FROM A GIRL'S POINT OF VIEW
BY
LILIAN BELL
1897
* * * * *
BY LILIAN BELL
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF AN OLD MAID. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges
and Gilt Top, $1 25.
... The love affairs of an old maid are not her own, but other
people's, and in this volume we have the love trials and joys of a
variety of persons described and analyzed.... The peculiarity of this
book is that each type is perfectly distinct, clear, and
interesting.... Altogether the book is by far the best of
those recently written on the tender passion.--_Cincinnati
Commercial-Gazette_.
THE UNDER SIDE OF THINGS. A Novel. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut
Edges and Gilt Top, $1 25.
A tenderly beautiful story.... This book is Miss Bell's best effort,
and most in the line of what we hope to see her proceed in, dainty and
keen and bright, and always full of the fine warmth and tenderness of
splendid womanhood.--_Interior_, Chicago.
* * * * *
Dedicated
WITH MANY APPREHENSIONS TO
THE DULL READER
WHO WILL INSIST UPON TAKING THIS BOOK LITERALLY
CONTENTS
THE UNTRAINED MAN UNDER THIRTY-FIVE
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES
WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN LOVE
MEN AS LOVERS
LOVE-MAKING AS A FINE ART
GIRLS AND OTHER GIRLS
ON THE SUBJECT OF HUSBANDS
A FEW MEN WHO BORE US:
THE SELF-MADE MAN
THE DYSPEPTIC
THE TOO-ACCURATE MAN
THE IRRESISTIBLE MAN
THE STUPID MAN
THE NEW WOMAN
THE UNTRAINED MAN UNDER THIRTY-FIVE
"Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee,
And move thee on to noble ends."
Every woman has had, at some time in her life, an experience with man
in the raw. In reality, one cannot set down with any degree of
accuracy the age when his rawness attacks him, or the time when he has
got the last remnant of it out of his system. But a close study of the
complaint, and the necessity for pigeon-holing everything and
everybody, lead one to declare that somewhere in the vicinity of the
age of thirty-five man emerges from his rawness and becomes a part of
trained humanity--a humanity composed of men and women trained in the
art of living together.
I am impressed with Professor Horton's remarks on this subject: "It
has sometimes struck me as very singular," he says, "that while
nothing is so common and nothing is so difficult as living with other
people, we are seldom instructed in our youth how to do it well. Our
knowledge of the subject is acquired by experience, chiefly by
failures. And by the time that we have tolerably mastered the delicate
art, we are on the point of being called to the isolation of the
grave--or shall I say to the vast company of the Majority?
"But an art of so much practical moment deserves a little more
consideration. It should not be taught by chance, or in fragments, but
duly deployed, expounded, and enforced. It is of far more pressing
importance, for example, than the art of playing the piano or the
violin, and is quite as difficult to learn.
"It is written, 'It is not good that man should be alone'; but, on the
other hand, it is often far from good to be with him. A docile cat is
preferable, a mongoose, or even a canary. Indeed, for want of proper
instruction, a large number of the human race, as they are known in
this damp and foggy island, are 'gey ill to live wi',' and no one
would attempt it but for charity and the love of God."
Now who but women are responsible for the training of men? If the
mother has neglected her obvious duty in training her son to be a
livable portion of humanity, who but the girls must take up her lost
opportunities? It is with the class of men whose mothers _have_
neglected to train them in the art of living that we have to deal; the
man with whom feminine influence--refining, broadening, softening,
graciously smoothing out soul-wrinkles, and generously polishing off
sharp mental corners--has had no part. It need not necessarily mean
men who have not encountered feminine influence, but it does mean
those who never have yielded to it. The natural and to-be-looked-for
conceit of youth may have been the barrier which prevented their
yielding. There is a time when the youth of twenty knows more than any
one on earth could teach him, and more than he ever will know again; a
time when, no matter how kind his heart, he is incased in a mental
haughtiness before which plain Wisdom is dumb. But a time will come
when the keenness of some girl's stiletto of wit will prick the empty
bubble of his flamboyant egoism, and he will, for the first time,
learn that he is but an untrained man under thirty-five.
This elastic classification does not obtain with either geniuses or
fools. It deals with the average man as the average girl knows him,
and may refer to every man in her acquaintance or only to one. It
certainly _must_ refer to one! Misery loves company to such an extent
that I could not bear to think that there was any girl living who did
not occasionally have to grapple with the problem of at least one man
in the raw, if only for her own discipline.
You cannot argue with the untrained man under thirty-five. In fact, I
never argue with anybody, either man or woman, because women are not
reasonable beings and men are too reasonable. I never am willing to
follow a chain of reasoning to its logical conclusion, because, if I
do, men can make me admit so many things that are not true. I abhor a
syllogism. Alas, how often have I picked my cautious way through
three-quarters of one, only to sit down at the critical moment,
declaring I would not go another step, and then to hear some
argumentative man cry, "But you admitted all previous steps. Don't you
know that this naturally _must_ follow?" Well, perhaps it _does_
follow, only I don't believe it is true. It may be very clever of the
men to reason, and perhaps I am very stupid not to be able to admit
the truth of their conclusions, but I feel like declaring with Josh
Billings, "I'd rather not know so much than to know so much that ain't
so."
Conversation with the untrained man under thirty-five is equally
impossible, because he never converses; he only talks. And your chief
accomplishment of being a good listener is entirely thrown away on
him, because a mere talker never cares whether you listen or not as
long as you do not interrupt him. He only wants the floor and the
sound of his own voice. It is the trained man over thirty-five who can
converse and who wishes you to respond.
The untrained man desires to be amused. The trained man wishes to
amuse. A man under thirty-five is in this world to be made happy. The
man over thirty-five tries to make you happy.
There is no use of uttering a protest. You simply must wait, and let
life take it out of him. The man under thirty-five is being trained in
a thousand ways every day that he lives. Some learn more quickly than
others. It depends on the type of man and on the length of time he is
willing to remain in the raw.
You can do little to help him, if you are the first girl to take a
hand at him. You can but prepare him to be a little more amenable to
the next girl. His mind is not on you. It is centred on himself. You
are only an entity to him, not an individual. He cares nothing for
your likes and dislikes, your cares or hopes or fears. He only wishes
you to be pretty and well dressed. Have a mind if you will. He will
not know it. Have a heart and a soul. They do not concern him, because
he cannot see them. He likes to have you tailor-made. You are a Girl
to him. That's all. The eyes of the untrained man under thirty-five
are never taken off himself. They are always turned in. He is studying
himself first and foremost, and the world at large is interesting to
him only inasmuch as it bears relation to himself as the pivotal
point. He fully indorses Pope's line, "The proper study of mankind is
man," and he is that man. Join in his pursuit if you will; show the
wildest enthusiasm in his golf record or how many lumps of sugar he
takes in his coffee, and he will evince neither surprise nor gratitude
for your interest. You are only showing your good taste.
Try to talk to the untrained man under thirty-five upon any subject
except himself. Bait him with different topics of universal interest,
and try to persuade him to leave his own point of view long enough to
look through the eyes of the world. And then notice the hopeless
persistence with which he avoids your dexterous efforts and mentally
lies down to worry his Ego again, like a dog with a bone.
The conceit of one of these men is the most colossal specimen of
psychological architecture in existence. As a social study, when I
have him under the microscope, I can enjoy this. I revel in it, just
as I do in a view of the ocean or the heavens at night--anything so
vast that I cannot see to the end of it. It suggests eternity or
space. But oh! what I have suffered from a mental contact with this
phase of him in society! Sometimes he really is ignorant--has no
brains at all--and then my suffering is lingering. Sometimes he really
knows a great deal--has the making of a man in him, only it lies
fallow for want of training--and then my suffering is acute. When
success--business or social or athletic or literary or artistic--comes
to the untrained man under thirty-five, it comes pitifully near being
his ruin. The adulation of the world is more intoxicating and more
deadly than to drink absinthe out of a stein; more insidious than
opium; more fatal than poison. It unsettles the steadiest brain and
feeds the too-ravenous Ego with a food which at first he deemed nectar
and ambrosia, but which he soon comes to feel is the staff of life,
and no more than he deserves. With success should come the
determination, be you man or woman, to fall upon your knees every day
and pray Heaven for strength to keep from believing what people tell
you, so that you still may be bearable to your friends and livable to
your family.
I know that all this will fall unkindly upon the ears of many a worthy
man under thirty-five whose charm is still in embryo, and that, unless
he is very clever, he will be mortally offended, and never believe my
solemn assertion that I am the stanchest friend the man of
possibilities has. Let him take care how he resents my amiable
brutality, or how he denounces me as his enemy, for if I were not
interested in the untrained man under thirty-five I wouldn't bother
with him, would I?
I know, too, that a diplomatic feminine contingency will raise a howl
of protest, and will read this aloud to men under thirty-five for the
express purpose of disclaiming all complicity with such heterodox
views, and doubtless will be able to make the men believe them.
Tactful girls are a necessity, and I approve of them. I do not in the
least mind their disclaiming my views to specific men, especially if I
can catch their eye for one subtle moment when the men are not
looking. On this subject there is a certain delicately veiled,
comprehending, soul-satisfying, mental _wink_ going the rounds of the
girls, indicating our comradeship and unanimity of thought quite as
understandingly as the fraternal grip stands for fellowship among
masons. We girls have been thinking these things for a long time, and,
with this declaration of independence, the shackles will fall from
many a girl's soul, because another girl has dared to speak out in
meeting.
Of course, I know, too, that girls with nice brothers and cousins and
husbands under thirty-five will also offer violent protest. I am
perfectly willing. Doubtless their feminine influence has circumvented
nature to such an extent that no one would suspect that their men were
under thirty-five. I only beg of them to remember that I am not
discussing girl-trained men or widowers. Both of these types are as
near perfection as a man can become.
A man whom girls have trained is really modest. Even at twenty he does
not think that he knows it all. He is willing to admit that his father
and mother have brains, and that thirty years' experience entitles
them to a hearing. He also is willing to give the girls a show, to
humor them, to find them interesting as studies, but never to claim to
understand them. In short, he has many of the charming qualities of
the man over thirty-five and the widower. That is the man who is
girl-trained. But Heaven help the man who is girl-spoiled.
Far be it from me to say that the untrained man under thirty-five, at
his worst, is of no use in this world. He is excellent for a two-step.
I have used a number of them very successfully in this way. But I know
the awful thought has already pierced some people's brains--what if
the man under thirty-five does not dance?
Sometimes an untrained man under thirty-five will actually have the
audacity to say to me that he takes small pleasure in society because
the girls he meets are so silly, and he must use small-talk in order
to meet them on their own ground. I am aghast at his temerity, as he,
too, will be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never
have allowed ourselves the luxury of vindicating ourselves, or
refuting this charge. It is the clever girl who suffers most of
all--not the brilliant, meteoric girl--but just the ordinarily clever
girl, as other girls know her. It is this sort of a girl who drags
upon my sympathies, because she occupies an anomalous position.
Being a real woman, she likes to be liked. She wishes to please men.
We all do. But what kind of men are we to please? Untrained men under
thirty-five? Owing to the horrible prevalence of these men, some girls
become neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. They see their
silly, pink-cheeked sisters followed and admired. They know either how
shallow these girls are or how cleverly hypocritical. Clever girls are
also human. They love to go about and wear pretty clothes, and dance,
and be admired quite as much as anybody.
The result is that they adopt the only course left to them, and,
bringing themselves down to the level of the men, feign a frivolity
and a levity which occasionally call forth from a thinking man a
criticism which is, in a sense, totally undeserved. What will not the
untrained man under thirty-five have to answer for on the Day of
Judgment!
It is of no use to argue about this state of things. Facts are facts.
Men make no secret of the kind of women they want us to be. We get
preached at from pulpits and lectured at from platforms and written
about by "The Saunterer" and "The Man About Town" and "The One Who
Knows It All," telling us how to be womanly, how to look to please
men, how to behave to please men, and how to save our souls to please
men, until, if we were not a sweet, amiable set, we would rebel as a
sex and declare that we thought we were lovely just the way we were,
and that we were not going to change for anybody.
You lords of creation ought to be very complaisant, or else very much
ashamed of yourselves. You send in an order: "The kind of girl that I
like is a Methodist without bangs." And some nice girl begins to look
up Methodist tenets and buys invisible hairpins and side combs. Or you
say, "Give me an athletic girl." And, presto! some girl who would much
rather read buys a wheel, and learns golf, and lets out the waists to
her gowns, and revels in tan and freckles. We do what you men want us
to. And, then, when you complain about our lack of brains, that we
cannot discuss current events, and that you have to give us society
small-talk, I feel like saying: "Well, whose fault is it? If you
demand brains, we will cultivate them. If you want good looks, we will
try to scare up some. If you want nobility, we will let you know how
much we have concealed about us."
Often it is not that we are not secretly much more of women, and
better and cleverer women, than you think us. But there is no call for
such wares, so we lay character and brain on the shelves to mildew,
and fill the show-windows with confectionery and illusion. We supply
the demand. We always have supplied it, and we always will.
Of course, some of us get very much disgusted with the débutantes.
But, aside from the great superiority they have over girls with
thinking powers (in regard to the number of men who admire them, for
all men admire cooing girls with dimples)--aside from this, I say,
there is something to be said on their behalf. Don't you believe, you
dear, unsuspicious men, who dote upon their pliability and the
trustfulness of their innocent, limpid blue or brown-eyed gaze, which
meets your own with such implied flattery to your superior strength
and intelligence--don't you believe for one moment that the simple
little dears do not know exactly the part they are playing. They are
twice as clever as the cleverest of you. They feel that they are
needed just as they are. The fashionable schools are turning them out
every year exactly as the untrained men under thirty-five would wish
them to be. They know this. Therefore they remain as art has made
them. Feeling themselves admired by the class of men they most wish to
attract, they have no incentive to improve.
And yet, I suppose, untrained men under thirty-five have their use in
the world, aside from the part they play in the discipline of
discriminating young women. Girls even marry these men. Lovely girls,
too. Clever girls--girls who know a hundred times more than their
husbands, and are ten times finer grained. I wonder if they love them,
if they are satisfied with them, if _ennui_ of the soul is not a
bitter thing to bear?
I am always wondering why girls marry them. Every week brings me
knowledge that some lovely girl I know has found another man under
thirty-five, or that some of my men friends of that persuasion have
married out-of-town girls. It does not surprise me so much when girls
from another city marry them. Most men do not like to write letters,
and visits are only for over Sunday.
Men are always saying, "Well, why don't you tell us the kind of men
you would like us to be?" And their attitude when they say it is with
their thumbs in the arm-holes of their waistcoats. When a man is
thoroughly satisfied with himself he always expands his chest.
There is something very funny to me in that question, because I
suppose they really think they would change to please us. I do not
mind talking about it, because I am sociable, and I like conversation;
but I never for a moment dream that they will do it. They intend to,
and their inclination is always to please us, even to spoil us; but
they either cannot or will not change; and they think if they can
refuse pleasantly, and mentally chuck us under the chin and make us
smile, that they have succeeded in getting our minds off a troublesome
subject.
Of course, it is partly our fault that we do not insist, but no one
wants to be disagreeable. Therefore we choose personal discomfort for
ourselves rather than to demand radical changes in the men, which
might bring on contention.
But women wish to please men, aside from their power of winning them.
Whereas if men can get the girls without any change on their part,
they consider themselves a howling success. But they might be a little
bit surprised if they could read the minds of these very wives whom
they have won, whose life-work often may be only to improve them so
that they will make some other woman the kind of a husband they should
have made at first, and then to lie down and die.
So let men beware how they criticise us unfavorably, no matter what
their ages, for the truth of the matter is that, be we frivolous or
serious, vain or sensible, clever or stupid, rich or poor, we are what
the American man has made us. We are supremely grateful to him for the
most part, for he has literally made us what we are by the sweat of
his brow. But let him beware how he cavils at his own handiwork. 'Tis
not for the untrained man under thirty-five to complain of us, when
now he knows why we are so.
"I'm not denyin' that women are foolish," says George Eliot. "God
Almighty made 'em to match the men."
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES
"Last night in blue my little love was dressed;
And as she walked the room in maiden grace,
I looked into her fair and smiling face.
And said that blue became my darling best.
But when, this morn, a spotless virgin vest
And robe of white did the blue one displace,
She seemed a pearl-tinged-cloud, and I was--space!
She filled my soul as cloud-shapes fill the West.
"And so it is that, changing day by day--
Changing her robe, but not her loveliness--
Whether the gown be blue or white or gray,
I deem that one her most becoming dress.
The truth is this: In any robe or way,
I love her just the same, and cannot love her less!"
If you are interested in the spectacle of letting people paint their
own portraits, at the same time entirely unconscious that they are
doing so, ask a number of women and girls whether they dress to please
men or other women, and then listen carefully to what they say and
watch their faces well while they are saying it. Most of the girls
will say they dress to please women; and the reason I ask you to watch
their faces is that you may see the subtle changes going on by which
they persuade themselves that they are telling the truth. Women--nice,
sweet women, the kind _we_ know--seldom tell a real untruth. But they
have a way of persuading themselves that what they are about to say is
the truth. Women must believe in themselves before they can hope to
make other people believe in them; therefore they have themselves to
persuade first of all. Now, when men are going to utter an untruth
they never care whether they believe it or not, as long as they can
make other people believe it. And the so-called brutal honesty of man
is only brutal want of tact. That poor, patient, misused word,
"honesty"! How sick it must get of its abuse!
Yes, girls really believe, I suppose, that they dress for other girls.
But they do not. They dress for men. And only experience will teach
them the highest wisdom in the matter. But that they cannot acquire
until they believe that only another woman will know just how well
they are dressed, and, above all, whether Doucet turned them out, or a
dress-maker in the house at two dollars a day.
Men only take in the effect. Women know how the effect is produced. Of
course, now I am speaking of the general run of men and women: neither
the man who clerked at Cash & Silk's nor the one who pays his wife's
bills in Paris, but the man in his native state of charming ignorance
of materials; the man who always suggests a "gusset" as a remedy for
too scant a gown, who calls insertion "tatting," and who, in setting
out for the opera, will tell his wife to put on her "bonnet and
shawl," although she may have on point-lace and diamonds. In his more
modern aspect he tells you that a girl at the Junior Promenade had on
a blue dress with feathers around her neck--which you must translate
into meaning anything from blue satin to organdie, and that between
dances she wore a feather boa.
It is the effect only that men take in; and when a man goes into
ecstasies over a gown of pale green on a hot day just because you look
so cool and fresh in it, when you know that you paid but forty cents a
yard for it, and only nods when you show him your velvet and ermine
wrap, which cost you two hundred dollars, I would just like to ask you
if it pays to dress for him. Women know this from a sorrowful
experience. Girls have to learn it for themselves. A ball-dress of
white tarlatan, made up over white paper cambric, with a white sash,
will satisfy a man quite as well as a Paris muslin trimmed with a
hundred dollars' worth of Valenciennes lace and made up over silk.
Most of them would never know the difference.
I do not know whether to be sorry for these men or not. It must be
lovely not to agonize and plan and worry to have everything the best
of its kind. I would like to take in only the effect, and never know
why I was pleased. Too much analysis is death to unmitigated rapture.
You always are haunted by knowing exactly what is lacking, and just
how it could be remedied. But these dear men are singularly deluded in
many ways, and upon these delusions clever women play, as a master
plays upon an organ. And young girls, who have not had time to study
into the philosophy of it--how should the poor things know that
clothes have any philosophy?--as usual, have to suffer for it.
One of these delusions is the "simple white muslin" delusion. When a
man speaks of a "simple white muslin" in the softly admiring tone
which he generally adopts to go with it, he means anything on earth in
the line of a thin, light stuff which produces in his mind the effect
of youth and innocence. A ball-dress or a cotton morning-gown is to
him a "simple white muslin."
Now a word with you, you dear, unsophisticated man. I have heard you,
with the sound of your hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month salary ringing
in your ears, gurgle and splash about a girl who wears "simple white
muslins" to balls; and I have heard you set down, as extravagant, and
too rich for your purse, the girl who wears silk. There is no more
extravagant or troublesome gown in the world than what you call a
"simple white muslin." In the first place, it never is muslin, unless
it is Paris muslin, which is no joke, if you are thinking of paying
for it yourself, as it necessitates a silk lining, which costs more
than the outside. If it is trimmed with lace, that would take as much
of your salary as the coal for all winter would come to. If trimmed
with ribbons, they must be changed often to freshen the gown, whose
only beauty is its freshness. Deliver me from a soiled or stringy
white party-dress! If it can be worn five times during the winter, the
girl is either a careful dancer or else a wallflower. In either case,
after every wearing she must have it pressed out and put away as
daintily as if it were egg-shells, all of which is the greatest
nuisance on earth. Often such a gown is torn all to pieces the first
time it is worn. Scores of "simple white muslin" ball-gowns at a
hundred dollars apiece are only worn once or twice.
Now take the "extravagant" girl with her flowered taffeta silk, or
plain satin, or brocade dress. There is at once the effect of richness
and elegance. No matter how sweet and pretty she is, you at once
decide that you never could afford to dress her. But that taffeta
cost, perhaps, only a dollar a yard. The satin, possibly a dollar and
a half. They require almost no trimming, because the material is so
handsome and the effect must be as simple as possible. Such a gown
never need be lined with silk unless you wish to do it. Many a girl
gets up such a gown for fifty or sixty dollars. And then think of the
service that there is in it. It does not tear, it does not crush. When
she comes home she looks as fresh as when she started. When it soils
at the edge of the skirt, she has it cleaned, and there she is with a
new dress again. Do you call that extravagant? Why, my dear sirs, it
is only the very rich who can afford to wear "simple white muslins!"
There is a hollowness about having a man praise your gowns when you
know he doesn't know what he is talking about. When a man praises your
clothes he always is praising you in them. You never will hear a man
praise even the good dressing of a woman he dislikes; while girls who
positively hate another girl often will add, "But she certainly does
know how to dress."
And so the experienced woman wears her expensive clothes for other
women, and produces her "effects" for men. She wears scarlet on a cold
or raw day, and the eyes of the men light up when they see her. It
makes her look cheerful and bright and warm. She wears gray when she
wants to look demure. Let a man beware of a woman in silvery gray. She
looks so quiet and dove-like and gentle that she has disarmed him
before she has spoken one word, and he will snuggle down beside her
and let her turn his mind and his pocket-book wrong side out. A woman
could not look designing in light gray if she tried. He dotes upon the
girl in pale blue. Pale blue naturally suggests to his mind the sort
of girl who can wear it, which is generally a blonde with soft, fluffy
hair, fair skin, and blue eyes--appealing, trustful, baby-blue eyes.
Did you ever notice that men always instinctively put confidence in a
girl with blue eyes, and have their suspicions of a girl with
brilliant black ones, and will you kindly tell me why? Is it that the
limpid blue eye, transparent and gentle, suggests all the soft,
womanly virtues, and because he thinks he can see through it, clear
down into that blue-eyed girl's soul, that she is the kind of girl he
fancies she is? I think it is; but some of the greatest little frauds
I know are the purry, kitteny girls with big, innocent blue eyes.
Blazing black eyes, and the rich, warm colors which dark-skinned women
have to wear, suggest energy and brilliance and no end of intellect.
Men look into such eyes and seem not to be able to see below the
surface. They have not the pleasure of a long, deep gaze into
immeasurable depths. And so they think her designing and clever, and
(God save the mark!) even intellectual, when perhaps she has a wealth
of love and devotion and heroism stored up behind that impulsive
disposition and those dazzling black eyes which would do and dare more
in a minute for some man she had set that great heart of hers upon
than your cool-blooded, tranquil blonde would do in forty years. A
mere question of pigment in the eye has settled many a man's fate in
life, and established him with a wife who turned out to be very
different from the girl he fondly thought he was getting.
Yet whenever I complain to experienced married women of how
discouraging it is to wear your good clothes for unappreciative men,
they beg me not to be guilty of the heresy of wishing things
different. If they have married one of the noticing kind, they tell me
harrowing tales of gorgeous costumes having been cast aside because
these critical men made fun of, or were prejudiced against them, and
"made remarks." And they point with envy to Mrs. So-and-So, whose
husband never knows what she has on, but who thinks she looks lovely
in everything, so that she is at liberty to dress as she pleases. When
a woman defers to her husband's taste, she sometimes is the
best-dressed woman in the room. And sometimes another woman, dressing
according to another man's taste, is the worst-dressed. So you see you
never can tell. "De mule don't kick 'cordin' to no rule."
There is something rather pathetic to me about a man being so ignorant
of why a woman's dress is beautiful, but only the effect remaining in
his memory. He remembers how she looked on a certain day in a certain
gown. He thinks he remembers her dress. He thinks he would know it
again if he saw it. But the truth is that he is remembering the woman
herself, her face, her voice, her eyes--above all, what she said, and
how she said it. If she wore a scarlet ribbon in her dark hair, a red
rose in another woman's hair will most unaccountably bring it all back
to him, and he will not know why he suddenly sees the whole picture
rise out of the past before his eyes, nor why his throat aches with
the memory of it.
I know one of these men, whose descriptions of a woman's dress are one
of the experiences of a lifetime. He loves the word bombazine. His
mother must have worn a gown of black bombazine during his
impressionable age. And he never will be successful in describing a
modern gown until bombazines again become the rage. This same dear man
brought back to his invalid wife a description of a fashionable noon
wedding, which consisted of the single item that the bride wore a blue
alpaca bonnet. It really would be of interest from a scientific point
of view to know what suggested that combination to any intelligence,
even if it were masculine.
I have more evidence to go on, however, when I wonder why the idea of
the cost penetrates this same man's brain when shown a new gown by any
member of his family, all of whom he is weak enough to adore. His
daughter will say, "Papa, do look here just one minute! How do you
like my new gown?" And the answer never varies: "Very pretty, indeed.
I hope it's paid for." He will say that of a cotton frock made two
years ago--he never knows--of a silk _négligé_, or of a ball-gown of
the newest make. The fashion produces no impression upon him, nor the
material, nor the cut. But let his daughter put on any kind of a pale
green dress, and stand before him with the question, "Papa, how do you
like my new gown?" While he is raising his head from his book he
begins the old formula, "Very pretty. I hope--" Then he stops and
says, "I have seen that dress before. Child, you grow to look more
like your mother every day of your life." And there is a little break
in his voice, and before he goes on reading he takes off his glasses
and wipes them, and looks out of the window without seeing anything,
and sits very still for a moment. It was the sight of the pale green
dress. When he came home from the war his lovely young wife, whom he
lost when she was still young and beautiful, came to meet him, holding
her baby son in her arms for his father to see, and she had worn a
pale green gown.
Why certain kinds of clothes are associated in the public mind with
certain kinds of women is to me an amusing mystery. Why are old maids
always supposed to wear black silks? And why are they always supposed
to be thin?--the old maids, I mean, not the silks. Why are literary
women always supposed to be frayed at the edges? And why, if they keep
up with the fashions and wear patent-leathers, do people say, in an
exasperatingly astonished tone, "Can that woman write books?" Why not,
pray? Does a fragment of genius corrupt the aesthetic sense? Is
writing a hardening process? Must you wear shabby boots and carry a
baggy umbrella just because you can write? Not a bit of it. Little as
some of you men may think it, literary women have souls, and a woman
with a soul must, of necessity, love laces and ruffled petticoats, and
high heels, and rosettes. Otherwise I question her possession of a
soul.
WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN LOVE
"She has laughed as softly as if she sighed!
She has counted six and over,
Of a purse well filled and a heart well tried--
Oh, each a worthy lover!
They 'give her time' for her soul must slip
When the world has set the grooving;
She will lie to none with her fair red lip--
But love seeks truer loving.
* * * * *
"Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behooving and unbehooving;
Unless you can DIE when the dream is past--
Oh, never call it loving!"
In love a woman's first right is to be protected from her friends
while she considers the man whom she contemplates loving. The
well-meant blundering of vitally interested friends has spoiled many a
promising love affair, which might have resulted in a marriage so much
above the ordinary that it could be termed satisfactory even by the
most captious.
At no time in a girl's life has she a greater right to work out her
own salvation in fear and trembling than during the period known among
girls as "making up her mind." If she is the right kind of a girl,
honest and delicate minded, it is nerve-racking to be talked about,
and sacrilege to be talked to. Then the bloom is on the grape, which a
rude touch mars forever.
Yet these kind friends never think of the delicate, touch-me-not
influences at work in the girl's soul, or that the instinct to hide
her real interest in the man precludes the possibility of her daring
to ask to be let alone. So they, in their over-zeal and ambition,
either make the path of love so easy and inevitable that all the zest
is taken out of it for both (for lovers never want somebody to go
ahead and baste the problem for them; they want to blind-stitch it for
themselves as they go along), or else, by critical nagging, and
balancing the eligibility of one suitor against another, these friends
so harass and upset the poor girl that she doesn't know which man she
wants, and so turns her back upon all.
In point of fact, when a man is in love, and a girl does not yet know
her own mind; when she is weighing out their adaptability, and
balancing his love for football against her passion for Browning;
during the delicate, tentative period, when the most affectionate
solicitude from friends is an irritation, there ought to be a law
banishing the interested couple to an island peopled with strangers,
who would not discover the delicacy of the situation until it was too
late to spoil it.
"Woman's rights." I certainly agree with the men who think that those
words have a masculine, assertive, belligerent sound. "Equal suffrage"
is much more lady-like, and we are by way of getting all we wish of
the men on any subject, under the gentlest title by which it may be
called. Strange, how, with strong men, force never avails, but the
softest methods are the surest and swiftest.
However, equal suffrage, wide as it is, is not all that I wish. It
does well enough, but it does not cover the entire ground. I never
clamored very much for women to be recognized as the equals of men,
either in politics or in love, because, if I had clamored at all, I
should have clamored for infinitely more than that. _I_ should have
clamored for men to recognize us as their superiors, and not for equal
rights with themselves, but for more, many more rights than they ever
dreamed of possessing. 'Tis not justice I crave, but mercy. 'Tis not
equality, but chivalry.
In the whole history of the world, from nineteenth-century Public
Opinion clear back to the age of chivalry, men never have been
inclined to deal out justice to women. It is their watchword with each
other, but with women it always is either injustice or mercy. And in
spite of all wrongs and all abuses, I say, Heaven bless the men that
this is so. Human nature is more fundamental than customs, and what
would become of women if we only got our exact deserts, or had
absolute justice dealt to us, either by men or other women or on the
Judgment Day?
In these latter days of this progressive, woman's century, however,
the most thoughtful men are valiant enough to re-adjust themselves to
the idea of woman's development, and allow her equality in progressive
thought; at the same time maintaining the old-time chivalry of their
attitude towards her. If she asks for justice at the hands of these
glorious men, she will get it, and they will uncover in her presence
and throw away their cigars while they are dispensing it. Equality to
them does not mean either rudeness or insolence. They are always
gentlemen.
It requires bravery on their part to take this ground, because the
sentiment has not as yet grown popular. But a New Man has been created
by the development of the New Woman, and he is the highest type we
have.
"Courtesy wins woman as well
As valor may, but he that closes both
Is perfect."
Woman's rights! Why, the very first right we expect is to be treated
better than anybody else! Better than men treat each other as a body,
and better by the individual man than he treats all other women. I
abominate the idea of equality, and to be mentally slapped on the
shoulder and told I am "a good fellow." I shrink from the idea of
independence and cold, proud isolation with my emancipated
sister-women, who struggle into their own coats unassisted and get red
in the face putting on their own skates, and hang on to a strap in the
street-car, in the proud consciousness that they are independent and
the equal of men. I never worry myself when a man is on his knees in
front of me, tying the ribbons of my slipper, as to whether he
considers me his equal politically or not. It is sufficient
satisfaction for me to see him there. If he hadn't wanted to save me
the trouble, I suppose he wouldn't have offered. He may even think I
am not strong enough for such an arduous duty. _That_ would not hurt
my feelings either. I have an idea that he likes it better to think
that I cannot do anything troublesome for myself than to believe that
I could get along perfectly without him. In fact--here's heresy for
you, O ye emancipated!--I do not in the least mind being dependent on
men--provided the men are nice enough. Let them give us all the
so-called rights they want to. I shall never get over wanting to get
behind some man if I see a cow. Let them give us a vote, if they will.
I shall want at least three men to go with me to the polls--one to
hold my purse, one to hold my gloves, and the third to show me how to
cast my vote.
If women are serious in wanting to vote in politics, why do they not
apply to the body politic the same methods they use with the one man
which an all-wise Destiny has committed to their keeping?
If all the women in the world should make up their minds that they
wanted to vote worse than anything else on earth--worse even than they
want their husbands to go to church with them--and each woman would
put on her prettiest clothes, and cuddle up to her own particular man
in her softest and most womanish way, when she was begging him to get
suffrage for her--why, you all know they would do it. Men would get it
for us exactly as they would buy us a pair of horses.
Have you men ever thought about practising for suffrage in politics by
giving women suffrage in love? Surely you do not doubt that, should
you do this, it would not occur to us to stuff the ballot-boxes, or to
put up a ticket with any but honorable candidates for our hands. We do
not ask nor wish to indicate who shall run for office. Let the men
announce themselves candidates. We would not take the initiative there
if it were offered to us for a thousand years. All we ask is to be
given plenty of time to canvass the honor of the candidates,
thoroughly to understand and investigate the platform (with an eye to
how near he will come to sticking to his promises after election), and
to be allowed to cast a free and untrammelled vote.
Now, men seem to think that if they allowed woman equal suffrage, the
bright white light of our honesty would be too strong a glare for
their weak eyes--so long accustomed to darkness--to bear. Um--possibly
in politics. Hardly in love.
For myself, I consider absolute honesty most unpleasant. I never knew
any really nice, lovable women who were unflinchingly honest. But I
have known a few iron-visaged, square-jawed women who were so brutally
honest that I have most ingloriously fled at the mention of their
approach, and solaced myself with a congenial spirit who is in the
habit of skirting delicately around painful truth, and a cozy corner
in which to abuse the aforesaid iron-visaged carver of helpless
humanity, who loves to draw blood with her truth. Such an one will get
a vote in politics long before she gets it in love.
No; men need not fear to give us equal suffrage in love. Our honesty
will not be disconcerting. (I would even address a private query, at
just this point, to the women, begging that the men will skip it,
asking women where in the world we would find ourselves if we were
unflinchingly honest with the men who love us?) No one will deny that
we would even countenance a certain amount of corruption. We fully
agree with those men who tell us weakly questioning women that
campaign funds are a necessity. We never have been able to discover
just where the money in politics went to, but the expenses of a
campaign in our line are more in evidence. I doubt if the most
straitlaced Puritan will gainsay me when I declare that bribery from
the candidates, in the form of theatres, opera-boxes, flowers,
bonbons, and books, would not only be tolerated, but even, in a modest
manner, encouraged--having, of course, a keen eye as to the elasticity
of the campaign fund. But, of course, just as vulgar bribery, _per
se_, only catches the easy and unthinking voter in politics, so, in
like manner, would these evidences of generosity only capture the less
desirable voter in love. When you men are trying for a woman's vote
you need give yourselves no uneasiness. If she is worth having,
character wins every time. You don't believe that. That is why you
trust to bribery to do it all. And it is also why so many of you get
the girl you try for--which is about the richest punishment you could
receive.
I adore Hamlet. Not because he was so noble as to give up his life to
avenge his father's most foul murder. Not because he was a chivalrous
King Arthur, to protect Ophelia's womanly pride from the jeers of a
coarse court by openly declaring that he had loved her when he hadn't.
Not for any of Shakespeare's reasons for painting him a hero. But for
two much more reasonable reasons. One that he said, "I myself am
indifferent honest"--oh, the humanity of Hamlet!--and the other that,
when under the spell of her beauty and in the tentative, interested
stage when he cared for her all but enough to ask her to marry him, he
had the wit to discover that she was a fool. Imagine the calamity of
Hamlet married to Ophelia! That _would_ have been a tragedy. Think of
a man clever enough to discover that his idol was made of putty--that
his sweetheart was a Rosamond Vincy! Hamlet was a wise man. He
withdrew in time. Most men have to be married ten years to discover
that they have married an Ophelia or a Rosamond.
It is a trite saying that the whole world is behind a woman urging her
to marry. But I find much to interest me in trite sayings. I like to
get hold of them, and look them through, and turn them wrong side out,
and pull them to pieces to find how much life there is in them.
Psychological vivisection is not a subject for the humane society. A
trite saying has my sympathy. It generally is stupid and shop-worn,
and consequently is banished to polite society and hated by the
clever. And only because it possessed a soul of truth and a wonderful
vitality has it been kept from dying long ago of a broken heart.
Books could be written of the truth of this particular trite saying.
The urging, of course, among people whom we know, is neither vulgar
nor intentional. It takes the form of jests, of pseudo-humorous
questions if a man sends flowers two or three times. But it takes its
worst and most common form in the sudden melting away of the family if
the man calls and finds them all together. If a man has no specific
intentions towards a girl, and has not determined in his own mind that
he wants to marry her; if he is only liking her a great deal, with but
an occasional wonder in the depths of his own heart whether this girl
is the wife for him; to call upon her casually and see the family
scatter, and other callers hastily leave, is enough to scare him to
death. And the girl herself has a right to be furiously indignant.
When eligible young people are in that tentative stage, it is death to
a love to make them self-conscious.
I myself am so afraid of brushing the down from the butterfly wings at
this point that, occasionally, when I have been calling, and the
girl's possible lover has caught me before I could escape in a natural
manner, I have doggedly remained, even knowing that perhaps he wished
me well away among the angels, rather than to run the risk of making
him conscious that I understood his state of mind. Imagine my feelings
of anguish, however, at holding on against my will and against theirs,
wanting somebody to help me let go! Much better, I solace myself
afterwards, that he should wish me away than to look after my
retreating form and wish, in Heaven's name, that I had stayed! Better
for the girl, I mean. For my own feelings--but I do not count. I am
only giving a girl one of her rights in love. A few judicious
obstacles but whet a man's appetite--if he is worth having. And I do
not mind being a judicious obstacle once in a while--if I like the
girl.
As to how far a girl has a right to encourage a man in love, opinions
differ. I once asked a clever literary friend of mine, whose husband
is so satisfactory that it is quite a delightful shock to discover it,
how far men ought to be encouraged to make love.
"Encourage them all you can, my dear. The best of men require all the
encouragement one is capable of giving them."
I pondered over that statement. From her point of view it was, of
course, perfectly proper. Married men need all the encouragement they
can get to keep them making love to their own wives. But from our
standpoint, of being girls--and very nice girls too, some of us, if I
do say it myself!--how far have we a right to encourage men to make
love to us?
Now I like men; and I like girls. So that I never want anybody to be
hurt at this very delicate and dangerous game of love-making. But
somebody always _is_ getting hurt, and although she never makes any
fuss about it, it is generally the girl.