Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)
By Winifred Kirkland
THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN.
THE OLD DILLER PLACE. Illustrated.
THE BOY-EDITOR. Illustrated.
THE HOME-COMERS. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
_The Joys of Being a Woman_
_The
Joys of Being a Woman_
AND OTHER PAPERS
BY
WINIFRED KIRKLAND
[Illustration: colophon]
BOSTON & NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY WINIFRED KIRKLAND
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published August 1918_
FOREWORD
_The Ego in the Essay_
We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate--set jogging upon
earth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magic
music; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him on
witching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but when
we do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him,
we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a
companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self.
Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for the
most part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the
strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is the
shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him.
One man there was in that peopled past, where friendship’s best doors
fly open at our knock, who knew how to catch his elusive Ego and keep
it glad even on ways that led through sordid counting-house and sadder
madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one since has ever known,
how to envisage and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint
sprite that it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us who
love essays say, of one possessing special grace, it is like Elia’s,
meaning not that it imitates Lamb’s style, the inimitable, but that it
reveals, as only the essay can do, personality.
Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless,
a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any sound
of machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if we
overheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his own
particular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicities
any grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his
own Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Self
speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. The
self-annalist whose essays warm our hearts with friendship, must be
one who sips the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self. Not
many such are born, and fewer of them write essays. The essay is no
easy thing. The true mood and the true manner of it are rare. It is
as difficult to write an essay on purpose as it is to be a person on
purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory.
Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by the delights: for
there is nothing so compelling to expression as chuckle, and that is
what the true essay is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that
time the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us, laughing,
how all our life is gilded with fun. Then off we fly to write it, with
the spell still upon us! The poising of a word on the tip of our pen
until the very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the weaving
the thread of a golden thought in and out through all the quips and
nonsense, the wrapping a whole life experience in the hollow shaft of
some light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous essay is that
the reader shall smile, not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall remember
no one passage at which he smiles: it is far better that he should
feel that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth. Ariel never
laughed. The fun that makes the soul expand must have in it the lift of
wings and the glimpsing fantasy of flight.
More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the essay should give the
reader a sense of good-fellowship. Probably the writer who as an actual
man is shyest, gives this comradeship best. The shy man sheds forth his
personality most opulently in print, and preferably, as certain wise
editors have perceived, in anonymous print. One is sensitive to having
an everyday friend see one’s soul in public, because the everyday friend
knows too well the everyday self, to which the elusive essay-self is too
often a stranger.
That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum man or woman who bears
our mortal name, if he only came to visit us oftener, stayed with us
longer, what essays we might write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of
laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger until I could
clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine, who tells such happy secrets!
Poor babykin, poor fairykin--that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe
the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to fairy fields, because
our feet are heavy with Other People’s clogs and fetters, we cannot hear
when he would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies--our own Self’s and
no one’s else, because of the grave grubby Book-people who thunder at
us from our shelves. Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at
me over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow wings and head
that is devil-may-care trying to get at me from behind her sable-stoled
form. Even in the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, “Could a
grave hold me?” For is not death also a bugbear of Other People, not at
all of my own Self’s making?
Gay little voyager! He seems, when he visits me, to be the prince of the
kingdom of fun. He does not stay long, but long enough sometimes for me
to write an essay. But whence he comes, or whither he goes, or what he
is, whether demonic or divine, I only know that he is mine.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD: THE EGO IN THE ESSAY v
I. THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN 1
II. A MAN IN THE HOUSE 23
III. OLD-CLOTHES SENSATIONS 29
IV. LUGGAGE AND THE LADY 35
V. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOARDING 49
VI. THE LADY ALONE AT NIGHT 62
VII. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 68
VIII. AN EDUCATIONAL FANTASY 75
IX. MY CLOTHES 87
X. THE TENDENCY TO TESTIFY 107
XI. LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS 113
XII. THE TYRANNY OF TALENT 124
XIII. THE WOMAN WHO WRITES 129
XIV. PICNIC PICTURES 154
XV. THE FARM FEMININE 171
XVI. A LITTLE GIRL AND HER GRANDMOTHER 183
XVII. THE WAYFARING WOMAN 194
XVIII. THE ROAD THAT TALKED 205
XIX. MY MOTHER’S GARDENERS 214
XX. MY LITTLE TOWN 227
XXI. GENUS CLERICUM 244
XXII. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN DOING WITHOUT ETERNITY 264
NOTE.--_Several of these essays have appeared in_
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,
THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, and THE CHURCHMAN, _and are
here reprinted with the kind permission of the editors of those
magazines_.
_The Joys of Being a Woman_
I
_The Joys of Being a Woman_
Some years ago there appeared in the “Atlantic” an essay entitled “The
Joys of Being a Negro.” With a purpose analogous to that of the author,
I am moved to declare the real delights of the apparently down-trodden,
and in the face of a bulky literature expressive of pathos and protest,
to confess frankly the joys of being a woman. It is a feminist argument
accepted as axiomatic that every woman would be a man if she could be,
while no man would be a woman if he could help it. Every woman knows
this is not fact but falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of those
falsehoods on which depends the stability of the universe. The idea
that every woman is desirous of becoming a man is as comforting to
every male as its larger corollary is alarming, namely, that women as
a mass have resolved to become men. The former notion expresses man’s
view of femininity, and is flattering; the latter expresses his view
of feminism, and is fearsome. Man’s panic, indeed, before the hosts
he thinks he sees advancing, has lately become so acute that there
is danger of his paralysis. Now his paralysis would defeat not only
the purposes of feminism, but also the sole purpose of woman’s conduct
toward man from Eve’s time to ours, a course of which feminism is only a
modern and consistent example.
It is for man’s reassurance that I shall endeavor gradually to unfold
this age-old purpose, showing that while the privileges which through
slow evolution we have amassed are so enjoyable as to preclude our
envying any man his dusty difficulties, still our attitude toward
these our toys is that of a friend of mine, a woman, aged four. Left
unprotected in her hands for entertainment, a male coeval was heard to
burst into cries of rage. Her parents, rushing to his rescue, found
their daughter surrounded by all the playthings, which she loftily
withheld from her visitor’s hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous response,
“I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish.”
The austere moral intention of my little friend was her direct heritage
from her mother Eve, whose much maligning would be regrettable if this
very maligning were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory:
Adam and all his sons had to believe that they amounted to more than
Eve, as the primary condition of their amounting to anything. Eve, in
her campaign for Adam’s education, was the first woman to perceive his
need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity, she undertook to
immolate her reputation for his sake. Eve, I repeat, was the first woman
to perceive Adam’s fundamental need, but she was not the last.
The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so subtle a psychologist
that I feel sure the novelist must have been a woman. Her deathless
allegory of Eden contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows
the superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good, to show
the superiority of man. As it must have required a woman to write the
parable, so perhaps it requires a woman to expound it.
I pass over the initial fact that the representation of Eve as the last
in an ascending order of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be
considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely, perfect, of created
things. The first thing of real importance in the narrative is the
purpose of Eve’s creation, to fill a need, Adam’s. “It was not good that
the man should be alone.” The whole universe was not enough for Adam
without Eve. It neither satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish,
dumpish, unconscionably lazy. If he had been merely lonely, why would it
not have been enough to create another Adam? Because the object was not
simple addition, whereby another Adam would merely have meant two Adams,
both mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was multiplication
by stimulation, whereby, by combining Eve with Adam, Adam, as all
subsequent history shows, was raised to the _n_th power.
Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation redound entirely to
Eve’s credit. Woman rather than man is selected as the one more open to
argument, more capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well
as braver to accept the consequences of action. The sixth verse of the
third chapter cuts away forever all claim for masculine originality,
and ascribes initiative in the three departments of human endeavor to
woman. For no one knows how long, Adam had been bumping into that tree
without once seeing that it was: (_a_) “good for food”; this symbolizes
the awakening of the practical instincts, the availing one’s self of
one’s physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all commercial
activity, in which sphere man has always been judged the more active;
(_b_) “the tree was pleasant to look upon”; here it is Eve, not Adam,
who perceives the æsthetic aspect; if man has been adjudged the more
eminent in art, plainly he did not even see that a thing was beautiful
until woman told him so; (_c_) “a tree to be desired to make one wise”;
Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it, whereas her own
desire for knowledge was so passionate that she was ready to die to
attain it. We all know how Eve’s motives have been impugned, for when a
man is ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific, but when a
woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is called inquisitive. The Eden
narrative concludes with the penalty, “He shall rule over thee,” that
is, the price Eve must pay for Adam’s seeming superiority is her own
seeming inferiority. The risk and the responsibility and the recompense
for man’s growing pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence,
wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she explained.
“And what was my reward when they had won--
Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds?
--They stormed through centuries brandishing their deeds,
Boasting their gross and transient mastery
To girls, who listened with indulgent ears!
And laughing hearts--Lord, they were ever blind--
Women have they known, but never Woman.”
The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have been the methods and
the motives of woman with man ever since. Eve’s purposes, summarized,
are fourfold: first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal his
education from him, as the only practical way of developing in man the
self-esteem necessary to keep him in his sex; third, Eve must never bore
Adam, to keep him going she must always keep him guessing; and fourth,
Eve must not bore herself; this last view of the temptation is perhaps
the truest, namely, that Eve herself was so bored by the inertness of
Adam and the ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see
what he and she would do afterwards.
* * * * *
The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of Genesis clearly
establishes the primary joy of being a woman, the joy of conscious
superiority. That it is the most profound joy known to human nature will
be readily attested by any man who has felt his own sense of superiority
shaking in its shoes as he has viewed the recent much-advertised
achievements of women. How could any man help envying a woman a
self-approval so absolute that it can afford to let man seem superior at
her expense?
Woman’s conviction of advantage supports her in using her prerogatives
first as if they were deficiencies, and then in employing them to offset
man’s deficiencies. Man is a timorous, self-distrustful creature, who
would never have discovered his powers if not stimulated by woman’s
weakness. Probably prehistoric woman voluntarily gave up her own muscle
in order that man might develop his by serving her. It is only recently
that we have dared to be as athletic as we might, and the effort is
still tentative enough to be relinquished if we notice any resulting
deterioration, muscular or moral, in men. Women, conscious how they
hold men’s welfare in their hands, simply do not dare to discover how
strong they might be if they tried, because they have so far used their
physical weakness not only as a means of arousing men’s good activities,
but also as a means of turning to nobler directions their bad ones.
Men are naturally acquisitive, impelled to work for gain and gold,
gain and more gain, gold and more gold. Unable to deter them from this
impulse, we turn it to an unselfish end, that is, we let men support
us, preserving for their sakes the fiction that we are too frail to
support ourselves. If they had neither child nor wife, men would still
be rolling up wealth, but it is very much better for their characters
that they should suppose they are working for their families rather than
for themselves. We might be Amazons, but for men’s own sakes we refrain
from what would be for ourselves a selfish indulgence in vigor. Man is
not only naturally acquisitive but is naturally ostentatious of his
acquisitions. Having bled for his baubles, he wishes to put them on and
strut in them. Again we step in and redirect his impulse; we put on his
baubles and strut for him. We let him think that our delicate physique
is better fitted for jewels and silk than his sturdier frame, and that
our complex service to the Society which must be established to show off
his jewels and silk, is really a lighter task than his simple slavery
to an office desk. How reluctantly men have delegated to women dress
and all its concomitant luxury may readily be proved by an examination
of historic portraits--behold Raleigh in all his ruffles!--and by the
tendency to top-hat and tin-can decoration exhibited by the male savage.
The passionate attention given by our own household males to those few
articles of apparel in which we have thought it safe to allow them
individual choice, unregulated by requirements of uniform, articles such
as socks or cravats, must prove even to men themselves how much safer it
is that their clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed, that women
should do their dressing for them.
* * * * *
Not only for the moral advantages gained by men in supporting us do
women preserve the fallacy of physical feebleness, but also for the
spiritual exaltation men may enjoy by protecting us and rescuing us from
perils. For this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the man should
think the peril real, but it is absolutely necessary that he should
think the woman thinks it real. It does a man more good to save a woman
from a mouse than from a tiger, as contributing more to the sense of
superiority so necessary to him. The truth is that women are not really
afraid of anything, but they perceive how much splendid incentive would
be lost to the world if they did not pretend to be. For example, if
women were actually afraid of serpents, would the Tempter have chosen
that form just when he wished to be most ingratiating? But think how
many heroes would be unmade if women should let men know that they are
perfectly capable of killing their own snakes. The universality of the
mouse fear proves its prehistoric origin, showing how consistently and
successfully women have been educating men in heroism; in earliest times
it probably required a whole dinotherium ramping at the cave-mouth to
induce primitive man to draw weapon in his mate’s defense, but now to
evoke the quintessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is to hop on a
chair at sight of a mouse.
* * * * *
Woman’s motive for suppressing her intellectual powers is exactly the
same as her motive for not developing her physical powers. She is ready
to enjoy and to employ her own genius in secret for the sake of the
free and open growth of man’s. She has wrought so conscientiously to
this end that it is probable that the average man’s belief in woman’s
mental inferiority is even stronger than his belief in her physical
inferiority, for well woman has perceived the peril to man of his ever
discovering the truth of her intellectual endowment. Man’s energy cannot
survive the strain of thinking his brain inferior, or even equal, to
a woman’s. This fact is the reason why women so long renounced all
educational advantages; that at last their minds were too much for them,
and that they were driven by pure ebullience of suppressed genius to
invade the university, will more and more be seen by women to have been
a regrettable mistake. There is much current newspaper discussion of the
failure of the men’s colleges to-day to educate the young male, his
utter obduracy before stimulus is despairingly compared with the effect
of college upon the youth of past generations. I fear that the reason is
simple to seek: men’s colleges have deteriorated exactly in the ratio
that women’s colleges have improved. The course for women and women’s
colleges is therefore clear.
Our history shows that we have, with only occasional lapses into genius,
nobly sustained the requirements of our unselfishness. On rare occasions
our ability has been so irresistible, and our honesty so irrepressible,
that in an unguarded moment we have tossed off a Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa
Bonheur, a Madame Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for the most
part we have preserved a glorious mediocrity that allows man to believe
himself dominant in administration, art, science, war, and finance. The
women who have so far forgotten themselves as almost to betray woman’s
genius to the world, are fortunately for the moral purpose of the sex,
exceptional, and the average woman makes a very creditable concealment
of intellect. I am hopeful that as women grow in wisdom, their outbreaks
of ability will be more and more controlled and sporadic, and man’s
paralysis before them be correspondingly infrequent, so that at
some future day, we may see woman again relinquish all educational
privileges, and become wisely illiterate for man’s sake.
Our own intellectual advantages are as much greater than man’s as
they are more secret. No woman would put up with the clumsiness and
crudity of a man’s brain, knowing so well the superexcellence of her
own, in the delicacy of its machinery, the subtle science required in
its employment, the absorbing interest of the material on which it is
employed, and the noble purpose to which it is solely devoted.
As to our mental mechanism, it is so much finer than man’s that, out
of pure pity for his clogging equipment, we let him think logic and
reason better means of traveling from premise to conclusion than the air
flights we encourage him to scorn as woman’s intuition. Nothing is more
painful to a woman than an argument with a man, because he journeys from
given fact to deduced truth by pack-mule, and she by aeroplane. When he
finds her at the destination, he is so irritated by the swiftness of her
passage that he accuses her of not having followed the right direction,
and demands as proof that she describe the weeds by the roadside, which
he has amply studied,--he calls this study his reasoning process. Of
course no woman stops to botanize when the object is to get there. No
man ever wants to be a woman? No man ever longs to exchange his ass for
our airship? No man ever envies us the nimbleness by which we can elude
logic and get at truth?
Our mental operations are keyed to the very sublimation of delicacy
and rapidity, and they need to be, considering the subtleties of the
skill with which we must employ them. Eve left it to us to educate
Adam without his knowing it, and to keep him endlessly entertained. To
educate, to amuse, and forever, calls for such exquisite manipulation of
our own minds, calls for such individual initiative, such originality,
as to provide woman with an aspiration that makes man’s creative concern
with such gross matters as art or letters, science or government, seem
puerile and pitiable. What skill do the tasks of man, so stupidly
tangible and public, evoke? How stimulating to be a woman! How dull to
amble along like a man, with only logic to carry you, and only success
to attain!
* * * * *
Poor man is to be pitied not only for the crudity of his mental
machinery and the creaking clumsiness of its movement, but for the
dullness of the material in which he must work. The truth is that
there would be no sex to do the unskilled labor of the world, if women
ever once let men be tempted by their superior employments. The surest
way of keeping man to his hod-carrying is to let him think that woman
spends all her secret hours sobbing for bricks and mortar. As a child
must respect his toys if he is to be happy, so a man must respect the
material he works in, and thus women foster his pride in making books,
pictures, machines, states, philosophies, while women--make _him_! The
subject to which we devote all our heads is man himself.
“Mine to protect, to nurture, to impel;
My lord and lover, yes, but first my child.
Man remains Man, but Woman is the Mother,
There is no mystery she dare not read;
No fearful fruit can grow, but she must taste;
No secret knowledge can be held from her;
For she must learn all things that she may teach.”
Our material, human, living, plastic, is immeasurably more marvelous
than man’s cold stone, cold laws, cold print. Unlike man’s, therefore,
our work can never be finished, can not be qualified and made finite by
any standard of perfection. It is more fun to make a Plato than to make
his philosophy, and at the same time to be skillful enough to conceal
our creatorship, knowing that the condition of producing another and
greater Plato is to let him have the inflation of supposing he produced
himself. Now unless woman’s efforts through all the ages to instill
into man the self-satisfaction necessary to his success have gone for
naught--which I cannot from observation believe--man could hardly help
envying woman the splendor and the scope of the subject to which her
intelligence is directed, to wit, himself.
* * * * *
The ultimate purpose of woman’s education of man transcends the grosser
aims to which man’s intellect is devoted. Woman wants man to be good, so
that he may be happy. He was not happy in Eden, and so she drove him out
of it. Woman’s education of man she has for the most part succeeded in
hiding from him, but the object of that education, man’s happiness, has
been so permeating that even man himself has perceived it. Man thinks
he can manufacture his own career, his own money, his own clothes, and
his own food, but no man thinks he can make his own happiness. Every man
thinks either that some actual woman makes or unmakes his joy, or that
some potential woman could make it. For a woman, love’s young dream is
of making some man happy; for a man, love’s young dream is of letting
some woman make him happy. These views plainly argue that in relation
to the supply of gladness, woman is the almoner, man the beggar. Since
every one would rather be a giver than a getter, it seems impossible
that no man ever wants to be a woman, in order to experience the most
indisputable of her joys, the joy of dispensing joy.
* * * * *
Reasons, however, why men should want to be women are more numerous
and more cogent than it would be safe to let men know, so I am cannily
concealing many. Among the few it may not be impolitic to divulge, is
one that of course any man who reads has seen for himself. While we
shall continue conscientiously devoted to our pedagogical duties, we
have pretty well determined Adam’s limitations, and need only apply to
him a pretty well established curriculum, whereas we ourselves remain an
undeveloped mystery that more and more attracts our imagination. Looking
far into the future one may see man finished and fossilized, when woman
is still at the stage of eohippus as
“On five toes he scampered
Over Tertiary rocks.”
Even now women, looking far out to space, sometimes echo the glee of
little eohippus:--
“I am going to be a horse!
And on my middle finger nails
To run my earthly course!
I’m going to have a flowing tail!
I’m going to have a mane!
I’m going to stand fourteen hands high
On the psychozoic plain!”
Now if any man, clearly perceiving his own possibilities, must envy
woman the joy of having him for an experiment, how could the same man,
if he should as clearly perceive woman’s greater possibilities, help
envying woman the joy of having herself for experiment?
* * * * *
With this paragraph I have plumply arrived at feminism, and at the
object of all my revelations, namely, to reassure men by stating that
women do not intend to take themselves up as a serious experiment for
ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel free to do so until we have
taught Bobby to be unselfish enough to let us; he is not yet strong
enough to try his own wings, much less strong enough to let us try ours.
To allay man’s fears, it may be well to elucidate some aspects of our
actions.
While there may be a little of eohippus exaltation in feminism, it is
so little as to be negligible; our main purpose is still our age-old
business of teaching by indirection. There are recurrent occasions when
Adam grows sluggish in his Eden, and women have to contrive new spurs
both for his action and his appreciation. As whips to make a lethargic
Adam move where he should move, Eve is brandishing two threats, one her
economic independence, the other, her use of the ballot. Adam thinks she
really means to have both. Now our threatening to march from The Home
and invade business, and by that action to let business invade The Home,
is very simply explained. Once again our purpose is unselfish: it gives
Adam false notions of economic justice to form a habit of not paying
for services rendered, so Eve conquers her shyness and pretends that
she will leave The Home if he does not pay her some scanty shillings to
stay in it. Even the dullest man has now become convinced that women can
earn money, so that we hope that in time even the most penurious husband
will perceive the wisdom of giving his wife an allowance, and that’s all
we’ve been after; and yet we have to make all this fuss to get it. If
Adam were only a little easier to move, he would save us and himself a
great deal of pushing.
Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our economic one. We mean only to
wake you to the use of the ballot in your hands, when we ask you to give
it to our hands. Already we have aroused you to two facts: if politics
is too soiled a spot for your women to enter, then it is too soiled
a spot for our men to enter, and therefore it is high time you did a
little scrubbing; and also that if you refuse to enlarge the suffrage to
admit desirable women, it is high time to consent to restrict it so as
not to admit undesirable men. Again this is all we have been after, but
again we have had to make a great deal of noise in order to wake you up.
But feminism to the male mind suggests not only commercial and
professional and political careers for women, but something less
tangible and more terrible, the advent of a bugaboo called the New
Woman, who shall devastate The Home and happiness. It is a strong
argument for our superiority that there is nothing that frightens a
man so much as a woman’s threatening to become like him. Yet the time
has come for frightening him, and we are doing it conscientiously,
for, to confess truth, there is nothing that frightens a woman so much
as becoming like a man. However, for his soul’s sake, she can manage
to assume the externals of man’s conduct, but not even for his soul’s
sake, much less her own, would she ever adopt his mental or spiritual
equipment. Adam has such a tendency to ennui that the only way to keep
him really comfortable is every now and then to make him a little
uncomfortable. He was so well off in Eden, and consequently so dour and
dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever but to remove him from The Home
entirely in order to save his character. We are hoping that we women
of the present shall not be driven to such an extremity; for we know
what her exile meant for Eve! We are busily fostering man’s fear of
losing The Home, as the best way of making him appreciate it, and so of
preserving it for him, and for ourselves.
As with The Home, so with the woman called New. She never was, she
never will be, but to present her to man’s future seems the only way of
making man satisfied with the woman of the past. We have had to stir
men to appreciate us as women, by showing them how easily we could
be men if we would. The creator granted to Adam’s loneliness an Eve,
not another Adam, and should we at this late day fail the purpose of
our making, and cease to be women? We have changed our manners and
conversation a little, for the better success of our scare, but the
woman who sits chuckling while she tends man’s hearth and him, is still
as old-fashioned as Eve, and as new.
* * * * *
Men, who always take themselves as seriously as children, have been easy
enough to frighten by means of a feminism that seems to take itself
seriously. A really penetrating man might guess that when women seem
to be so much in earnest, they must be up to something quite different
from their seeming, and he might safely divine that, however novel
woman’s purposes may appear to be, they will always be explicable in the
light of her oldest purpose--man’s improvement. Now man’s improvement
is a heavy task, and when nature entrusted it to woman, she gave her
a compensating advantage. To become a genuine feminist, a woman would
have to forego her most enviable possession--her sense of humor. Man can
laugh, of course, noisily enough; but what man possesses the gift and
the grace of seeing himself as a joke? Men who must do the work of the
world are better off without humor, because they can thus more easily
keep their eyes on the road, just as a horse needs blinders; but woman,
who directs the work of man, needs to have her eyes everywhere at once.
By another figure, such rudimentary humor as man does have is merely an
external armor against circumstance; but woman’s humor is permeating,
her armor is all through her system, as if her sinews were wrought of
steel and sunbeams. A man never wishes to be a woman? Is it not an
argument for the joys of being a woman, that no man seems to have had
such fun in being a man that it has occurred to him to write an essay on
the subject?
II
_A Man in the House_
There persists much of the harem in every well-regulated home. In every
house arranged to make a real man really happy, that man remains always
a visitor, welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest. He steps in
from the great outside for rest and refreshment, but he never belongs.
For him the click and hum of the harem machinery stops, giving way to
love and laughter, but there is always feminine relief when the master
departs and the household hum goes on again. The anomaly lies in the
fact that in theory all the machinery exists but for the master’s
comfort; but in practice, it is much easier to arrange for his comfort
when he is not there. A house without a man is savorless, yet a man in a
house is incarnate interruption. No matter how closely he incarcerates
himself, or how silently, a woman always feels him there. He may hide
beyond five doors and two flights of stairs, but his presence somehow
leaks through, and unconsciously dominates every domestic detail. He
does not mean to, the woman does not mean him to; it is merely the
nature of him. Keep a man at home during the working hours of the day,
and there is a blight on that house, not obvious, but subtle, touching
the mood and the manner of maidservant and manservant, cat, dog, and
mistress, and affecting even the behavior of inanimate objects, so
that there is a constraint about the sewing-machine, a palsy on the
vacuum-cleaner, and a _gaucherie_ in the stove-lids. Over the whole
household spreads a feeling of the unnatural, and a resulting sense of
ineffectuality. Let the man go out, and with the closing of the front
door, the wheels grow brisk again, and smooth. To enjoy a home worth
enjoying, a man should be in it as briefly as possible.
By nature man belongs to the hunt in the open, and woman to the fire
indoors, and just here lies one of the best reasons for being a woman
rather than a man, because a woman can get along without a man’s
out-of-doors much better than a man can get along without a woman’s
indoors, which proves woman of the two the better bachelor, as being
more self-contained and self-contented. Every real man when abroad on
the hunt is always dreaming of a hearth and a hob and a wife, whereas
no real woman, if she has the hearth and the hob, is longing for man’s
hunting spear or quarry. If she is indeed a real woman she is very
likely longing to give a man the comfort of the fire, provided he will
not stay too long at a stretch, but get out long enough to give her time
to brush up his hearth and rinse his teapot satisfactorily to herself.
A man’s home-coming is not an end in itself, its objective is the woman;
but a woman’s home-making exists both for the man and for itself. A
woman needs to be alone with her house because she talks to it, and
in a tongue really more natural than her talk with her husband, which
is always better for having a little the company flavor, as in the
seraglio. The most devoted wives are often those frankest in their
abhorrence of a man in the house. It is because they do not like to keep
their hearts working at high pressure too long at a time; they prefer
the healthy relief of a glorious day of sorting or shopping between the
master’s breakfast and his dinner.
It is a rare _ménage_ that is not incommoded by having its males lunch
at home. It is much better when a woman may watch their dear coat-tails
round the corner for the day, with an equal exaltation in their freedom
for the fray and her own. A woman whose males have their places of
business neither on the great waters nor in the great streets, but in
their own house, is of all women the most perpetually pitied by other
women, and the most pathetically patient. She never looks quite like
other women, this doctor’s, minister’s, professor’s, writer’s wife. Her
eyes have a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting sweetness, for
she does not belong to her house, and so she does not belong to herself.
When a man’s business-making and a woman’s home-making live under the
same roof, they never go along in parallel independence: always the
man’s overlaps, invades. Kitchen and nursery are hushed before the needs
of office and study, and the professional telephone call postpones
the orders to the butcher. The home suffers, but the husband suffers
more, for he is no longer a guest in his own house, with all a guest’s
prerogatives; he now belongs there, and must take the consequences.
Fortunately the professional men-about-the-house are in small minority,
and so are their housekeepers, but all women have sometimes to
experience the upheaval incident on a man’s vacation at home; whether
father’s, or husband’s, or college brother’s, or son’s, the effect is
always the same: the house stands on its head, and for two days it kicks
up its heels and enjoys it, but after two weeks, two months, that is,
on the removal of the exciting stimulus, it sinks to coma for the rest
of the season. The different professions differ in their treatment of
a holiday, except that all men at home on a vacation act like fish on
land or cats in water, and expect their womenfolk either to help them
pant, or help them swim. They seem to go out a great deal,--at least
they are always clamoring to have their garments prepared for sorties,
social or piscatorial,--and yet they always seem to be under heel. Some
men on a home holiday tinker all day long, others bring with them a
great many books which they never read, and the result in both cases
is that house-keeping becomes a prolonged picking up. All men at home
on a vacation eat a great deal more than other men, or than at other
times; but with the sole exception of the anomalous academic, who is
always concerned for his gastronomy, they will eat anything and enjoy
it,--and say so. A man at home for his holidays is always vociferously
appreciative. His happiness is almost enough to repay a woman for the
noise he makes, and the mess; yet statistics would show that during
any man’s home vacation the women of the house lose just about as many
pounds as the man gains. But what are women for, or homes?
After all, you can have a house without a man in it if you are quite
sure you want to, but you cannot have a home without one. You cannot
make a home out of women alone, or men alone; you have to mix them.
Still every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a
woman, that it’s very hard to make a home for any man if he is always
in it. Every honest front door must confess that it is glad to see its
master go forth in the morning; but this is only because it is so much
gladder to see him come back at night.
III
_Old-Clothes Sensations_
People whom penury has never compelled in infancy or adolescence to
wear other people’s clothes have missed a valuable lesson in social
sympathy. In our journey from the period when we first strutted
thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles’s cast-off coat on to the time when
we resented its misfit, and thence to that latest and best day when we
could bestow our own discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we
have successively experienced all the gradations of soul between pauper
and philanthropist. Most of us are fortunate enough to put away other
people’s clothes when we put away the rest of childhood’s indignities;
but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of those who have
no such luck, who seem ordained from birth to be all the world’s poor
relations. In gift-clothes there is something peculiarly heart-searching
both for giver and recipient.
This delicacy inherent in the present of cast-off suit or frock is due
perhaps to the subtle clinging of the giver’s self to the serge or
silk. It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in another man’s
old coat. If an individuality is fine enough to be worth retaining, it
is likely to be fine enough to disappear utterly beneath the weight of
another man’s shoulders upon one’s own. Most of us would rather have
our creeds chosen for us than our clothes. Most of us would rather
select our own tatters than have another’s cast-off splendors thrust
upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other
people’s clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first
wearer,--adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the
elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,--that the first wearer always wears
them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt
to be inside, so that the second wearer’s ego is constantly bruised by
the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat.
Middle children are to be pitied for being condemned to be constantly
made over out of the luckier eldest’s outgrown raiment. How can Tommy be
sure he is Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny’s shoes? Or
Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own heart, when all her life it
has beaten under Anna’s pinafore?
The evil is still worse when the garments come from outside the family,
for one may readily accept from blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by
a stranger, would arouse a corroding resentment. This is because one
can always revenge one’s self on one’s relatives for an abasement of
gratitude by means of self-respecting kicks and pinches. A growing soul
may safely wear his big brother’s ulster, but no one else’s; for there
are germs in other people’s clothes,--the big bad yellow bacilli of
covetousness. People give you their old clothes because they have new
ones, and this fact is hard to forgive.
There may, of course, exist mitigating circumstances that often serve to
solace or remove this basic resentment. To receive gown or hat or boots
direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion as they come to us
through a lengthening chain of transferring hands the indignity fades
out, the previous wearer’s personality becomes less insistent; until,
when identification is an impossibility, we may even take pleasure in
conjecturing who may have previously occupied our pockets, may even feel
the pull of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat beneath
the warm woolen bosom presented to us.
Further, the potential bitterness of the recipient is dependent on the
stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian
prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her
mistress’s cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny.
She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for
herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid.
On assuming the white woman’s clothes, the black woman feels that she
succeeds also to the white woman’s dignity. The duskier race stands at
the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of
cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought
of his own discarded independence.
I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in
childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received
were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,--that
period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness
and spiritual splendor,--sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy,
uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted
the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I
wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.
No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to
the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his
first self-bought clothes. At last one is one’s self and belongs not
to another man’s coat, or another woman’s gown. It is a period of
expansion, of pride: when one’s clothes are altogether one’s own, one’s
pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them,
not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat
we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old
clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the
ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes.
It was not alone for the new coat’s intrinsic sake that we desired it;
we coveted still more the experience of giving it away when we were
done with it. There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of
giving away something that you no longer want. The pain of a recipient’s
feelings on receiving a thing which you can afford to give away, but
which he himself cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride
in presenting him with something that you can’t use.
The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one
else. This is cynical philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It
follows that the best way to restore a pauper’s self-respect is to
present him with some old clothes to give to some one still poorer;
for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test of character. It
was the custom of epics to represent the king as bestowing upon his
guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old clothes. If
you could picture some Homeric monarch in the act of giving away his
worn-out raiment, in that moment you would see his kingliness dwindle.
The man who can receive another man’s old clothes without thereby losing
his self-respect is fit to be a prince among paupers, but the man
who can give another man his old clothes without wounding that man’s
self-respect is fit to be the king of all philanthropists.
IV
_Luggage and the Lady_
I write as one pursued through life by the malevolence of inanimate
objects. My singular subjection to things was never brought so painfully
home to me as during four months in Europe. Of course, my soul had been
to Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I was taking
it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage for its journey. I chained
up my soul and held it under lock and key while I took counsel with
certain seductive guidebooks. These paternal manuals left no detail
untouched, until there was no fear left for me of cabs or custom-houses,
of money-tables or time-tables. It was all as simple as bread and milk.
One thing all my guides inveighed against, a superfluity of baggage;
with them I utterly agreed. A trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign
railways: there stood ready always an army of porters to escort one’s
handbags. A lady could travel gayly with a single change of raiment;
after a day’s dust and soil, merely the transformation of a blouse, and
behold a toilet fit for any table d’hôte. Moreover, so remarkable were
foreign laundry facilities that on tumbling to bed all you had to do
was to summon an obliging maid, deliver, sleep, and on the morrow morn,
behold yourself all crisply washed and ironed. As to the expense of a
trunk and the battalions of porters, the guidebooks were correct; as to
the rest, they lied. The single blouse theory is all very well if you
don’t wear out or tear out by the way; and as to the laundry fallacy, do
I not still see myself roaming the streets of Antwerp searching vainly
for one single _blanchisserie_? My conclusion is that one needs clothes
and a right mind about as much on one side of the Atlantic as on the
other.