Bernard Shaw on Woman... and Love... and Marriage

Here is a collection of Shaw's piquant opinions on the subjects of woman and her rights, love, marriage, sexual relations, the family, children, and other matters which the readers of this magazine will be interested to see.

It is well known of Bernard Shaw that woman was not a strong factor in his life, although she was a fundamental factor in his art. That is because he sought her with his imagination far more than his bodily desires sought her.

And yet he was the cynosure of women's eyes, especially the women of the thinking and upper classes in England. He had numerous love stories and romances, which this is not the place to recount. The well-known political writer Beatrice Webb, wife of the thinker Sidney Webb, declared that she was confident that she alone of all women could stand firm against Shaw's seduction! And she added that Shaw inclined toward women not out of love for them, but to draw from his connections with them material for his plays...

On woman's political right:

Shaw once declared: "If one of the two halves of society, its men or its women, must take over the direction of affairs alone, I vote that the women take it."

Apropos of granting woman the right of suffrage he said: "Many people were annoyed with me when I gave my opinion that granting woman the vote would not lead to a single woman reaching Parliament, but rather would lead to her being kept out of it even if the men voted for her."

And he added: "Consider the cowardice that would seize men if it fell to them to bear children! Women are a class that stands a rank above the class of men. The pity is only that woman refuses to vote for a woman, and prefers to cast her ballot for a man unworthy of the office rather than for a capable woman."

On love and marriage

Shaw said to a friend of his in the course of talk about love, marriage, and the relation between them: "So it is right that two lovers should marry! For my part, I have loved a woman or two; but had I thought of living with one of them and sharing daily life with her, it would have driven me to madness and to earning her hatred. Love and marriage do not agree..."

And when his friend answered: "And how can you conceive of two people living together without the bond of love binding them?"

Shaw replied: "Marriage ought to be forbidden to lovers. Marriage is a partnership between two; but let love enter into it, and everything is lost..."

Shaw did not believe in love, because love played no prominent role in his life.

He said once: "What people call love is a thing that cannot possibly happen except by way of a jest between two strangers who have met by chance in a hotel or a forest."

He believed that imaginary love plays a more important role in life than real love plays, and that what a woman gives her beloved in reality is feebler and slighter than what she grants him in dreams.

He declared: "The ideal love is love by way of letters..." And he added: "My correspondence with Ellen Terry (the actress) is a successful love story. I could have met her had I wished, but I did not want to complicate that connection. As for her — though she lifted from her neck the yoke of five husbands, she never once wearied of me..."

And Shaw had an 'ideal' program for mating: that a crowd of healthy men and women should gather, in the dark, and couple, and then each go off to his own house without having seen his companion's face!..

On sexual relations

Shaw was once asked whether he was austere and puritanical in his sexual life. He answered that sexual intercourse was a savage and ugly thing in his eyes, and that he could not conceive how any self-respecting man or woman could face one another in the light of day after they had spent the night together!..

He also said: "I loved sexual relations for their extraordinary power to call forth a spiritual flood of emotion and exaltation. In those moments I would give my words free rein, and they would race on unchecked. For I felt that the woman had a right to know what I felt while in her arms, and I wanted her to share what I felt. But except in one case, as I believe, I never felt that I gave a woman half of what she gave me..."

On children:

Shaw's opinion of children was that they are a necessity that cannot be avoided... And he said that children are the last who can understand their fathers, just as fathers are the last who can understand their children. It is well known that Shaw was granted no children.

On family life

Two things Shaw never repented of: his birthplace and his marriage... And if the choice of his birthplace was one in which he had no hand, the choice of his wife was of course by his own will.

As for his advice concerning marriage and family life, it is this:

"Women, marry — but beware of marrying the man who squats at home all day long... I leave the house for a hut every morning, as the clerk leaves his house for the office. Women like the men to leave the house, especially if they are men like me, content to sit and think. A few days ago I turned and found on the wall something I had never noticed before, and when I pointed to it, Charlotte (his wife) chided me and added that it had been hanging on the wall for thirty years!..."