The everlasting Newness of Woman.
An Oriental visitor was returning from our shores to his native land.
"Well," asked the youthful diplomatist who had been told off to show him
round, as on the deck of the steamer they shook hands, "what do you now
think of England?"
"Too much woman," answered the grave Orientalist, and descended to his
cabin.
The young diplomatist returned to the shore thoughtful, and later in the
day a few of us discussed the matter in a far-off, dimly-lighted corner
of the club smoking-room.
Has the pendulum swung too far the other way? Could there be truth in
our Oriental friend's terse commentary? The eternal feminine! The
Western world has been handed over to her. The stranger from Mars or
Jupiter would describe us as a hive of women, the sober-clad male being
retained apparently on condition of its doing all the hard work and
making itself generally useful. Formerly it was the man who wore the
fine clothes who went to the shows. To-day it is the woman gorgeously
clad for whom the shows are organized. The man dressed in a serviceable
and unostentatious, not to say depressing, suit of black accompanies her
for the purpose of carrying her cloak and calling her carriage. Among
the working classes life, of necessity, remains primitive; the law of the
cave is still, with slight modification, the law of the slum. But in
upper and middle-class circles the man is now the woman's servant.
I remember being present while a mother of my acquaintance was instilling
into the mind of her little son the advantages of being born a man. A
little girl cousin was about to spend a week with him. It was impressed
upon him that if she showed a liking for any of his toys, he was at once
to give them up to her.
"But why, mamma?" he demanded, evidently surprised.
"Because, my dear, you are a little man."
Should she break them, he was not to smack her head or kick her--as his
instinct might prompt him to do. He was just to say:
"Oh, it is of no consequence at all," and to look as if he meant it.
Doctor says she is not to be bothered.
She was always to choose the game--to have the biggest apple. There was
much more of a similar nature. It was all because he was a little man
and she was a little woman. At the end he looked up, puzzled:
"But don't she do anything, 'cos she's a little girl?"
It was explained to him that she didn't. By right of being born a little
girl she was exempt from all duty.
Woman nowadays is not taking any duty. She objects to housekeeping; she
calls it domestic slavery, and feels she was intended for higher things.
What higher things she does not condescend to explain. One or two wives
of my acquaintance have persuaded their husbands that these higher things
are all-important. The home has been given up. In company with other
strivers after higher things, they live now in dismal barracks differing
but little from a glorified Bloomsbury lodging-house. But they call them
"Mansions" or "Courts," and seem proud of the address. They are not
bothered with servants--with housekeeping. The idea of the modern woman
is that she is not to be bothered with anything. I remember the words
with which one of these ladies announced her departure from her bothering
home.
"Oh, well, I'm tired of trouble," she confided to another lady, "so I've
made up my mind not to have any more of it."
Artemus Ward tells us of a man who had been in prison for twenty years.
Suddenly a bright idea occurred to him; he opened the window and got out.
Here have we poor, foolish mortals been imprisoned in this troublesome
world for Lord knows how many millions of years. We have got so used to
trouble we thought there was no help for it. We have told ourselves that
"Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards." We imagined the only
thing to be done was to bear it philosophically. Why did not this bright
young creature come along before--show us the way out. All we had to do
was to give up the bothering home and the bothering servants, and go into
a "Mansion" or a "Court."
It seems that you leave trouble outside--in charge of the hall-porter,
one supposes. He ties it up for you as the Commissionaire of the Army
and Navy Stores ties up your dog. If you want it again, you ask for it
as you come out. Small wonder that the "Court" and "Mansion" are growing
in popularity every day.
That "Higher Life."
They have nothing to do now all day long, these soaring wives of whom I
am speaking. They would scorn to sew on a shirt-button even. Are there
not other women--of an inferior breed--specially fashioned by Providence
for the doing of such slavish tasks? They have no more bothers of any
kind. They are free to lead the higher life. What I am waiting for is a
glimpse of the higher life. One of them, it is true, has taken up the
violin. Another of them is devoting her emancipation to poker work. A
third is learning skirt-dancing. Are these the "higher things" for which
women are claiming freedom from all duty? And, if so, is there not
danger that the closing of our homes may lead to the crowding up of the
world with too much higher things?
May there not, by the time all bothers have been removed from woman's
path, be too many amateur violinists in the world, too many
skirt-dancers, too much poker work? If not, what are they? these "higher
things," for which so many women are demanding twenty-four hours a day
leisure. I want to know.
One lady of my acquaintance is a Poor Law Guardian and secretary to a
labour bureau. But then she runs a house with two servants, four
children, and a husband, and appears to be so used to bothers that she
would feel herself lost without them. You can do this kind of work
apparently even when you are bothered with a home. It is the
skirt-dancing and the poker work that cannot brook rivalry. The modern
woman has begun to find children a nuisance; they interfere with her
development. The mere man, who has written his poems, painted his
pictures, composed his melodies, fashioned his philosophies, in the midst
of life's troubles and bothers, grows nervous thinking what this new
woman must be whose mind is so tremendous that the whole world must be
shut up, so to speak, sent to do its business out of her sight and
hearing, lest her attention should be distracted.
An optimistic friend of mine tells me not to worry myself; tells me that
it is going to come out all right in the end. Woman just now, he
contends, is passing through her college period. The school life of
strict surveillance is for ever done with. She is now the young
Freshwoman. The bothering lessons are over, the bothering schoolmaster
she has said good-bye to. She has her latchkey and is "on her own."
There are still some bothering rules about being in at twelve o'clock,
and so many attendances each term at chapel. She is indignant. This
interferes with her idea that life is to be one long orgie of
self-indulgence, of pleasure. The college period will pass--is passing.
Woman will go out into the world, take her place there, discover that
bothers were not left behind in the old schoolhouse, will learn that life
has duties, responsibilities, will take up her burden side by side with
man, will accomplish her destiny.
Is there anything left for her to learn?
Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time--some people think too good
a time. She wants the best of both. She demands the joys of
independence together with freedom from all work--slavery she calls it.
The servants are not to be allowed to bother her, the children are not to
be allowed to bother her, her husband is not to be allowed to bother her.
She is to be free to lead the higher life. My dear lady, we all want to
lead the higher life. I don't want to write these articles. I want
somebody else to bother about my rates and taxes, my children's boots,
while I sit in an easy-chair and dream about the wonderful books I am
going to write, if only a stupid public would let me. Tommy Smith of
Brixton feels that he was intended for higher things. He does not want
to be wasting his time in an office from nine to six adding up figures.
His proper place in life is that of Prime Minister or Field Marshal: he
feels it. Do you think the man has no yearning for higher things? Do
you think we like the office, the shop, the factory? We ought to be
writing poetry, painting pictures, the whole world admiring us. You seem
to imagine your man goes off every morning to a sort of City picnic, has
eight hours' fun--which he calls work--and then comes home to annoy you
with chatter about dinner.
It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day
but to enjoy herself. Making a potato pie! What sort of work was that?
Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a potato pie.
So the woman said, "Try it," and took the man's spade and went out into
the field, and left him at home to make that pie.
The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had
reckoned--found that running the house and looking after the children was
not quite the merry pastime he had argued. Man was a fool.
Now it is the woman who talks without thinking. How did she like hoeing
the potato patch? Hard work, was it not, my dear lady? Made your back
ache? It came on to rain and you got wet.
I don't see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato patch,
which of you makes the potato pie. Maybe the hoeing of the patch demands
more muscle--is more suited to the man. Maybe the making of the pie may
be more in your department. But, as I have said, I cannot see that this
matter is of importance. The patch has to be hoed, the pie to be cooked;
the one cannot do the both. Settle it between you, and, having settled
it, agree to do each your own work free from this everlasting nagging.
I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman's work for
the man's. One was deserted by her husband, and left with two young
children. She hired a capable woman to look after the house, and joined
a ladies' orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week. She now earns four,
and works twelve hours a day. The husband of the second fell ill. She
set him to write letters and run errands, which was light work that he
could do, and started a dressmaker's business. The third was left a
widow without means. She sent her three children to boarding-school, and
opened a tea-room. I don't know how they talked before, but I know that
they do not talk now as though earning the income was a sort of round
game.
When they have tried it the other way round.
On the Continent they have gone deliberately to work, one would imagine,
to reverse matters. Abroad woman is always where man ought to be, and
man where most ladies would prefer to meet with women. The ladies _garde-
robe_ is superintended by a superannuated sergeant of artillery. When I
want to curl my moustache, say, I have to make application to a superb
golden-haired creature, who stands by and watches me with an interested
smile. I would be much happier waited on by the superannuated sergeant,
and my wife tells me she could very well spare him. But it is the law of
the land. I remember the first time I travelled with my daughter on the
Continent. In the morning I was awakened by a piercing scream from her
room. I struggled into my pyjamas, and rushed to her assistance. I
could not see her. I could see nothing but a muscular-looking man in a
blue blouse with a can of hot water in one hand and a pair of boots in
the other. He appeared to be equally bewildered with myself at the sight
of the empty bed. From a cupboard in the corner came a wail of distress:
"Oh, do send that horrid man away. What's he doing in my room?"
I explained to her afterwards that the chambermaid abroad is always an
active and willing young man. The foreign girl fills in her time
bricklaying and grooming down the horses. It is a young and charming
lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist's. She doesn't
understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr. Frederic Harrison, regards
smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see, herself, any
difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they are both the
same price; thinks you fussy. The corset shop is run by a most
presentable young man in a Vandyck beard. The wife runs the restaurant;
the man does the cooking, and yet the woman has not reached freedom from
bother.
A brutal suggestion.
It sounds brutal, but perhaps woman was not intended to live free from
all bothers. Perhaps even the higher life--the skirt-dancing and the
poker work--has its bothers. Perhaps woman was intended to take her
share of the world's work--of the world's bothers.