The Common Woman: Part 2

But it gets even worse. More dangerous than any of this is the solution to the workplace problem propounded not merely on the fringes of feminism, but in the mainstream media: the solution that there shall be no children, that by various unnatural devices a woman shall set herself “free” from the most fundamental function of womanhood in order to serve some of the most superficial functions of modern civilisation. The very fact that the unnatural devices are considered necessary is itself instructive, for in that very fact the commercial sphere half-admits its essential inferiority to the domestic. Nuns, feeling themselves called to something higher than the family, have remained childless for professional purposes; but where is the woman who would take a vow of chastity for McDonald’s, and wear to work a habit with the “golden arches” hanging from a necklace? Where is the business man or woman foolish enough to expect her to do such a thing? Modern capitalism is neither as mad nor as noble as that. Instead of self-control we have birth control, which is designed to ensure that there will be no births to control, and abortion, which is very careful to keep quiet about what is being aborted.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally got to the crux of the matter. I have hardly touched upon motherhood yet, but it is by the dignity of motherhood that feminism shall either stand or fall. I have often heard feminists decry the “reduction” as they see it, of woman to this function—“a glorified womb” is the derisive description which sticks most in my mind—and when I hear that woman is more than “just” a mother I agree wholeheartedly; but in following-up I cannot but echo the words of the German poet: Was ist so nur? To anyone who considers life a good thing, to be its nurturer and the channel for its transmission is the most sacred thing a human being can be. C.S. Lewis described homemaking as the “ultimate career,” the end to whose support all other careers are but mere means; and this strikes me not as superstition but as solid scientific fact. I do not know how it feels to a woman, and I am perfectly prepared to admit that my entire sex may have made a colossal mistake; but everything men have done throughout history has been done so that women could do this. Yes, it is an exhausting and at times depressing task, but because it is gigantic, not because it is insignificant. It is an oppressive task, not because it is lowly but because it is the highest task of all. It is oppressive because every great task is oppressive, because everything that is bigger than oneself cannot help but weigh down on one. The point is not that it is the only thing that a woman can do, or even the only thing that a woman should do; but that even if it were it would still be more than any man could hope to match. If feminism makes the mistake of elevating commercial work over this, it has put the means before the ends; and if a woman, in her admiration of the masculine sphere, abandons her own to rush into it, I hope she will forgive my own sex if its confusion sometimes turns to anger. I have no doubt that her motives are mostly pure, but to most men the embrace will feel like a rejection, as if woman has thrown in their face the gifts they have worked all their lives to lay at her feet. I do not absolve my own sex of blame in this matter, for we men have indeed indulged in exaggeration when stating our own case and dismissiveness when hearing yours. We have stated that we men—statesmen and scientists, artists and architects, builders and barbers, policemen and plumbers, philosophers and farmers—were upholding the nation and doing the great work of civilisation, neglecting to mention that without the women we could not have done it at all. We over-emphasised our own importance; but deep down we never believed our own bullshit, and we certainly never expected our sisters to believe anything of the kind. Condemn us, but do us this justice at least: even at the height of our masculine arrogance, we were never as arrogant as that; and is women have begun to take us far more seriously than we ever took ourselves it is only natural that we should feel a little disconcerted at least. If the "Common Woman" really is behind this movement, then I salute her ingenuity. Like a Japanese wrestler, she has conquered by means of surrender. In the battle of the sexes, we men were prepared for anything except victory.

But I am not so certain that she is behind it; and I especially doubt that the movement has been successful because she has been behind it. Apart from its convenience to the “career woman” and to the capitalist who wants more of her, “birth control” in all its forms has multitudinous advantages, and women are not the only beneficiaries. I would not insult the reader’s intelligence by trying to list them even if I thought I could reach the end. Yet however much fun the amoristic anarchy it has facilitated might be, we owe it to ourselves as rational agents to think with our heads and not our genitalia; and before I dive into this Dionysian orgy occurring around me, I pause to wonder what in the world we think we are doing – for if we really believe we are expanding liberty, or raising the dignity of womanhood, we need to think again.

Now, the desire to liberate Woman from Nature is a perfectly understandable one. I am perfectly cognisant of the fact that having a child can ruin a person’s future, particularly if the person in question is female. I have never asked, but is quite likely that I have been that child. I would be the last person in the world to patronise a woman by telling her that motherhood is a pleasant task. Rather, it is precisely because it is such an unpleasant task that its importance must be emphasised. If a feminist says she does not want to be a mother, I can quite understand the view; but what I cannot understand as anything other than the arrogance of the pure individualist is the assumption in modern feminist thought (or what passes for thought) that the task is for somebody else. I do not deny for one moment that parenthood is a burden; but a moment’s reflection will tell one that the burden has to be borne by somebody if the human race is to survive. I have been accused, when I have mentioned this fact, of speaking “as if there were a population crisis,” but the plain fact is that there always is a population crisis. The race is never more than one generation away from extinction; and even if it does not care about posterity, every generation should take care to replenish itself out of simple self-interest. One day it will get old, and its ability to enjoy a dignified dotage is dependent on subsequent generations being sufficiently numerous to take care of it. Now, the world’s resources are finite; and I do not deny that in addition to the ever-present threat of under-population there may be a threat of over-population; but distributing contraceptive devices and leaving the matter to private enterprise is the least logical way of dealing with such a scenario. It amounts to an act of blind faith that the human race, atomised, will collectively decide to have exactly as many children as it needs. Perhaps I’m too much of an economist, but I see no reason to make any such assumption.

“Pro-choice” feminists frequently speak of preventing or ending “unwanted” pregnancies, and I do not deny that they speak movingly. I would rather like to agree with them, not least for selfish reasons of my own, but honesty compels me to ask myself the question: what in the world justifies the assumption that there will be any wanted pregnancies at all? In a civilisation where people relied on their children to take care of them in their old age, it would be rational to have as many as one could; but in a civilisation with state pensions I can think of no reason why a rational agent would want them. (Perhaps this is the strongest argument for abolishing state pensions, but if anything could exacerbate the threat of over-population this would.) Evolution has not programmed us to want children. It has programmed us to want sex, with the risk of having children as a by-product. If she can have sex without running that risk, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that Femina Economica will choose to do anything else. People may decide to have children in the belief that it will make them happier, but I have seen no evidence to that effect and frankly I suspect the contrary. A society which has to encourage its members to procreate under a misapprehension is a society which has to lie to itself to survive; and a society which has to lie to itself to survive is one that does not deserve to survive. The world may threaten to become over-populated (indeed, it may already be over-populated), and deadly venereal diseases may threaten to wipe out the species. It may be socially expedient to distribute condoms, but do not assume that the population will stabilise. If the breeding of the race is left to the people who want to do it; it is more likely that the population will age and dwindle until it cannot support itself, getting stupider with every generation, until the pension system at last becomes unsustainable and young people will be faced with two alternatives: either care for their aged parents as they care for their children, or do to them what the Red Indians did to theirs on the plains of North America. Stable societies without modern contraception have existed in the past; and I can easily imagine a stable society of the future in which condom use will be not only encouraged but mandatory, with the perpetuation of the race provided for by means of sexual conscription; but I cannot imagine as anything other than unstable a society such as ours, in which the largest licence in love is extended to everyone under the guise of liberty. The risk of having children is nature’s tax on sex, and it must be paid one way or another. If the "Uncommon Woman" claims the right not to pay the tax she is assuming that the "Common Woman" will pay her share. If a feminist wants to make the burden fall upon men and women more equally I shall support her wholeheartedly; but if she wants to eat her cake and still have it she is unburdening herself onto her sisters. If the Common Woman refuses to allow her this privilege, it is not because she despises her own sex but because she is loyal to it. She knows that feminine liberty means nothing without feminine equality, and that feminine equality means nothing without sorority.

There are complications I have not covered, and in the case of contraception I do not insist on the economic, egalitarian argument as outlined above being accepted uncritically. There are cases that seem to be crying out for relief. Some people do need to use condoms to protect themselves against venereal diseases, and some people need to take birth-control pills for medical reasons. Some people simply cannot afford to take care of a child, and where self-control fails birth-control is by far the most humane alternative; although I consider this state of affairs less a recommendation of contraception than a condemnation of the social circumstances that necessitate it. Even where birth-control is the lesser evil it is an evil nonetheless, and if its availability is used as an excuse for maintaining those circumstances, we are not so much heading for hell as already there. There is almost nothing for which the poor people of England are so contemptuously criticised by the right-wing press than for their sexual honesty; and there is nothing in which they are so radically right (in instinct at least) and the rich so wrong. If the "Common Woman" turns up her nose at the unwomanly rights with which she is bribed to suffer unwomanly wrongs, who are any of us to condemn her? If she trusts her sisters not to abuse too disastrously the licence it affords then I shall defer to her judgement. She knows more about such things than I do. But I do believe the economics of the matter should be taken into account; and that before we begin to admit exceptions we should ask ourselves what, if anything, is the self-limiting principle that prevents this or that exception from becoming the rule. There is scarcely a fact of practical politics more established than that he who asks for exceptions will get them, or that those who least deserve them are those most liable to claim them. Perhaps there is a solution, and I certainly hope there is, for selfish reasons as much as social ones. Perhaps a Pigouvian tax on contraceptives can keep the population within bounds and turn sexual licence into true sexual liberty. But, however the matter be resolved, until it has been resolved I for one will not pretend otherwise.

In point of fact, a thousand little things lead me to suspect that, however unconsciously, she understands the underlying economics of sex intuitively—far better than most of us do intellectually. I do not know how many women share my view on this particular subject; but I do know that most of the women I know, even those who are enthusiastic advocates for artificial birth-prevention, continue to think and act, and expect others to think and act, as if it had never been invented. I know plenty of women whose exploit these devices, but very few who exploit them to their logical limit. Correct me if I’m wrong; but I don’t think I know a single woman who would accept her boyfriend “cheating” her because he used a condom while doing so, or whose guilt at cheating him would be alleviated by the fact that she had swallowed a certain pill beforehand. The primal instinct of possessiveness, founded on the firm fact that a promiscuous partner is either sowing his seeds in a foreign field, to whose yield you have no claim, or else letting somebody else sow his seeds in yours, possibly choking up your own harvest, does not go away when the fact goes away. Even the men and women who ardently advocate contraception tend to be better than their creed—or possibly worse, depending on your point of view.

When it comes to prenatal infanticide, or what is more politely called abortion, there is no shortage of women (forget the men if you like) who do indeed feel that loyalty, if not to the collective of womankind then to an ideal of womanhood, supersedes any consideration of convenience. They do not usually voice their opinions in the scientific language I use here, but that does not mean that their instincts are not scientifically sound. They may prefer the older, more emotive language of religion, but that is no reason for atheists and agnostics to dismiss them. What the outer light of science learns at last by patient inquiry, the inner light of instinct has often known from the first; and in the light of that fact we would all be wise to pay more attention to our instincts–especially when they appear irrational. Incest taboos have existed before anyone knew the genetic disadvantages of consanguineous conjugation. Millions of men before now have been right without knowing why, and one does not need to believe in their God to acknowledge the faint possibility that the same can be said for these women. In fact, if their arguments were, as simple secularists so often like to maintain, derived solely from some supposedly sacred text, Catholics, to name but one of the anti-abortion groups, would consider it a severe weakness. I cannot speak for other traditions, but Catholics since Aquinas, reasoning that a rational God must have made his morality manifest in science, have sought objective morality not only in the scriptures but in the “Natural Law,” as evident to the Christian and the non-Christian alike.

Similarly, these women may not always appear articulate in expressing their concerns, but that is no reason to reject those concerns. What is subtly felt may be crudely expressed, and a moment’s self-reflection should teach most of us (it certainly teaches me) that the more subtly a thing is felt, the more crudely it is likely to be expressed. The more entangled a knot, the harder it is to untie; and when it comes to a problem as knotty as this, activists on either side may be excused if, like Alexander, they occasionally yield to the temptation to take a shortcut.

All the same, I think one should do one’s best to disentangle the strings methodically; and having gone over the economic ground already we have no need to do so extensively again. As with contraception, so with abortion. Whatever its virtues, it does not pass the Rawlsian test: that every person shall be granted as much liberty as is consistent with others having the same liberty. If no pregnancies were aborted, the human race would survive. If every pregnancy were aborted, it would not; and given the assumption (not universally accurate, but accurate enough by the standards of economics) that pregnancy and parenthood are disutilities there is no self-limiting principle to suggest that a single pregnancy would remain un-aborted. The rest follows logically as above. But the anti-abortionist does not stop there. She feels quite certainly that something bigger than self-interest, even the self-interest of her entire sex, is at stake, and before we say “case closed” we ought to examine, as fairly as possible, what that something is. In order to do so, it is necessary to untie ourselves from the linguistic Gordian knot in which the subject has trapped us, and clear away some of the cant that has confused the issue.

In particular, we must examine more closely the names which the two camps have chosen to give themselves. “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” are both labels sufficiently vague as to mean anything. Indeed, each might easily mean the exact opposite of what it is commonly supposed to mean. A “Pro-Choice” feminist might quite easily say “I’m pro-life too. I want everyone to enjoy his or her life. I’m in favour of giving those who have made a mistake a second chance at life.” Similarly, a “Pro-Life” advocate might say “I’m Pro-Choice as well. That’s why I believe in being held to account for one’s choices;” and if one looks under the surface this is indeed what is being assumed. This is the real, fundamental argument of the anti-abortionist, and it is the argument that he or she almost always forgets to explain. By a clever piece of sophistry, the sexual libertarians have claimed that they want nothing more than for a woman to have “control of her own body,” and it sounds like a perfectly reasonable request. The only thing wrong with it is that it misses the point, for except in the case of rape (which I will deal with later) no anti-abortionist is suggesting that anyone should have anything less. Nobody is suggesting that any woman should consent to being impregnated against her will. Except in the case of rape, abortion is not the assertion of control over one’s body; it is an escape from the consequences of not controlling one’s body. What these people mean to say is not that they want every woman to have control over her body, but that they want her to have control over her biology, and that is a radically different thing. It is akin to saying that every woman should have control over her own weather. I can see the advantages in both cases, but the power to be petitioned is not government but God. (The same argument is trotted out in favour of contraception, and with exactly as much truth. Birth-controllers talk of the right to “safe sex,” which is exactly as logical as if they talked of the right to safe suicide.)

To me, at least, this is the only meaning in the phrase “Pro-Life” which carries any force. It does not mean that one supports the baby’s life against the mother’s life, or even the baby’s life against the mother’s happiness. It means that one supports Life itself, even against lives. It means that one’s supreme loyalty is not to this life or that life or these lives or those lives but to Life with a capital L - the continuous, cumulative, chthonic process that began a billion years ago; Life, the force of Nature, the Prime Mover which created us all and which will consume us all. It is this, more than mere collective self-interest, which speaks to the primitive, pagan part of Man – and I use the word primitive in the highest sense, for so far from being a derogation it is simply the Latin for that which is first. (Indeed, no collective can inspire loyalty for long unless it appeals to something superior to itself.) One need not subscribe to any supernatural religion to remain loyal to the natural religion. One may or may not believe in a God, but we all believe instinctively in a Goddess. This is the flag around which the vitalist is roused to rally; and this is the thing that the individualist, who seems to dominate feminist thought these days, will never understand: that the great joy in life, the highest honour, is to be a conduit for the flow of the life-Force – to be used, and used up, for a purpose recognised by oneself as greater than the self. This is the misunderstanding that feminism has got itself into: it has forgotten, or seems to have forgotten, that there can be anything greater than the self, and can consider any intimation to that effect only as the profoundest of insults.

Hence, we are told that support for the liberalisation of abortion laws represents a respect for women that those of a more conservative disposition lack. To anyone who supposes that a woman owns life, as distinguished from life owning all of us, this is logical enough; but to a vitalist it is the exact reverse of the truth. Rightly or wrongly, for at least as long as men and women have been civilised they have seen sex as a sacrament. Whether or not it was undertaken with procreation as its purpose, parenthood was at least accepted as an attendant hazard. It was a voluntary vow; and even now, even among so-called “pro-choice” feminists, something of the sacramental sense of sex can still be seen. It can be seen in the very language used to state their case, in the assertion that intercourse is more than “just” (there’s that word again) a means of replication. It is also, they say, a supreme sensual pleasure and an extreme expression of love; and of course they are quite correct. But what, I wonder, do they think those facts mean? Where did the sensual pleasure originate, if not in nature’s need to bribe us to keep doing it? Just as procreation, or the risk thereof, is the price of the pleasure, so (from the perspective of evolution) is the pleasure the price of our procreativity. I do not mean that God, or the "Life-Force," or whatever you want to call it, deliberately doled out the one as compensation for the other. Rather, in evolution as in economics, the interplay of opposing forces resulted in an equilibrium price. Precisely because parenthood could be so painful, the only animals who could be induced to bear it were those to whom the act itself was addictive. Similarly, the romance of sex is not something separate from its progenitive properties; it is a direct outgrowth of them. Precisely because conjugation was an adventure, only those who loved (or at least trusted) each other would dare to do it together. In the ancient understanding of sex, as it was until about sixty years ago, intercourse took on the qualities of a religious act. It was a vow, voluntarily undertaken, to accept its attendant risks and responsibilities; and in holding her to that vow the State paid the "Common Woman" the supreme compliment of taking her at her word. Modern liberalism may give the modern woman much more freedom than her ancestor; but it does not respect her as the old law respected her, and millions of modern women feel this fact at least as strongly as I do, mere man that I am. They know very well that, the egalitarian economic argument notwithstanding, one cannot outgrow the universe. One can try, but one will only diminish the universe down to one’s own size. They know that the very fact of having a way out, regardless of whether one intends to use it, alters the essence of the act itself, and being democrats they rather resent not being consulted on the matter first. They know that the usurpation of the life-force by women is not the widening of womanhood but the narrowing of nature; and that even if she releases nature’s hold on her, Nature in turn will loosen her hold on man.

I have tried, as much as possible, to avoid talking about my own sex here. For the sake of argument, I have tried to forget the fact that babies have to have fathers as well as mothers, even if it be only at the beginning. But before I continue I must mention one fact about abortion that strikes me as particularly pertinent to my own sex, albeit indirectly. The fact is this: that the enslavement of Woman to Nature, such that it is, is the only honourable foundation of the enslavement to Woman of Man. The fact that the duties of parenthood are now shared at least somewhat equally between mothers and fathers is one of the definite achievements of feminism; and while I have my reservations about the exaction of child support payments from unmarried fathers it is at least a step in the right direction. It is now acknowledged, not only in custom but in law, that procreation carries duties for fathers as well as mothers, even if they be only secondary; yet while abortion has given a woman a way out of her duties, no such escape exists for a man – save by the mother’s mercy. Now, one does not have to feel particularly sorry for a man who has undertaken undesirable obligations to see that it is hard to conceive of any state of affairs so corrupting to an entire sex.

It is easy to say that he already made his choice when he had sex, but so did she. It is easy to say (if you believe in contraception) that he could have used a condom, but so could she have taken a pill (although the former, providing protection against venereal diseases, is admittedly more honourable). If one takes the line, as I do, that unprotected intercourse constitutes consent to the risks of fatherhood; it is inconsistent of anyone with egalitarian pretensions to claim that the same principle does not apply to motherhood. The fact that gestation occurs in the mother’s womb obscures, but does not change, the principle of the vow—or, if you prefer, of the contract. It changes the emotional, but not the theoretical, quality of the case, the immediate but not the abstract. The statement “it’s my body” can easily be met with “it’s my money.” What, I wonder, would the feminist think if an expectant father responded thus? What would any of us think, come to that, if a speculator said the same thing after short-selling shares on the stock exchange and going bankrupt? Quite properly, we would say “So it is. It was your money and your choice, and you staked your money and made your choice. Maybe it’s not your fault, but it’s nobody else’s fault either; and like it or lump it, you must live with it.” Either intercourse is a contract with nature or it is not; and to say otherwise is to say not that sex—not the woman’s body but the process itself- is something into which a man and a woman must enter as equals, but that it is something which woman owns as private property, and continues to own even after the act. Whatever else such a state of affairs be, there is no equality there. Now, as long as life owned woman, there could be no sound objection to woman’s ownership of man. It was precisely because she was the servant of something greater that he was content to be subordinate to her, in private life if not in public. Long before modern feminism, it was rightly felt that to be a slave to a woman’s duty was the highest honour that could be bestowed on a man. Only a cad and a coward could cavil at such a status; but I think a man may be allowed to kick at being a slave to something as subjective as a woman’s whim. Whatever the rights and wrongs of such a subjection, one thing at least is certain: it leaves the man mentally and morally in a ditch from which only a saint could escape with honour. The moment a man’s duty becomes dependent on a woman’s whim, the more tempted he is to hope she will release him from it, irrespective of the woman’s wishes or indeed his own conscience; and regardless of whether he sinks to petitioning her, the woman herself can hardly fail to be aware of the fact. A man may sincerely disapprove of abortion, but once the option of abortion is admitted he cannot help but hope for one. I do not know for definite whether this inequality between men and women is deserved; but I do know that whatever its effects on women, it makes us men worse men by any standard I can conceive.

Again, with abortion as with contraception, there are complications that make me hesitate to advocate acting on my own conclusions. Anyone with an ounce of fellow-feeling can see the suffering of people who feel that they have no choice but to abort a baby, or whose circumstances have changed, or who have (and surely this is the worst of all) had the duties of pregnancy forced on them. But, as in the case of contraception, one must be careful before one cleaves to compassion. The whole point of law is that it should be stronger than the strongest of emotions; and though we may feel sorry for those who have got stuck in a hole through no fault of their own, their blamelessness is not itself an argument for allowing them to burrow through to the other side of the world. Sympathetically speaking, there is much to be said for the feeling that nobody should be held responsible for anything they did when they were horny. If anything constitutes temporary insanity, that does; and a plea for diminished responsibility on such grounds is quite reasonable. The only counterargument to this very humane attitude is that it will not work. It is quite as rational to apply such an argument to a rapist, or a mass murderer, as to someone who surrendered to the sexual passion unwisely; yet regardless of the emotional excuses which can almost always be advanced honestly on behalf of both these criminals, we find it necessary to imprison them. We may not be ourselves in our extreme moments, but it is our extreme moments that define our lives.

Even in the most heart-breaking and outrageous case of all, there are difficulties about allowing an exception in practice, although I hope we should all agree it should be done in theory. Jacob Rees-Mogg, I know, disagrees on this point, stating that women who abort a child conceived in rape are committing “a second wrong.” Perhaps they are, but it is at the very least a wrong which they should have the right to commit; and in this case the fact that a baby’s life is at stake is beside the point. One can, I think, be justly held to a vow one has made; but I do not see what gives us the right to hold anyone, man or women, to a vow he or she has not made. If one consents to be hooked up to a machine on a hospital bed for nine months to keep somebody else alive, that person’s family has a right to be indignant, and to hit you with the full force of the law, if you subsequently disconnect yourself before time is up; but if the same family kidnaps you and connects you to that machine without consent, you have every right to refuse to remain there. Now, if the rapist were always a man, and as easy to identify and convict as our hypothetical kidnappers, there would be no problem at all about allowing abortions in such cases as extreme exceptions to a general rule, but unfortunately neither of those things are true. First of all, let us take the case of the man who is raped by a woman (such things can happen) who consequently becomes pregnant. Does this have any relation to what should happen in the reverse case? Should he be permitted to insist on an abortion? I honestly have no idea, and if any of you want to tell me what you think I shall listen gratefully. Now, this possibility is inextricably bound up with the other, far more likely, possibility that complicates the case: the possibility that rape by its very nature is a crime particularly difficult to prove. With the possible exception of blackmail, it is usually the most private of private crimes, frequently coming down in law to no more than one person’s unverifiable testimony. I know honest, intelligent, well-meaning people who hold the view that abortions should be prohibited, with rape the sole exception to a general rule; and there is a large part of me that agrees with them. Yet once this proposition is admitted we must ask ourselves what standard of proof should be demanded before the procedure is permitted. Demanding that the guilt of the accused party be proved beyond “reasonable doubt” is all very well in a criminal trial, but if the same standard were to apply in abortion cases a huge majority of women who had been raped would find no relief under such a law. Where the accused’s liberty is not at stake I can quite easily understand anyone saying that this is too stringent, and that a simple balance of probabilities should be all that is required. I can just as easily understand that even if an adult’s liberty is not at stake, an infant’s life is, and that if standards of proof should be no higher than in a court case, they should at least be no lower. One must also ask oneself what the unintended consequences of demanding any kind of proof might be. It was once impossible for an unhappily married couple to obtain a divorce unless infidelity on the part of one partner could be proved, and the result was that it became customary for a man seeking a divorce to pretend to commit adultery. Honourable men found it their duty to commit perjury against themselves, to pretend to have wronged their wives in order to do right by them. Might we find something similar if such abortion laws as I have spoken of here were enacted? If abortion tribunals and criminal courts demanded different standards of proof, they would have to be kept completely separate, no accusation made in the one having any effect in the other, in order to preserve the democratic rights of the accused. As long as this remained the case, might not a man, confronted with a woman in a very real difficulty, feel compelled by his compassion to confess to a crime he has not committed? Even worse, might not a market in false confessions emerge? Faced with these difficulties, even the most ardent anti-abortionist must admit the impossibility of designing an abortion law that is fair for everybody. Some, I’m sure, will suggest that it should be sufficient for a woman to claim that she has been inseminated by rape, without any standard of proof being applied at all, in which case whatever restrictions one has crafted might as well not exist. This is not as irrational as it at first appears. It would have the vitalist virtue of being, in theory, on the side of life, while providing for people who have had an obligation forced on them; and it would take a woman at her word not once but twice. To my mind, this is the most attractive abortion law I can think of; yet it does not get us out of our recurring difficulties. Like the liberal system we have at the moment, and indeed like almost any system which advertises for exceptions, it lends itself open to abuse; and it leaves unanswered the question of what is to be done with the men who find themselves in a similar situation? Should a man be granted the same license as a woman in this matter, needing only to claim that he was forced into fatherhood to absolve himself of its duties?

I do not know how to resolve any of the difficulties I have pointed out in the above paragraph, and even if I thought I did I should hardly consider it my business to force my solutions on anyone. I am not one of those people who believe men should have no say in the matter (I don’t have a uterus, but like everyone else I came from one), but while we have a right to a voice I’m not sure we should have a vote. This, I think, is one matter in which “the collective act of coercion” that is democratic government should be performed directly by the one half of humanity whom it touches most directly. But I do believe that the female anti-abortionists and sexual conservatives should be listened to, and not dismissed as simpletons or as sexists against themselves. Perhaps some of them are, but many more, I suspect, are motivated not by a hatred of their own sex but by a religious respect for it and a sororal solidarity which too many feminists are too quick to ignore. As in private things, so in public, and the women who express misgivings about the feminisation of the workplace must not be ignored. There is, I have noted previously, a systematic bias in these matters which gives the greatest public prominence to those who least deserve it; and we (men and women) would do well to remember that noise does not equal numbers. The private woman, precisely because she is private, has less time and space in which to make her concerns known than the public woman, and in many things her interests may be different or even opposite. Those women who presume, and are presumed, to speak for their sex are frequently those who have the least right to do so, and if we are to be democrats as well as feminists we must resist the impulse to yield to mere volume. One woman with the megaphone of the mass media at her disposal can drown out a myriad women with nothing but their own voices, and a million more who are quietly minding their own business. It is those women whose voices we must go out of our way to hear. We must listen especially to those least inclined to speak. I do not know if I am a feminist anti-feminist or an anti-feminist feminist, but I do know this: Feminism, if it is to represent Femina, must enthrone the "Common Woman" as democracy seeks to enthrone the "Common Man." To put it in the imagery of the Great Democrat, we must search the quietest corners of the land and put the crown on the head of the woman who does not want it.

I could go on, but I won’t. This essay is already far longer than I intended it to be, and if it gets any longer I will bore myself almost as much as I must have bored you. I have tried to be as structured as possible, but most of this has been written as it came to me, in the order in which it came to me, and if I ramble any more I will forget what I was writing about in the first place. There are still things I have not covered, and tangents I could have taken you along, but I have said enough, I think, to make the substance of my concerns clear. I am not against feminine liberty, or feminine equality, or feminine independence. What I am against, in either sex, is license masquerading as liberty, enslavement in the guise of “empowerment,” and a new form of dependence calling itself independence. Most of all, I am against all this talk of equality for women being used to mask the destruction of the more fundamental equality among them. I have neither the right nor the desire to demand that the divergent desires of womankind should be ignored, that three and a half billion independent intellects should be assimilated into a hive-mind; but I do desire, for the sake of both sexes, that any movement which claims to speak for a sex should be honest with itself, acknowledge that conflicts of interest do exist, and at least try to resolve them. How they are resolved is none of my business. I ask only that they be confronted. To return to our original metaphor, it is desirable that the horses pulling the carriage should have minds of their own, but not that they should disregard all discipline. Let the horses determine the direction in which we are to be pulled, and if they disagree let them disaxfgree and decide democratically amongst themselves; but if we are pulled simultaneously in different directions we shall break, men and women both. I have said my piece. Let the "Common Woman" say hers.