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.