Chapter VIII: Is Femininity at a Discount?

Femininity is a disadvantage to the professional woman, first of all, because it is expensive, and secondly because it takes up too much time.

If the hours spent trying on dresses, hats and other items of the wardrobe were presented in the form of a bill, one may wonder how many feminine existences would have a life balance at all.

Some women make dress their life work, the planning of their clothes and going out to show themselves in them, dominating all else in their minds. While others, the workers, are sighing for just a little more time, mostly to keep themselves neat and tidy. Life does sometimes seem out of proportion.

The subject of dress in a professional woman’s life is a vexed problem. How is she to find time to attend to her wardrobe? A short while ago, I saw a woman at the club sipping hot water. She owned she was banting. “I’m getting fat,” she said, “too fat to be stock-size, and that would be a calamity. Where can I find time to wear any but ready-made dresses?”

Yet unreasonable as it is to wear lace cuffs, collars and blouses which require constant washing and ironing, what true woman would give them up? Laundry bills are too heavy, so these things have to be done at home, and the already long day must begin an hour earlier, probably at six instead of seven. And how much time is squandered sewing on buttons, mending, and other things. For a woman suffers when she feels all her garments are not in order; those unseen, as well as those seen. Whilst the man worker goes off to tennis, cricket or football on Saturday afternoons without a thought of the clothes to be mended for him by some female hand, the woman worker stays at home to do her tidying up herself.

Although the final result is often quite as satisfactory as when the work is done by a woman, there is something pathetic in the sight of a male using a needle. He holds his garments in such awkward, though mathematically correct, positions, and the table is his thimble. Nothing more quickly arouses the maternal side of a woman than the sight of a man with a needle. “Has he no woman to look after him?” is the question which comes instinctively. And, in the same way a chivalrous man will ask, “Has she no man to take care of her?” when he sees a woman wearing herself out in an office.

People may argue as they like; the old primitive division—man the hunter, woman the tent-keeper—is the natural order of things. Will the world’s mind really grasp any other? It is true that women workers are to be seen everywhere in England, but, as one witty woman said, “their real work has to be done out of hours.”

“However severe the orders given my servants to leave me to work undisturbed,” said Flora Annie Steele, “just when I am wondering how I can best kill off my hero, the cook comes in to tell me she has no lemon.” Such a thing would never happen to her husband were he the writer of books.

Another woman, the editress of a big woman’s paper, tells me she leaves home to this tune—“the pipe has burst,” “the gas is out of order,” “the ceiling is leaking,” and then more of these important items are sometimes communicated by telephone to the office during her busiest days. All this side of life, of course, is kept from a busy man. He has to think only of his work.

Knowing, as she does, the time that clothes take to keep in order, knowing that long hair means at least an afternoon to wash, and always constant attention, a feminine woman defies all reason and somehow makes time for these things. And so it is with the care of her house or flat. She could live in lodgings or have a corner in a hostel, but she cannot bear the atmosphere that is not of her own creation. She must therefore have a place of her own. The whole of her income probably goes on the upkeep of her home; she cannot afford a servant, she cannot even really afford a flat if she looked into the future as a man looks. But she will have it. From an outsider’s point of view, one wonders where the pleasure comes in. She begins the day by getting her own breakfast, and having worked in an office all day, she returns to shop and sweep and dust and sew, or to cook and wash up for friends when they come to spend the evening. “It’s silly, I know,” said a bachelor woman, “I’m always having to draw on my sleep capital, but I couldn’t stand “apartments,” and I’m not going to try.” Were women really intended to live in this way?

Seeing then the time that femininity absorbs in a woman’s career, can we not understand those who cast it aside for ever? They cut off their useless hair, buy substantial masculine boots with low, flat heels, and dress themselves as nearly as they dare in the comfortable, ugly fashions of men.

From the artistic point of view the result is often deplorable. It needs a brave woman to be seen in such clothing, except at a carnival; but for the work they have to do perhaps male attire is more consistent.

Such clothing, however, convenient as it may be, tends to unsex the wearer. No longer feminine, unable to be quite masculine, she becomes a _neutral_, and her real friends, male or female, are few and far between.

I shared a cabin, crossing the Atlantic, with one of these “neutrals.” Except for a very short skirt, her garments were all masculine until the evening when, remembering her original sex, she extracted some rings from a grandmother’s pocket somewhere in her nether garments, and at the same time allowed her femininity to go the length of wearing lace stockings, without ceasing, however, to don her major’s coat. Such a woman would probably never do any great good nor any great harm, and, supposing she had sex, it could easily be transmuted to her work.

This type, nevertheless, gets a perfectly square deal from a man employer. “With such a woman as a business associate or a secretary, I can treat her like a man,” said a member of Parliament.

Probably this type of woman would be excellent on a jury, even a jury to try a murderer. But to ask some women to sit on juries is next to a crime. It is not at all in their line of thinking. They would be much happier buying silk stockings and leaving this grim and complicated subject to men or to other women of tried experience.

In the question of juries we have another example of the part being made greater than the whole. For one woman who can be of any real use in a police court, a hundred are no good at such work, at least until they have learnt to be more just to their own sex, and more balanced in judgment. No woman should sit on a jury against her will.

Face to face with two million superfluous women, perhaps the “neutral” may offer a solution, who can tell? They work mechanically, like the bees, and judging the work, one forgets the worker.

But it was neither as a hybrid nor through any male mentality that Mme. Curie succeeded in helping her husband to discover radium. It was the feminine quality of her mind that was of such great value. And when he was killed in the most stupid of street accidents, that female mind became sterile until the day when she found a substitute for the great masculine mind at rest.

George Eliot, before she met George Lewis, was no more than a competent journalist. With the assistance of his mind she wrote _Adam Bede_. Without him, would her novels have ever been produced?

And the hybrid can never be good for the community. It may be convenient for us to ask women to give up their femininity, but the sacrifice is too great. It is marking her with the same gender as a table.