Meditations About Women
It is doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make generalizations, because nobody else believes in them—least of all in the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe. Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy; your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation, women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a beautiful explanation of life—if life were only like that. Thus, I do not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it would be quite pleasant if they were true.
Why do Men generalize especially about Women?
But that is so simple. Because of their overweening vanity that will not allow them to admit that a subject on which they spend ninetenths of their thoughts can in itself be other than a rich subject full of mystery and significance. Having briefly settled this, I now go on to my own instructive considerations on women, which begin with an inquiry into
Their Untruthfulness.
Men are to be found who frequently tell the truth on principle, and those are quite common who habitually tell the truth because, though they would prefer to lie when lying would be advantageous, something prevents them from doing so, they stammer, grow red, and are forced back on truth in spite of themselves. Women only tell the truth when lying is unprofitable, and never on principle. This is because women have not got principles. Men, not they, are idealists; they only pretend to be idealists in eras when that is what men want them to be. They live among facts, and are bored or amused by abstractions, the making of which they tolerantly consider only one more of the childish games, like curling or pinochle, men delight to play at; which, indeed, it is. Men generalize incessantly about women, but women do not generalize about men. They take men individually as they come—if they do. Also they never experience any difficulty in telling a lie; on the contrary, they look more candid then than at other times. This is, again, because they do not see why truth should be any more important than falsehood, because almost their chief preoccupation is to keep men quiet and happy, and because they believe in doing everything as well as it can be done.
Their Courage.
Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired tottering wrecks.
But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider
Their Lack of Imagination.
This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they despise abstractions, they admire imagination and would like to possess it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and, with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral. Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The excuse women give for this—that they have always been held back by men and have only recently begun to come into their own—is, and they know it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe—and a pretty mess they made of it.
I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced (witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to what they have observed; when they essay to do more than this they fall heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we read her with interest; when, in the last part of One of Ours, she attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe acutely—and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It is not very important to be a quite creditable artist.
On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book
Their Intuition.
Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The gift of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.
There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy, another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.
Their Morals.
This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme importance.
Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to behave—in short, that there is a way to behave. Women have no such conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave ‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit, but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue. Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral. Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be wicked. Accordingly, women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.
A Reservation.
It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most Americans.
However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.
Their Fastidiousness.
If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness—namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself—any act—is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.
Their Maturity.
It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.
Women expect a great deal less from life—once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. They become disillusioned very early—as soon, in fact, as they have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer; if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them? Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.
However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow, amazingly tolerant and—oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all. This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified, neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short, since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very interesting, so the more of it the better—only there is nothing to get excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely. Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among idealists.
This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respective youth and maturity of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.
The Unanswerable Riddle.
It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women (of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still, women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heaven’s name, can they put up with men—and why do they?
They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean, quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in any case.
There is no difficulty in understanding why a man marries. He gets a great deal for his money—a home, a housekeeper, some smoothness, a little fineness, the convenient inexpensive satisfaction of his sexual desires, a kind mature companion to spoil him and protect him against the harsh buffets of a world eternally different than he childishly and sentimentally fancies it.
But a woman? What does she get in return for marriage? Nothing, so far as I can see, save the satisfaction (at moments not of her choosing) of her sexual desires. Surely it cannot be for this alone that women marry. That would be like buying a whole house for the sake of one picture in it. In fact, in this matter women have, potentially, an immense advantage over men. Men, the childish dreamers, will (everywhere save in pure America) follow unknown attractive women about the streets of a city for hours, murmuring compliments from time to time, hoping against hope for some response. It is pathetic. But think of the field that would be open to women if they chose to behave in this manner! Even venal professionals are not without some success. The entire male sex would be at the service of a really ‘nice’ woman; for who ever heard of a man rejecting any woman’s advances, however indifferent he might be to her? His vanity would not let him. A man can have only an inconsiderable fraction of the women he desires; a woman could have any or all of the men who pleased her—and with the minimum of effort. She could select a lover at just the moment when she desired a lover. Equally, if she desired a child she could select a promising father for the child, and, supposing the combination not to work out so well as she hoped, could next time select another. True, at present such behaviour might be looked at askance by the most meticulous; but women could alter this attitude to a sensible one at any time they pleased.
Instead, they elect to marry. Oscar Wilde was wrong to call ‘woman’ ‘a sphinx without a secret.’ Women have their secret, and this is it.
Ministering Angels.
Well, marry they do and will probably continue to do despite my advice. It offers a field for useless but entertaining conjecture. Do they marry because they like to try everything? Or because they are sorry for men? Or because it requires more energy to repel a man’s repeated advances than is worth devoting to anything, either good or bad? At any rate, one thing is certain: unless they marry very, very young, it can hardly be because they expect much of marriage. They cannot fail to know that they must give a great deal and receive very little.
What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties, such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties, difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely showing any resentment at the impatience with which they were treated when they were ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company they listen to their husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking, smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat little and delicately, they allow—nay, assist—men to eat much and grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one could, not even God.
Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this (both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In the meantime men flourish and grow fat.