23. A Glimpse Into Utopia

You ask me what would be the position of women in an ideal community.
Well, after dinner, imagination may take free flight. Suppose, till the
coffee comes, we discuss that question.

Woman, I take it, differs from man in being the sex sacrificed to
reproductive necessities.

Whenever I say this, I notice my good friends, the women's-rights women,
with whom I am generally in pretty close accord, look annoyed and hurt.
I can never imagine why. I regard this point as an original inequality
of nature, which it should be the duty of human society to redress as
far as possible, like all other inequalities. Women are not on the
average as tall as men; nor can they lift as heavy weights, or undergo,
as a rule, so much physical labour. Yet civilised society recognises
their equal right to the protection of our policemen, and endeavours to
neutralise their physical inequality by the collective guarantee of all
the citizens. In the same way I hold that women in the lump have a
certain disadvantage laid upon them by nature, in the necessity that
some or most among them should bear children; and this disadvantage I
think the men in a well-ordered State would do their best to compensate
by corresponding privileges. If women endure on our behalf the great
public burden of providing future citizens for the community, the least
we can do for them in return is to render that burden as honourable and
as little onerous as possible. I can never see that there is anything
unchivalrous in frankly admitting these facts of nature; on the
contrary, it seems to me the highest possible chivalry to recognise in
woman, as woman, high or low, rich or poor, the potential mother, who
has infinite claims on that ground alone to our respect and sympathy.

Nor do I mean to deny, either, that the right to be a mother is a sacred
and peculiar privilege of women. In a well-ordered community, I believe,
that privilege will be valued high, and will be denied to no fitting
mother by any man. While maternity is from one point of view a painful
duty, a burden imposed upon a single sex for the good of the whole, it
is from another point of view a privilege and a joy, and from a third
point of view the natural fulfilment of a woman's own instincts, the
complement of her personality, the healthy exercise of her normal
functions. Just as in turn the man's part in providing physically for
the support of the woman and the children is from one point of view a
burden imposed upon him, but from another point of view a precious
privilege of fatherhood, and from a third point of view the proper
outlet for his own energy and his own faculties.

In an ideal State, then, I take it, almost every woman would be a
mother, and almost every woman a mother