“You see, the great hopes for the emancipation of women with which the century had started had been outflanked. Purchasing power had passed into the hands of the ill-educated and highly suggestible. The desire for Romance is essentially a selfish wish, and when it is encouraged to dominate every other it breaks down all corporate loyalties. The individual woman thus separated from, and yet at the same time thrust into competition with, all other women was almost defenceless; she became the prey of organised suggestion. When it was represented to her that the lack of certain goods or amenities would be fatal to Romance she became alarmed and, thus, eminently exploitable. She could only believe what she was told, and spent a great deal of time worrying about whether she was doing all the right things to encourage Romance. Thus, she became, in a new, a subtler way, more exploited, more dependent, and less creative than she had ever been before.”
“Well,” I said, “this is the most curiously unrecognisable account of my world that I have ever heard it’s like something copied, but with all the proportions wrong. And as for “less creative”, well, perhaps families were smaller, but women still went on having babies. The population was still increasing.”
The old lady’s eyes dwelt on me a moment.
“You are undoubtedly a thought child of your time, in some ways,” she observed. “What makes you think there is anything creative about having babies? Would you call a plant pot creative because seeds grow in it? It is a mechanical operation and, like most mechanical operations, is most easily performed by the least intelligent. Now, bringing up a child, educating, helping her to become a person, that is creative. But unfortunately, in the time we are speaking of, women had, in the main, been successfully conditioned into bringing up their daughters to be unintelligent consumers, like themselves.”
“But,” I said helplessly, “I know the time. It’s my time. This is all distorted.”
“The perspective of history must be truer,” she told me again, unimpressed, and went on: “But if what happened had to happen, then it chose a fortunate time to happen. A hundred years earlier, even fifty years earlier, it would very likely have meant extinction. Fifty years later might easily have been too late it might have come upon a world in which all women had profitably restricted to domesticity and consumership. Luckily, however, in the middle of the century some women were still entering the professions, and by far the greatest number of professional women was to be found in medicine which is to say that they were only really numerous in, and skilled in, the very profession which immediately became of vital importance if we were to survive at all.
“I have no medical knowledge, so I cannot give you any details of the steps they took. All I can tell you is that there was intensive research on lines which will probably be more obvious to you than they are to me.
“A species, even our species, has great will to survive, and the doctors saw to it that the will had the means of expression. Through all the hunger, and the chaos, and the other privations, babies somehow continued to be born. They had to be. Reconstruction could wait: the priority was the new generation that would help in the reconstruction, and then inherit it. So babies were born: the girl babies lived, the boy babies died. That was distressing, and wasteful, too, and so, presently, only girl babies were born. again, the means by which that could be achieved will be easier for you to understand than for me.
“It is, they tell me, not nearly so remarkable as it would appear at first. The locust, it seems, will continue to produce female locusts without male, or any other kind of assistance; the aphis, too, is able to go on breeding alone and in seclusion, certainly for eight generations, perhaps more. So it would be a poor thing if we, with all our knowledge and powers of research to assist us, should find ourselves inferior to the locust and the aphis in this respect, would it not?”
She paused, looking at me somewhat quizzically for my response. Perhaps she expected amazed or possibly shocked disbelief. If so, I disappointed her: technical achievements have ceased to arouse simple wonder since atomic physics showed how the barriers fall before the pressure of a good brains team. One can take it that most things are possible: whether they are desirable, or worth doing, is a different matter and one that seemed to me particularly pertinent to her question. I asked her: “And what is that you have achieved?”
“Survival,” she said, simply.
“Materially,” I agreed, “I suppose you have. But when it has cost all the rest, when love, art, poetry, excitement, and physical joy have all been sacrificed to mere continued existence, what is left but a soulless waste? What reason is there any longer for survival?”
“As to the reason, I don’t know except that survival is a desire common to all species. I am quite sure that the reason for that desire was no clearer in the twentieth century than it is now. But, for the rest, why should you assume that they are gone? Did not Sappho write poetry? And your assumption that the possession of a soul depends upon a duality of sexes surprises me: it has so often been held that the two are in some sort of conflict, has it not?”
“As a historian who must have studied men, women, and motives you should have taken my meaning better,” I told her.
She shook her head, with reproof. “You are so much the conditioned product of your age, my clear. They told you, on all levels, from the works of Freud to that of the most nugatory magazines for women, that it was sex, civilised into romantic love, that made the world go round and you believed them. But the world continues to go round for others, too for the insects, the fish, the birds, the animals and how much do you suppose they know of romantic love, even in brief mating seasons? They hoodwinked you, my dear. Between them they channelled your interests and ambitions along all courses that were socially convenient, economically profitable, and almost harmless.”
I shook my head.
“I just don’t believe it. Oh, yes, you know something of my world from the outside. But you don’t understand it, or feel it.”
“That’s your conditioning, my dear,” she told me, calmly.
Her repeated assumption irritated me. I asked: “Suppose I were to believe what you say, what is it, then, that does make the world go round?”
“That’s simple, my dear. It is the will to power. We have that as babies; we have it still in old age. It occurs in men and women alike. It is more fundamental, and more desirable, than sex; I tell you, you were misled, exploited, sublimated for economic convenience.
“After the disease had struck, women ceased, for the first time in history to be an exploited class. Without male rulers to confuse and divert them they began to perceive that all true power resides in the female principle. The male had served only one brief and useful purpose; for the rest of his life he was a painful and costly parasite.
“As they became aware of power, the doctors grasped it. In twenty years they were in full control. With them were the few women engineers, architects, lawyers, administrators, some teachers, and so on, but it was the doctors who held the keys of life and death. The future was in their hands and, as things began gradually to revive, they, together with the other professions, remained the dominant class and became known as the Doctorate. It assumed authority; it made the laws; it enforced them.
“There was opposition, of course. Neither the memory of the old days, nor the effect of twenty years of lawlessness, could be wiped out at once, but the doctors had the whip-hand any woman who wanted a child had to come to them, and they saw to it that she was satisfactorily settled in a community. The roving gangs dwindled away, and gradually order was restored.