I A NOT inconsiderable portion of the women of the United States is inclined to regard man as a necessary evil. Their point of view is that he is here, and therefore is likely, for the present at least, to remain a formidable figure in human affairs, but that his ways are not their ways, that they disapprove of them and him, and that they intend to work out their lives and salvation as independently of him as possible. What man in the flush and prime of life has not been made conscious of this attitude of the modern woman? She is constantly passing us in the street with the manner of one haughtily and supremely indifferent. There are women enough still who look patterns of modesty, and yet let us feel at the same time that we are more or less an ob VOL. XVIII.-38 ject of interest to them; but this particular type sails by in her trig and often stylish costume with the air not merely of not seeing us, but of wishing to ignore us. Her compressed lips suggest a judgment; a judgment born of meditated conviction which leaves no hope of reconsideration or exception. "You are all substantially alike," she seems to say, "and we have had enough of you. Go your ways and we will go ours." The Mecca of the modern woman's hopes, as indicated by this point of view, would appear to be the ultimate disappearance of man from the face of the earth after the manner of the mastodon and other brutes. Nor are her hopes balked by physiological barriers. She is prepared to admit that it is not obvious, as yet, how girls alone are to be generated and boy babies given the cold maternal shoulder; but she trusts to science and the long results of time for a victory which will eliminate sexual relations and all their attendant perplexities and tragedies from the theatre of human life. We are not so sanguine as she that the kingdom of heaven is to be brought to pass in any so simple and purely feminine a fashion. That is, we men. Perhaps we are fatuous, but we see no reason to doubt that sexual relations will continue to the crack of doom, in spite of the perplexities and tragedies consequent upon them; and moreover, that man will continue to thrive like a "Man, the tyrant and highwayman, has thrown up his arms. young bay-tree, even though she continues to wear a chip on her tailormade shoulder. And yet at the same time we feel sober. It is not pleasant to be regarded as brutes and to have judgment passed upon us by otherwise attractive women. It behooves us to scratch our heads and ask ourselves if we can possibly merit the haughty indifference and thinly disguised contempt which is entertained toward us. To be weighed in the balance and found wanting by a serene and beautiful young person is a far from agreeable experience. There must be something wrong with us, and if so, what is it? Of course there was a time-and not so very long ago- when men were tyrants and kept women under. Nowadays the only thing denied them in polite circles is to whisk around by themselves after dark, and plenty of them do that. The law is giving them, with both hands, almost everything they ask for nearly as rapidly as existing inequalities are pointed out, and the right of suffrage is withheld from them only because the majority of women are still averse to exercising it. Man, the tyrant and highwayman, has thrown up his arms and is allowing woman to pick his pockets. He is not willing to have her bore a hole in his upper lip, and drag him behind her with a rope, but he is disposed to consent to any reasonable legislative changes which she desires to have made, short of those which would involve masculine disfigurement or depreciation. It certainly cannot be his bullying qualities which have attracted her disdain, for he has given in. If woman to-day finds that the law discriminates unjustly between her and man, she has merely to ask for relief in sufficient numbers to show that she is not the tool of designing members of her own sex, in order to obtain it. Under the spur of these reflections I consulted my wife by way of obtaining light on this problem. "Barbara, why is it that modern women of a certain type are so sniffy toward men? You know what I mean; they speak to us, of course, and tolerate us, and they love us individually as husbands and fa thers; but instead of counting for everything, as we once did, we don't seem to count for anything unless it be dollars and cents. It isn't merely that you all talk so fast and have so much to say without regard to us that we often feel left out in the cold, and even hurt, but there is a stern, relentless look on some of your faces which makes us feel as though we had stolen the Holy Grail. You must have noticed it." "Oh, yes," said Barbara, with a smile. "It doesn't mean very much. Of course times are not what they were. Man used to be a demigod, now he is only a Barbara hesitated for a word, so I suggested, "Only a bank." "Let us say only a man. Only a man in the eyes of reflective womanhood. We have caught up and are beginning to think for ourselves. You can't expect us to hang on your every word and to fall down and worship you without reservation as we once did. Man used to be woman's whole existence, often to her infinite sorrow, and now he is only part of it, just as she is only a part of his. You go to your clubs; we go to ours; and while you are playing cards we read or listen to papers, some of which are not intelligible to man. But we love you still, even though we have ceased to worship you. There are a few, I admit, who would like to do away with you altogether; but they are extremists in every revolution, you know, there are fanatics and unreasonable persons-but the vast ma jority of us have a tender spot for you in our hearts, and regard your case in sorrow rather than in anger-and as probably not hopeless." What is the matter with us?" Oh, everything. You are a failure fundamentally. To begin with, your theory of life is founded on compromise. We women-the modern woman-abhor compromise." Although it was obvious that Barbara was trying to tease me, I realized from her expression that she intended to deal my sex a crucial stab by the word compromise. I must confess that I felt just a little uncomfortable under the white light of scorn which radiated from her eyes, while her general air reminded me for the first time disagreeably of the type of modern woman to whom I had referred. Behooves us to scratch our heads." "The world progresses by compromise," I replied, sententiously. "Yes, like a snail." 66 Otherwise it would stand still. A man thinks so and so; another man thinks precisely opposite; they meet each other half-way and so much is gained." "Oh, I know how they do. A man who stands for a principle meets another man; they argue and bluster for a few minutes, and presently they sit down and have something to eat or drink, and by the time they separate the man who stands for a principle has sacrificed all there is of it, except a tiny scrap or shred, in order not to incommode the man who has no principles at all; and what is almost worse, they part seemingly bosom friends and are apt to exchange rhetorical protestations of mutual esteem. The modern woman has no patience with such a way of doing things." "I suppose," said I, "that two modern women under similar circumstances would tear each other all to pieces; there would be nothing to eat or drink, except possibly tea and wafers, and the floor would be covered with fragments of skin, hair, and clothing. When they separated one would be dead and the other maimed for life, and the principle for which the victor stood would be set back about a century and a half." Barbara winced a little, but she said, "What have you men accomplished all these years by your everlasting compromises? If you were really in earnest to solve the liquor problem, and the social evil, as you call it, and all the other abuses which exist in civilized and uncivilized society, you would certainly have been able to do more than you have. You have had free scope; we haven't been consulted; we have stood aside and let you have your innings: now we merely wish to see what we can do. We shall make mistakes I dare say; even one or two of us may be torn to pieces or maimed for life; but the modern woman feels that she has the courage of her convictions and that she does not intend to let herself be thwarted or cajoled by masculine theories. That accounts largely for our apparent snif finess. I say apparent,' because we are not really at bottom so contemptuous as we seem-even the worst of us. I suppose you are right in declaring that the proud, superior, and beautiful young person of the present day is a little disdainful. But even she is less severe than she looks. She is simply a nine teenth century Joan of Arc protesting against the man of the world and his works, asking to be allowed to lead her life without molestation from him in a shrine of her own ble to him. She wishes It was something to be assured by my wife that the modern woman does not purpose to abolish either maternity or men, and that, so to speak, her bark is worse than her bite. Barbara belongs to a woman's club, so she must know. We men are in such a nervous state, as a result of what Barbara calls the revolution, that very likely we are unduly sensitive and suspicious, and allow our imaginations to fly off at a tangent. Very likely, too, we are disposed to be a trifle irritable, for when one has been accustomed for long to sit on or club a person (literally or metaphorically according to one's social status) when she happens to express sentiments or opinions contrary to ours, it must needs take time to get used to the idea that she is really an equal, and to adjust one's ratiocinations to suit. But even accepting as true the assurance that the forbidding air of the modern woman does not mean much, and that she loves us still though she has ceased to worship us, we have Barbara's word for it, too, that the modern woman thinks we have made a mess of it and that man is a failure fundamentally. Love without respect! Sorrow rather than anger! It sobers one; it saddens one. For we must admit that man has had free scope and a long period in which to make the most "A nineteenth century Joan of Arc." Of a little too far the other way. course she is wrong; woman can no more live wholly independent of man than he of her-and you know what a helpless being he would be without her -and the modern woman is bound to recognize, sooner or later, that the sympathetic companionship of women with men is the only basis of true social progress. Sexual affinity is stronger than the constitutions of all the women's clubs combined, as eight out of ten young modern women discover to their cost, or rather to their happiness, sooner or later. Some brute of a man breaks into the shrine, and before she knows it she is wheeling a baby carriage. Even the novelist, with his or her fertile invention, has failed to discover any really satisfactory ending for the independent, disdainful heroine but marriage or the grave. Spinsterhood, even when illumined by a career, is a worthy and respectable lot, but not alluring.' "The so-called man of the world." |