Have you ever remarked as a curious thing that, whereas every day we hear
women sighing because they have not been born men, you never hear a sigh
blowing in the other direction? I only know one man who had the courage to
say that he would not mind exchanging into the female infantry, and it may
have been affectation on his part. At any rate, he blushed deeply at the
avowal, and his friends look askance at him ever since. Of course, the
obvious answer of the self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of
creation, that his is the better part which shall not be taken from him.
Yet this does not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, when oppressed
with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, that 'it is
nice to be her. Nothing to worry her all day long. No responsibility.'
For in his primitive vision of female existence, his wife languidly
presides for ever at an eternal five-o'clock tea. And it is not in the
province of this article to turn to him the seamy side of that charming
picture. Rather is it our mission to convince him of the substantial truth
of his intuition. He is quite right. It _is_ 'nice to be her.' And if men
had a little more common-sense in their consequential skulls, instead of
striving to resist the woman's invasion of their immemorial
responsibilities and worries, they would joyfully abdicate them--and skip
home to Nirvâna and afternoon tea.
Foolish women! To want of your own free will to put yourselves in painful
harness; to take the bit of servitude between your rose-leaf lips; to
fight day-long in the reeking arena of bacon merchants; to settle accounts
instead of merely incurring them; to be confined in Stygian city-blocks
instead of silken bedchambers; to rise with the sparrow and leave by the
early morning train. What fatuity! Some day, when woman has had her way
and man has ceased to have his will, she will see of the travail of her
soul and be bitterly dissatisfied; for, unless man is a greater fool than
he looks, she shall demand back her petticoats in vain.
For what is the lot of woman? The first superficial fact about a woman is,
of course, her beauty. Secondly, as the leaves about a rose, comes her
dress. To be beautiful and to wear pretty things--these are two of the
obvious privileges of woman. To be a living rose, with bosom of gold and
petals of lace, a rose each passer-by longs to pluck from its
husband-stem, but dare not for fear of the husband-thorns. To be
privileged to play Narcissus all day long with your mirror, to love
yourself so much that you kiss the cold reflection, yet fear not to drown.
To reveal yourself to yourself in a thousand lovely poses, and bird-like
poises of the head. To kneel to yourself in adoration, to laugh and nod
and beckon to yourself with your own smiles and dimples, to yearn in
hopeless passion for your own loveliness. To finger silken garments,
linings to the casket of your beauty, never seen of men, to draw on stiff
embroidered gowns, to deck your hands with glittering jewels, and your
wrists with bands of gold--and then to sail forth from your boudoir like
the moon from a cloud, regally confident of public worship; to be at once
poet and poem, painter and painted: does not this belong to the lot of
woman?
But it was of nobler privileges than these that the candidate for
womanhood of whom I have spoken was thinking. It is fit that we skim the
surface before we dive into the deeps--especially so attractive a surface
as woman's. He was, doubtless, thinking less of woman as a home comfort or
a beauty, and much more of her as she once used to be among our far-off
sires, Sibyl and Priestess. Is it but an insular fancy to suppose that
Englishmen, beyond any other race, still retain the most living faith in
the sanctity of womanhood? and, if so, can it be doubted that it is an
inheritance from those wild child-hearted Vikings, who were first among
the peoples of Europe to conceive woman as the chosen vessel of the
divine? And how wittily true, by the way, how slily significant, was both
the Norse and the Greek conception of the ruling destinies of man, the
Norns and the Fates, as women!
To speak with authority, one should, doubtless, first sprout petticoats;
and, meanwhile, one must rest content with asking the intelligent women of
our acquaintance--whether man inspires them with anything like the
feelings of reverential adoration, the sense of a being holy and supernal,
with which woman undoubtedly inspires man. He is, of course, their god,
but a god of the Greek pattern, with no little of the familiarising alloy
of earth in his composition. He is strong, and swift, and splendid--but
seems he holy? Is he angel as well as god? Does the dream of him rise
silvery in the imagination of woman? Is he a star to lift her up to heaven
with pure importunate beam? I seem to hear the nightingale-laughter of
women for answer. Man neither is, nor would they have him, any of these
things.
But though some men, by a fortunate admixture of woman silver in their
masculine clay, may be even these, there is one sacred thing no man can
ever be, a privilege by which nature would seem to have put beyond doubt
the divinity of woman: a mother. It is true that it is within his reach
to be a father; but what is 'paternity' compared with motherhood? The very
word wears a droll face, as though accustomed to banter. Let us venture on
the bull: that, though it be possible for most men to be fathers, no man
can ever be a mother. Maybe a recondite intention of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception was the accentuation of the fact that man's share in
the sacred mystery of birth is so small and woman's so great, that the
birth of a child is truly a mysterious traffic between divine powers of
nature and her miraculous womb--mystic visitations of radiant forces
hidden eternally from the knowledge of man.
We stand in wonder before the magical germinating properties of a clod of
earth. A grass-seed and a thimbleful of soil set all the sciences at
nought. But if such is the wonder of the mere spectator, how strange to be
the very vessel of the mystery, to know it moving through its mystic
stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young
life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though
as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate
spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all
seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic
pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the
hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; to lie still in the night
and see through the darkness the little white soul shining softly in its
birth-sleep, slowly filling with life as a moon with silver--it was a
woman and not a man that God chose for this blessedness.