Recent ideas of social justice have been marked by a vast extension of
the category of human rights. While these new rights are most various
they may all be covered by the general principle that wages may be of
right more than what the wage taker earns for his employer, and that
in all exchanges of any sort between the poor and the rich the poor
has the right to take more than he gives. To follow the applications
of this new doctrine of rights would be instructive. We should find
that an employer is financially responsible for accidents occurring
through an employee's recklessness. If my gardener gets drunk and
drowns himself in the cistern, I must pay roundly to his estate. Nor
have I the satisfaction, if it be such, of regarding this contribution
as a compulsory beneficence. It is my gardener's right. The odd part
is that if I, being a professor, get drunk and drown myself in the
campus fountain, the corporation is in no way bound to assuage my
widow's financial need. If the corporation should, by way of embalming
my memory, grant her a pension, it would be a case not of her rights
but of their charity. This perfectly possible instance reveals an odd
reversal of all earlier doctrines of rights. It used to be supposed
that rights increased with capacity. Now the more incapable a person
may be, the more completely the state invests him with rights. Ability
and power must be carefully hemmed in with duties. Weakness on the
contrary is freed from duties and must be privileged.
Into what moral gulf we are thus cheerfully staggering it would be a
high public service to inquire. But my theme is not so ambitious. I
wish merely to suggest in a particular instance the somewhat woeful
reaction of this new doctrine of rights upon a certain class of the
weak--to wit, ill balanced and discontented women. I have witnessed
many cases of personal unhappiness among women, some of domestic
shipwreck, owing to a wife's moral confusion, some of women hounded by
unreasonable discontent into public careers for which they have no
capacity, and perhaps the most pitiful cases of all, women pursued by
an aimless restiveness which finds no stated expression, but colors
atrociously their every act. Peace and clear thinking wither as those
women pass. They are mostly victims of a false theory that a woman has
the innate right to be amused, and that for such amusement she need
not pay. It will be seen that I have described what foreign
neurologists call _la maladie Américaine_. And as a matter of fact the
fallacy that a right to be amused exists, is more prevalent in America
than elsewhere. Let us admit that Mrs. Wharton's Undine Spragg is
overdrawn, she still retains high symbolic value. As Americans we may
doubt her in parts, but we cannot disown her as a whole. She is the
bright archangel of the dogma that while a woman must be amused, she
need not pay.
At the outset we must discriminate sharply the right to be amused,
from the ordinary pursuit of pleasure. The most reckless or voluptuous
programme of life assumes in contrast a certain dignity and morality,
from the fact that the pleasure seeker is prepared to take all risks
and pay all prices. That is the man's code the world over, and in most
countries it has imposed itself upon the community generally. It is a
poor code enough as compared with self control and social service, but
at least it has glimmerings of generosity and justice. The strong at
all times have managed to live pretty satisfactorily by it. The weak
have not suffered unduly under the rule of he who breaks must pay.
Quite apart from the Epicurean programme, all sensible people work on
a theory of reciprocity in service and in pleasure. I can't expect
nice people to seek me unless I now and then seek them. If I am
habitually silent or merely garrulous, I have no claim upon the good
talker; he will properly flee my approach. So for the person who is
not amusing there can be no right to be amused, and if he succeeds
nevertheless in extorting amusement from the world, it is at somebody
else's expense, and at the cost of his own soul.
What I frequently see in the faces of women, and especially in the
faces of young girls of the wealthy classes, is as distressing to me
as mysterious. It has been my rare good fortune to live among serene
and companionable women, women whose graciousness has been rooted in
character. Accordingly I am mystified by the hungry defiant faces I
see about me wherever women congregate. They seem to be playing a
part, to be desperately seeking something which they are getting in
insufficient measure. They have the air of being ready to resent a
slight while stubbornly maintaining a right. They are too intent.
There is no ease in them and no fragrance. Now if these observations
were of recent date or suddenly made, it would be prudent to set them
down to the score of middle age and a growing disinclination from
general society. It would be pleasant to believe that I am merely
become old fashioned, mistaking Paris modes for inner characteristics,
and particular cosmetic arts which the young girls of my youth
happened not to employ, for a sign of degeneracy. Whereas, it may
still be a true heart, the beating of which one observes too plainly
at opera or dance, and rouge tinges nothing but the skin. So I would
fain believe that the readiness with which our women assume the
stigmata of the Paris half-world, is without significance. "The
Ladies! God bless them!" it would be pleasant to end this ungracious
discourse with the familiar toast. But the toast itself no longer is
pledged with the old unction, and the modern woman is too intelligent
to be satisfied with stale and perfunctory oblations. She knows that
not all is well with her, and welcomes the probe. The satirists of
our womenkind would starve but for women readers. I who am no
satirist, but a simple observer of life, shall have my best reading
from women, or shall go unread.
That defiant hungry look on our young girls' faces, so different from
the shyness and wistfulness one generally notes in Europe, what is its
ground? A complete answer would mean the writing of a considerable
chapter of our history. One would trace the course of happy laborious
partnerships in pioneer times, to the establishment of wealth, and the
institution of a peculiar American cult of womanhood. This cult found
expression in eloquent cant phrases. "Every American woman is a queen
in her own household" was a favorite article of the liturgy. More
economically expressive was the phrase "able to support a wife," a
wife obviously being regarded as a luxury of the more expensive order.
Along with the cult went a resolute practice of keeping all business
or political cares from the women of the family. Such reticence as to
the real issues of living, such exclusion from the usual means of
education, was the lot of the American woman from early in the last
century. She was, in another favorite liturgical phrase, exclusively,
"The ornament of the home." Naturally her education was to consist
wholly of accomplishments. Money poured into her hands and out. Whence
it came, and the difficulty of getting it, were scrupulously concealed
from her. To be a good provider was the cardinal masculine merit. For
the husband the money grubbing realities; for the wife the decorative
appearances. Very soon it became a tacit convention that, already
separated in all ordinary business relations, husband and wife should
be separated also in their pleasures. He was too dull or too tired for
society, but from his fireside or club chair took a remotely conjugal
satisfaction in the report of her brilliancy and social successes: for
after all he was subsidizing her career. To be the husband of a very
successful woman was like being the background angel for a theatrical
star. It implied association and interest, but nothing like intimacy.
Being reduced to a scintillant parasitic role, the American woman, to
do her justice, played it pretty well. The literature and general
discussions of the sixties and seventies abound in her laudation,
while the American man is either charitably ignored or briefly
commended for his self effacing virtues and unlimited generosity as a
provider. It was in this black walnut era, which corresponds exactly
with the high point of the cult of the American woman, that she became
a familiar apparition in the hotels of Europe. Ostensibly she was
cultivating some accomplishment, or, less specifically, her soul. In
response to an abnormal social position she developed peculiar
capacities. She devoured wholesale miscellaneous ill assorted
information, and gave it back with interest. She acquired a brittle
fluent manner of talk, but her idea of conversation was to be
vivacious and assertive and above all merely to keep things going. She
created a social atmosphere in which no thoughtful, unaggressive
person could live. The American husband withdrew more securely into
his social nonentity, while his place was taken by nondescript
foreigners or by light footed and joyous young native male beings who
also had the gift of keeping things up. These radiant young males for
the most part flourished only for a space. In turn they became
occulted husbands and tolerated good providers.
The women were less fortunate. To be an American woman was an
inexorable career that once undertaken could not be abandoned. A few
escaped by marrying into the simple human conditions prevailing among
the European aristocracy, some American queens were dethroned through
failure of the exchequer, a few succumbed to an increasing group of
children; these were the fortunate exceptions. Most of them continued
the hopeless task of building up a satisfactory life without
including the ordinary responsibilities and loyalties. Naturally the
cardinal maxim of a life largely empty of real interests and devoted
to self exploitation along social lines, was the right to be amused.
That is what, by and large, the good looking American woman is taught
to regard as her most peculiar and precious right. That is the meaning
of the hungry and defiant faces of our young girls. They are the last
logical stage in the American notion of womanhood. They are anxiously
asserting a right which the world by no means always allows--the right
to be amused.
Let me restore a perhaps tottering reputation for humor by admitting
that the picture just sketched is somewhat overdrawn. There was
sometimes a certain unity in grotesquely sundered families. The
organizing and management of a household in days before the apartment
hotel, the telephone, and the department store, involved an
irreducible minimum of steadying duties. The cult of the American
woman often produced a sense of _noblesse oblige_, not very logical
but efficacious. The queen could in the better sense do no wrong. Then
there were always happy backwaters of society where the family was
still an alliance, and mutual understanding was the rule. What
justifies me in blackening the picture, is the fact that the dogma of
the right to be amused is as strong as ever, and more disastrous in
its results. Few duties and educational offsets help the modern girl
to see life clearly and see it whole. Increasingly detached from all
imposed responsibilities, she is more in danger of regarding the world
as her playground and other men and women as her toys. The inevitable
weakness of her position is that she has little to give. Her beauty
and the charm of her sex, a certain restless vivacity, are often her
sole current coin. It is a currency subject to rapid depreciation.
After girlhood she frequently is not amusing, has nothing to give for
the amusement become necessary to her. Establishing no stable and self
respecting relations, she flies about in search of new excitements.
Isms and ologies claim her passing fealty. Messiahs alternate with
neurologists. To the problems of life she brings the mind of a spoiled
child. If she marries well, she may at least conduct satisfactorily an
expensive will-o'-the-wisp existence. For amusement by this sort is
very exactly graded by its expensiveness. Large motor cars or yachts,
opera boxes, public dining and dancing--these are the surest evidence
that one's right to be amused is duly conceded by one's husband and by
the world. Whatever satisfactions the married butterfly commands are
largely denied to her unwedded sister. I know of no more pitiful
spectacle than that of women in the forties still conducting with a
child's mentality the occupations of girlhood. These constitute the
supporting public for all the charlatanisms--social, political, and
religious.
Of course I am aware that all babies are born with the right to be
amused--a right which child specialists have valiantly but vainly
striven to abridge. In the case of a male baby that right is pretty
soon abridged by the rough and tumble and give and take of school and
games. The sense that he must be amused is soon knocked out of a
normal boy. In a young man whatever may survive of it yields to the
somewhat grim business of earning a living. In a rich and unoccupied
young man, the problem of amusement is very much that of the woman,
with the marked difference, however, that only a very perverse young
man imagines that amusement is due him, or can be had on other terms
than his paying for it. In comparison with this wholesome process of
gradual enlightenment, how little is done for the education of a girl!
Compare with the unconditioned freedom of a well to do American
maiden, that stern subjection to the complicated interest of a clan
which is the lot of an English girl, or better, the rational
preparation for marriage and motherhood which every well born French
girl receives. To submit, to play a social part, to discount pleasure
in favor of duty, this is the very air girls breathe in the older
civilizations. A study or a mere observation of the women of Europe
and America will leave no doubt as to where the balance of happiness
lies. The boasted freedom of the American woman is often her sorrow,
and her joy is escape from freedom into some kind of service.
This is a trite story. Robert Grant, Edith Wharton, Robert Herrick
have expended the greatest artistry on the ungrateful theme of the
egocentric American woman. More blatantly, David Graham Phillips,
Upton Sinclair, and Owen Johnson have belabored the unfortunate
creature. I venture to move matter so thoroughly familiar, only in the
hope of setting it in something like historic perspective, and of
pointing out remedial tendencies. And first of all, while this is
primarily a woman's problem, it is emphatically of man's making. It
would be a most curious and interesting historical study to ascertain
just when and precisely how, the American notion of women as a luxury
and ornament came into being. Until the quite recent revulsion against
the theory, it passed for a beautiful expression of the innate
chivalry of the American man. It is possible that it is indeed a
product of that peculiar inept sentimentality--of that impotence in
the field of the emotions--which frequently accompanies a life too
narrowly devoted to business. In affairs involving the intelligence of
the heart, there is notoriously no fool comparable with a certain type
of millionaire. An unkinder view of this chivalric delusion of the
American man as regards his womankind, is that it is not a delusion at
all but a Machiavellian policy. He is overconcentrated in work, and
socially inert. He bribes his women in order to be let alone. He
dangles vanities before them in order to avoid a manly sharing of his
life. The Undine Spraggs and her sisters in fiction are prone to take
this view when they go to the rare pains of general reflection.
Probably a mixture of the two motives would supply the real cause. Our
forefathers did idolize their women, and doubtless wished to procure
them happiness without first taking the trouble to learn where a
woman's happiness really lies. Our forefathers were also over busy
men, and willing to pay handsomely for immunity from ungrateful social
duties. They may have quite honestly desired to simplify what is a
delicate and complicated personal adjustment, but in so doing they
ignored that broad community of interest which is the vitalizing
principle of any successful marriage. The present iconoclasm
concerning our once idolized women will do very little good until it
be clearly perceived that what is very much the misfortune of the
American woman is also very much the fault of the American man. When
he begins to realize that he is not merely a provider or patron, but
in the fullest sense a partner, the old sentimentalisms will give way
to reality and common sense.
Meanwhile much is happening to make our women more capable of genuine
partnership. The projection of millions of women from sheltered homes
into business has been a rude process and fraught with evils, but it
has given to these women some vision of the world of affairs. Much of
our recent humanitarian endeavor has been hysterical and half-baked,
but it has also left a considerable residuum of genuine new experience
and wisdom. Suffragist and socialist agitation has wavered between
gushing sentimentalisms and benighted fanaticisms, but it has also
been an educational process, revealing, to hundreds of thousands of
women even if in a hectic light, the real figure of the world. A great
deal that is still raw in these fermentations may eventuate in clearer
ideas of social justice and personal wisdom. In a very true sense much
of the revolt of women has been an unconscious protest against the
theory of man as paymaster general. When men understand that women
cannot live by frocks and functions alone, however generously
provided, but want companionship, less will be heard about feminism
and more about humanity.
Meanwhile it is the duty of parents to disabuse their female
offspring as to the existence of a right to be amused. To be amused is
at best a privilege conditional upon one's desire to prove amusing to
others. Amusement is necessary, but less necessary than it seems, and
always has to be paid for fairly. It seems as if such ideas could be
instilled into children, substituting a general morality and sense of
fair play, for the old pseudo-chivalric notion of sex privilege. There
was more to come of this argument when I was summoned to the telephone
to command any one of a half a dozen little playmates to come and see
my eight year old daughter. She is temporarily unoccupied and needs to
be amused. When she is a little older she shall read this article.
_Fiat justitia!_ But stop! When I consider her with many women of my
acquaintance, I am amazed that so much sweetness and efficiency have
after all survived so much false doctrine and so many unfair
kindnesses. The stock is good, if much of the thinking and training
has been bad. Quite sincerely I toast the Ladies, if not with the old
sentimental unction, at least with the profound conviction that they
are worthy of more substantial guerdon than can ever be compacted from
mere profits, dividends, and coupons. I will be more of a companion to
her who has ever been that to me, and more of a comrade too for the
little girl who wants to be amused.