I've been hearing lately about the "New Woman" until I get considerably mixed up as to the kind of creature it is, anyway. I used to think that I was pretty progressive but it seems to me that the sweet "New Woman" is the same "New Woman," it depends on the way you look at her, is several miles in advance.
What is a "New Woman ?" an innocent friend asked me the other day, in a hushed voice, as though she were talking of a funeral in which she expected to hold the leading position.
"Well," I remarked, to gain time, because you can't answer these sphinx riddles right away, you know, and must never confess to ignorance until you really know that you don't know." I suppose that a "New Woman" is one who has found out that she knew nothing before but now knows all about it."
Atrocious pun, wasn't it? But, bless your heart, you can work off real Jack the Ripper puns on English people and they either won't notice it unless you call their attention to it with a stick, or if they do notice it will look at you admiringly and wish they could have thought of it. My innocent friend never noticed it.
"Knows all about what, Mrs. Sharpe ?" she asked, leaning forward, deeply interacted.
"Knows all about the way she should go and the way she shouldn't, the way she should dress and the way she shouldn't, the things she should do and the things that she shouldn't, and knows among other things that which puzzled poor old Solomon— the way of a man with a maid."
" Does she really ? " asked my innocent friend, credulously. "She must be very clever."
"Clever's no name," said I. "She knows more about things than Mother Nature herself and if she'd only been created out of chaos and given a chance to see the Creator filing the universe and the stars and the little blades of grass and the blubbers that sting when you go in bathing, she'd have chipped in with advice that would have altered it all very considerably for the better— if her advice had only been taken."
"Now you're joking, Mrs. Sharpe," said my innocent friend. "The worst of you is that one doesn't know when you're joking and when you're not."
So off she went. But I wasn't exactly joking, for what the "New Woman" allows that she doesn't know isn't enough to make up into the shape of a new spring bonnet.
But, seriously, I'll tell you what the "New Woman" reminds me of. You know, out West, the sheep will go nibbling, nibbling, nibbling at the dainty, delicate, titbits of grass and letting the strong, coarse, get-out-of-my-way-and-look-for-a-brick grass severely alone, and this goes on year after year and season after season and finally the sheep have got to tackle the coarse, get-out-of-my-way-grass or die and they don't like it a little bit, do they? It's exactly the same with women and the New Woman. The world with its beautiful civilisation, that reminds one of the image of Baal Moloch, all brass on the outside and with a red-hot stomach for digesting babies inside, which wouldn't be so bad if it were handy to a theatre and if it was fed with the little brats that are smuggled in under shawls and always shriek and howl at the most pathetic moment as though their King-Workingman's-wife mother couldn't leave them at home with the nurse or the butler— this world, to repeat and so not get mixed, has gone nibbling away at the gentle, sweet, long-suffering woman and the strong-minded lady is beginning to loom largely in the big world-paddock. Bless your heart ! She's a product of civilisation, like the larrikin and his "donah," but you mustn't go and confuse her with the larrikin who is a product of a very different complexion altogether. She has an ideal, and a lopsided ideal is very many degrees better than no ideal at all.
In the first place she believes from the very bottomless depths of her yearnings that she ought to wear pants and that the flowing skirts are a gilded chain rivetted on her by that bad wicked creature— man.
"Look at this !" declaimed a friend to me, with such an accent on the "this," sticking out a not-too-bad foot with a natty pair of boots and the weeniest glimpse of a natty stocking. " And tell me if I'm a free woman !"
"It's quite neat, my dear," I replied. "You probably wouldn't be with such a recommendation if you were born in the Caucasus, but since you were born in Queensland I really can't see why wearing a number three should make a slave of you."
"Of course," she snapped. "'Even women won't be serious and so they go on being slaves all their lives. It's my dress I mean, not my boots. Do you think a woman can be free so long as her limbs are wrapped up in skirts and petticoats ?"
"It depends," I said, "on what she wants to do. It would be a bit awkward if she wanted to turn a somersault or stand on her head and drink a glass of milk, but it really doesn't strike me as stopping us from sitting here and talking it over."
"But how can we be free if our limbs aren't free ?" she cried, indignantly, though just where the cause for indignation came in I couldn't make out without careful consideration.
"We aren't— when we want to kick high," I admitted.
" Kick high ! Why, Mrs. Sharpe, I'm surprised at you, though I might have known you're a real old-fashioned Conservative, in spite of the way you go on about some things. You are worse than a Catholic about marriage, for you wouldn't even have dispensations ; and I'd like to know what our marriage is but a miserable piece of slavery that gives a woman over bound hand and foot to the will of a tyrant. And you've got to think that it's right to heap children into the world like rabbits without thinking what's to become of them and never recollecting that maternity is a sacred privilege of woman which she should exercise intellectually and not degrade to the level of the brute instincts of lower animals. And you actually look upon the proper place of a woman as being a wife and mother, and I've heard you say that really if she isn't going to have children there's no earthly reason for her existence and the world could get along just as well without her. And when I talk seriously of the slavery chains of dress you only laugh and talk of kicking high."
"Now, my dear," I urged, "don't get angry and don't hit me with quotations out of New Woman novels. I wear knickerbockers myself when I go in bathing, and if I were a tramway girl in a coalpit I suppose I'd wear trousers like Zola's Catherine does. And I must say that long skirts are silly, useless contrivances which we'd give up quicker if we were better built about the calves, just as corsets are regular death traps that we'd forget to put on if we were all better built to the neck. But I don't see why we should abuse poor men and shout out that we're slaves and generally prove our love of liberty by thinking that we want license when we don't."
"Men!" she cried. "Men! They're the lower half of society. Ugh ! the brutes! How on earth you can tolerate them so I can't understand."
"Nor I," I admitted. "But we do tolerate them, you know. I suppose because we can't get anything better just at present. Which I reckon is the main reason why they tolerate us, too. Men and women are both very far from perfect, don't you see, and it takes some little tolerance to make us even get on with our own sex."
She glared as though she felt from the bottom of her heart that it took heaps of forbearance to get on with me. And very soon she went off to try her mission on a likelier convert. For I can't say I'm a New Woman. No, I'm not a New Woman, but a very, very old-fashioned one at the bottom —a real old Conservative, as my friend pointed out.
The knickerbockers that the New Woman wants to put on are right enough. Though what the objection to below-the-knee skirts are I could never see. The peasant girls all over the world work and work hard in their below-the-knee petticoats. Even in England, I'm told, they go into the fields and work alongside the men without finding it necessary to put on trousers, and it's very funny that it should suddenly have struck idle people or towns-people that the moderately short skirt prevents the free use of the legs— or of the "limbs," as the New Woman calls it. I reckon the swell riding set who want to sit a horse straddle have had something to do with the knickerbocker notion, which is all right, too, for of all the silly, foolish, crazy, idiot ways of sitting on a horse the crouched-up side-saddle style is the very worst, and not the way a bush girl sits when she goes off to the post box for letters riding bare-backed on a flour bag. You must ride straddle to ride really well and easily— there can't be any doubt about that to any man who can tell a crick in a horse's back from an emu jumping at a wire fence —and to ride straddle you must have knickerbockers if you're going to do it with any grace or comfort. The Tartar women, who're great riders, ride man fashion, and so do the Patagonian, who don't take the trouble to put on knickerbockers or any thing else. But to get back to the thing we're talking of, I can't for the life of me see why we should all of us march about in knickerbockers unconcealed just because they're good for riding and swimming in. For even for riding the below-the-knee skirt wouldn't be in the way. And I must say that to me man's dress isn't pretty enough to want to imitate it too closely.
A dressed-up man is an ugly thing when you come to sum him up. Trouser legs like stove-pipes, sleeves like stove-pipes and a medley of bits of clothes showing like a patchwork quilt badly patterned on his body. Compare him to the skirted woman. Stupid as her long skirts are she beats him to pieces for attractive dressing, I think.
But the New Woman doesn't think of that. As I said before she is the strong-minded one who has been left when the sweet gentle woman was eaten out, and the reason of her mission is a secret anger against you men. You haven't used her rightly, any more than you've used yourselves rightly, and so she's come on the warpath and is going to make you all sit up, if she can. She's going to show she's just every little bit as good as you are, if not better, and she's going to begin by showing you and every down-trodden and eaten-up sister that if Man — the brute, as she'd say— thinks that he has any more right to wear breeches than sweet woman he's very much mistaken, and has got to be let know it. And she's going to make a rabid sort of raid on all sorts of institutions that she gets her eagle eyes on, just to show the despised sex that she wants a say in law in order too. She's alright, but she s got it into her furious head that Man is all bad and that all the things she thinks he's doing are bad, from petticoats up to marriage. She's going to fix everything up the way it ought to be, and if you suggest mildly that the little function of maternity has got to be performed somehow if we want to get a drink of tea when we're old she glares at you with her eagle eye and puts you down as a poor deluded fellow-slave who wants rescuing badly.
Mind ! Every New Woman doesn't believe in "free love" as commonly understood, although most of 'em have surprisingly liberal theories on the subject which would be a little shocking if they weren't, like many other theorists, the very last to put their own proposals into practice. And there is one section of the New Woman, for she is many, who is a fervid champion of a strait-waistcoat morality which would make the Puritan fathers feel that Puritanism itself is only fit for young men about town. But one thing you may rely on, which is that the New Woman doesn't sing herself to sleep with "John Anderson my Jo" and doesn't look on "Annie Laurie" as the sweetest song in the world.
She isn't soft-hearted, at least she don't lay out on soft-heartedness. But then, the world kills the soft-hearted and encourages the harder and more self-sufficient. It always did, you know, and will keep on doing it till it gets to know better and, oh, it takes us such long weary years, such ages of aching and suffering, to learn enough to come in out of the wet. Once upon a time, if all one hears is true, a man came along who hadn't a mean atom in his whole body and the crowd had the chance to choose between him and a Ned Kelly sort of bushranger and they put up their hands solid: " Not this man, but Barrabas." And so the loving, tender woman, who cares for nothing so much as she does for the straight love of an honest man and the prattling of her children and for the soft, sweet womanliness that is a halo round her, is shoved out of the running and has no show at all much. Whereupon, up comes the New Woman saying "Give me room, you villains." And if she hits out a bit at random and makes things uncomfortable generally, who is to blame I'd like someone to tell. It really isn't the knickerbockers she wants, or the unholy things. She doesn't really mean that all men are villains and that the strong-minded female is the only good thing ever created. Not a bit of it. She talks that way with her mouth, and not knowing exactly what she does want she reckons that's how she feels, but what is spurring her on and making her a nuisance is the vague, empty, dreary feeling inside her that things aren't right somehow, and she sees that women are jumped on and doesn't trouble that they jump on themselves so she wants to jump back.
And the workingman shrugs his shoulders in noble lordly man fashion, and bawls out in shearing-shed or workshop: "What's that got to do with us? Fancy the Worker printing such twaddle !" Which only shows what a noodle the workingman is very often, because the New Woman can do him serious bodily harm in her hitting-out just as she could do him very much good if she only saw things in the right light and went with him to alter the evil and to let the good alone. For women have to live, that's a moral. And if men won't help women to keep in their own "sphere" as the old-fangled call it; well, woman is going to give man a big crowding in his half of it. Concerning which, if you wait a little longer you may get a few words of commonsense from
LUCINDA SHARPE.
Worker (Brisbane, Qld. : 1890 - 1955), Saturday 5 June 1897, page 6
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