they are made of 'all that's good if well understood'--as wives
certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a husband
knows where the shoe pinches, and if he blasphemes during the wearing
of it, on his own head be the guilt as is already the punishment.
As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of
humanity, and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to
the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic world we
are told to look for the time when the moral supremacy of woman shall
be the recognized law of human life and the reign of violence and
tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end. Thus the moral
loveliness of collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught from
their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of experience,
and women naturally keep them up to the mark--theoretically, at all
events. Yet for all this lip-homage, of which so much account is
made, women are often ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of
their superior pretensions as often fall below men in every quality
but that of patience. And patience is eminently the virtue of
weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking broadly and
allowing for exceptions. But what women do not see is that all this
poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing passion of men,
and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and
analyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous
moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth.
And this would be the best thing for them in the end. If they could
but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, they would rise
beyond the power of much that now degrades them. If they would but
honestly consider the question of their own shortcomings when told
where they fail, and what they cannot do, and what they will be sure
to make a mess of if they attempt, they would prove their title to
man's respect far more than they prove it now by the shrill cries and
indignant remonstrances of affronted womanhood.
This is the day of trial for many things--among others, for the
capacity of women for an enlarged sphere of action and more public
exercise of power. Do women think they show their fitness for nobler
duties than those already assigned them, by their impatience under
censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching? Are they
qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by assuming an
absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of sacrilege to deny? If
they think they are on the right road as at present followed, let them
go on in heaven's name. When they have wandered sufficiently far
perhaps they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for
themselves what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had
they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree.
Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, _per se_, a special
and unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered
comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through
ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by
rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated
pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical
homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has
so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too
sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of
women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because
womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother
and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem,
where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the
outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the
workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to
accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the
other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity assayed
in reference to the place they want to take--and in doing this their
faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed--or they must be
content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanctity of
their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion--belonging,
by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too
perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to
be.
_FEMININE AFFECTATIONS._
The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away
fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the
vapours, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was
an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who
passed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most
part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes which gave more
satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an
Italian scholar and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them
pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honourable
election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver
lyre; any way she was 'a sister of the Muses,' and had something to do
with Apollo or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phoebus or Pallas
Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had
dealings with Diana too--for this kind of woman does not in any age
affect the 'seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
fruits--a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being
to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that
the world can give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or
the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a
sister of the Muses and one of the beloved of Apollo! The Della
Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music
and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the
nursery is a prison and babies are no dearer gaolers than any other;
and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the
empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of last generation--the
Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to
heaven and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She
dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the
Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We
still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their
etherealization, rave about music and poetry and æsthetics and
culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.
A favourite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness--an aggravating
intensity of womanliness--that makes one long for a little roughness,
just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is
generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the
orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face--a
certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty
thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness
that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits is most
probably internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this sort stand
for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of
nature; and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the
simulation does quite as well as truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They
live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to
what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply,
nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how
they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action
of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a
novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give
you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and
Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they
bring you a photographic album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying
her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms,
they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love though they
never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for
the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or
attempt to do it--making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl,
fasten a button--they are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect
you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of
ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten the button with
ordinary deftness--for they have a trick of using only the ends of
their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more
graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer grasp, with the
delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more
commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally and never parades
her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and
is the Charity which the other only plays at being.
This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for
the tyranny. 'I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too
much as I liked,' said one before she married, who, after she was
married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins and
took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave.
For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the
intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her
own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among
women is not the one who flounces and splutters and declares that
nothing shall make her obey, but this soft-mannered, large-eyed,
intensely womanly person who says that Griselda is her ideal and that
the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness
of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
unmistakeable shirt-fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like
a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike.
If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness,
the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores
dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She
boasts of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself
markswoman--and how she can hit right and left and bring down both
birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass
between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and, throwing her
head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught--she would disdain
the lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is
great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup and still champagne,
but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines.
She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their
elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry,
she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw. For charms
to her watch-chain she wears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a
small foot-rule; and in contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who
uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does
anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would
thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is
affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of
virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and
mental, of a woman.
Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a
personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact
limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the
antiseptic element in society; who makes believe that without her the
world and human nature would go to the dogs and plunge headlong into
the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand
heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavour and
patient seeking after truth would serve his turn or the world's if she
did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the
boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and
speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is
mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to
their own boundary lines as that which she claims for herself: but it
seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated
beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most
specially consecrated. As an offshoot of this kind stands the
affectation of simplicity--the woman whose mental attitude is
self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the
world is ringing with her praises. 'Is it possible that your Grace has
ever heard of _me_?' said one of this class with prettily affected
_naïveté_ at a time when all England was astir about her, and when
colours and fashions went by her name to make them take with the
public at large. No one knew better than the fair _ingénue_ in
question how far and wide her fame had spread; but she thought it
looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to
declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that
she was a soaring butterfly.
There is a certain like kind of affectation very common among pretty
women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are
pretty, and not recognizing the effect of their beauty on men. Take a
woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape and
fringed with long lashes which distract you to look at; the creature
knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire
burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has
with them--the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid and the swift, full
gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practised it
often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact
height to which the lid must be raised and the exact fixity of the
gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look and the stirring of
men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of
her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her
entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean; and if you
press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own
benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence. Various other tricks
has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each more perilous than
the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what
the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits,
then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she
has led you on, with looks and smiles and pretty doubtful phrases
always susceptible of two meanings--the one for the ear by mere word,
the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner,
which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper
into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she
has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
you have mistaken her cruelly and that she has meant nothing more than
any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake?
Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen
this all along and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides,
what is there about her that you or any one should love?
Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when
they practise their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most
dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The
very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his
perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the
woman's triumph, guilt and condonation; and so long as the trick
succeeds it will be practised.
Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a
year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate,
declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be
natural! This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life;
being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not
long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would befit middle
age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous
even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.
Then there is that affectation pure and simple which is the mere
affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude which by
consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little
_minauderies_ and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is
the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they
condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they are
not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are
Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the
affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any
chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were
never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with
women who are to be met about the world with every man of their
acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation
of asceticism in women who lead a self-enjoying life from end to end;
and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give
up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets
us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away.
In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating
everywhere--even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty
penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and
furtively looks about to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to
whom her picturesque piety has commended itself. All sorts and
patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and
delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and
unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her heart's
core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she
would dare to tell a lie.
_INTERFERENCE._
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean
tyranny; that is another matter--tyranny being active while
interference is negative--the one standing as the masculine, the other
as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has
generally some personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force
people to do what they dislike to do; while interference seeks no good
for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free-will for
the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention.
Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic; but the
curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of
home, where also it is most felt. Very many people spend their lives
in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes into wheels
with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their
fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no way
concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make
up the larger number and are the greater sinners. To be sure
there are some men--small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature
has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as troublesome in
their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling
women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men
are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious
calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly
sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right
to control--say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's too
patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and,
knowing what other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect,
they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But
this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes
into another class of motives altogether and does not belong to that
kind of interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other
and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to
church and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much as they
tell us what we are not to do. They do not command so much as they
forbid. And, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to
handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains.
Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain
of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to
submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part so loftily
snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are laid aside
for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be
a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of
personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how
to use the prerogative they assume. Take an unlucky man who smokes
under protest--his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely,
but always grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each cigar
represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number.
The first may have been had with only a light skirmish--perhaps a mere
threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual
onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or
fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the big guns thundering.
She could understand a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says,
with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes
to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her
best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken
her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She
never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses
nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere
so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that pledge with
energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a
feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the
gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines nor sups
jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that
salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a
headache to-morrow; and, 'My dear! when you know how bad salad is for
you!' or, 'How can you eat that horrid pastry? You will be so ill in
the night!' 'What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you
are! how wrong!' The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
stimulants; the husband is a strong, large-framed man who can drink
deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit
is her husband's measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of her
own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks
herself justified in interfering with his further progress. For women
cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they
cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not
be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge
of a man's strength.
A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears
furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East
Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father,
sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must
not go out without an overcoat; they must take an umbrella if the day
is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far nor ride too hard; and
they must be sure to be at home by a given hour.
When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line
between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they put
forward the time of old age by many years. We see their men rapidly
sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing
life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But
women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions
and dread rather than desire the masculine comradeship which would
keep them up to the mark of virile independence; for most women--but
not all--would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than
in a manly one, as being more within the compass of their own
sympathies and understanding.