FROM SARAH SHELFWORN
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: I have to complain of an abuse which is daily growing greater and which, if not checked, will soon assume the proportions of a national menace. It is my purpose, Sir, to call to your attention and to the attention of all earnest thinking people, a pernicious influence exercised by a certain portion of our daily press—by those vulgar flaunting publications known as “yellow journals”. Now do not misunderstand me, Mr.Idler; this letter is no ill-considered general attack upon the press; no incoherent or fanatical outcry against the publication of disagreeable facts. It is, on the contrary, a protest against a certain idealism which pervades the pages of these newspapers and which unduly excites the imagination of our young men. I do not refer to stories of crime, extravagance or anything of that sort—butto the publication of pictures of beautiful women.
You may ask, what possible harm can come of the publication of these pleasing portraits? Well, Sir, I will tell you; but in order that you may understand my point of view, I must first tell you something of myself and explain somewhat, my own experience.
I, Sir, am a school-teacher—an instructor in English literature—and since the school where I am employed is a public high school, it is hardly necessary to add, I am a woman. Or perhaps it would be more truthful to say Iwasa woman once upon a time. When I was young and fairly pretty, there was no more womanly woman than I in all this section of the country, but let me tell you, Sir, ten years of teaching school is an experience calculated to unsex any person, man or woman. We veteran school-teachers constitute what a magazine writer recently referred to as “an indeterminate sex.” We have left in us nothing of the masculine or feminine nature. We think, feel, argue and reason like one another and like nobody else inthe world—we are neuter throughout. It is, perhaps, for this reason that I can now look back upon my wasted life with only a passing regret, and that I can, without any feeling of outraged modesty or womanly reserve, lay bare to you the dreams of my girlhood and the thoughts of my maturity.
To begin, then, I have always lived in the little town where I am now teaching, though to be sure, since I became a teacher, I have traveled more or less during my vacations. I have visited many places in Europe and America at one time or another. I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon six times in as many years, and it is perhaps for this reason that I have never found time to read any of Shakespeare’s works beyond the four or five plays which we read in class. Be that as it may, when I was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, I was a bright, merry-hearted young creature who had not a care in the world, nor a thought for anything but pleasure. Not that I was without sentiment, for truth to tell, I was as sentimental as any, and let me tell you, Sir,one girl of eighteen has more sentiment in her composition than all of the old men in the world. I say “old men,” because I have observed that whereas sentiment comes to a woman early in life, so that she is soon done with it, men seldom become sentimental until they have passed middle age. And that is why, Sir, you will observe in the restaurants and cafés of your city, young men with old women and old men with young women. Like is naturally attracted to like. The old man loves the young woman for her romanticism which is akin to his own, and the young woman loves the old man because he is not ashamed to admit his infatuation and glories in his subjection to her charms. The young man, upon the other hand, is attracted to the older woman by her knowledge of the world, her masculine view-point, her independence of mind, her air of good-fellowship, and her frank acceptance of a temporary affection. The old woman finds in the young man the only sensible, sober and sane being that wears trousers.
As I say, Sir, I was as sentimental as any;I had my girlish dreams of home and fireside, of husband and little ones, but I was not obsessed with this pleasant dreaming. I took all that for granted as my natural birthright, and a career which was guaranteed to me by virtue of my very womanhood. I was cheerful, a capable housekeeper, possessed of a clear complexion, good eyes, sound teeth, a fair figure—in short, I was passably good-looking. Why should not I be married in due time, as my mother was before me, and as the girls of my native village had always been? I was not hump-backed, bow-legged, nor squint-eyed. I was neither a shrew nor a prude. I could manage a house and (I had no doubt) I could manage a husband; how could I fail to get him?
Alas! Sir, my youthful optimism was my undoing. I delayed my choice and I lost my opportunity. I refused one or two offers of marriage that came to me in the first flush of my womanhood—and I have never since received another! The young men of our town had always married our home girls. With the exception of a few prodigals who left hometo see the world and who never returned, some going to jail and some to congress, none of our young men sought their wives among strangers. They were well content with what they found at home. How, then, could I anticipate a sudden exodus of eligible young men? An exodus, I say! For an exodus it was, and an exodus it has continued, year by year, ever since that fatal day when Willie Titheridge Talbott went over to Ithaca and married Minna Meyerbeer who won the Tompkins County beauty contest!
No sooner do our young men arrive at that age when they can don a fuzzy hat and coax a mustache without exciting the ridicule of their little brothers, than they shake the dust of this town from their feet and set out to find a wife among those vampire beauties whose portraits decorate the pages of our Sunday papers. As for our girls, they are left as I was, to choose between frank spinsterhood at home, or to follow the young men out into the world, there to become chorus girls, manicures, stenographers—or to engage in someother similar profession which exerts such a glamour and fascination over the men as to make up for their lack of classical beauty.
And who, Sir, is to blame for this lamentable state of affairs? The beauties? No, not altogether, for if they were not so exploited by the newspapers, our young men would never suspect that they existed. For, Sir, even if he were to meet her face to face, the ordinary young man is so lacking in sentiment, so matter-of-fact, that he would never suspect one of those beauties of being anything extraordinary if her beauty were not vouched for by some newspaper. The young man who has not been corrupted in this way, and who has not had fostered in him by these newspapers the silly notion that he is a knight errant searching the world for beauty in distress, is a docile creature, easily captured and easily managed. He treats matrimony as he treats his meals, he takes what is set before him and afterward grumbles as a matter of course, but deep down in his heart he is very well satisfied. It is the editors, Sir, who have caused all of the trouble;the editors with their silly beauty contests and their simpering half-tone, half-world women of the stage flaunting their coquettish graces and flirting with our young men from the pages of the Sunday papers.
Now, Sir, I hope that you will not dismiss this letter as a matter of no consequence and the peevish complaint of a disappointed spinster, for I assure you the roots of this evil go deeper than appears at first glance. Our magazines are asking, “Why do young men leave the farm?” Our sociologists are asking why are our villages becoming depopulated? Superficial observers often reply that the young men go to the city for the sake of money-making. But I, Sir, know better. The young men are leaving the farms and the villages to hunt for wives because the newspapers, with their photographs, have made them dissatisfied with what they find at home. And now that you know the cause of it, Mr.Idler, is there no hope that you may devise some way to put a stop to it?
I am, Sir,Sarah Shelfworn.