How successful such a concealment may be is well displayed by the
general acceptance of the notion that women are reluctant to enter into
marriage—that they have to be persuaded to it by eloquence and
pertinacity, and even by a sort of intimidation. The truth is that, in
a world almost divested of intelligible idealism, and hence dominated
by a senseless worship of the practical, marriage offers the best
career that the average woman can reasonably aspire to, and, in the
case of very many women, the only one that actually offers a
livelihood. What is esteemed and valuable, in our materialistic and
unintelligent society, is precisely that petty practical efficiency at
which men are expert, and which serves them in place of free
intelligence. A woman, save she show a masculine strain that verges
upon the pathological, cannot hope to challenge men in general in this
department, but it is always open to her to exchange her sexual charm
for a lion’s share in the earnings of one man, and this is what she
almost invariably tries to do. That is to say, she tries to get a
husband, for getting a husband means, in a sense, enslaving an expert,
and so covering up her own lack of expertness, and escaping its
consequences. Thereafter she has at least one stout line of defence
against a struggle for existence in which the prospect of survival is
chiefly based, not upon the talents that are typically hers, but upon
those that she typically lacks. Before the average woman succumbs in
this struggle, some man or other must succumb first. Thus her craft
converts her handicap into an advantage.
In this security lies the most important of all the benefits that a
woman attains by marriage. It is, in fact, the most important benefit
that the mind can imagine, for the whole effort of the human race,
under our industrial society, is concentrated upon the attainment of
it. But there are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in
dignity which goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got
herself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband, is
regarded with respect by other women, and has a contemptuous patronage
for those who have failed to do likewise. Again, marriage offers her
the only safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as
property which Christianity has preserved in our civilization, to
obtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we
call the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity. The
woman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more
than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never
stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her
sex. Moreover, a social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard
her as a sort of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed
disdain, and deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her
experiential penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect
among women for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has
got rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost
anything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad
bargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect for
virtue held by men, and hence one against the general advantage and
well-being of the sex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that
they feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively
moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who
is in wide practice among them is occasionally astounded and horrified
to discover, on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of
modesty in some women of the highest respectability.
But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable is
economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, but
usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may die
without enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous light
of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangible
and wavering line which separates business success from a prison cell.
Again, a woman may be deceived: there are stray women who are credulous
and sentimental, and stray men who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may
make false deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptly
guessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head of the firm
tomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole
it must be plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself
a reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is
accustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;
she always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom takes a
chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marry
women who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good
looks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women
to neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in
America, marries his typist or the governess of his sister’s children
and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable
marriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster that
almost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis.
The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and
the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the
heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a
husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the
underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before
marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress
upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its
highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the
disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this
disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual
enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines
that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with
marriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future,
and holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are
under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts
they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too
feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of
the idiotic “knowledge” in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or
even convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the
head of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons
the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away
the hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that
she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest
to whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop
competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious
training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still
definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose
either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of
snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to
be pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.