A FEW weeks ago. I said I’d return to a re-evaluation of Cunninghame Graham’s stories and sketches. I haven’t forgotten the promise but since I’ve been rereading them, I’ve realised so much material needs to be resifted and thought through.

In any case, after his account of Queen Victoria’s funeral was published in The National to coincide with the funeral of the more recent woman monarch, the idea that we might approach his literary works through some of his political assessments of social reality and injustice seems apt and helpful.

He was writing more than a century ago. The hard question is, have we come any distance since then? If so, how, and where are we? If not, or rather, where not, what do we need to do?

So this week, with thanks to Lachlan Munro for making this available to us, we have an essay first published in the journal The New Age in July 1908. Its pertinence in 2022 is horribly close. And in literary terms, if one were to look for a model of clear prose, controlled irony, passionate commitment and the eloquent expression of anger at the evident injustice in the world, here’s an example.

At a time when politicians and media pundits erupt in verbal self-debasement at every opportunity, flaunt their moral ineptitude with torrents of vanity and self-gratification in full flow and wall-to-wall nonsense on glittering parade, something that’s as enjoyable to read as this might remind us that the values stay real, the battle continues, and it’s still worth the candle.

Graham’s essay is precisely dated and that’s both a virtue and a liability. We would not say today some of the things he says here. Yet it’s rich in provocation. As an analysis of the social and political manufacture of “dependency” and its purpose, aspects of the argument apply to Scotland and England as well as to women and men – a crude parallel, perhaps, but there’s truth in it.

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The discrimination between the “feminine” capacity for “wit” and the “masculine” capacity for “humour”, has its own pedigree.

We might feel distant from such generalisation and simplification a century on but we still need to pay attention to what Graham is doing in making this distinction – he’s challenging assumptions, now as much as then, if in a different way. Likewise, what seem to be his social, racial and religious quasi-caricatures – he’s challenging convention, not endorsing it.

Final truths are rarely uttered but unmistakable when they come: “a ‘cause’ is the means whereby a politician is put into the position of being able to plunder the nation”. Or more particularly: “Women’s emancipation is first an economic and then a sexual and religious matter after all.”

Or, and this might apply closely to Scotland and England: “Man had his children and his money protected, and his wife became his slave, and has remained so to the present day.

“She will remain so until the marriage laws are changed; divorce (charter of liberty to women) made easy, and the dual contract made soluble at the will of both or either party to it, instead of being, as it too often is, a lifelong chain.”

That’s it: “Dual contract made soluble at the will of both or either party”. Honestly, what are we waiting for?

Finally, “When some of these things that I have indicated have been achieved, women will really be emancipated; and, standing on her feet, look a man squarely in his eyes and say, ‘I have done this or that because it was my pleasure,’ and the man, looking back at her, will see she is an equal, for in freedom of the will lies true equality.” Equality – and independence.

When the flaunted boast of “a woman in high office” is taken as an intrinsically progressive end in itself, we need to correct the error.

If Hitler had been a woman, would that have made his actions better? And then there was Lady Macbeth. Thankfully, there’s something much more constructive to say. Here it is.

RB Cunninghame Graham – THE REAL EQUALITY OF THE SEXES (The New Age, July 1908)

IN the actual struggle for the franchise now going on, I am but little interested. It is certainly a great movement and a just one, but the franchise, to men, has proved but a broken reed as far as social freedom is concerned, and there is no apparent reason why it should prove more potent in the hands of women.

My real sympathy is with their social and economic freedom. Almost every institution, economic, social, political, and religious (especially religious) is designed, or has become without designing a means to keep women dependent on men.

Men nowadays have a hard enough struggle to keep themselves, and it is to their manifest advantage that women should be able to maintain and fend for themselves in life.

As to the servitude that our present political system brings on women, have not a thousand eloquent feminine tongues set it forth, throughout the length and breadth of the land?

No man can add anything to what they have said, except in the particularly masculine realm of humour. It would appear that wit is a feminine and humour a masculine quality and it is doubtful if even adult suffrage will ever remedy this state of things.

t has, however, often struck me that a convention of the most foolish women in Great Britain, chosen with the greatest care by the most incompetent of the female electorate, could not well be foolisher than is the British House of Commons, elected as it is at present entirely by men.

That the present political system is a potent engine for the subjection of women, anyone who has ever been at an election can at once understand.

We know that Englishmen are free and equal before the law, yet no country exists where there is greater division of classes except perhaps the United States. One man is a bounder, another a barbarian, a third a sanguinary Jew, a fourth a snuffling nonconformist, a fifth a bigoted Catholic, a sixth a stuck-up churchman.

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A soldier is said to be narrow, a tradesman mean, a politician a shuffler, a stockbroker a cheat, a lawyer a deceiver, a doctor a fee-hunter, and “to lie like a vivisector” has become a proverb.

Yet, in the mass we are all “God’s Englishmen” and at election time we are assured that the Lord himself being but imperfectly equipped for the task of creation, left the world unfinished for us to correct its shortcomings.

But below all these divisions, and ticketed persons, there yet exists a lower abyss. The working classes, before whom we all truckle, but whom we heartily despise in our hearts, are the real objects of our scorn. You make a fool of the working man, says the Tory to the Liberal, and then the speaker sneaks out to see what he can do to secure the vote of the Helot at the next election.

NEEDLESS to say, both Tory and Radical amongst their friends speak patronisingly but disparagingly of the class on whose backs they climb into front seats at the national hog-trough.

There comes an election, and both parties drag themselves on their bellies before the class they despise, and each professes his admiration of the virtues, the sobriety, the perseverance, the uncomplainingness of the class of whose thriftlessness, unreasonableness, insolence, and incapacity they have no words hard enough to stigmatise.

And so with women; all their frivolity, their love of change, their want of grasp of a political situation, and their other mental and moral failings about which we hear so much nowadays when two or three (men) are gathered together, would all be overlooked when their votes were required for some great “cause” or another.

Women should not forget that a “cause” is the means whereby a politician is put into the position of being able to plunder the nation; and they should not forget that if on the whole our politicians are honest over the counter, that in the “jug and bottle” department of contracts, making use of knowledge acquired on the Stock Exchange and the like, that when the south wind blows they can tell a hawk from a hernshaw.

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So that the first step to political consideration is obviously the vote, though it would do little enough towards complete emancipation, which, of course, is an economic and a sexual affair, for them.

It is conceivable that every political disability now relating to women might be swept away and that wages become equal for equal quantity and quality of work done by men and women, and yet the position of women be but little really altered unless the existing social and religious institutions and the views incident to the prevalence of these institutions were radically changed.

That way alone leads to emancipation, although the franchise may do some little good, if only at election time. Women’s emancipation is first an economic and then a sexual and religious matter after all. Alter all the laws which set up property above mere human beings, and women will be free, and man also, for women agitators always forget (just as men do) that to free one sex and leave the other slaves is quite impossible.

In the old days in Carolina the N**** and the master both were slaves. The Christian religion has been too readily assumed to have been the only faith which has raised women in the social scale.

The National:

Only repeat what is false long enough, loud enough, and with a sanctimonious air, and people will believe you, although you know it is a lie. In point of fact, it has taken 1900 years for women to gain the same quality before the law as they enjoyed in the time of Hadrian. The Romans had a married woman’s property act at least as much in woman’s favour as in our own.

During those 1900 years the Church, whether Greek, Roman, Anglican, or Nonconformist, has fought against all efforts to place men and women on an equality before the law. All know the medieval Church’s attitude towards women as a sex.

She was unclean, a snare, the undoer of mankind. Virginity was placed above the maternal state, thus showing the Church thought she knew better what was good for us than did the power she knew as God. Only when priests were feed and Latin mumbled was commerce between the sexes ought but a deadly sin.

Thus did the Church degrade both sexes, and constitute itself the universal brothel-keeper of mankind. Its sacramental marriage, which at first was but a means of regulating natural affection for the priests’ benefit, become in the lawyer’s hands an instrument for the protection of property, and women, being weaker, bore the full brunt of any step aside when once the fees were paid and the indecent service duly mumbled out.

Man had his children and his money protected, and his wife became his slave, and has remained so to the present day. She will remain so until the marriage laws are changed; divorce (charter of liberty to women) made easy, and the dual contract made soluble at the will of both or either party to it, instead of being, as it too often is, a lifelong chain. By these means, and by legitimisation of all children and the abolition of the degrading custom of making breach of promise an actionable thing, woman’s true freedom will be attained.

What can be more unjust than that a man who has run his course like 20,000 bridegrooms rolled up into one should insist on marrying what he calls “a pure girl”?

His wife should be a hardened prostitute, that is, if prostitution hardens more than does enforced celibacy. Thus, then, it seems to me, emancipation lies in ways more difficult to follow than the mere agitation for the vote.

When some of these things that I have indicated have been achieved, women will really be emancipated; and, standing on her feet, look a man squarely in his eyes and say, “I have done this or that because it was my pleasure,” and the man, looking back at her, will see she is an equal, for in freedom of the will lies true equality.