The complacence of the unmarried is regarded by many as one of the most distressing spectacles in modern life. Perhaps there is some resentment of this as an apparent lack of faith, or at least of hope; others may be inclined to add, of charity. Eliminate these from woman and it may be difficult to mend the situation by making her president of a kindergarten society.
It is natural enough that the unmarried woman rather than the unmarried man should be the particular mark for attack. There are obvious reasons why woman’s resentment of the unmarried man should be concealed or disguised. Woman, outside the resolution committee at a suffrage convention, cannot gracefully seem to resent an impairment of the selecting instinct in man. Even though she werequite securely removed from the possibility of social commiseration she always would be in danger of appearing to speak with something less than strictly abstract feeling. She knows her fundamental limitations in the casting of missiles, and the boomerang of personalities is least to her liking. To her, natural selection may begin to wear the appearance of a huge joke, an immense, fantastic contradiction. “This,” she may say, “is natural, but it is not selection.” Under the circumstances who can blame her if she resort to a paraphrase of evolution and bewilder man by an unnatural rejection?
Man’s resentment is more vocal, and so often does it seem to be touched with real asperity that we well may feel that he has begun to contemplate the situation with more than a languid interest. I suppose there is a fair question as to who began it. Gallantry dictates that a man should neither admit nor declare that he did. The excitements of scientific controversy doubtless often cause the masculine debater to overlook this obligation. Certainly it often is beyond all dispute that the American girl has succeeded, with or without design, in affecting man with a definite awe, and it is claimed that, in certain quarters at least, this awe has resulted in making him afraid to marry her, which, if it were true, would have to be regarded as a calamity of the profoundest moment. To admit the existence of such a condition would be deeply humiliating, since it must belittle both man and woman, though it should be admitted that woman would appear tobetter advantage as a creature that had frightened man than as one that had ceased to attract him.
As I said one day to the Professor, science is not treating us quite fairly in this emergency. “As a scientific person,” I said to the Professor, “you will remember the things science once undertook to tell us about the great dualities. ‘Witness,’ said science, with not a glimmer of insincerity, ‘the beautiful interdependence of the two lobes of the cerebrum! How marvellous is their union! Each individual in form and function, yet working in an eternal harmony. One cannot get along without the other. Let one side of the brain be hurt and the other droops in sympathetic inactivity.’ This was lovely. It fortified every advocate of the fitness of marriage. ‘Observe,’ we could say to the skeptic, ‘that this duality proceeds throughout nature. Interdependence is universal,’ and so on. But what happens? Just as we have this impressive object lesson in good working order, along comes science, with a frown and a cough, to remark that it was mistaken in the matter of that absolute interdependence theory, that the brain lobes can, after all, each get along quite well at times without the other; that the injury or decay of one is, indeed, sometimes followed by a steady increase in the powers of the other, one taking up the functions lost or dropped by the other. Nor was this the worst thing that happened. You know well enough what they used to say about the marriage of the two lobes of the cerebrum by thecorpus callosum.Thecorpus callosumat least seemed secure. We could have worried along with thecorpus callosum. We always could say: the lobes are highly independent in action, but they are firmly married by this wonderful ligament—if it is a ligament. Even this comfort is now taken from us. Science has just rudely snatched away thecorpus callosum. ‘The two lobes can get along without it,’ grunts science. ‘People have lived for years with no impairment of their brain power with a totally shrivelledcorpus callosum.’ It is hard to keep pace with these cynicisms of science.”
“You simply have been punishing yourself for whimsical analogies,” remarked the Professor dryly. “Moreover, you are quoting abnormalities.”
“Alas, Professor!” I cried, “it makes little difference about the abnormality. Admit an exception and the law is dead. We could conjure with the law. What can we hope to do now? The American girl dotes on exceptions—especially on illustrating them.”
“You must remember,” said the Professor, her eyes glowing solemnly, and with the tone of being consciously judicial and at a great altitude, “you must remember certain facts about the selecting—the pairing—instinct. Now, in the case of man it is necessary that the selecting instinct be special and not general. So long as a man permits himself to think of woman as an abstraction, continues to admire ideals of womanhood and does not seek or is not drawn to seek charms in a particular woman,he is likely to remain a bachelor. His instinct must be, and has become by centuries of custom, an instinct for specific selection. On the other hand, the instinct of specific selection so favorable to the man, is distinctly unfavorable to the woman—that is to say, unfavorable to the woman if we accept marriage as her natural destination. A woman who grows up with the habit of mind which predisposes her to search for a particular man, is likely to remain unmarried. To favor pairing in her case, the instinct toward marriage must be general rather than specific. A woman does not select a mate from all the men in the world, as a man is supposed to select a mate from all the women in the world. She selects from among those who ask her, or, at most, from the group which she may have attracted into debatable ground.”
“But—” I interposed.
“Wait a moment,” pursued the Professor firmly. “This is not to say that a woman has no actual right to a privilege of selecting quite as definite as that permitted to man. It simply is saying that under present customs an effort toward specific selection on her part is not favorable to marriage. There may, and probably will, come a time when custom will permit to woman a more specific selection, without hazard as to the chance of marriage, and without loss of status on her part in any resulting marriage.”
“I am glad,” I said, “that you have touched that point, for of course woman could not afford tobe specific at the loss of prestige. It seems to me that the present system gives an immense advantage to women, since, in any matrimonial emergency she may always retort, ‘Nobody asked you, sir.’ Man’s initiative gives her the benefit of the doubt in all after judgments from the world; for if man selects her, and she accepts him or yields to his selection, and there should possibly be error, plainly, as with Mark Twain’s mistaken lynchers, the joke is on him. She cannot escape responsibility, but her responsibility always is lesser, and all the privileges of reservation are on her side.”
“My personal opinion,” observed the Professor (I always accept this form of approach as a great concession), “is that she loses more than she gains by these conditions. It is generally believed that during the past century, particularly during the past half-century, woman, and especially the American woman, has been selecting more definitely than at any previous time in the history of civilized society. One result of the habit of a more specific selection on the part of woman is a decrease in the number of early marriages among women in circles or classes where these ideas prevail, and a general increase in the whole number of unmarried women. It may be that a further development of this instinct will still further increase the proportion of the unmarried, unless custom shall so far modify the arrangement of marriages that women may more equally participate in the selection without, as at present, exciting the antipathy of society, or, as youhave suggested, destroying her prestige under the partnership. There is, of course, no final reason why matrimonial partnerships should not be arranged upon a basis of as perfect equality as any other partnership. It simply is a question of instinct on the one hand and expediency on the other.”
I quote the Professor’s opinions here with especial gratification, since in this instance they seemtriumphantly free from sex bias,—a freedom which, indeed, is a growing trait with women. And there is something not always comfortable in the sign. Is the time coming when we no longer can say, “Just like a woman”?
Perhaps we may discover that sentiment has more to do with the case than has been supposed. If the progress of education has menaced sentiment, who shall say that the greatest of sentiments may not be the first to suffer? Nothing is truer than that all women are not equally capable of sentiment. Some women seem to like the symbol of an emotion quite as well as if it were the genuine article. To them the innocuous make-believe of love is quite as satisfactory as the real thing. They play with a great sentiment as they used to play with their dolls, which gave much less trouble than real children and furnished just as much sentimental excitement as if they actually had been alive. I suppose this is particularly true of imaginative women, who know how to drape their souls in nun’s garb and let their fancy play the devil. Their character is illustrated by the modern fashion which permits them to wear gowns sombre to superficial observation, but which, you may have the opportunity to discover, possess a riotously crimson lining.
What is to happen to the world if women are to acquire a fondness for the mere symbols of sex, if femininity is to become disembodied, is a vast and vital question which prudence wellmight refer to one of their own eager and tireless committees.
The other day I boldly put the thing to the Professor. “What,” I asked, “is going to happen to the world if the number of old maids keeps on increasing?”
“Well,” mused rather than replied the Professor, “the present rate of increase in the number of old maids—”
“By which,” I said, “I assume that you mean hopelessly unmarried women.”
“I do not like that word,” retorted the Professor, a little sharply, “it makes me think of hopelessly insane. I should prefer to say affirmatively unmarried—the present rate of increase in the number of affirmatively unmarried American women might suggest at the first glance that something very annoying to evolution was going to happen by-and-by. Indeed the conditions might seem to be positively detrimental to the Darwinian hypothesis.”
“Not at all,” I protested, “if you remember the married old maids. Their transmitted instinct is bound to count sooner or later.”
“But I have no fear that anything absurd is going to happen.” (I adored the smile of which the Professor was guilty at this point.) “Nature will work out the scheme. I mean supply and demand.”
“I hope you cannot mean,” I protested, “that the American girl has deliberately set about creatinga corner in wives for the sake of raising the market—”
“Not precisely that,” returned the Professor; “though in the evolution of altruism that might not be so absurd. But you must see that old-maidism will not flourish unless it advantages the race somehow. You cannot think that a girl would set about being an old maid for any other reason than to please or profit herself—”
“Unless,” I said, “it were to get even.”
“Get even!” laughed the Professor, “think of getting even by being odd! No. The American girl simply is experimenting in independence. If it pays, she will keep it up. If it does not pay, she will revert to the alternative.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “she always can do that.”
“And meanwhile,” pursued the Professor, “I insist that girl-bachelorism must not be considered as in any sense final. The suggestion that woman can get along without man is an impeachment of his charm and of her wisdom. One thing is always to be remembered: a man cannot reasonably expect to conquer a woman by not marrying her. If the girl bachelor does not know what is good for her, if her position is untenable, if she is losing precious time, a cynical attitude in the man bachelor does not seem at all likely to help the matter. The presumption that the American girl knows what she is about may be erroneous, but ill temper in the opposition will simply fortify her. She will smile and smile and be a spinster still.”
A Spinster
A Spinster
A spinster! How oddly the word sounded! How grotesque the contrast between the image called up by the name and the image that fills the eye of modern contemplation! The old maid of tradition has become a fantastic figure, as fantastic as if she had no actual successor—which possibly is the real fact, for old-maidism is not strictly a social condition but a state of mind. Nothing could better demonstrate this than the prominence and multiplicity of married old maids. It is a mere truism to say that old-maidism is not even restricted by gender. Who does not know the masculine old maid! He is an altogether different creature from the normal bachelor. Indeed,hesometimes is married. In this instance contemporary satire is entirely within facts; he alone is the new woman.
It is not always an easy matter to estimate or to define the effect of the new-spinsterism upon the mind of the opposition. If we were to judge from certain acrid comments, the new state of mind not only is more affirmative, but is vastly more aggressive than the old. A shrill tenor note here and there complains that the sopranos are sounding with an inelegant and disproportionate vigor. There is an ill-concealed admission that man in general is still wholly unadjusted to the affirmative attitude on the part of woman. Man cannot open the door for her or help her out of the coach unless she lets him precede her. The whole structure of gallantry is built upon her acquiescence in his leadership,—his giving upon her taking. If she is to ignore thetradition of his leadership and goes forth upon her own account, what is to prevent the occasional, perhaps even the frequent, awkwardness of her actual leadership? And when she ceases to follow she already has begun to restrain. So runs the charge. You would think, to hear some people talk, that the modern woman should be indicted for delaying the males.
It is hard to live down a tradition. Take the tradition about the college girl, for example, the tradition that she is a sombre person, strenuous, unlovely, dominated by an ambition to subdue man and emancipate her sex by sheer force of learning. You can call up a picture of her at work, her brain throbbing with great thoughts, her face seared by study, greeting you with a smileless challenge to talk to the point, mostly in Latin, and with a decent frequency in quotations from Plato and Epictetus. This gruesome tradition makes her the pallid, gloomy, absorbed, spectacled member of the household, with a soul above clothes, glorying in unfeminine incapacities, shuddering at fashion magazines and peevishly rebuking the frivolities of girlhood. She uses vast words, communes with literary gods, and stands forth as a sort of Book in Bloomers.
The College Girl of Satire
The College Girl of Satire
The College Girl of Fact
The College Girl of Fact
This, I say, is the college girl of tradition, of the older comic papers. But what is the simple fact?—no, I cannot say the simple fact, for she is a fact of the most complex variety; what, rather is the literal, photographable truth? Very different, surely from the absurdities of satire; in fact, simplythe American girl, alive to all of life, woman first and student afterward, continually up to the mischief of teasing the social scientist by being lovely and actually marrying, college education and all!
Yes, we are making some new traditions. The new old maid is a charming perplexity. The old maids of the past read Plato together and established Boston marriages. They read in Cicero and elsewhere that friendship is less undebatable than love. The traditional old maid talked about “the faded fire of chivalry.” Like Walpole on his Paris journey, she “fell in love with twenty things and in hate with forty,” which fully restored her equilibrium. Yet she did not “vow an eternal misery,” nor grow combative at the thought that St. Chrysostom found woman to be a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination and a painted ill. She acquired a beautiful serenity. She could read Schopenhauer’s proposition to rid the world of old maids by establishing polygamy, without even an audible snort of contempt. She filled her leisure by admonitions to younger girls as to the fathomless hazards of credulity. She was securely and splendidly detached.
Of the new old maid, variously titled, it is, of course, too early to write. Whether she is sweeter or the world less sour, there certainly is less antipathy between her and the world. Society certainly likes her. She has been discovered to be immensely convenient. She has no asperity. “It is not,” she murmurs to man, “that I love you less, butthat I love my freedom more,” for answer to which, man is sitting up o’ nights in profound thought. She does not even claim that her mood is permanent. At the first feeling of heart failure she knows just when to appoint a receiver.
All women can fool us some of the time, and some women can fool us all of the time.