THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN
THE RUDENESS OF WOMEN
Dec. 17, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
As in your last letter you pose me with no puzzling questions on the subject of conduct, I may take it, I suppose, that for the moment, at least, life has become less problematical to you. That is well. Even the youngest and most intelligent of us should cease from bothering now and then, and be content just to be onlookers, to banish that fearsome word “ought” from our vocabularies and from our minds. Conduct, as Matthew Arnold pointed out a long time ago, is three-fourths of life, a biggish fraction, but, after all, a fraction only; and there come periods when we thank our stars for the comparative restfulness of that odd quarter. I often think that Matthew might, with advantage, slightly have expanded his formula. Had he said that conduct is three-fourths of lifeforthree-fourths of life he had been nearer the mark. Men and women, but more often men than women, I fancy, who have passed the third quarter rarely worry themselvesas to what they ought, or ought not, to do. They just go ahead and do it, confident that whether the action turn out for weal or for woe it has been decided for them in that other three-quarters left behind and beyond recall or undoing. We spend the greater part of our life in acquiring habits, and the lesser in acquiescent obedience to them. Therefore, if you are to be a delightful middle-aged lady you must practise sedulously to be a delightful young one. It is worth a bit of hard work to begin with, for middle-age lasts longer than youth, and middle-aged ladies who are not delightful are not anything; they simply don’t count.
One little habit I advise you to cultivate, to cultivate until it becomes as natural and as spontaneous as eating peas with a fork; it is the habit of saying “Thank you” for minor services rendered. We are all of us taught that in the nursery, I know, but an uncountable number of us, or rather of you, seem to forget it when you lengthen your skirts. Let me tell you something that happened only yesterday. I went up to Charing Cross by a mid-day train from here. The only other person in the carriage was a woman.She was a lady—you know what I mean—the sort of woman who lives in a hundred-a-year house, who keeps three maidservants and a boot boy, possibly a carriage, and who goes for a month or six weeks to the Continent or elsewhere every autumn with her husband. The sort of person who when she gives a small dinner party has little pink shades over the candles and at least two sorts of wine. I think, by the way, she was the sort who would call a table napkin a serviette, but perhaps I’m prejudiced by what happened. Well, when she reached Blackheath she rose to leave the carriage. I was sitting in the corner by the door through which she had to get out, and, of course, I opened it for her. If you sit by the door you have to open it for all the outgoers. It is a nuisance, but it has its compensation in the extra comfort of the corner seat. This woman did not say “Thank you”; she passed me without even an inclination of her sulky head. Presently two other women got in, two women of the same social standing as the one who had left. At Lewisham one of these got out. I opened the door for her. She didn’t say “Thank you.” At LondonBridge precisely the same thing happened with the remaining third. All the way thence I meditated on writing a stinging letter to theTimeson “The Decadence of Manners in the Upper Middle Class,” but you who know me know that the letter is still to write. What happened psychologically to me was this: that I felt just a trifle less regard and respect for your sex, Alexa, than I was conscious of when I left home. I daresay it was unreasonable of me, but there it was. Women of our class are not really nice, I found myself saying to myself, not really and truly nice in the innermost soul of them. No wonder they don’t get on with their servants, I thought to myself, for if they are rude to their social equals, what must they be to those whom they think their inferiors? I rather hated your sex for about twenty-five minutes. And please don’t tell me that these impolite hussies were exceptions, because on the balance of probabilities it is most unlikely that I should have struck three exceptions in the course of one short train journey. No, Alexa, you are very rude. You are attractive sometimes, I admit; you are even, in passing moments of folly andmadness, bewitching, but you are very rude. I don’t mean you personally, of course, but you regarded collectively—you women, you!
I find myself getting cross even now as I write when I recall that incident, getting cross and asking myself all sorts of questions which it were well for women that men should not ask. As, for instance: Why do we put up so tamely with so much of your cheek? Cheek is a slang word, but made venerable by long use, and I can think of no other so exactly adequate, so comprehensively expressive. Why do we not give you more severe talkings to than we do? They would do you no end of good, and we know it, and yet refrain. You scarcely ever get a severe talking to, any of you. Yesterday, after leaving Charing Cross Station, I walked up Bond Street. I was really going somewhere, oh sceptical child; you must not think your father was merely loafing. I was not in a hurry, and I looked at the shops. There were lots of pretty women driving up and down in their carriages, but I did not look at them; I was at odds with the whole sex. Well, those shops! With the exception of a fishmonger’s, a few most attractive tobacconists,in which you cannot get a briar root pipe under 25s., and a stray tailor or two, all those shops were women’s shops; full of hats for women to wear, each hat to be worn about twice, or at the most half-a-dozen times; shops full of frocks, each frock costing more than a week’s earnings of a man who works hard to make, say, £2000 a year; shops creaming over with fluffy, frilly under-things, the fluffiest and the frilliest of which disappear for ever when once they leave the shop, or, let us say, almost disappear. And then the jewellers! Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals in little heaps on velvet-lined trays. Diamonds and diamonds, and yet more diamonds flashing in the sunlight, flashing scorn and contempt upon all such as are too poor to purchase them; and gold, gold enough to have paved the street! Oh, and the pearls, the ropes, nay, rather the cables of pearls. Pearl fishing, they used to tell me in myChild’s Guide to Knowledge, is a perilous profession, and a profession followed wholly by men. And all the things that these shops displayed—of course, there was more than as much again in drawers and cupboards and stout iron safes within the shops—were to bebought by men and given to women. For what? For what, in the name of reason? Men, merely as men, give to women as much as women, just as women, give to men; and so that part of the account is squared by nature’s self, as it were. But all this balance, this ransack of Bond Street, of South African and Eastern and Australasian mines, of ocean depths, of forest solitudes, all this is collared by women, and they won’t even say “Thank you.” It is true I did not give those three women yesterday any jewels to speak of; but still I did save them the soiling of their light-coloured gloves, and you know by experience, Alexa, that carriage door handles on our railway are always filthy.
Forgive this outburst, which, after all, so far as you are concerned, is quite impersonal, but out of the bitterness of the heart the pen writeth. You want to be, and I want you to be, an exceptional woman, and the easiest way in which to be an exceptional woman is to be a polite one. I don’t think there is any radical difference between the sexes in the way of politeness. We are all born impolite—there is nothing much more impolite than a young baby—but one sexacquires politeness and the other doesn’t—that’s where it is. I wonder if you have ever noticed that. If not, just use your eyes for the next four-and-twenty hours, and once more you will be compelled to admit and to admire the accuracy of your father’s criticisms of life. Watch, watch closely, next time you see two or three young men talking to two or three women in a drawing-room or at a garden party. Notice the difference (it is not a subtle, it is a quite blatant difference) between the attitude and tone of the men to the women and those of the women to the men. Unless the men be rank outsiders, and that sort is not likely to come your way, you will find in the men’s attitude and tone a deference, a respectful diffidence—how shall I put it?—quite lacking in the women. However foolish, jejune, inconsequential be the remarks of any one of the women the man immediately talking to her will put on an air of interest; he will treat her as though anything she said had some real importance; he will receive her feeblest joke as though it were wit of the most polished. But she, well, if he doesn’t amuse her she won’t even try to look amused,and if he bores her she will most unmistakably look bored. It is horribly impolite to look bored, you know. To bore is beastly, but to look bored is damnable. Most women behave as though their mere existence were a blessing to men, as though all that men could possibly ask of them was just to be there! It is not enough, you know, Alexa; it really isn’t, and in our saner moods we men feel that. We don’t say unpleasant things of you, but we feel them.
The worst of it is that social custom accepts the woman’s point of view and enforces it. Think what happened to me last week. It was on Wednesday—on Wednesday your mother and I dined with the Devrients. Your mother was all right from start to finish. She was taken down by Forsyth—I know you rather admire him, and you are right, for he is about as clever as they make them, and talks even better than he writes. But, then, your mother is a woman, and these sort of things are arranged for the likes of her and you. But I! In obedience to that monstrous social convention which pairs off married men with married women—I never felt it so bitterly before, for your friend, thebeautiful Janet, was there and sat opposite me, hidden behind a tall epergne of tall flowers, and I’m fond of Janet, and you say she likes me—I was sent down with Mrs ⸺ (never mind, I won’t mention names), a middle-aged woman, who has no beauty nor traces of beauty, who is neither clever nor interesting, who is nothing, so far as I could make out, but stupid and rather greedy. For the whole of that awful dinner—it lasted from eight until a quarter to ten—I had to make myself agreeable to that preposterous person. And I did it. I was as nice and kind as anything. I plied her with banalities, such as her soul (what there was of it) loved. I wouldn’t have minded her not being intelligent had she been pretty. I wouldn’t have minded her not being pretty had she been intelligent; but she was neither, and at the end of it I felt as though my brain had been wiped out with a sponge. Now, there was a man there with whom I particularly wanted to talk, he is one of the few men out of whom one always sets an idea or two, but devil a word could I get with him, and all because it is taken for granted that I, a man, must needs want to sit next to a woman.On the way home your mother remarked what a delightful evening it had been, and how quickly it had passed! I said—but you who know me, Alexa, know quite well that I said nothing.
The Registrar-General’s returns inform me that men are marrying less freely than they used, and that each year they marry less freely than in the year before. It is almost the one piece of evidence I can discover of the growth and development of intelligence among my sex. It means, say the commentators in the newspapers and the magazines, that men are getting more selfish, more exacting. It does. As we get more and more civilised so shall we demand more and more from life. My savage ancestor asked but little here below. I ask quite a lot, and get some. My remote descendant will ask more, and get all of it. Of course, men who fall in love will continue to marry; the Registrar-General will always have them to go on with. For a man in love themere girlsuffices. But hitherto the marriage returns have been made up by the marriages of a certain number, and a pretty large number, of men who have not been in love and whoconsequently can see things, I mean women, more or less as they really are. For them the mere girl does not suffice. She has got to be a nice girl as well, a girl who takes as much trouble to be nice as she does, say, to be clean. These are the fellows, I feel certain, whose defection has caused, and will further cause, the fall in the marriage rate. Your sex is being found out, my child, found out at long last by mine. When the discovery is quite complete Lord only knows what sort of a world we shall have!
I don’t suppose it has ever struck you before how nice we are to you—now has it?—how patient we are with your caprices, how tolerant of your tempers, how semi-blind to your deficiencies, how little and how rarely we use against you the strength, moral, mental, and physical, that is ours. An excellent French priest once advised me, as a cure for discontent, to spend half an hour three times a week in meditating upon my blessings. You do that, Alexa, and don’t forget that perhaps, on the whole, the chiefest of yours is the possession of a most wise and always a most loving
Father.