answer is clear. We have two great forces at our disposal, the desire for knowledge, [12] or, as psychologists call it, the "instinct of curiosity," and pure altruism, the desire to use our strength and our knowledge for the welfare of the herd, and specially its weaker members. ”

“ So long as the need is simple and instinctive, its inherent egotism is not seriously anti-social; but when the simple instinct of sex develops into the complex sentiment of love, the impulse and its attendant egotism is, if less violent, far more extensive and all-pervading, far more difficult to content and balance. Desire is a ruthless tyrant, but simple-hearted; love the most exacting of taskmasters.
This egotism, this exclusiveness in sex-emotion, is most easily observed in its acuter phases, and in these analytic days is noted by patient as well as spectator. ”

“ Sex must be not ignored or atrophied, still less must it, by a sort of mental jugglery, be at one and the same moment ignored and over-emphasised. Woman cannot be moralised through sex, because sex is a non-moral, that is a non-social instinct. But, for woman as for man, non-moral sex, the greatest of life forces, can be balanced, blended with other and humane sentiments. Man, because he is physically stronger, has got a little ahead in civilisation. Woman, not because he is stronger, but merely qua sex impulse, is at present subject to him. ”

“ Before leaving the question of sex-egotism and sex-exclusiveness, may I guard against any possible exaggeration or misunderstanding? The instinct of sex, by its association with pugnacity, and by the intensity of its mutual egotism, is, we are obliged to admit, to an extent beyond that of the other instincts, exclusive and anti-social. Under the influence of sex and the intensified self-assertion it brings with it, a man will demand that society should be a sympathetic spectator ”

“ We want to live life, and human life, for woman as for man, is lived to the full only in and through the "herd,"—is social. We want, in a word, for the sake of this fulness of life, to co-ordinate our individualistic instincts of which sex seems to be the strongest and most exclusive, with our altruistic herd-instincts.
The old view, while we were yet untroubled by ethnology, sociology, and psychology, was that life is a sort of Sunday school, which we entered at birth to fit us for a future life. ”

“ Their charity is always to begin, and often end, at home. What purpose in evolution this tendency to self-devotion in women serves, remains, as before said, obscure. It is the cause of intense rapture to women, and, so far, is a good. It occurs in strong natures as much, and perhaps more, than in weak. When unduly fostered, and when not balanced by sympathy and comradeship, and by a wide intellectual and social outlook, it acts in married life as an obscure canker, peculiarly irritating and poisonous, because masquerading as a virtue. ”

“ Rather, by a swing of the pendulum we are back in an inverse form of the old initial error, the over-emphasis of sex. Woman, not man, now insists over-loudly on her own womanhood, and in this hubbub of man and woman the still small voice of humanity is apt to be unheard. ”

“ Instincts on the whole tend to be recurrent rather than concurrent. If we had only these simple instincts to reckon with, if our humanity was based only on sex, self-preservation, nutrition, there would be, it seems, no "war in our members."
But to these simple impulses, these life-functions as it were, man has added another,—the gregarious, or, as sociologists pleasantly term it, the "herd" instinct. [5] Why men and some other animals herd together—whether for warmth, for food, for mutual protection, or from some obscurer sympathetic impulse—is not very clearly known. ”

“ There can, however, be little question that, though it is rarely, in moments of vehement emotion, wholly absent in either sex, it is more highly developed and more uniformly present in women. In the bed-rock of human—or, rather, animal—nature lies, I think, the sex-subjection of woman, not, be it clearly understood, because man is physically stronger, but because he is man and his form of sex self-feeling is dominant and positive; woman's is more usually submissive and negative. ”

“ Most highly civilised human beings have moments when, if they look facts in the face, they feel that under the influence of passion they fall, somehow, a little below themselves, just because of this intense egotism, this inexorable inability to share. ”