3. MARRIAGE
III
17. Fundamental Motives
How successful such a concealment may be is well displayed by the
general acceptance of the notion that women are reluctant to enter
into marriage--that they have to be persuaded to it by eloquence and
pertinacity, and even by a sort of intimidation. The truth is that, in a
world almost divested of intelligible idealism, and hence dominated
by a senseless worship of the practical, marriage offers the best
career that the average woman can reasonably aspire to, and, in the
case of very many women, the only one that actually offers a
livelihood. What is esteemed and valuable, in our materialistic and
unintelligent society, is precisely that petty practical efficiency at
which men are expert, and which serves them in place of free
intelligence. A woman, save she show a masculine strain that verges
upon the pathological, cannot hope to challenge men in general in
this department, but it is always open to her to exchange her sexual
charm for a lion's share in the earnings of one man, and this is
what she almost invariably tries to do. That is to say, she tries to get
a husband, for getting a husband means, in a sense, enslaving an
expert, and so covering up her own lack of expertness, and escaping
its consequences. Thereafter she has at least one stout line of
defence against a struggle for existence in which the prospect of
survival is chiefly based, not upon the talents that are typically hers,
but upon those that she typically lacks. Before the average woman
succumbs in this struggle, some man or other must succumb first.
Thus her craft converts her handicap into an advantage.
In this security lies the most important of all the benefits that a
woman attains by marriage. It is, in fact, the most important benefit
that the mind can imagine, for the whole effort of the human race,
under our industrial society, is concentrated upon the attainment of
it. But there are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in
dignity which goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got
herself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband,
is regarded with respect by other women,
and has a
contemptuous patronage for those who have failed to do likewise.
Again, marriage offers her the only safe opportunity, considering
the levantine view of women as property which Christianity has
preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratification for that powerful
complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, in particular, for
the instinct of maternity. The woman who has not had a child
remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a little ridiculous.
She is in the position of a man who has never stood in battle; she
has missed the most colossal experience of her sex. Moreover, a
social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard her as a sort
of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed disdain, and
deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her experiential
penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect among
women for virginity
per se. They are against the woman who has
got rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost
anything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad
bargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect
for virtue held by men, and hence one against the general
advantage an dwell-being of the sex. In other words, it is a
guild resentment that they feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in
general, are not actively moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably
modest. Every man, indeed, who is in wide practice among them is
occasionally astounded and horrified to discover, on some rainy
afternoon, an almost complete absence of modesty in some women
of the highest respectability.
But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable
is economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute,
but usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may
die without enough life insurance, or run off with some
preposterous light of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step
over the intangible and wavering line which separates business
success from a prison cell. Again, a woman may be deceived: there
are stray women who are credulous and sentimental, and stray men
who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may make false deductions
from evidence accurately before her, ineptly guessing that the clerk
she marries today will be the head of the firm tomorrow, instead of
merely the
bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole it must be
plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself a
reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is
accustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but
realistically; she always gives thought to the economic situation; she
seldom takes a chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for
men to marry women who bring nothing to the joint capital of
marriage save good looks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost
unheard of for women to neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a
rich man, at least in America, marries his typist or the governess of
his sister's children and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman
enters upon a comparable marriage she is commonly set down as
insane, and the disaster that almost always ensues quickly confirms
the diagnosis.
The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in
marriage--and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench
who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable
flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce--is, by a
curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their
precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them.
In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and
almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the
more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being
less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have
seen, is congenital; their very intellectual enterprise makes it difficult
for them to become the efficient machines that men are. But part of
it is also due to the fact that, with marriage always before them,
coloring their every vision of the future, and holding out a steady
promise of swift and complete relief, they are under no such
implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts they revolt
against. The time is too short and the incentive too feeble. Before
the woman employs of twenty-one can master a tenth of the
idiotic"knowledge" in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even
convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head
of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons
the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put
away the hope of
marriage, or, at all events, admitted the
possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles
down in earnest to whatever craft she practises, and makes a
genuine effort to develop competence. No sane man, seeking a
woman for a post requiring laborious training and unremitting
diligence, would select a woman still definitely young and
marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose either a woman so
unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of snaring a man,
or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to be
pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.
18. The Process of Courtship
This bemusement of the typical woman by the notion of marriage
has been noted as self-evident by every literate student of the
phenomena of sex, from the early Christian fathers down to
Nietzsche, Ellis and Shaw. That It is denied by the current
sentimentality of Christendom is surely no evidence against it. What
we have in this denial, as I have said, is no more than
a proof of
woman's talent for a high and sardonic form of comedy and of
man's infinite vanity. "I wooed and won her," says Sganarelle of his
wife. "I made him run,"says the hare of the hound. When the thing
is maintained, not as a mere windy sentimentality, but with some
notion of carrying it logically, the result is invariably a display of
paralogy so absurd that it becomes pathetic. Such nonsense one
looks for in the works of gyneophile theorists with no experience of
the world, and there is where one finds it. It is almost always
wedded to the astounding doctrine that sexual frigidity, already
disposed of, is normal in the female, and that the approach of the
male is made possible, not by its melting into passion, but by a
purely intellectual determination, inwardly revolting, to avoid his ire
by pandering to his gross appetites. Thus the thing is stated in a
book called "The Sexes in Science and History," by Eliza Burt
Gamble, an American lady anthropologist:
The beautiful coloring of male birds and fishes, and the various
appendages acquired by males throughout the various orders below
man, and which, sofar as they themselves are concerned, serve no
other
useful purpose than to aid them in securing the favours of
the females, have by the latter been turned to account in the
processes of reproduction. The female made the male beautiful
that she might endure his caresses.
The italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds
to the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species,
including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their
chief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the
native reluctance of the aesthetic and anesthetic females. In her
own words: "Regarding males, outside of the instinct for
self-preservation, which, by the way is often overshadowed by their
great sexual eagerness, no discriminating characters have been
acquired and transmitted, other than those which have been the
result of passion, namely, pugnacity and perseverance." Again the
italics are mine. What we have here is merely the old, old delusion
of masculine enterprise in amour--the concept of man as a lascivious
monster and of woman as his shrinking victim--in brief, the Don
Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the springs of
many of the
most vexatious delusions of the world, and of some
of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are led
to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that
they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres,
and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is
thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been
launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is
thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have
been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a
co-operation in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but
to the solitary libidinousness of their swinish and unconscionable
husbands.
Dr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of
Noah. A literal application of her theory toman today is enough to
bring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo
sapiens actually does the primping and parading that she describes? Which
runs to "beautiful coloring," sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases
itself in vestments which "serve no other useful purpose than to aid
in securing the favours" of the other? The
insecurity of the gifted
savante's position is at once apparent. The more convincingly she
argues that the primeval mud-hens and she mackerel had to be
anesthetized with spectacular decorations in order to "endure the
caresses" of their beaux, the more she supports the thesis that men
have to be decoyed and bamboozled into love today. In other
words, her argument turns upon and destroys itself. Carried to its
last implication, it holds that women are all Donna Juanitas, and that
if they put off their millinery and cosmetics, and abandoned the
shameless sexual allurements of their scanty dress, men could not
"endure their caresses."
To be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting
conclusion herself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional
theory that the human female of today is no more than the plaything
of the concupiscent male, and that she must wait for the feminist
millenium to set her free from his abominable pawings. But she can
reach this notion only by standing her whole structure of reasoning
on its head--in fact, by knocking it over and repudiating it. On the
one hand, she argues that splendour of attire is merely a bait to
overcome the
reluctance of the opposite sex, and on the other
hand she argues, at least by fair inference, that it is not. This
grotesque switching of horses, however, need not detain us. The
facts are too plain to be disposed of by a lady anthropologist's
theorizings. Those facts are supported, in the field of animal
behaviour, by the almost unanimous evidence of zoologists,
including that of Dr. Gamble herself. They are supported, in the
field of human behaviour, by a body of observation and experience
so colossal that it would be quite out of the question to dispose of it.
Women, as I have shown, have a more delicate aesthetic sense than
men; in a world wholly rid of men they would probably still array
themselves with vastly more care and thought of beauty than men
would ever show in like case. But with the world what it is, it must
be obvious that their display of finery--to say nothing of their
display of epidermis--has the conscious purpose of attracting the
masculine eye. Anormal woman, indeed, never so much as buys a
pair of shoes or has her teeth plugged without considering, in the
back of her mind, the effect upon some unsuspecting candidate for
her "reluctant" affections.
19. The Actual Husband
So far as I can make out, no woman of the sort worth hearing--that
is, no woman of intelligence, humour and charm, and hence of
success in the duel of sex--has ever publicly denied this; the denial is
confined entirely to the absurd sect of female bachelors of arts and
to the generality of vain and unobservant men. The former, having
failed to attract men by the devices described, take refuge behind
the sour grapes doctrine that they have never tried, and the latter,
having fallen victims, sooth their egoism by arrogating the whole
agency to themselves, thus giving it a specious appearance of the
volitional, and even of the, audacious. The average man is an
almost incredible popinjay; he can think of himself only as at the
centre of situations. All the, sordid transactions of his life appear to
him, and are depicted in his accounts of them, as feats, successes,
proofs of his acumen. He regards it as an almost magical exploit to
operate a stock-brokerage shop, or to get elected to public office, or
to swindle his fellow knaves in some degrading
commercial
enterprise, or to profess some nonsense or other in a college, or to
write so platitudinous a book as this one. And in the same way he
views it as a great testimony to his prowess at amour to yield up his
liberty, his property and his soul to the first woman who, in despair
of finding better game, turns her appraising eye upon him. But if
you want to hear a mirthless laugh, just present this masculine
theory to a bridesmaid at a wedding, particularly after alcohol and
crocodile tears have done their disarming work upon her. That is to
say, just hint to her that the bride harboured no notion of marriage
until stormed into acquiescence by the moonstruck and impetuous
bridegroom.
I have used the phrase, "in despair of finding better game." What I
mean is this that not one woman in a hundred ever marries her first
choice among marriageable men. That first choice is almost
invariably one who is beyond her talents, for reasons either
fortuitous or intrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose
relative naivete makes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple
shop-girl. Her absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at
all, but a supernatural abstraction in a book,
say, one of the
heroes of Hall Caine, Ethel M.Dell, or Marie Corelli. After him
comes a moving-picture actor. Then another moving-picture actor.
Then, perhaps, many more--ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous
young clergyman. Then the junior partner in the firm she works
for. Then a couple of department managers. Then a clerk. Then a
young man with no definite profession or permanent job--one of the
innumerable host which flits from post to post, always restive,
always trying something new--perhaps a neighborhood
garage-keeper in the end. Well, the girl begins with the Caine
colossus: he vanishes into thin air. She proceeds to the moving
picture actors: they are almost as far beyond her. And then to the
man of God, the junior partner, the department manager, the clerk;
one and all they are carried off by girls of greater attractions and
greater skill--girls who can cast gaudier flies. In the end, suddenly
terrorized by the first faint shadows of spinsterhood, she turns to the
ultimate numskull--and marries him out of hand.
This, allowing for class modifications, is almost the normal history
of a marriage, or, more accurately, of the genesis of a marriage,
under
Protestant Christianity. Under other rites the business is
taken out of the woman's hands, at least partly, and so she is less
enterprising in her assembling of candidates and possibilities. But
when the whole thing is left to her own heart--i.e., to her head--it is
but natural that she should seek as wide a range of choice as the
conditions of her life allow, and in a democratic society those
conditions put few if any fetters upon her fancy. The servant girl,
or factory operative, or even prostitute of today may be the chorus
girl or moving picture vampire of tomorrow and the millionaire's
wife of next year. In America, especially, men have no settled
antipathy to such stooping alliances; in fact, it rather flatters their
vanity to play Prince Charming to Cinderella. The result is that
every normal American young woman, with the practicality of her
sex and the inner confidence that goes therewith, raises her amorous
eye as high as it will roll. And the second result is that every
American man of presentable exterior and easy means is surrounded
by an aura of discreet provocation: he cannot even dictate a letter,
or ask for a telephone number without being measured for his
wedding coat. On the
Continent of Europe, and especially in
the Latin countries, where class barriers are more formidable, the
situation differs materially, and to the disadvantage of the girl. If
she makes an overture, it is an invitation to disaster; her hope of
lawful marriage by such means is almost nil. In consequence, the
prudent and decent girl avoids such overtures, and they must be
made by third parties or by the man himself. This is the explanation
of the fact that a Frenchman, say, is habitually enterprising in
amour, and hence bold and often offensive, whereas an American is
what is called chivalrous. The American is chivalrous for the simple
reason that the initiative is not in his hands. His chivalry is really a
sort of coquetry.
20. The Unattainable Ideal
But here I rather depart from the point, which is this: that the
average woman is not strategically capable of bringing down the
most tempting game within her purview, and must thus content
herself with a second, third, or nth choice. The only women who
get their first
choices are those who run in almost miraculous
luck and those too stupid to formulate an ideal--two very small
classes, it must be obvious. A few women, true enough, are so
pertinacious that they prefer defeat to compromise. That is to say,
they prefer to put off marriage indefinitely rather than to marry
beneath the highest leap of their fancy. But such women may be
quickly dismissed as abnormal, and perhaps as downright diseased
in mind; the average woman is well-aware that marriage is far better
for her than celibacy, even when it falls a good deal short of her
primary hopes, and she is also well aware that the differences
between man and man, once mere money is put aside, are so slight
as to be practically almost negligible. Thus the average woman is
under none of the common masculine illusions about elective
affinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is
quite ready to fall in love, as the phrase is, with any man who is
plainly eligible, and she usually knows a good many more such men
than one. Her primary demand in marriage is not for the agonies of
romance, but for comfort and security; she is thus easier satisfied
than a man, and oftener
happy. One frequently hears of
remarried widowers who continue to moon about their dead first
wives, but for a remarried widow to show any such sentimentality
would be a nine days' wonder. Once replaced, a dead husband is
expunged from the minutes. And so is a dead love.
One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the
contempt with which women normally regard their husbands--a
contempt grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual
superiority. To this primary sense of superiority is now added the
disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an
ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been
necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater,
and no one is better aware of it than his wife. He is, taking
averages, one who has been loved, as the saying goes, by but one
woman, and then only as a second, third or nth choice. If any other
woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she would have
married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness.
But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak,
by many women, and is the
lost first choice of at least some of
them. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the
husband is the attained and disdained.
Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of
bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind--a superiority so
marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate
philosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity
to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom
from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex--in other words, of his
greater approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He
is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the
business an equipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert
Spencer, until he was fifty, was ferociously harassed by women of
all sorts. Among others, George Eliot tried very desperately to
marry him. But after he had made it plain, over a long series of
years, that he was prepared to resist marriage to the full extent of his
military and naval power, the girls dropped off one by one, and so
his last decades were full
of peace and he got a great deal of
very important work done.
21. The Effect on the Race
It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men
are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority
dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of
lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that
the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectual
superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and that
fact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries of
Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English
school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and
Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable,
would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and
grandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus
Darwin to biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of
Hamilcar Barcato the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer's
escape from marriage
facilitated his life-work, and so served the
immediate good of English philosophy, but in the long run it will
work a detriment, for he left no sons to carry on his labours, and the
remaining Englishmen of his time were unable to supply the lack.
His celibacy, indeed, made English philosophy co-extensive with his
life; since his death the whole body of metaphysical speculation
produced in England has been of little more, practical value to the
world than a drove of bogs. In precisely the same way the celibacy
of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche has reduced German
philosophy to feebleness.
Even setting aside this direct influence of heredity, there is the
equally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic
advantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate, man, and have
his care. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general
in his actual son; he also gave them a great general in his son-in-law,
trained in his camp. But the tendency of the first-rate man to
remain a bachelor is very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that,
of all the great writers of England since the Renaissance, more than
half were either celibates or lived apart from their wives. Even
the
married ones revealed the tendency plainly. For example,
consider Shakespeare. He was forced into marriage while still a
minor by the brothers of Ann Hathaway, who was several years his
senior, and had debauched him and gave out that she was enceinte
by him. He escaped from her abhorrent embraces as quickly as
possible, and thereafter kept as far away from her as he could. His
very distaste for marriage, indeed, was the cause of his residence in
London, and hence, in all probability, of the labours which made
him immortal.
In different parts of the world various expedients have been resorted
to to overcome this reluctance to marriage among the, better sort of
men. Christianity, in general, combats it on the ground that it is
offensive to God--though at the same, time leaning toward an
enforced celibacy among its own agents. The discrepancy is fatal to
the position. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that the
same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards
celibacy as an actual sin, and on the other hand, it is obvious that the
average cleric would be damaged but little, and probably improved
appreciably, by having a wife to think for him,
and to force him
to virtue and industry, and to aid him otherwise in his sordid
profession. Where religious superstitions have died out the
institution of the
dot prevails--an idea borrowed by Christians from
the Jews. The
dot is simply a bribe designed to overcome the
disinclination of the male. It involves a frank recognition of the fact
that he loses by marriage, and it seeks to make up for that loss by a
money payment. Its obvious effect is to give young women a wider
and better choice of husbands. A relatively superior man, otherwise
quite out of reach, may be brought into camp by the assurance of
economic ease, and what is more, he may be kept in order after he
has been taken by the consciousness of his gain. Among
hardheaded and highly practical peoples, such as the Jews and the
French, the
dot flourishes, and its effect is to promote intellectual
suppleness in the race, for the average child is thus not inevitably the
offspring of a woman and a noodle, as with us, but may be the
offspring of a woman and a man of reasonable intelligence. But
even in France, the very highest class of men tend to evade
marriage; they resist money
almost as unanimously as their
Anglo-Saxon brethren resist sentimentality.
In America the dot is almost unknown, partly because
money-getting is easier to men than in Europe and is regarded as
less degrading, and partly because American men are more naive
than Frenchmen and are thus readily intrigued without actual
bribery. But the best of them nevertheless lean to celibacy, and
plans for overcoming their habit are frequently proposed and
discussed. One such plan involves a heavy tax on bachelors. The
defect in it lies in the fact that the average bachelor, for obvious
reasons, is relatively well to do, and would pay the tax rather than
marry. Moreover, the payment of it would help to salve his
conscience, which is now often made restive, I believe, by a maudlin
feeling that he is shirking his duty to the race, and so he would be
confirmed and supported in his determination to avoid the altar.
Still further, he would escape the social odium which now attaches
to his celibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as his right.
As things stand, that odium is of definite potency, and undoubtedly
has its influence upon a certain
number of men in the lower
ranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of
bachelorhood, with one leg furtively over the altar rail; it needs only
an extra pull to bring them to the sacrifice. But if they could
compound for their immunity by a cash indemnity it is highly
probable that they would take on new resolution, and in the end
they would convert what remained of their present disrepute into a
source of egoistic satisfaction, as is done, indeed, by a great many
bachelors even today. These last immoralists are privy to the
elements which enter into that disrepute: the ire of women whose
devices they have resisted and the envy of men who have
succumbed.
22. Compulsory Marriage
I myself once proposed an alternative scheme, to wit, the prohibition
of sentimental marriages by law, and the substitution of
match-making by the common hangman. This plan, as
revolutionary as it may seem, would have several plain advantages.
For one thing, it would purge the serious business of marriage of the
romantic fol-de-rol that now corrupts it, and so
make for the
peace and happiness of the race. For another thing, it would work
against the process which now selects out, as I have said, those men
who are most fit, and so throws the chief burden of paternity upon
the inferior, to the damage of posterity. The hangman, if he made
his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanence
and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with
public approbation, i.e., men obviously of sound stock and talents,
i.e., the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his
selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a
hat, or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance
would fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper
orders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True
enough, a good many men would endeavour to influence him
privately to their own advantage, and it is probable that he would
occasionally succumb, but it must be plain that the men most likely
to prevail in that enterprise would not be philosophers, but
politicians, and so there would be some benefit to the race even
here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when a
Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an
ambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert
Spencer goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a
detriment to all the generations of the future.
I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical
politics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify the
problem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its
execution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also
by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at
least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite
its unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose
the substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle
for the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt
rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the
common hangman or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more
favourable to her opportunities. And men would oppose it because
it would restrict their liberty. This liberty, of course, is largely
imaginary. In its common manifestation, it is no more, at bottom,
than the
privilege of being bamboozled and made a mock of by
the, first woman who ventures to essay the business. But none the
less it is quite as precious to menas any other of the ghosts that their
vanity conjures up for their enchantment. They cherish the notion
that unconditioned volition enters into the matter, and that under
volition there is not only a high degree of sagacity but also a touch
of the daring and the devilish. A man is often almost as much
pleased and flattered by his own marriage as he would be by the
achievement of what is currently called a seduction. In the one
case, as in the other, his emotion is one of triumph. The
substitution of pure chance would take away that soothing unction.
The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man
realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in
which he humbly whispers:"There, but for the grace of God, go I."
But that chance has a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion;
it shows less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the
bald hazard of the die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the
other. In the same way, I have no doubt, the majority of foxes
would object to choosing lots to determine the victim of a
projected fox-hunt. They prefer to take their chances with the dogs.
23. Extra-Legal Devices
It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class
men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that
their high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one
hand it must be obvious that an appreciable number of them,
perhaps by reason of their very detachment and preoccupation, are
intrigued into the holy estate, and that not a few of them enter it
deliberately, convinced that it is the safest form of liaison possible
under Christianity. And on the other hand one must not forget the
biological fact that it is quite feasible to achieve offspring without
the imprimatur of Church and State. The thing, indeed, is so
commonplace that I need not risk a scandal by uncovering it in
detail. What I allude to, I need not add, is not that form of
irregularity which curses innocent children with the stigma of
illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form which
safeguards their social
dignity while protecting them against
inheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I have
shown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to
permit himself any such romantic altruism--just as American
literature gains enormously by the fact that Walt Whitman
adventured, leaving seven sons behind him, three of whom are now
well-known American poets and in the forefront of the New Poetry
movement.
The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is very
considerable; its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps
a majority of first-rate men; its advantages have been set forth in
George Moore's "Euphorion in Texas," though in a clumsy and
sentimental way. What is behind it is the profound race sense of
women--the instinct which makes them regard the unborn in their
every act--perhaps, too, the fact that the interests of the unborn are
here identical, as in other situations, with their own egoistic
aspirations. As a popular philosopher has shrewdly observed, the
objections to polygamy do not come from women, for the average
woman is sensible enough to prefer half or a quarter or even a tenth
of a first--rate man
to the whole devotion of a third--rate man.
Considerations of much the same sort also justify polyandry--if not
morally, then at least biologically. The average woman, as I have
shown, must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain
disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot
help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact
that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty about it; for she
knows that he is their father only by reason of her own initiative in
the, proceedings anterior to her marriage. If, now, an opportunity
presents itself to remove that handicap from at least some of them,
and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy her vanity--if
such a chance offers it is no wonder that she occasionally embraces
it.
Here we have an explanation of many lamentable and otherwise
inexplicable violations of domestic integrity. The woman in the case
is commonly dismissed as vicious, but that is no more than a new
example of the common human tendency to attach the concept of
viciousness to whatever is natural, and intelligent, and above the
comprehension of politicians, theologians and green-grocers.
24. Intermezzo on Monogamy
The prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed
to ethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to
ethical motives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple
truth is that ethical motives are no more than deductions from
experience, and that they are quickly abandoned whenever
experience turns against them. In the present case experience is still
overwhelming on the side of monogamy; civilized men are in favour
of it because they find that it works. And why does it work?
Because it is the most effective of all available antidotes to the
alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in brief, kills
passion--and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving
enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order,
decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized
man--the ideal civilized man--is simply one who never sacrifices the
common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection
when he even ceases to love passionately--when he reduces the most
profound of all his instinctive experience from the level of an
ecstasy to the
level of a mere device for replenishing armies
and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the
infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and
making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at
any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by
producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion
formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.
The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail
to get all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example,
the important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the
unmarried--that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in
dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with
scare-crows and prohibitions--to try to convince him logically that
passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and
imbecility--supererogation because he already knows that it is
dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a
passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein
under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions--to bring it down, by
slow
stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How
much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man
were forbidden polygamy, before marriage, but permitted
monogamy! The prohibition in this case would be relatively easy to
enforce, instead of impossible, as in the other. Curiosity would be
satisfied; nature would get out of her cage; even romance would get
an inning. Ninety-nine young men out of a hundred would submit,
if only because it would be much easier to submit that to resist.
And the result? Obviously, it would be laudable--that is, accepting
current definitions of the laudable. The product, after six months,
would be a well-regimented and disillusioned young man, as devoid
of disquieting and demoralizing, passion as an ancient of eighty--in
brief, the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails
to produce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one
hand its impossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable
revolts, often ending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other
hand they fill the Y. M. C. A.'s with scared poltroons full of
indescribably disgusting Freudian suppressions. Neither group
supplies many ideal
citizens. Neither promotes the, sort of
public morality that is aimed at.
25. Late Marriages
The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all,
commonly takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end,
but he is almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal
longer than the average poor clodpate, or normal man. If he
actually marries early, it is nearly always proof that some intolerable
external pressure has been applied to him, as in Shakespeare's case,
or that his mental sensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in
Shelley's. This fact, curiously enough, has escaped the observation
of an otherwise extremely astute observer, namely Havelock Ellis.
In his study of British genius he notes the fact that most men of
unusual capacities are the sons of relatively old fathers, but instead
of exhibiting the true cause thereof, he ascribes it to a mysterious
quality whereby a man already in decline is capable of begetting
better offspring than one in full vigour. This is a palpable absurdity,
not only because it
goes counter to facts long established by
animal breeders, but also because it tacitly assumes that talent, and
hence the capacity for transmitting it, is an acquired character, and
that this character may be transmitted. Nothing could be more
unsound. Talent is not an acquired character, but a congenital
character, and the man who is born with it has it in early life quite as
well as in later life, though Its manifestation may have to wait.
James Mill was yet a young man when his son, John Stuart Mill,
was born, and not one of his principle books had been written. But
though the"Elements of Political Economy" and the"Analysis of the
Human Mind"were thus but vaguely formulated in his mind, if they
were actually so muchas formulated at all, and it was fifteen years
before he wrote them, he was still quite able to transmit the capacity
to write them to his son, and that capacity showed itself, years
afterward, in the latter's "Principles of Political Economy" and
"Essay on Liberty."
But Ellis' faulty inference is still based upon a sound observation, to
wit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to a son
is ordinarily a man who does not have a
son at all, at least in
wedlock, until he has advanced into middle life. The reasons which
impel him to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or
three of them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the
fact that every man, whether of the first-class or of any other class,
tends to decline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the
actual range and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on
improving until he collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere
agility of mind, and not profundity, that is of most value and effect
in so tricky and deceptive a combat as the duel of sex. The aging
man, with his agility gradually withering, is thus confronted by
women in whom it still luxuriates as a function of their relative
youth. Not only do women of his own age aspire to ensnare him,
but also women of all ages back to adolescence. Hence his average
or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger
than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth may be
sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it, is why
oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that
age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets
would have it; it is
that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and
youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At
forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever
so much as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the
composition of "The League of Youth," his first social drama. At
fifty he was almost as preoccupied; "A Doll's House" was then
hatching. But at sixty, with his best work all done and his decline
begun, he succumbed preposterously to a flirtatious damsel of
eighteen, and thereafter, until actual insanity released him, he
mooned like a provincial actor in a sentimental melodrama. Had it
not been, indeed, for the fact that he was already married, and to a
very sensible wife, he would have run off with this flapper, and so
made himself publicly ridiculous.
Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is
found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the
disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the
advantages to increase. At thirty aman is terrified by the inhibitions
of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a
home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need
of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in
these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in
imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus
confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and
he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting.
The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow; if he
employs her in place of a wife he commonly ends by finding himself
married and minus a nurse, to his confusion and discomfiture, and
to the far greater discomfiture of his heirs and assigns. This process
is so obvious and so commonplace that I apologize formally for
rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this: that aman's instinctive
aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense of social and
economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a mere theory
when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is on the side
of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is a
powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half
as much to gain by marriage as
women gain, then, all men
would be as ardently in favour of it as women are.
26. Disparate Unions
This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject:
that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably
inferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed
and so seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate
man, by postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches
it in the end with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open
to the advances of women whose attractions are wholly
meretricious, e.g., empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained
nurses with a highly developed professional technic of sympathy. If
he marries at all, indeed, he must commonly marry badly, for
women of genuine merit are no longer interested in him; what was
once a lodestar is now no more than a smoking smudge. It is this
circumstance that account for the low calibre of a good many
first-rate men's sons, and gives a certain support to the common
notion that they are always third-raters. Those
sons inherit
from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is
often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity,
as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and
extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between
an able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given
child will resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one.
The fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against the
superman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no
ground for assuming that the continued progress visualized by man
is in actual accord with the great flow of the elemental forces.
Devolution is quite as natural as evolution, and may be just as
pleasing, or even a good deal more pleasing, to God. If the average
man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or
Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of
him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain.
The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless
reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a
subtle and
mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of
philosophers.
Per corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently
marry second-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war
upon progress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of
some sordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional
man is a woman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with
intellectual interests so far above his comprehension that he is
scarcely so much as aware of them. Again, there are the leading
feminists, women artists and other such captains of the sex; their
husbands are almost always inferior men, and sometimes downright
fools. But not paupers! Not incompetents in a man's world! Not
bad husbands! What we here encounter, of course, is no more than
a fresh proof of the sagacity of women. The first-rate woman is a
realist. She sees clearly that, in a world dominated by second-rate
men, the special capacities of the second-rate man are esteemed
above all other capacities and given the highest rewards, and she
endeavours to get her share of those rewards by marrying a
second-rate man at the to of his class. The first-rate man is an
admirable creature; his qualities are appreciated by every
intelligent woman; as I have just said, it may be reasonably argued
that he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a
certain point, do not run in proportion to his deserts; beyond that he
ceases to be a good husband. Hence the pursuit of him is chiefly
maintained, not by women who are his peers, but by women who
are his inferiors.
Here we unearth another factor: the fascination of what is strange,
the charm of the unlike, heliogabalisme. As Shakespeare has put it,
there must be some mystery in love--and there can be no mystery
between intellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries
an inferior man, not primarily because he is a good provider (though
it is impossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his
very inferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and
mother him. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a
feeling of superiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If
now, that feeling he mingled with sexual curiosity and economic
self-interest, it obviously supplies sufficient motivation to account
for so natural and banal a thing as a
marriage. Perhaps the
greatest of all these factors is the mere disparity, the naked
strangeness. A woman could not love a man, as the phrase is, who
wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, and by the same token she
would probably find it difficult to love a man who matched perfectly
her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems in marriage, on
the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the exercise of that
caressing irony which I have already described. She likes to observe
that her man is a fool--dear, perhaps, but none the less damned.
Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always somewhat
pitying and patronizing.
27. The Charm of Mystery
Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down
this strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an
intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at
too many points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the
relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother
and sister. Thus that "maximum of temptation" of which Shaw
speaks has within itself
the seeds of its own decay. A husband
begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so
handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to
avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels,
pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a
proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The
thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native
sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that
get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any
appearance of gusto and spontaneity toit.
An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs.
Marion Cox, in a somewhat florid book entitled "Ventures into
Worlds," has a sagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the
essay "Our Incestuous Marriage," and argues accurately that, once
the adventurous descends to the habitual, it takes on an offensive
and degrading character. The intimate approach, to give genuine
joy, must be a concession, a feat of persuasion, a victory; once it
loses that character it loses everything. Such a destructive
conversion is effected by the
average monogamous marriage.
It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how can mystery and
reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a joint
concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the
husband's side, is esteem--the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt.
And confidence--the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist ora
fortune-teller. And habit--the thing which makes it possible to eat
the same breakfast every day, and to windup one's watch regularly,
and to earn a living.
Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to
prevent this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its
course--that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that
neither will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By
this means, she, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and
there will be a chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so
each reunion will have in it something of the surprise, the adventure
and the virtuous satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not
come back to precisely the same wife that he parted from, and the
wife will not welcome precisely the same husband. Even supposing
them to have gone
on substantially as if together, they will have
gone on out of sight and hearing of each other, Thus each will
find the other, to some extent at least, a stranger, and hence a bit
challenging, and hence a bit charming. The scheme has merit.
More, it has been tried often, and with success. It is, indeed, a
familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are
occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite
maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not
actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more
eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the
widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the,
average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even
temporarily. The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the
envy and ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a
gabbling of scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let
man and wife separate to save their happiness from suffocation in
the kitchen, the dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will
immediately conclude that the corpse is already laid out in the
drawing-room.
28. Woman as Wife
This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a
menace to the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm,
permits herself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife,
who is almost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of
the husband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality
with which men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage.
Moreover, the average male gets his living by such depressing
devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. A man
who spends six or eight hours a day acting as teller in a bank, or
sitting upon the bench of a court, or looking to the inexpressibly
trivial details of some process of manufacturing, or writing imbecile
articles for a newspaper, or managing a tramway, or administering
ineffective medicines to stupid and uninteresting patients--a man so
engaged during all his hours of labour, which means a normal,
typical man, is surely not one to be oppressed unduly by the dull
round of domesticity. His wife may bore him hopelessly as
mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores a man
(though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores
a woman), but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other
capacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is
not that she tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her
variety--not that she is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is
weary when he gets home, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a
comfortable sty. This peace is broken by the greater restlessness of
his wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and curiosity.
Of far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the general
inefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping
house--a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities.
As I have argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for
mastering these technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs
them more effort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent
application with that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring
to their tawdry and childish concerns. But in addition to their
natural incapacity, there is a reluctance based upon a deficiency in
incentive, and deficiency in incentive is due to
the maudlin
sentimentality with which men regard marriage. In this
sentimentality lie the germs of most of the evils which beset the
institution in Christendom, and particularly in the United States,
where sentiment is always carried to inordinate lengths. Having
abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress the men
of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval concept of
woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have create for
her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of late years
in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of marriage, all
the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the
woman. In part this doctrine has been established by the intellectual
enterprise and audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing upon
masculine stupidity, sentimentality and lack of strategical sense, they
have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and
law. But in other part it is the plain product of the donkeyish vanity
which makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his
wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and
consideration. Whatever is revolt against her
immediate
indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in
which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress
without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour
and responsibility.
29. Marriage and the Law
This was not always the case. No more than a century ago, even by
American law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was
the head of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had
authority over the purse-strings, over the children, and even over his
wife. He could enforce his mandates by appropriate punishment,
including the corporal. His sovereignty and dignity were carefully
guarded by legislation, the product of thousands of years of
experience and ratiocination. He was safeguarded in his self-respect
by the most elaborate and efficient devices, and they had the
support of public opinion.
Consider, now, the changes that a few short years have wrought.
Today, by the laws of most American states--laws proposed, in most
cases, by maudlin and often notoriously
extravagant agitators,
and passerby sentimental orgy--all of the old rights of the husband
have been converted into obligations. He no longer has any control
over his wife's property; she may devote its income to the family or
she may squander that income upon idle follies, and he can do
nothing. She has equal authority in regulating and disposing of the
children, and in the case of infants, more than he. There is no law
compelling her to do her share of the family labour: she may spend
her whole time in cinema theatres or gadding about the shops an she
will. She cannot be forced to perpetuate the family name if she
does not want to. She cannot be attacked with masculine weapons,
e.g., fists and firearms, when she makes an assault with feminine
weapons, e.g.,snuffling, invective and sabotage. Finally, no lawful
penalty can be visited upon her if she fails absolutely, either
deliberately or through mere incapacity, to keep the family habitat
clean, the children in order, and the victuals eatable.
Now view the situation of the husband. The instant he submits to
marriage, his wife obtains a large and inalienable share in his
property, including all he may acquire in future; in most
American states the minimum is one-third, and, failing
children, one-half. He cannot dispose of his real estate without her
consent; He cannot even deprive her of it by will. She may bring up
his children carelessly and idiotically, cursing them with abominable
manners and poisoning their nascent minds against him, and he has
no redress. She may neglect her home, gossip and lounge about all
day, put impossible food upon his table, steal his small change, pry
into his private papers, hand over his home to the
Periplaneta
americana, accuse him falsely of preposterous adulteries, affront
his'friends, and lie about him to the neighbours--and he can do
nothing. She may compromise his honour by indecent dressing,
write letters to moving-picture actors, and expose him to ridicule by
going into politics--and he is helpless.
Let him undertake the slightest rebellion, over and beyond mere
rhetorical protest, and the whole force of the state comes down
upon him. If he corrects her with the bastinado or locks her up, he
is good for six months in jail. If he cuts off her revenues, he is
incarcerated until he makes them good. And if he seeks surcease in
flight, taking the children with him,
he is pursued by the
gendarmerie, brought back to his duties, and depicted in the public
press as a scoundrelly kidnapper, fit only for the knout. In brief, she
is under no legal necessity whatsoever to carry out her part of the
compact at the altar of God, whereas he faces instant disgrace and
punishment for the slightest failure to observe its last letter. For a
few grave crimes of commission, true enough, she may be
proceeded against. Open adultery is a recreation that is denied to
her. She cannot poison her husband. She must not assault him
with edged tools, or leave him altogether, or strip off her few
remaining garments and go naked. But for the vastly more various
and numerous crimes of omission--and in sum they are more
exasperating and intolerable than even overt felony--she cannot be
brought to book at all.
The scene I depict is American, but it will soon extend its horrors to
all Protestant countries. The newly enfranchised women of every
one of them cherish long programs of what they call social
improvement, and practically the whole of that improvement is
based upon devices for augmenting their own relative
autonomy and power. The English wife of tradition, so
thoroughly a femme covert, is being displaced by a gadabout,
truculent, irresponsible creature, full of strange new ideas about her
rights, and strongly disinclined to submit to her husband's authority,
or to devote herself honestly to the upkeep of his house, or to bear
him a biological sufficiency of heirs. And the German
Hausfrau,
once so innocently consecrated to
Kirche, Kche und Kinder, is
going the same way.
30. The Emancipated Housewife
What has gone on in the United States during the past two
generations is full of lessons and warnings for the rest of the world.
The American housewife of an earlier day was famous for her
unremitting diligence. She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she
also made shift to master such more complex arts as spinning,
baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high
level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long,
long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her
average incarnation, she is not
only incompetent (alack, as I
have argued, rather beyond her control) ; she is also filled with the
notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is,
in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call her a good
cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; the early American
cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery
turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not
welcome it. I used to know an American literary man, educated on
the Continent, who married a woman because she had exceptional
gifts in this department. Years later, at one of her dinners, a friend
of her husband's tried to please her by mentioning the fact, to which
be had always been privy. But instead of being complimented, as a
man might have been if told that his wife had married him because
be was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual
housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the
guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave
her husband.
This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as
well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the
character of
a definite cult in the United States, and the stray
woman who attends to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and
a fool, just as she is apt to be dismissed as a "brood sow" (I quote
literally, craving absolution for the phrase: a jury of men during the
late war, on very thin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she
favours her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious
villainousness of American cookery--a villainousness so painful to a
cultured uvula that a French hack-driver, if his wife set its
masterpieces before him, would brain her with his linoleum hat. To
encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class,
simple, sensibly chosen and competently cooked, becomes almost as
startling as to meet a Y. M.C. A. secretary in a bordello, and a good
deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of the large cities of the Republic,
scarcely has any existence. If the average American husband wants
a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he
wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and
well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum. Only the
immigrant can take his case and invite his soul within his own house.