THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN by WINIFRED KIRKLAND Italics are in _italics_ format Page numbers are in < > brackets The table of contents is "as is" (it needs cleaned up) One {sic} for a typo. Etext prepared with the use of Calera WordScan Plus 2.0, by CEK This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, posted December 1993. The Joys of Being a Woman AND OTHER PAPERS BY WINIFRED {Margaretta} KIRKLAND {1872-1943} Essay Index Reprint Series BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS FREEPORT, NEW YORK First Published 1918 Reprinted 1968 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-8477 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOREWORD _The Ego in the Essay_ We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate-- set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him. One man there was in that peopled past, where friendship's best doors fly open at our knock, who knew how to catch his elusive Ego and keep it glad even on ways that led through sordid counting-house and sadder madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one since has ever known, how to envisage and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint sprite that it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us who love essays say, of one possessing special grace, it is like Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as only the essay can do, personality. Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless, a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if we overheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his own particular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Self speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. The self-annalist whose essays warm our hearts with friendship, must be one who sips the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self. Not many such are born, and fewer of them write essays. The essay is no easy thing. The true mood and the true manner of it are rare. It is as difficult to write an essay on purpose as it is to be a person on purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory. Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by the delights: for there is nothing so compelling to expression as chuckle, and that is what the true essay is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that time the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us, laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun. Then off we fly to write it, with the spell still upon us! The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth. Ariel never laughed. The fun that makes the soul expand must have in it the lift of wings and the glimpsing fantasy of flight. More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the essay should give the reader a sense of good-fellowship. Probably the writer who as an actual man is shyest, gives this com-radeship best. The shy man sheds forth his personality most opulently in print, and preferably, as certain wise editors have perceived, in anonymous print. One is sensitive to having an everyday friend see one's soul in public, because the everyday friend knows too well the everyday self, to which the elusive essay-self is too often a stranger. That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum man or woman who bears our mortal name, if he only came to visit us oftener, stayed with us longer, what essays we might write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger until I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine, who tells such happy secrets! Poor babykin, poor fairykin--that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to fairy fields, because our feet are heavy with Other People's clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies--our own Self's and no one's else, because of the grave grubby Book-people who thunder at us from our shelves. Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at me over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow wings and head that is devil-may-care trying to get at me from behind her sable-stoled form. Even in the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, "Could a grave hold me?" For is not death also a bugbear of Other People, not at all of my own Self's making? Gay little voyager! He seems, when he visits me, to be the prince of the kingdom of fun. He does not stay long, but long enough sometimes for me to write an essay. But whence he comes, or whither he goes, or what he is, whether demonic or divine, I only know that he is mine. CONTENTS FOREWORD: THE EGO IN THE ESSAY v I. THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN 1 II. A MAN IN THE HOUSE......... 23 III. OLD-CLOTHES SENSATIONS........ 29 IV.LUGGAGE AND THE LADY......... 35 V.DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOARDING 49 VI.THE LADY ALONE AT NIGHT 62 VII. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 68 VIII. AN EDUCATIONAL FANTASY 75 IX. MY CLOTHES.................... 87 X.THE TENDENCY TO TESTIFY . 107 XI.LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS 113 XII. THE TYRANNY OF TALENT 124 XIII. THE WOMAN WHO WRITES 129 XIV.PICNIC PICTURES................ 154 XV.THE FARM FEMININE............. 17I XVI.A LITTLE GIRL AND HER GRAND- MOTHER...................... 183 XVII. THE WAYFARING WOMAN........ 194 XVIII. THE ROAD THAT TALKED....... 205 XIX. MY MOTHER'S GARDENERS 214 XX. My LITTLE TOWN...... 227 XXI. GENUS CLERICUM....... 244 XXII. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN DOING WITH- OUT ETERNITY...... 264 NOTE.-- _Several of these essays have appeared in_ THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, and THE CHURCHMAN, _and are here reprinted with the kind permission of the editors of those magazines._ 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<1> 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<2> 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<3> 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 _n_th 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<4> 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. "And what was my reward when they had won-- Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds? --They stormed through centuries brandishing their deeds, Boasting their gross and transient mastery To girls, who listened with indulgent ears And laughing hearts--Lord, they were ever blind-- Women have they known, but never Woman."<5> 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?<6> 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<7> 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<8> 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<9> 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<10> 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<11> 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<12> 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<13> 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<14>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<15> 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 "On five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks." <16> Even now women, looking far out to space, sometimes echo the glee of little cohippus:-- "I am going to be a horse! And on my middle finger nails To run my earthly course! I 'm going to have a flowing tail! I 'm going to have a mane! I 'm going to stand fourteen hands high On the psychozoic plain!" 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<17> 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.<18> 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<19> 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<20> 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,<21> 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? II _A Man in the House_ There persists much of the harem in every well-regulated home. In every house arranged to make a real man really happy, that man remains always a visitor, welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest. He steps in from the great outside for rest and refreshment, but he never belongs. For him the click and hum of the harem machinery stops, giving way to love and laughter, but there is always feminine relief when the master departs and the household hum goes on again. The anomaly lies in the fact that in theory all the machinery exists but for the master's comfort; but in practice, it is much easier to arrange for his comfort when he is not there. A house without a man is savorless, yet a man in a house is incarnate interruption. No matter how closely he incarcerates himself, or how silently, a woman always feels him there. He may hide beyond five doors and two flights of stairs, but his presence somehow leaks through, and unconsciously dominates every domestic detail. He<23> does not mean to, the woman does not mean him to; it is merely the nature of him. Keep a man at home during the working hours of the day, and there is a blight on that house, not obvious, but subtle, touching the mood and the manner of maidservant and manservant, cat, dog, and mistress, and affecting even the behavior of inanimate objects, so that there is a constraint about the sewing-machine, a palsy on the vacuum-cleaner, and a _gaucherie_ in the stove-lids. Over the whole household spreads a feeling of the unnatural, and a resulting sense of ineffectuality. Let the man go out, and with the closing of the front door, the wheels grow brisk again, and smooth. To enjoy a home worth enjoying, a man should be in it as briefly as possible. By nature man belongs to the hunt in the open, and woman to the fire indoors, and just here lies one of the best reasons for being a woman rather than a man, because a woman can get along without a man's out-of-doors much better than a man can get along without a woman's indoors, which proves woman of the two the better bachelor, as being more self-contained and self-contented. Every real man when abroad on the hunt is always dreaming of a hearth and a hob and a wife, whereas no real woman, if she has the hearth and the<24> hob, is longing for man's hunting spear or quarry. If she is indeed a real woman she is very likely longing to give a man the comfort of the fire, provided he will not stay too long at a stretch, but get out long enough to give her time to brush up his hearth and rinse his teapot satisfactorily to herself. A man's home-coming is not an end in itself, its objective is the woman; but a woman's home-making exists both for the man and for itself. A woman needs to be alone with her house because she talks to it, and in a tongue really more natural than her talk with her husband, which is always better for having a little the company flavor, as in the seraglio. The most devoted wives are often those frankest in their abhorrence of a man in the house. It is because they do not like to keep their hearts working at high pressure too long at a time; they prefer the healthy relief of a glorious day of sorting or shopping between the master's breakfast and his dinner. It is a rare _menage_ that is not incommoded by having its males lunch at home. It is much better when a woman may watch their dear coat-tails round the corner for the day, with an equal exaltation in their freedom for the fray and her own. A woman whose males have their places of business neither on the<25> great waters nor in the great streets, but in their own house, is of all women the most perpetually pitied by other women, and the most pathetically patient. She never looks quite like other women, this doctor's, minister's, professor's, writer's wife. Her eyes have a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting sweetness, for she does not belong to her house, and so she does not belong to herself. When a man's business-making and a woman's home-making live under the same roof, they never go along in parallel independence: always the man's overlaps, invades. Kitchen and nursery are hushed before the needs of office and study, and the professional telephone call postpones the orders to the butcher. The home suffers, but the husband suffers more, for he is no longer a guest in his own house, with all a guest's prerogatives; he now belongs there, and must take the consequences. Fortunately the professional men-about-the-house are in small minority, and so are their housekeepers, but all women have sometimes to experience the upheaval incident on a man's vacation at home; whether father's, or husband's, or college brother's, or son's, the effect is always the same: the house stands on its head, and for two days it kicks up its heels and enjoys it, but after two-weeks, two<26> months, that is, on the removal of the exciting stimulus, it sinks to coma for the rest of the season. The different professions differ in their treatment of a holiday, except that all men at home on a vacation act like fish on land or cats in water, and expect their womenfolk either to help them pant, or help them swim. They seem to go out a great deal,--at least they are always clamoring to have their garments prepared for sorties, social or piscatorial,--and yet they always seem to be under heel. Some men on a home holiday tinker all day long, others bring with them a great many books which they never read, and the result in both cases is that housekeeping becomes a prolonged picking up. All men at home on a vacation eat a great deal more than other men, or than at other times; but with the sole exception of the anomalous academic, who is always concerned for his gastronomy, they will eat anything and enjoy it,--and say so. A man at home for his holidays is always vociferously appreciative. His happiness is almost enough to repay a woman for the noise he makes, and the mess; yet statistics would show that during any man's home vacation the women of the house lose just about as many pounds as the man gains. But what are women for, or homes?<27> After all, you can have a house without a man in it if you are quite sure you want to, but you cannot have a home without one. You cannot make a home out of women alone, or men alone; you have to mix them. Still every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a woman, that it 's very hard to make a home for any man if he is always in it. Every honest front door must confess that it is glad to see its master go forth in the morning; but this is only because it is so much gladder to see him come back at night. III _Old-Clothes Sensations_ People whom penury has never compelled in infancy or adolescence to wear other people's clothes have missed a valuable lesson in social sympathy. In our journey from the period when we first strutted thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles's castoff coat on to the time when we resented its misfit, and thence to that latest and best day when we could bestow our own discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have successively experienced all the gradations of soul between pauper and philanthropist. Most of us are fortunate enough to put away other people's clothes when we put away the rest of childhood's indignities; but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of those who have no such luck, who seem ordained from birth to be all the world's poor relations. In gift-clothes there is something peculiarly heart-searching both for giver and recipient. This delicacy inherent in the present of castoff suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle<29> clinging of the giver's self to the serge or silk. It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in another man's old coat. If an individuality is fine enough to be worth retaining, it is likely to be fine enough to disappear utterly beneath the weight of another man's shoulders upon one's own. Most of us would rather have our creeds chosen for us than our clothes. Most of us would rather select our own tatters than have another's cast-off splendors thrust upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people's clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer,--adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,--that the first wearer always wears them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer's ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat. Middle children are to be pitied for being condemned to be constantly made over out of the luckier eldest's outgrown raiment. How can Tommy be sure he is Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny's shoes? Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own heart, when all her life it has beaten under Anna's pinafore?<30> The evil is still worse when the garments come from outside the family, for one may readily accept from blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by a stranger, would arouse a corroding resentment. This is because one can always revenge one's self on one's relatives for an abasement of gratitude by means of self-respecting kicks and pinches. A growing soul may safely wear his big brother's ulster, but no one else's; for there are germs in other people's clothes,--the big bad yellow bacilli of covetousness. People give you their old clothes because they have new ones, and this fact is hard to forgive. There may, of course, exist mitigating circumstances that often serve to solace or remove this basic resentment. To receive gown or hat or boots direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion as they come to us through a lengthening chain of transferring hands the indignity fades out, the previous wearer's personality becomes less insistent; until, when identification is an impossibility, we may even take pleasure in conjecturing who may have previously occupied our pockets, may even feel the pull of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat beneath the warm woolen bosom presented to us. Further, the potential bitterness of the<31> recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her mistress's cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny. She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid. On assuming the white woman's clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also to the white woman's dignity. The duskier race stands at the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought of his own discarded independence. I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,--that period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,-- sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy, uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.<32> No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes. At last one is one's self and belongs not to another man's coat, or another woman's gown. It is a period of expansion, of pride: when one's clothes are altogether one's own, one's pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes. It was not alone for the new coat's intrinsic sake that we desired it; we coveted still more the experience of giving it away when we were done with it. There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of giving away something that you no longer want. The pain of a recipient's feelings on receiving a thing which you can afford to give away, but which he himself cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride in presenting him with something that you can't use. The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical <33> philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It follows that the best way to restore a pauper's self-respect is to present him with some old clothes to give to some one still poorer; for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test of character. It was the custom of epics to represent the king as bestowing upon his guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old clothes. If you could picture some Homeric monarch in the act of giving away his worn-out raiment, in that moment you would see his kingliness dwindle. The man who can receive another man's old clothes without thereby losing his self-respect is fit to be a prince among paupers, but the man who can give another man his old clothes without wounding that man's self-respect is fit to be the king of all philanthropists. IV _Luggage and the Lady_ I write as one pursued through life by the malevolence of inanimate objects. My singular subjection to things was never brought so painfully home to me as during four months in Europe. Of course, my soul had been to Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I was taking it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage for its journey. I chained up my soul and held it under lock and key while I took counsel with certain seductive guidebooks. These paternal manuals left no detail untouched, until there was no fear left for me of cabs or custom-houses, of money-tables or time-tables. It was all as simple as bre