opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the
cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, ‘No, mother, they are
for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.’ She opened the
box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, ‘To my daughter
Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,’ with a lot of rigmarole
warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time!
I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the
cigarettes and the case from her and threw them into the fireplace.”
“If you take the jest seriously,” I said, “I don’t blame you for
being perturbed. I haven’t any clear moral principle on this point.
Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede
that smoking isn’t a ‘sex function.’ But smoking and Dorothy don’t
go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like
offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not
to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But
smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to
you, Cornelia.”
“Ugh! Don’t be disgusting,” she pleaded.
“I’m not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the
immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable
taste. But go on with your story.”
“Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant
by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly
disarming way he has, and said, ‘Oh, I have been reading Heywood
Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas.
He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird
upon them the sword of early experience, the buckler of knowingness,
and the whole armor of sophistication. And I’ve decided to turn over
a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals,
instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next
fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing
she will ever learn there. _Qui sait?_ But if she waits till then,
she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it
is devilish. Let’s try the effect of having her begin now at the
domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don’t think it
devilish.”
I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in
Oliver’s madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers
for “communal bathing” in the household, as an antidote to precocious
sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to
have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an
undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I
could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely
asked, “And what did you say?”
“I said,” she replied, “that Dorothy’s mother did think it
devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never
would. He laughed again and said, ‘Then she will never learn
to do it like a lady.’ I inquired whether he were incapable of
distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps
pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his
seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of
the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women,
and English women can’t understand why we make a moral issue of it.
I said, ‘So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something
obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously
worse exists elsewhere.’ He said, ‘Cornelia, you are a Little
American. You are out of step.’ And I lost my temper, and exclaimed,
‘Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn’t smoked yet, and she
wouldn’t think of smoking now, if she hadn’t a fool for a father.’”
II
FLAGS OF REVOLT
As this was the first and remains the only occasion in my life
on which any married woman has ever revealed to me any serious
altercation between herself and her husband,—though I have been
informed by others that such revelations are not uncommon,—I was
astounded.
“Why, my dear Cornelia!” I exclaimed, “that was a fighting word. Was
it then that Oliver beat you?”
“No,” she answered with a partially reassuring smile, “I wish he had.
Oliver sulks when he is angry. I flash out what I feel, and have it
over with. Oliver sulks and plots some revenge—some ingenious, horrid
little revenge that he knows will make me furious.”
I gasped inwardly—if one can do that; but I tried to play the part of
the unruffled confessor. I was learning so much that was new to me
about happy family life. “Well, what did he do next?” I asked.
“He took a box of cigars and a novel and went up to his room, to bed.
At six o’clock in the morning he got up and roused the household,
apparently in the jolliest humor, ringing all through the house the
big dinner-bell that we use to call the children from the woods. He
made Dorothy put on her new knickers, and got the car out, and drove
off to town with the children, ‘for a lark,’ he said. They came back
about noon, and drove up to the door, and honked. I went out; and
there was Dorothy in her knickers on the front seat with her father,
both of them smoking, and Dorothy with her hair—her lovely soft
hair—bobbed above her ears, and her neck shaved like a convict’s. I
could have cried—either with grief or with rage. And Oliver, simply
bubbling with joy, called out, ‘I’ve met them halfway, Cornelia
darling!’ Wasn’t he horrid? Wasn’t he perfectly horrid? I didn’t cry.
But Oliver went back to New York by the afternoon train. And now you
know why there was no birthday party last night.”
III
BLOOM
“Cornelia,” I said after a moment of intense meditation, “I think—I
am not sure, but I think you are making a mistake.”
“I am sure!” she retorted. “I am not making a mistake. I know
perfectly well what I am doing. I have never been more certain about
anything in my life than that Oliver is wrong—utterly wrong. What
mistake am I making?”
“You are making the mistake which nine tenths of the good people of
our generation are making in dealing with their own children. You
are making the mistake of trying to suppress the symptoms instead of
diagnosing the disease. Knickers and the rest are symptoms. Of what?
You ought to be thinking about that, but you are not. Cigarettes and
bobbed hair are flags of revolt. You are interested only in capturing
the flags and burning them. But what is the revolt about? That is
what you ought to be thinking about; and you aren’t thinking about it
at all.”
“I am thinking about it,” she protested. “I am thinking about nothing
else. I am not a simpleton. Personally I do abominate bobbed hair
and cigarettes, but I am not afraid of them. What I am afraid of is
the disease, or the revolt, of which they are the signals. It is the
state of mind which goes along with them. It is the precious and
irrecoverable things that disappear when these things appear.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I mean the sweetness and freshness of young girls—their bloom.
Don’t you care, don’t you really care, even you—Oh, how shall I make
you understand what I feel about the preciousness of the bloom on
things, and on boys and girls who have been brought up happily and
wisely in the right surroundings! Ever since I can remember I have
had the strangest ecstatic sense about everything that has just come
new into the world—dewy things, roses and morning glories early in
the morning, little bits of babies, a pear tree all a soft mist of
white blossoms, the slender little new moon in a green sky low in the
west over treetops at nightfall, robin’s eggs, just peeped at, in a
lilac bush, the rosy-white tips of old grapevines, the silvery mist
of plums before they are picked—anything, everything lovely before
dust or heat has touched it and before anyone, anyone, has pawed it
over. When I was a young girl my heart fairly ached with tenderness
for this quality in things—and with a passionate desire to preserve
it. When one grows older, the desire doesn’t die out; it becomes
only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like
pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking
of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little
Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off.”
Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager,
glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I
somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for
the rest of Cornelia’s family, which stood at the moment in dire
need of advocacy. I smothered my instinctive emotional response, and
exclaimed:
“Nonsense! What you value in Dorothy can’t be brushed off. Bloom is
only the transient breath of qualities that extend in her from rind
to core, like the red in a blood orange. You are reveling in a mood,
or you yourself would recognize that bloom—intactness—is preserved
only by unsuccessful, undiscovered, sterile things. If it remains, it
becomes a badge of uselessness. It is meant only for a brief seasonal
show, which we may enjoy while it lasts; but it is silly to grieve
over it. Other beauties follow—the full moon, and birds that break
the lovely blue shells to bits and sing. Dorothy is breaking through
her shell. That is all.”
Cornelia sighed: “If it only were! But you don’t know anything
about the revolution that takes place in a girl’s mind, and in her
character, the moment she puts on the badge of those who have ceased
to care for ‘intactness!’”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and
knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge
up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some
unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas
of some outrageous ‘reformer,’ something revolting that is sanctioned
in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly
‘martyr’ who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some
crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the
latest novel. Perhaps you will hear them discussing what I overheard
a group of our modern maidens debating not long ago—whether if a man
and a woman registered at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of
this state would not recognize them as such.”
“These are ‘strong’ topics,” I said. “I don’t think they are the only
topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are
discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair
reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia,
is that life is full of strong topics. We can’t get away from them
or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready
to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over
a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same
fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you
fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You
conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of
evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain,
if I edged up to a group of ‘modern’ girls in conclave on these
themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount
of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and
follies of their contemporaries.”
Cornelia likes the _ad hominem_ form of argument. “If you had a
daughter of seventeen,” she said, “should you enjoy seeing her blow
the smoke through her lips and hearing her wisely consider the legal
consequences of registering at a hotel under the names of ‘John Doe
and Wife’?”
“If I had a daughter,” I replied cautiously, “I have a sentimental
notion that I should like to have one who at the age of seventeen
would feel the æsthetic impropriety of smoking, and who at any rate
would not feel her nerves on edge without tobacco. But suppose
Heaven visited the sins of the father upon the child by giving me
a—well, a ‘modern’ daughter. If my daughter, after emitting the
smoke, ejaculated the word ‘Geese!’ with a good accent, and a clear
cool sound of conviction, and a kind of contemptuous remoteness
from Greenwich Village problems, why I think I should feel mightily
reassured. I should be positively glad to have heard her express
her mind on this strong topic. And if tobacco helped her to express
her mind, as it helps me to express mine, I might even feel mildly
grateful to the tobacco.”
“You know you would not,” said Cornelia.
“Perhaps you are right. But at any rate, I can conceive of no person
more properly subject for satire than a man with the fifth cigar
of the morning in his mouth taking up the battle axe to make war
against the first cigarette of his wife or daughter.”
“You are merely talking for argument. I hate you when you do that.
You get so far away from me that I can’t talk with you.”
“No,” I insisted, “I am not talking for argument. I am pleading
in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things
of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am
pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the
necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination.
You don’t seem to discriminate at all among your ‘modern’ girls. It
simply isn’t true that they are all discussing suppressed novels
and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested
in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to
Yellowstone Park. I am not sure what our girls are going to get out
of their political activities; but I know what they are going to
get out of their athletic activities. I am an uncompromising and
enthusiastic adherent of athletic life for women—not Country Club
women alone, but all women.”
“I approve of women exercising,” assented Cornelia, “if it can be
done in a nice way. I don’t care for Marathon runners and champion
swimmers and that vulgar display of limbs in the newspapers.”
“Cornelia,” I said, “you use the word ‘nice’ too much; you overwork
it. Your son told me the other day that, whenever he mentions a new
girl acquaintance in your presence, you have only one question about
her: ‘Is she nice?’ ‘It gets on my nerves,’ he says, ‘to hear that
everlasting: Is she nice?—Is she nice?—Is she nice?—till I don’t
care whether she is nice or not; and I feel like saying, No, she is
horrid; but she sings like an angel, and she dances like a wave,
and she makes a sparkling quip, and she has brains of her own, and
she is attractive, and she is reasonable, and she is a good sport,
and she doesn’t squall when we get caught in the rain. I don’t go
around asking girls whether they are nice. How should I know? Mother
means well and is perfectly fine herself, and all that. But somehow,
you know, it strikes me as kind of nasty for a fellow to be always
thinking whether a girl is nice.’ And there, my dear Cornelia, you
get a bit of the spirit of the younger generation, which is, I think,
essentially sounder and healthier than the perpetual incensing of
‘purity’ by some earlier generations.”
“In what way is it sounder and healthier?”
“Why, I mean that it isn’t the presence of sexual characteristics
and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her
‘not nice.’ That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not
nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual
preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and
exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am
convinced that many of your ‘modern’ girls are discovering that fact
for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess
the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of
this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many
of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling
and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism,
medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political
organization.”
IV
CAREERS FOR WOMEN
“Is that the sort of woman that you would have married,” said
Cornelia, “if you had married?”
“Let us not discuss the woman I would have married. Or rather let me
remind you of this about her: the reason why the woman I would have
married decided not to marry me was her clear-eyed perception, after
some tears and emotional stress, that love was not enough to live on:
that what I could offer her was not enough to make up a life for the
many-sided being that she knew herself to be.”
I paused a moment for a response. But Cornelia kept silence, looking
out over the blue water. I continued:—
“If a girl is so placed in the world that she can find expression for
the versatility of human nature in a really satisfactory domestic
life and really satisfactory society and luxurious travel and
beautiful surroundings and the fine things in literature and art and
the rearing of really superior children—why, then she may not be
tempted at all by advertising and real estate. But can’t you see,
Cornelia, that for the immense majority of girls the only way of
getting anything but their conjugal and maternal capacities valued or
expressed, and the only way of getting even their feminine charms to
a suitable market lies through some such avenues as I have mentioned?”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “I know girls are going in for these things
more and more; that is why I am so much worried about my son. I don’t
want him to become interested in that sort of girl. She wouldn’t
make him happy. She wouldn’t be a good wife for him. Yet, just now,
he seems to have a mania for ‘girls that do things.’ I know it’s the
fashion for girls to ‘do things’ nowadays; but don’t you hate to see
them doing them?”
“I truly do not. I admit that ‘careers’ for women are still in a
more or less experimental stage. But the results from the ancient
experiment in keeping women out of careers are all in. I am curious
to see the results of the more recent experiment. Professional men,
as life wears on, come to look upon a career, with all its burdens,
as literally the one indispensable element, without which existence
would be intolerable. For ages, men have lied to their sweethearts;
have deceived them into thinking sweethearts and wives are the
indispensable elements in the happiness of men. But it really is not
so.”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
“No. And the girls themselves are finding it out, and are very
sensibly claiming a share in the substantial satisfactions of life.”
“You have no imagination. You don’t understand. It’s so simple,
so perfectly simple. Substantial satisfactions for men are not
substantial satisfactions for women. That is all there is to it. The
things that please you and fill your lives are sawdust to us—after
the first novelty wears off; and they leave our hearts aching and
burning. I am certain there isn’t a mature woman in business who
wouldn’t admit, if she were honest, that if the choice were open,
she would choose even a moderately successful marriage in preference
to a brilliant success in business. They are making a mistake—such a
mistake. I am sure that, in their hearts, they know from the outset
that it isn’t what their hearts desire.”
“About the hearts of young girls,” I admitted, “I know next to
nothing. I am still curious about them because I have heard so much
about them. But the only occasion on which I ever asked a girl for
her heart, she gave me a stone. And I believe that, far oftener than
most men suspect, the place in the pectoral cavity of women assigned
to the heart is occupied by some far harder substance. You remember
that lovely creature in Balzac whose lover overheard her in solitude
exclaiming, ‘My God! O my God!’; and the words seemed to him to come
from the uttermost depths of her heart and made him love her more
passionately than ever, till he learned that she had merely been
anxious about her stock speculations—and that the deep suspiration
really came from the woman’s purse.”
Cornelia was not impressed by this reference to Balzac. She has a
capable business head herself, and manages her property, which is
considerable, with more judgment than her husband displays. She
ignored the malice in my speech and merely remarked:—
“A nice woman need not be a fool in money matters.”
“No,” I continued, “and many of them aren’t. That is why I believe
many of them are not making a mistake but following a real vocation
when they turn to business. I don’t know much about their hearts, but
I have had extensive opportunity to observe their brains, and, in
some respects, I am tremendously impressed by them.”
“Oh, we have some common-sense among us,” she agreed.
“It isn’t common-sense so much,” I corrected, “in which girls excel.
It is a special faculty of their sex, a kind of darting velocity
of mind, which men of other races, the Jews and the Chinese, for
example, display more abundantly than Anglo-Saxon men. In manual
deftness, in celerity of apprehension, in executive readiness, in a
kind of swift practical insight, in flying straight to the point,
girls and young women are proving dangerous competitors. They remind
me of turtle doves, which, you know, have two very different notes.
They coo and coo in the woods, till you think that a mournful
amorousness is all they are good for; but if you start them up,
they go ‘piet, piet, piet’ at ninety miles an hour to their next
destination.”
“Oliver is quicker than I am,” said Cornelia, whose generalizations
on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, “but
Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are.
Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn’t
very important in itself. The important thing is to know where one
is going.”
“Girls show,” I proceeded, “very many of them, what the advocates
of mental tests recognize as officer quality. I suspect that, if
the draft were made universal, and if the army tests were applied
to all the women in the country, not only would the disgrace of our
moron percentage be greatly abated, but ninety-nine per cent of
the men would be obliged to serve in the ranks. Among women, there
is an immediacy of reaction to stimuli, a freedom from dubitation,
subordinate considerations, and inhibiting afterthoughts, which make
them invaluable members of a General Staff, when the General Staff
is infested with doubting Thomases, Hamlets, and authorities on red
tape.”
“If you think that,” inquired Cornelia, “why don’t you, and why
doesn’t Oliver, give more attention to what I tell him is right?”
“Because,” I replied, “we are harassed by subordinate considerations
and afterthoughts. But that is just what makes women want to get
their hands on things and manage them. I am astounded every day to
discover in how many big businesses and even political organizations
there is some woman, who has perhaps risen from a stenographic
position, sitting in with the chiefs of the concern at the centre
of the web and actually telling the ‘big wigs’ what to do—actually
ruling the whirlwind and directing the storm.”
After this speech, I glanced at Cornelia to see whether she would
admit to herself her own master passion, her suppressed desire. I
could see that she was doing something which she ordinarily would no
more think of doing in my presence than of doing up her hair: she was
reflecting.
“Possibly,” she conceded.
“Not possibly,” I pursued, “but certainly. All women crave mastery,
beginning with the government of their own husbands; and their
happiness, after the first feigning delight of amorous surrender,
is to extend their jurisdiction, to enlarge the limits of their
empire. It is the quality that makes queens. It is the quality that
made Elizabeth and not Burleigh the ruler of England, and Catherine,
not her minister,—whoever he was,—ruler of all the Russias. It is a
quality which you yourself possess, my dear Cornelia, in abundance,
only you haven’t an adequate throne to display it on; and so,
instead of sending Raleigh to South America for galleons of treasure
or telling the president of your company which railroad to buy
next, you have to take it out in sending Oliver back to the city in
disgrace because he has had Dorothy’s hair bobbed.”
“How I hate him!” cried Cornelia, as if still nursing the bitterness
of defeat.
“Really?” I asked, in a momentary flutter of hope.