The New Woman |
BY the 'seventies and 'eighties the tide of prudery was on the ebb. Ignorance-or an affectation of it-was no longer a girl's best asset. The whole status of women was changing. Most of the romantic fiction in the country was being written, it now appeared, by women. Some of the more presumptuous feminists were even speaking in public. Men of an older generation were thoroughly alarmed at the changes for which these over-articulate females, supported by deluded males in high places, were pressing. How (for example) could the passing of a Married Women's Property Bill fail to have a disastrous effect on courtship? If this measure went on the Statute Book, men and women would come to look on marriage merely as a business partnership in which both parties had equal property rights. Surely man was being deprived of an old and honourable privilege if he could not offer protection, physical and financial, to his beloved? It was unthinkable for a wife not to be dependent on her husband; it was unnatural for her to wish to be otherwise. A marriage partnership initiated in this spirit would be liable to be broken up with no more compunction than any other business partnership. But the reformers pointed out that an honourable suitor's path would be made easier: he could woo a lady of substance and no longer be under suspicion of trying to gain her money. The Act would prevent an adventurer marrying a rich young woman and then spending her income on his mistresses. The feminists cried out, too, against the 'double standard', under which it was perfectly acceptable for a man in a good social position to keep a mistress, but unthinkable for a woman to give herself to more than one man in her lifetime. 'The virtuous man by popular standards was one who, before his marriage, did not have sexual relations with a virtuous woman,' says Walter Lippman, in A Preface to Morals. Not that women (save in a few instances) wanted a similar freedom for themselves; they just wanted to stop men's fun. This battle, of course, is still in progress. It was Mrs Lynn Linton's view, already more than a little old-fashioned, that 'women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser masculine faculties'. As always, the girl of the period was not quite as bad as she was made out to be. Her brazenness sprang from a harmless desire to prick pomposity, of which there was plenty about; much of her flirtatious manner was banter, now to be the common currency of conversation. And on the whole the bantering approach was appreciated by the 'grosser masculine faculties'. |