University of Virginia Library

I The Joys of Being a Woman

Some years ago there appeared in the "Atlantic" an essay entitled "The Joys of Being a Negro." With a purpose analogous to that of the author, I am moved to declare the real delights of the apparently downtrodden, and in the face of a bulky literature expressive of pathos and protest, to confess frankly the joys of being a woman. It is a feminist argument accepted as axiomatic that every woman would be a man if she could be, while no man would be a woman if he could help it. Every woman knows this is not fact but falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of those falsehoods on which depends the stability of the universe. The idea that every woman is desirous of becoming a man is as comforting to every male as its larger corollary is alarming, namely, that women as a mass have resolved to become men. The former notion expresses man's view of femininity, and is flattering; the latter expresses his view of feminism, and is fearsome. Man's panic, indeed, before the hosts he thinks he

sees advancing, has lately become so acute that there is danger of his paralysis. Now his paralysis would defeat not only the purposes of feminism, but also the sole purpose of woman's conduct toward man from Eve's time to ours, a course of which feminism is only a modern and consistent example.

It is for man's reassurance that I shall endeavor gradually to unfold this age-old purpose, showing that while the privileges which through slow evolution we have amassed are so enjoyable as to preclude our envying any man his dusty difficulties, still our attitude toward these our toys is that of a friend of mine a woman aged four. Left unprotected in her hands for entertainment, a male coeval was heard to burst into cries of rage. Her parents, rushing to his rescue, found their daughter surrounded by all the playthings, which she loftily withheld from her visitor's hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous response, "I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish."

The austere moral intention of my little friend was her direct heritage from her mother Eve, whose much maligning would be regrettable if this very maligning were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory: Adam and all his sons had to believe that they

amounted to more than Eve, as the primary condition of their amounting to anything. Eve, in her campaign for Adam's education, was the first woman to perceive his need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity, she undertook to immolate her reputation for his sake. Eve, I repeat, was the first woman to perceive Adam's fundamental need, but she was not the last.

The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the novelist must have been a woman. Her deathless allegory of Eden contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows the superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good, to show the superiority of man. As it must have required a woman to write the parable, so perhaps it requires a woman to expound it.

I pass over the initial fact that the representation of Eve as the last in an ascending order of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely, perfect, of created things. The first thing of real importance in the narrative is the purpose of Eve's creation, to fill a need, Adam's. "It was not good that the man should be alone." The whole universe was not enough for Adam without Eve. It neither

satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy. If he had been merely lonely, why would it not have been enough to create another Adam? Because the object was not simple addition, whereby another Adam would merely have meant two Adams, both mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was multiplication by stimulation, whereby, by combining Eve with Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows, was raised to the nth power.

Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation redound entirely to Eve's credit. Woman rather than man is selected as the one more open to argument, more capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well as braver to accept the consequences of action. The sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away forever all claim for masculine originality, and ascribes initiative in the three departments of human endeavor to woman. For no one knows how long, Adam had been bumping into that tree without once seeing that it was: (a) "good for food"; this symbolizes the awakening of the practical instincts, the availing one's self of one's physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all commercial activity, in which sphere man has always been judged the more active; (b) "the tree was

pleasant to look upon"; here it is Eve, not Adam, who perceives the aesthetic aspect; if man has been adjudged the more eminent in art, plainly he did not even see that a thing was beautiful until woman told him so; (c) "a tree to be desired to make one wise"; Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it, whereas her own desire for knowledge was so passionate that she was ready to die to attain it. We all know how Eve's motives have been impugned, for when a man is ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific, but when a woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is called inquisitive. The Eden narrative concludes with the penalty, "He shall rule over thee, that is, the price Eve must pay for Adam's seeming superiority is her own seeming inferiority. The risk and the responsibility and the recompense for man's growing pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence, wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she explained.

The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have been the methods and the motives of woman with man ever since. Eve's purposes, summarized, are fourfold: first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal his education from him, as the only practical way of developing in man the self-esteem necessary to keep him in his sex; third, Eve must never bore Adam, to keep him going she must always keep him guessing; and fourth, Eve must not bore herself; this last view of the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely, that Eve herself was so bored by the inertness of Adam and the ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see what he and she would do afterwards.

The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of Genesis clearly establishes the primary joy of being a woman, the joy of conscious superiority. That it is the most profound joy known to human nature will be readily attested by any man who has felt his own sense of superiority shaking in its shoes as he has viewed the recent much-advertised achievements of women. How could any man help envying a woman a self-approval so absolute that it can afford to let man seem superior at her expense?

Woman's conviction of advantage supports her in using her prerogatives first as if they were deficiencies, and then in employing them to offset man's deficiencies. Man is a timorous, self-distrustful creature, who would never have discovered his powers if not stimulated by woman's weakness. Probably prehistoric woman voluntarily gave up her own muscle in order that man might develop his by serving her. It is only recently that we have dared to be as athletic as we might, and the effort is still tentative enough to be relinquished if we notice any resulting deterioration, muscular or moral, in men. Women, conscious how they hold men's welfare in their hands, simply do not dare to discover how strong they might be if they tried, because they have so far used their physical weakness not only as a means of arousing men's good activities, but also as a means of turning to nobler directions their bad ones. Men are naturally acquisitive, impelled to work for gain and gold, gain and more gain, gold and more gold. Unable to deter them from this impulse, we turn it to an unselfish end, that is, we let men support us, preserving for their sakes the fiction that we are too frail to support ourselves. If they had neither child nor wife, men would still be rolling up wealth, but it is very much better for

their characters that they should suppose they are working for their families rather than for themselves. We might be Amazons, but for men's own sakes we refrain from what would be for ourselves a selfish indulgence in vigor. Man is not only naturally acquisitive but is naturally ostentatious of his acquisitions. Having bled for his baubles, he wishes to put them on and strut in them. Again we step in and redirect his impulse; we put on his baubles and strut for him. We let him think that our delicate physique is better fitted for jewels and silk than his sturdier frame, and that our complex service to the Society which must be established to show off his jewels and silk, is really a lighter task than his simple slavery to an office desk. How reluctantly men have delegated to women dress and all its concomitant luxury may readily be proved by an examination of historic portraits—behold Raleigh in all his ruffles!—and by the tendency to top-hat and tin-can decoration exhibited by the male savage. The passionate attention given by our own household males to those few articles of apparel in which we have thought it safe to allow them individual choice, unregulated by requirements of uniform, articles such as socks or cravats, must prove even to men themselves how much safer it is that their clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed, that women should do their dressing for them.

Not only for the moral advantages gained by men in supporting us do women preserve the fallacy of physical feebleness, but also for the spiritual exaltation men may enjoy by protecting us and rescuing us from perils. For this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the man should think the peril real, but it is absolutely necessary that he should think the woman thinks it real. It does a man more good to save a woman from a mouse than from a tiger, as contributing more to the sense of superiority so necessary to him. The truth is that women are not really afraid of anything, but they perceive how much splendid incentive would be lost to the world if they did not pretend to be. For example, if women were actually afraid of serpents, would the Tempter have chosen that form just when he wished to be most ingratiating? But think how many heroes would be unmade if women should let men know that they are perfectly capable of killing their own snakes. The universality of the mouse fear roves its prehistoric origin, showing how consistently and successfully women have been educating men in heroism; in earliest times it probably required a whole

dinotherium ramping at the cave-mouth to induce primitive man to draw weapon in his mate's defense, but now to evoke the quintessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is to hop on a chair at sight of a mouse.

Woman's motive for suppressing her intellectual powers is exactly the same as her motive for not developing her physical powers. She is ready to enjoy and to employ her own genius in secret for the sake of the free and open growth of man's. She has wrought so conscientiously to this end that it is probable that the average man's belief in woman's mental inferiority is even stronger than his belief in her physical inferiority, for well woman has perceived the peril to man of his ever discovering the truth of her intellectual endowment. Man's energy cannot survive the strain of thinking his brain inferior, or even equal, to a woman's. This fact is the reason why women so long renounced all educational advantages; that at last their minds were too much for them, and that they were driven by pure ebullience of suppressed genius to invade the university, will more and more be seen by women to have been a regrettable mistake. There is much current newspaper discussion of the failure of the men's colleges

to-day to educate the young male, his utter obduracy before stimulus is despairingly compared with the effect of college upon the youth of past generations. I fear that the reason is simple to seek: men's colleges have deteriorated exactly in the ratio that women's colleges have improved. The course for women and women's colleges is therefore clear.

Our history shows that we have, with only occasional lapses into genius, nobly sustained the requirements of our unselfishness. On rare occasions our ability has been so irresistible, and our honesty so irrepressible, that in an unguarded moment we have tossed off a Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa Bonheur, a Madame Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for the most part we have preserved a glorious mediocrity that allows man to believe himself dominant in administration, art, science, war, and finance. The women who have so far forgotten themselves as almost to betray woman's genius to the world, are fortunately for the moral purpose of the sex, exceptional, and the average woman makes a very creditable concealment of intellect. I am hopeful that as women grow in wisdom, their outbreaks of ability will be more and more controlled and sporadic, and man's paralysis before them be correspondingly infrequent, so that at some

future day, we may see woman again relinquish all educational privileges, and become wisely illiterate for man's sake.

Our own intellectual advantages are as much greater than man's as they are more secret. No woman would put up with the clumsiness and crudity of a man's brain, knowing so well the superexcellence of her own, in the delicacy of its machinery, the subtle science required in its employment, the absorbing interest of the material on which it is employed, and the noble purpose to which it is solely devoted.

As to our mental mechanism, it is so much finer than man's that, out of pure pity for his clogging equipment, we let him think logic and reason better means of traveling from premise to conclusion than the air flights we encourage him to scorn as woman's intuition. Nothing is more painful to a woman than an argument with a man, because he journeys from given fact to deduced truth by pack-mule, and she by aeroplane. When he finds her at the destination, he is so irritated by the swiftness of her passage that he accuses her of not having followed the right direction, and demands as proof that she describe the weeds by the roadside, which he has amply studied,—he calls this study his reasoning

process. Of course no woman stops to botanize when the object is to get there. No man ever wants to be a woman? No man ever longs to exchange his ass for our airship? No man ever envies us the nimbleness by which we can elude logic and get at truth?

Our mental operations are keyed to the very sublimation of delicacy and rapidity, and they need to be, considering the subtleties of the skill with which we must employ them. Eve left it to us to educate Adam without his knowing it, and to keep him endlessly entertained. To educate, to amuse, and forever, calls for such exquisite manipulation of our own minds, calls for such individual initiative, such originality, as to provide woman with an aspiration that makes man's creative concern with such gross matters as art or letters, science or government, seem puerile and pitiable. What skill do the tasks of man, so stupidly tangible and public, evoke? How stimulating to be a woman! How dull to amble along like a man, with only logic to carry you, and only success to attain!

Poor man is to be pitied not only for the crudity of his mental machinery and the creaking clumsiness of its movement, but for the dullness of the material in which he must

work. The truth is that there would be no sex to do the unskilled labor of the world, if women ever once let men be tempted by their superior employments. The surest way of keeping man to his hod-carrying is to let him think that woman spends all her secret hours sobbing for bricks and mortar. As a child must respect his toys if he is to be happy, so a man must respect the material he works in, and thus women foster his pride in making books, pictures, machines, states, philosophies, while women—make him! The subject to which we devote all our heads is man himself.

Mine to protect, to nurture, to impel;

My lord and lover, yes, but first my child.

Man remains Man, but Woman is the Mother,

There is no mystery she dare not read;

No fearful fruit can grow, but she must taste;

No secret knowledge can be held from her;

For she must learn all things that she may teach."

Our material, human, living, plastic, is immeasurably more marvelous than man's cold stone, cold laws, cold print. Unlike man's, therefore, our work can never be finished, can not be qualified and made finite by any standard of perfection. It is more fun to make a Plato than to make his philosophy, and at the same time to be skillful enough to con

ceal our creatorship, knowing that the condition of producing another and greater Plato is to let him have the inflation of supposing he produced himself. Now unless woman's efforts through all the ages to instill into man the self-satisfaction necessary to his success have gone for naught—which I cannot from observation believe—man could hardly help envying woman the splendor and the scope of the subject to which her intelligence is directed, to wit, himself.

The ultimate purpose of woman's education of man transcends the grosser aims to which man's intellect is devoted. Woman wants man to be good, so that he may be happy. He was not happy in Eden, and so she drove him out of it. Woman's education of man she has for the most part succeeded in hiding from him, but the object of that education, man's happiness, has been so permeating that even man himself has perceived it. Man thinks he can manufacture his own career, his own money, his own clothes, and his own food, but no man thinks he can make his own happiness. Every man thinks either that some actual woman makes or unmakes his joy, or that some potential woman could make it. For a woman, love's young dream

is of making some man happy; for a man, love's young dream is of letting some woman make him happy. These views plainly argue that in relation to the supply of gladness, woman is the almoner, man the beggar. Since every one would rather be a giver than a getter, it seems impossible that no man ever wants to be a woman, in order to experience the most indisputable of her joys, the joy of dispensing joy.

Reasons, however, why men should want to be women are more numerous and more cogent than it would be safe to let men know, so I am cannily concealing many. Among the few it may not be impolitic to divulge, is one that of course any man who reads has seen for himself. While we shall continue conscientiously devoted to our pedagogical duties, we have pretty well determined Adam's limitations, and need only apply to him a pretty well established curriculum, whereas we ourselves remain an undeveloped mystery that more and more attracts our imagination. Looking far into the future one may see man finished and fossilized, when woman is still at the stage of eohippus as

Even now women, looking far out to space, sometimes echo the glee of little cohippus:—

Now if any man, clearly perceiving his own possibilities, must envy woman the joy of having him for an experiment, how could the same man, if he should as clearly perceive woman's greater possibilities, help envying woman the joy of having herself for experiment?

With this paragraph I have plumply arrived at feminism, and at the object of all my revelations, namely, to reassure men by stating that women do not intend to take themselves up as a serious experiment for ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel free to do so until we have taught Bobby to be unselfish enough to let us; he is not yet strong enough to try his own wings, much less strong enough to let us try ours. To allay man's fears, it may be well to elucidate some aspects of our actions.

While there may be a little of eohippus

exaltation in feminism, it is so little as to be negligible; our main purpose is still our age-old business of teaching by indirection. There are recurrent occasions when Adam grows sluggish in his Eden, and women have to contrive new spurs both for his action and his appreciation. As whips to make a lethargic Adam move where he should move, Eve is brandishing two threats, one her economic independence, the other, her use of the ballot. Adam thinks she really means to have both. Now our threatening to march from The Home and invade business, and by that action to let business invade The Home, is very simply explained. Once again our purpose is unselfish: it gives Adam false notions of economic justice to form a habit of not paying for services rendered, so Eve conquers her shyness and pretends that she will leave The Home if he does not pay her some scanty shillings to stay in it. Even the dullest man has now become convinced that women can earn money, so that we hope that in time even the most penurious husband will perceive the wisdom of giving his wife an allowance, and that 's all we 've been after; and yet we have to make all this fuss to get it. If Adam were only a little easier to move, he would save us and himself a great deal of pushing.

Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our economic one. We mean only to wake you to the use of the ballot in your hands, when we ask you to give it to our hands. Already we have aroused you to two facts: if politics is too soiled a spot for your women to enter, then it is too soiled a spot for our men to enter, and therefore it is high time you did a little scrubbing; and also that if you refuse to enlarge the suffrage to admit desirable women, it is high time to consent to restrict it so as not to admit undesirable men. Again this is all we have been after, but again we have had to make a great deal of noise in order to wake you up.

But feminism to the male mind suggests not only commercial and professional and political careers for women, but something less tangible and more terrible, the advent of a bugaboo called the New Woman, who shall devastate The Home and happiness. It is a strong argument for our superiority that there is nothing that frightens a man so much as a woman's threatening to become like him. Yet the time has come for frightening him, and we are doing it conscientiously, for, to confess truth, there is nothing that frightens a woman so much as becoming like a man. However, for his soul's sake, she can manage

to assume the externals of man's conduct, but not even for his soul's sake, much less her own, would she ever adopt his mental or spiritual equipment. Adam has such a tendency to ennui that the only way to keep him really comfortable is every now and then to make him a little uncomfortable. He was so well off in Eden, and consequently so dour and dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever but to remove him from The Home entirely in order to save his character. We are hoping that we women of the present shall not be driven to such an extremity; for we know what her exile meant for Eve! We are busily fostering man's fear of losing The Home, as the best way of making him appreciate it, and so of preserving it for him, and for ourselves.

As with The Home, so with the woman called New. She never was, she never will be, but to present her to man's future seems the only way of making man satisfied with the woman of the past. We have had to stir men to appreciate us as women, by showing them how easily we could be men if we would. The creator granted to Adam's loneliness an Eve, not another Adam, and should we at this late day fail the purpose of our making, and cease to be women? We have changed our manners

and conversation a little, for the better success of our scare, but the woman who sits chuckling while she tends man's hearth and him, is still as old-fashioned as Eve, and as new.

Men, who always take themselves as seriously as children, have been easy enough to frighten by means of a feminism that seems to take itself seriously. A really penetrating man might guess that when women seem to be so much in earnest, they must be up to something quite different from their seeming, and he might safely divine that, however novel woman's purposes may appear to be, they will always be explicable in the light of her oldest purpose—man's improvement. Now man's improvement is a heavy task, and when nature entrusted it to woman, she gave her a compensating advantage. To become a genuine feminist, a woman would have to forego her most enviable possession—her sense of humor. Man can laugh, of course, noisily enough; but what man possesses the gift and the grace of seeing himself as a joke? Men who must do the work of the world are better off without humor, because they can thus more easily keep their eyes on the road, just as a horse needs blinders; but woman,

who directs the work of man, needs to have her eyes everywhere at once. By another figure, such rudimentary humor as man does have is merely an external armor against circumstance; but woman's humor is permeating, her armor is all through her system, as if her sinews were wrought of steel and sunbeams. A man never wishes to be a woman? Is it not an argument for the joys of being a woman, that no man seems to have had such fun in being a man that it has occurred to him to write an essay on the subject?