Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write Woman Suffrage, for that
is an accomplished fact—for good or evil we shall presently be better
able to determine.
Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers—saving that the word
presses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man—most things do in
fact, whereby she is given greater endurance—leaving to men the duty of
caring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and
defiantly in the face.
The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under the
dispensation of the Christian civilization—derived from the Hebraic—the
family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male is
commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency of
behavior. He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets
toughened by outer contact. But back of all are the women, the children
and the home.
I have been fighting the woman’s battle for equality in the things that
count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In
contesting precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I
was still fighting the woman’s battle.
We can escape none of Nature’s laws. But we need not handicap ourselves
with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final
adventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call
the woman who assails the soap boxes—even those that antic about the
White House gates—by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a
one is not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.
We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither
Aspasia nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with
accuracy be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its
origin and growth have arisen out of the complexities of modern
society.
In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors—in each
the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat,
beautiful and wicked—but since the Balzac and Dumas days the
story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type,
and we have between Herman Merivale’s Stephanie de Mohrivart and
Victorien Sardou’s Zica a very theater—or shall we say a charnel
house—of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of
circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through
lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts;
cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends
with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet,
beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon
in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a
certain regret for the innocence she has lost.
Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many
pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European
resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic
apparel, to the fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the
tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often
fooled by the enterprising sport who has been there before.
These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other
adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the
casino and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with
the future.
Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited
from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles
join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the
hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a
nobleman—occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble
family—carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title—the count and the
no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with a
_dot_ had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious
aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their
frequency and squalor.
Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American
newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially
luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded
game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over
the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and
keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage
waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration,
works the old story over again.
These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the
wondrous beauty with the cool million, who, having married some
illegitimate of a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of
Rigmarolia, and now—ever increasing the dose—it is the
ten-million-dollar widow who is going to marry the King of Pontarabia’s
brother, and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of Sahara.
Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy
incidents—episodes—histories—of which they have witnessed the beginning
and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.