In Defense of Women Part 6

Their famous killings have always been made among the silliest sort of women--the sort, in brief, who fall so short of the normal ac.u.men of their s.e.x that they are bemused by mere beauty in men.

Such women are in a minority, and so the s.e.x shows a good deal fewer religious enthusiasts per mille than the s.e.x of sentiment and belief.

Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the Rev. Dr.

Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was constantly struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to the altar, loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women were anything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly either chlorotic adolescents or pathetic old Saufschwestern. For six nights running I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorter without seeing a single female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearing age--that is, the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the male simpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president of a railroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the former governor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable position or dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care to chuck under the chin.

This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole stock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least in part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal career.

In those Christian sects which still bar them from the pulpit--usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect--one never hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite content to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better fitted for it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque sects, chiefly American, which admit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole and chasuble. When the first clergywoman appeared in the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that men would be driven out of the pulpit by the new compet.i.tion. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect.

The whole corps of female divines in the country might be herded into one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory.

Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably moved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is a commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven into convents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far oftener than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of the female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage and failed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant lands very few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few a secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly overcome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is nearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a theory that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In point of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it impossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China, Senegal and Somaliland, with no white compet.i.tion present, it is equally impossible to fail.

40. Piety as a Social Habit

What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more inviting divertiss.e.m.e.nts. If you have ever observed the women of Spain and Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in their daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaeval taboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse is opposed by masculine distrust and superst.i.tion; they meet no strangers; they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High they escape from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders with a crowd.

Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and stretch their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some sort of contact with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming than their husbands and fathers--to wit, with the rev. clergy.

Elsewhere in Christendom, though women are not quite so relentlessly watched and penned up, they feel much the same need of variety and excitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord.

No one, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary society or church sewing circle is not primarily a religious organization. Its actual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret orders to which the lower and least resourceful cla.s.ses of men belong: it offers a means of refreshment, of self-expression, of personal display, of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to be interesting, of discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course of a life largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have never met a single woman who cared an authentic d.a.m.n for the actual heathen.

The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely social. Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church.

Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of Christendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants are ever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitious architecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressing meaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far more responsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily quite as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The att.i.tude of the typical man toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an att.i.tude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would trust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to beautiful ritual, their obscene b.u.t.tonholing of G.o.d, their great talent for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of idiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all, moves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism.

The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time holding her. She can no more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist.

This inclination toward beauty, of course, is dismissed by the average male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth is that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the ma.s.s, or even, say, by those timid imitations of it which one observes in certain Protestant churches. Such proceedings, whatever their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are at all events vastly more beautiful than any of the private acts of the folk who take part in them. They lift themselves above the barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and no less above the maudlin sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in. They offer a means of escape, convenient and inviting, from that sordid routine of thought and occupation which women revolt against so pertinaciously.

41. The Ethics of Women

I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.

In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has pa.s.sed into proverb.

Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those under her protection--say a child or a husband--she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as is commonly a.s.sumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and without qualms.

What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having pa.s.sed through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite in the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more men than women go insane, and many more married men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a c.o.c.k on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they deceive even themselves; the average woman's contentment, indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders that so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it out; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among wives.

More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintance who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the inconsolable widow.

Even in this age of emanc.i.p.ation, normal women have few serious transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands; the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to senility. When they step outside their habitual circle they show the same alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A man who has dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when he is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into trade she quickly gets a reputation as a sharp trader. Every little town in America has its Hetty Green, each sweating blood from turnips, each the terror of all the male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazon of barter takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more chance of success against the feminine technique in business than he has against the feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the advantage of women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In business they address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give no thought whatever to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their antagonists. And in the duel of s.e.x they fence, not to make points, but to disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off a woman who has attempted to marry him, always carries away a maudlin sympathy for her in her defeat and dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman who pitied the poor fellow whose honest pa.s.sion she had found it expedient to spurn. On the contrary, women take delight in such clownish agonies, and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to other women.

V. The New Age

42. The Transvaluation of Values

The gradual emanc.i.p.ation of women that has been going on for the last century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the oppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made enormous progress--perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so harshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down that large cla.s.ses of women are now almost free agents, and quite independent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding to ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by marriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact remains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire necessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn't marry if they don't want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own labour in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far more difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of those times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or accept a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.

Nothing could be plainer than the effect that the increasing economic security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind. The diminis.h.i.+ng marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng birth rates show which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no considerable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large numbers of them now approach the business with far greater fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited.

They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a century ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage; even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all.

This notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion.

Women in general may still prefer marriage, to work, but there is an increasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the greater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount of philandering.

There already appears in the world, indeed, a cla.s.s of women, who, while still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any theory that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these women are a good man somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in their violent earnestness; they range from the man eating suffragettes to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional shockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret Sanger. But among them are many more who wake the world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectable manner. The number of such women is much larger than is generally imagined, and that number tends to increase steadily.

They are women who, with their economic independence a.s.sured, either by inheritance or by their own efforts, chiefly in the arts and professions, do exactly as they please, and make no pother about it.

Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely attractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one of them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage, without any preliminary scheming by herself--surely an experience that very few ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.

The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women's clubs and in the women's colleges, I have no doubt, there is still much debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possible between the s.e.xes? In other words, is friends.h.i.+p possible without s.e.x? Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another question: Why without s.e.x? With the decay of the ancient concept of women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole s.e.x question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity--this notion is so preposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actually cherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions of Christianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bind them they will throw off this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded upon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear and conformity, will become afar more laudable thing than it ever can be under the present system. And for its absence, if they see fit to dispose of it, they will no more apologize than a man apologizes today.

43. The Lady of Joy

Even prost.i.tution, in the long run, may become a more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fas.h.i.+onable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prost.i.tute is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently a.s.sumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this a.s.sumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound a.s.sumption, e.g., that G.o.d observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prost.i.tution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prost.i.tute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prost.i.tutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who a.s.sent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by tee-totalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol.

No prost.i.tute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prost.i.tute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations.

A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution be almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.

The high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is based upon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women to guard it in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their private inclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of it would materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is not supported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices her chast.i.ty, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance of making a creditable marriage than the woman who remains chaste. This is especially true of women of the lower economic cla.s.ses. At once they come into contact, hitherto socially difficult and sometimes almost impossible, with men of higher cla.s.ses, and begin to take on, with the curious facility of their s.e.x, the refinements and tastes and points of view of those cla.s.ses. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what has begun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal marriage. The number of such marriages is enormously greater than appears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort to conceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personal acquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth and position, who have made such marriages, and who do not seem to regret it. It is an old observation, indeed, that a woman who has previously disposed of her virtue makes a good wife. The common theory is that this is because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from social outlawry; the truth is that she makes a good wife because she is a shrewd woman, and has specialized professionally in masculine weakness, and is thus extra-competent at the traditional business of her s.e.x. Such a woman often shows a truly magnificent sagacity. It is very difficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm her emotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual enterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and ac.u.men.

Even the most lowly prost.i.tute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of cla.s.ses distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prost.i.tution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superst.i.tion that the professional life of the average prost.i.tute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed When they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prost.i.tute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of G.o.d, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community.

This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own att.i.tude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prost.i.tute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prost.i.tute's own cla.s.s--say her father and brothers--and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic. I well remember observing, during my collaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a lady of joy who had attracted the notice of a police lieutenant; she was intensely pleased by the idea of having a client of such haughty manners, such brilliant dress, and what seemed to her to be so dignified a profession. It is always forgotten that this weakness is not confined to prost.i.tutes, but run through the whole female s.e.x. The woman who could not imagine an illicit affair with a wealthy soap manufacturer or even with a lawyer finds it quite easy to imagine herself succ.u.mbing to an amba.s.sador or a duke. There are very few exceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societies the women who represent their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to royalty. And royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequently yield to actors and musicians, i.e., to men radiating a glamour not encountered even in princes.

44. The Future of Marriage

The transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowly and for a very long while. That it will ever be quite complete is, of course, impossible. There are inherent differences will continue to show themselves until the end of time. As woman gradually becomes convinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but also of its value, she will probably lose her present overmastering desire for marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free economic compet.i.tion. That is to say, she will address herself to acquiring that practical competence, that high talent for puerile and chiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the labour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or b.u.t.tonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house painter.

Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade of their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to them, or at all events to most of them, and its overthrow will be prevented. To abolish it entirely, as certain fevered reformers propose, would be as difficult as to abolish the precession of the equinoxes.

At the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between two schemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economic independence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand they are in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a general unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent revolt.

One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual striving in women--not a striving, alas, toward the genuine pearls and rubies of the mind, but one merely toward the acquirement of the rubber stamps that men employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women who launch themselves into party politics, and fill their heads with a vast ma.s.s of useless knowledge about political tricks, customs, theories and personalities. Thus, too, we have the woman social reformer, trailing along ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of male utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the woman who goes in for advanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women's clubs--in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of beliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue. Such ba.n.a.l striving is most prodigally on display in the United States, where superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is due to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work less than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the relatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have been emanc.i.p.ated from any compulsion to productive labour without having acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or social duty. The result is that they swarm in the women's clubs, and waste their time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worse lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the subconscious. It is among such women that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism, the Montessori method, the twilight sleep and other such follies, so pathetically characteristic of American culture.

One of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto descanted upon, to wit, the growing disposition of American women to regard all routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence intolerable. Out of that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest elements of thrift. No such instruction was needed by the housewives of the Continent. They were simply told how much food they could have, and their natural competence did the rest. There is never any avoidable waste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little use for a garbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature. She does her best with the means at her disposal, not only in war time but at all times.

As I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman's disinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at the bottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active intelligence; it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such stupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is obviously important for the average woman to make some effort in that direction, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly visible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their subterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are quite without that dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the s.h.i.+ning marks of men. They never summon up a high pride in doing what is inherently disagreeable; they always go to the galleys under protest, and with vows of sabotage; their fundamental philosophy is almost that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at this, and is thus largely responsible for it. Before the average puella, apprenticed in the kitchen, can pick up a fourth of the culinary subtleties that are commonplace even to the chefs on dining cars, she has caught a man and need concern herself about them no more, for he has to eat, in the last a.n.a.lysis, whatever she sets before him, and his lack of intelligence makes it easy for her to shut off his academic criticisms by bald appeals to his emotions. By an easy process he finally attaches a positive value to her indolence. It is a proof, he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty incompetence he is abashed.