This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a menace
to the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm, permits
herself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife, who is
almost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of the
husband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality with
which men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage. Moreover,
the average male gets his living by such depressing devices that
boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. A man who spends six or
eight hours a day acting as teller in a bank, or sitting upon the bench
of a court, or looking to the inexpressibly trivial details of some
process of manufacturing, or writing imbecile articles for a newspaper,
or managing a tramway, or administering ineffective medicines to stupid
and uninteresting patients—a man so engaged during all his hours of
labour, which means a normal, typical man, is surely not one to be
oppressed unduly by the dull round of domesticity. His wife may bore
him hopelessly as mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores
a man (though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores a
woman), but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other
capacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is not
that she tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her
variety—not that she is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is
weary when he gets home, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a
comfortable sty. This peace is broken by the greater restlessness of
his wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and
curiosity.
Of far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the general
inefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping
house—a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As I
have argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for mastering
these technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs them more
effort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent application
with that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring to their tawdry
and childish concerns. But in addition to their natural incapacity,
there is a reluctance based upon a deficiency in incentive, and
deficiency in incentive is due to the maudlin sentimentality with which
men regard marriage. In this sentimentality lie the germs of most of
the evils which beset the institution in Christendom, and particularly
in the United States, where sentiment is always carried to inordinate
lengths. Having abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress
the men of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval
concept of woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have
create for her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of
late years in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of
marriage, all the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges
appertain to the woman. In part this doctrine has been established by
the intellectual enterprise and audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing
upon masculine stupidity, sentimentality and lack of strategical sense,
they have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and
law. But in other part it is the plain product of the donkeyish vanity
which makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his wife
as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and
consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and
efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will
figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio,
entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour and responsibility.